People Say WoD Raiding Is Amazing?

[zephid]

Except a huge amount of those bosses from raids like Karazhan, Gruul, Mags. Even Naxxramas 2.0 were known for being exceedingly easy mom and pop guild bosses that no "real raider" would have difficulty with at the time. They are raids that are equivalent to how we now view normal and heroic, but they are still fully fleshed raids. They WERE the normal/heroic of the TBC era with simply a different content layout in mind. You can't compare what was essentially normal/heroic of TBC to the mythic of current WoW. Even singular bosses in TBC and WotLK were much, much more difficult than the rest of their tier. Bosses like Malygos, Kael'thas and Brutallus were extremely difficult encounters for the time when compared to the rest of their "tier".

So in essence, you can't tell someone they can't compare raiding then to how it is now, because there are far more options in terms of difficulty now, not to mention the in general difficulty of raiding has definitely increased over the years to compensate an overall increase in player skill as well as helpful and useful addons. They are incomparable over that medium.

I haven't said anything about raid being incomplete just because the raid is easy on normal/heroic mode. I'm talking about the fact that they are incomplete because the bosses doesn't have all of their abilities in them. The difficulty of an encounter has nothing to do with it.

If a boss in normal mode had all of his abilities you could say that you have experienced the whole fight when you did it in normal mode.

But when content is fundamentally designed for different people in mind, it's not fair to tell someone who has no desire to play mythic raiding that his opinions about encounters on other difficulties are meaningless. It's not as if mythic somehow completes an otherwise incomplete puzzle when it comes to a bossfight. It's the difference between a 1,000 and 2,000 piece puzzle of the same picture.

But it's not the same picture since they contain different things. For your puzzle analogy to work the only difference between a mythic and a normal mode encounter would be the numbers, Boss HP, boss damage etc.

When in reality it's more like you are trying to piece together a puzzle but you can only complete the picture in mythic mode. When you do the puzzle in normal/heroic mode you will be missing pieces, making it impossible to get a complete picture.

[Manabomb]

But it's not the same picture since they contain different things. For your puzzle analogy to work the only difference between a mythic and a normal mode encounter would be the numbers, his HP, the damage his does etc.

When in reality it's more like you are trying to piece together a puzzle but you can only complete the picture in mythic mode. When you do the puzzle in normal/heroic mode you will be missing pieces, making it impossible to get a complete picture.

Except you don't need to beat it on mythic to beat the encounter. Mythic is just a harder version of the puzzle. It's for those players that want to be challenged and has the most rewards from it. In no other game, hell in no other RPG will you find this idea that somehow completing it on the highest difficulty gives you a better understanding of the game itself. The boss encounters largely stay the same going from normal-heroic-mythic with obvious increases in things like mechanic difficulty or numbers difficulty. It's not as if the boss suddenly becomes completely different from heroic to mythic, it's still the very same puzzle that takes more time and effort to complete.

That sort of elitism is unbecoming of this community, with the ideal that the only way to even comment on an encounter design is to beat it on the highest difficulty.

[Kantoro]

Is how I would respond.

[Manabomb]

I haven't said anything about raid being incomplete just because the raid is easy on normal/heroic mode. I'm talking about the fact that they are incomplete because the bosses doesn't have all of their abilities in them. The difficulty of an encounter has nothing to do with it.


But it's not the same picture since they contain different things. For your puzzle analogy to work the only difference between a mythic and a normal mode encounter would be the numbers, Boss HP, boss damage etc.

When in reality it's more like you are trying to piece together a puzzle but you can only complete the picture in mythic mode. When you do the puzzle in normal/heroic mode you will be missing pieces, making it impossible to get a complete picture.

But we are talking about an era where the word "heroic" meant "oh heroic dungeons?". The difficulty of a singular encounter has everything to do with your argument, and hell by your logic we can only compare normal HFC to gruul/mag/kara because obviously BT, SWP and Hyjal were the highest difficulty of the era.

Commenting on the design of an encounter and spreading an opinion about it should not be bound to this rhetoric of someone beating it on the highest difficulty. If you do that, then the only people talking about boss encounters will be the only people that want raiding to be brutal for everyone.

[ecca2]

On topic, I agree with OP. I think the fights feel like they're getting to the point of being overcomplicated/overdesigned because they have to be. The devs seem to feel like they need to do SOMETHING to keep raid boss fights fresh. They've largely got a "been there, done that" style to them where you can basically go "oh, this mechanic is like x mechanic from y boss in z expansion". Only caveat is the fights now feel like they're combining several old bosses/mechanics into 1 and it feels like too much at times.

The difficulty that the content is done on is irrelevant in terms of the current discussion. Everyone in this thread is framing their own experience relative to the difficulties they're used to. In that case: my opinion is that yes, while Raiding this xpac has easily been its best feature and has its high point that I'd put equal to some of the fights they've thrown at us in the past, that doesn't make it as fun as some past bosses either. Some of the fights are fantastic; Archimonde is well-done and has a great rhythmic chaos to it. Others just feel like they're just overdesigned and chaotic just to be. Sure, timers exist but knowing when mechanics are coming on Heroic or that an additional add is coming on Mythic doesn't make a miserable fight any more fun to slog through. If it's not fun, it's not fun.

[Sam the Wiser]

As someone who always did heroic raids Wod raids put me to sleep.

[Super Kami Dende]

Apart from maybe Kael and Black Temple Illidari Council. TBC has some of the most boring fights in all of WoW mechanic wise.

WoD's raids were great, most bosses felt quite different which after 10 years of boss mechanics is still quite a feat.

[Spiral Mage]

You basically say you don't understand why WOD is being praised for it's raid content, then you somehow think BC was better, when BC content is braindead easy. If raids today were that simple, you'd be up here crying about how no raid actually requires any skill. Since BC raids had virtually no skill involved.

How in hell, you think WOD, which has some of the most interesting raid fights and concepts to date .. is worse than a day and age, where raids required damn near no thought in any capacity .. is completely beyond me.

I raided in BC. Even back then, I was astounded by how badly a number of the fights were designed. Today, I actually respect how they're done.

This is another one of those threads where the meme: "Not Sure If Serious" comes to mind. Since it's hard to believe the OP is.

[Concequence]

Not worth discussing then.

Mythic Raiding was the worst part of this expansion and that's saying a LOT. Considering the rest was not really all that spectacular.

And I 100% know there is a very small percentage of people who are very