What if Flex replaced normal and the size ranged from over 25 to 40?

[scarson]

sorry I made the title a little misleading, I would like it to be 10-40 as well

If people want to do it, Blizzard should let scaling go all the way to 40. Players are tired of being told how to play the game.

It is unreasonable not to extend flex to 40-mans. They can easily scale the boss and tune any mechanics the way they do for 10-25 flex.

[StrayFox]

Bad for Flex? You realize it already scales to 25?

How is adding up another 15 players hard? They already did it once with 10 and 25 people.

40 raid = 8-9 healers from 5-6 from 25, and maybe another tank or two.

I think it would be a huge success. And it can work. We're talking 40 people. That's nothing compared to the hundreds of people waiting at an Oondasta spawn.

I doubt it would be a huge success, it would become a hardly raided bracket except by the hardcore. Also most guilds are designed around 25 to 10 man raiding it would become a mess for them to have to nearly double their amount of raiders needed. Raids are far different than oondasta, as thats just one boss and doesn't require the commitment of a raid.

This subject of bringing back 40 mans is beaten to death, Blizzard won't do it, thats the point of Flex and LFR because people aren't doing 25 man or 10 man content because they can't so they made those so people can experience the content. Adding a 40 man would invalidate Blizzard's whole idea.

Blizzard can do it and make it happen, but it would be wasted energy as there wouldn't be very many people doing 40 man. Content gets taken out the less its used. Thats why 40 man was taken out in the first place.

[Jayjayhey]

I doubt it would be a huge success, it would become a hardly raided bracket except by the hardcore. Also most guilds are designed around 25 to 10 man raiding it would become a mess for them to have to nearly double their amount of raiders needed. Raids are far different than oondasta, as thats just one boss and doesn't require the commitment of a raid.

This subject of bringing back 40 mans is beaten to death, Blizzard won't do it, thats the point of Flex and LFR because people aren't doing 25 man or 10 man content because they can't so they made those so people can experience the content. Adding a 40 man would invalidate Blizzard's whole idea.

dude your logic is just flawed. They can scale up to 500 if they even wanted. Your anti-vanilla presence is obvious enough. Like it or not people like to do 40 mans like back in the day.

[Deleted]

40 man raids (with flex or not) would be a success if they'd offer better loot.
If not - unlikely, too hard to organize.

[Jayjayhey]

40 man raids (with flex or not) would be a success if they'd offer better loot.
If not - unlikely, too hard to organize.

That's not what this topic is about. We are talking about Flex scaling to 40. There is no "new raid" or need for "new loot."

[StrayFox]

dude your logic is just flawed. They can scale up to 500 if they even wanted. Your anti-vanilla presence is obvious enough. Like it or not people like to do 40 mans like back in the day.

They can't scale shit, they have to design the whole raid around it. Different amounts of people require more mechanics on boss fights. And 500 people in one spot would blow your computer to pieces.

I played in Vanilla, ask most people who played in Vanilla. 40 mans weren't fun they were pointlessly difficult and required really committed people to do them.

If you are committed go for it, but don't get mad that we don't have other features because SOME people wanted to do 40 mans.

[Jayjayhey]

yeah some people wanted lfr too but that's alright

[Duridi]

Using flex as an oportunity to scale raids up to 40 man again would be quite brilliant I think!

I don't personally care for 40 man raids, but I am not against it either. I know a lot of people really liked them.

[Deleted]

For me, in terms of enjoyability, it's 10 man > flex > 25 man. I'm not interested in playing 25s (even though my PC can handle it, thankyouverymuch), let alone 40s. I'd be quite pissed if they started to fiddle with normal mode to try and stretch it to accomodate anything from 10 to 40 people. That would be a goddamn nightmare to design, balance and play.

Normal/HC should be tightly tuned around the specific player number, either 10 or 25, additional difficulties are welcome in the form of flex and I guess LFR (I quit LFR completely since 5.4 and don't plan to come back ever, but it has its audience I guess). These difficulties are easier, made for casual play, so tuning is much less of an issue. Keep it that way.

[Jokerfiend]

The future of raiding, will be Flex, LFR, and (H)Flex. Flex starts at 10 and ends at 25. It covers the most bases, while on a sliding scale, that allows a majority to access the content on a higher difficulty, than LFR. It will throws attendance issues out the window. That is of course, if you have at least 10 reliable people.

Flex is a win/win for the player base and for Blizzard. I'm sure it costs less money to make Flex. It just makes sense.

The next marker is to have scaling ilvl loot, based on how many players are in the raid. It will also affect how many pieces drop. Let's say 10-13, 14-17, 18-21, 22-25.

It covers the most bases. It's smart business. This is the future of raiding and we have been corralled to it for a long time.

[Relimash]

This will most likely never happen, if you want to do a 40man raid nowadays go do a world boss. Get your fix doing Ordos.

[darkwarrior42]

dude your logic is just flawed. They can scale up to 500 if they even wanted. Your anti-vanilla presence is obvious enough. Like it or not people like to do 40 mans like back in the day.

First off, the fact that your thread said "25-40" and you actually meant "10-40" isn't just misleading; it's a complete misstatement of what you're thinking.

Second, the more players you add, the more the fight changes. Yes, they had 40-man fights back in the day, so let's look at some from the zones that actually had some complexity. We'll start with the big one: 4 horsemen. On the original 40-man version, it was designed for 8 tanks. 8 tanks. Because when you have a fight that works well with 40 people, 8 tanks isn't too much to ask for; 8/40 is the same ratio as 2/10. Mechanics that require people to spread out become far more difficult on 40 man, because there just isn't enough space. Literally, in some cases; the raid arenas are designed around the idea of 25 people at this point, so if they were to allow the raids to scale higher they'd need to re-design the space of the raid encounters to allow for that many people.

And what about stacking raid cooldowns? The more players you have the more raid cooldowns you have to stack, which can potentially allow raids to completely trivialize certain aspects of the fight. Yes, the entire fight would have higher numbers, but for a fight that has specific windows where high burst or high damage reduction is needed, having a higher absolute number of cooldowns is far more powerful than the scaling would compensate for (unless the scaling were so strong that the fight became progressively harder the more people you added to it). They could avoid that by having specific mechanics scale at different rates of course... but now you're just talking about manually balancing the encounter around every possible raid size.

But let's assume, for a moment, that the mechanics don't need to change, and the numbers can scale infinitely. That's not possible, of course, but let's assume it is. One of the main things that happens with a larger raid is that the damage taken by the tank increases. THe reason for this is simple: because we're not adding more tanks (if we were, we'd be completely changing the mechanics of the encounter), the only way to increase difficulty of tank healing is to increase the damage that's taken by the tanks we already have. The fact that the raid has more healers is what helps compensate for this, but even with that extra compensation tank gear and durability is more important in larger raids (this can be seen by looking at brewmasters, who didn't care at all about mastery on their gear in the previous tier... except in 25H, where it was what they stacked because the incoming damage was so high that they needed to smooth out incoming damage more than they needed to reduce average damage taken). Eventually, there will come a point where either this damage cannot scale any higher, or the tank will simply get one shot... at which point absorption effects become far more powerful, because the incoming damage is so great that while healing is necessary, effects that effectively increase how much damage the tank can take before dying become mandatory, not even counting the necessity of having sufficient resto shamans to make sure their maximum health boosting effect is maintained across the entire raid at all times (though on a positive note, having so many people would probably mean that resto shamans would finally be able to use their stacked up healing effects at full power...)

That's not even considering how spec diversity would suffer (in terms of ratios; having so many people makes it easy to have at least one of each, but that also means you're better off stacking specifically what's best atm once you've satisfied that minimum representation), or other more fight-specific effects that would vary based off difficulty... and since you''re talking about having this replace normal mode, you're talking about a mode that will be tuned to kill people if they mess up, so effects that require spacing are going to get very brutal very fast.

I'm sure there are people who would like it, and I'm sure that at least up to 40, they could probably make it work if they put a *lot* of time and effort into it. I just don't think the time and effort required for the endeavor would be worth the payoff. I'd be curious to know, on average, how many people are going on flex raids... because while I frequently saw guilds that had more than 10 people and had to figure out who to bench for a 10m raid, I haven't seen a guild that had more than 25 people that wanted to go to a single raid since WotLK... which, coincidentally, was when 25m still had higher ilvl gear (which tells me that most people who did the larger raids back then didn't actually prefer the larger raid size, but just wanted the better gear.)

[muto]

Loath and hate flex, it should be removed. I see no fun in it now nor any fun in bigger one -_-

I loathe and hate LFR it should be removed. LFR makes players worse since abilities hit for squat. Oh, I'll just stand here in the fire, no big deal, it doesn't hit for much anyhow.

[darkwarrior42]

The future of raiding, will be Flex, LFR, and (H)Flex. Flex starts at 10 and ends at 25. It covers the most bases, while on a sliding scale, that allows a majority to access the content on a higher difficulty, than LFR. It will throws attendance issues out the window. That is of course, if you have at least 10 reliable people.

Flex is a win/win for the player base and for Blizzard. I'm sure it costs less money to make Flex. It just makes sense.

The next marker is to have scaling ilvl loot, based on how many players are in the raid. It will also affect how many pieces drop. Let's say 10-13, 14-17, 18-21, 22-25.

It covers the most bases. It's smart business. This is the future of raiding and we have been corralled to it for a long time.

That's certainly a potential, but I can't really see (H)Flex working. The tuning on heroic is much tighter than it is on any other mode, and proper tuning would be almost impossible if you couldn't specify ahead of time how many people were there. People are already trying to game how many people they bring to Flex for ideal difficulty.... on heroic I would wager that some people would say that is mandatory on certain fights.

As for costing less money.... when the difficulty is designed to be lower, absolutely, because it doesn't matter too much if they get it exactly right. On normal and heroic? If they wanted the same level of quality, it'd take a lot more testing because they'd have to do the testing they do now on 10 and 25, but for every raid size (not just brackets).

[melodramocracy]

Too much graphical nonsense flying around in the game these days for 40 man, and enounter spaces arent physically large enough in some cases.

I've always been an advocate of the last boss of an expansion being 40 man only, but currently the game isn't designed around such things.

[scarson]

I doubt it would be a huge success, it would become a hardly raided bracket except by the hardcore. Also most guilds are designed around 25 to 10 man raiding it would become a mess for them to have to nearly double their amount of raiders needed. Raids are far different than oondasta, as thats just one boss and doesn't require the commitment of a raid.

This subject of bringing back 40 mans is beaten to death, Blizzard won't do it, thats the point of Flex and LFR because people aren't doing 25 man or 10 man content because they can't so they made those so people can experience the content. Adding a 40 man would invalidate Blizzard's whole idea.

Blizzard can do it and make it happen, but it would be wasted energy as there wouldn't be very many people doing 40 man. Content gets taken out the less its used. Thats why 40 man was taken out in the first place.

You're totally missing the point. We are not asking for 40-man normal/heroics. Therefore there will not be any reason for 40-man guilds. But if a raid happens to have more than 25, they can go do flex instead of kicking the extra players.

[Jokerfiend]

They can't scale shit, they have to design the whole raid around it. Different amounts of people require more mechanics on boss fights. And 500 people in one spot would blow your computer to pieces.

I played in Vanilla, ask most people who played in Vanilla. 40 mans weren't fun they were pointlessly difficult and required really committed people to do them.

If you are committed go for it, but don't get mad that we don't have other features because SOME people wanted to do 40 mans.

I was a raider in Vanilla, and you are full shit.

It was frankly easy, MC, ZG, and Ony. Easy fights. Super fun. We cleared that shit every Tuesday, in about 3 1/2 - 4 Hours. While BWL took about 2 days to clear. Progression into AQ-40wasn't anymore or less difficult than getting into progression for any current (H) raids. I loved Twins fight, so hard.

The only difference now, you don't have to clear MC, ZG, ONY, BWL for people missing Rep, Mats, or whatever from previous raids.

Yeah, MC was pointless hard for bads. Just saying.

[beanman12345]

Why stop at 40? 500 man raid ftw!

[darkwarrior42]

You're totally missing the point. We are not asking for 40-man normal/heroics. Therefore there will not be any reason for 40-man guilds. But if a raid happens to have more than 25, they can go do flex instead of kicking the extra players.

Thread title, emphasis mine: "What if flex replaced normal and the size ranged from over 25 to 40?"

Edit: At least I'm assuming that when the OP says "replaced normal", he's actually talking about replacing normal, as opposed to changing flex mode. If the OP is only talking about changing flex mode to allow for another 15 people, much of what I said isn't relevant... but in that case, there is literally nothing in the OP's thread title or in his OP that represents what he's talking about.

[gee]

Why are some people AGAINST making 40-man flex? If you don't like it, don't raid in a 40-man flex!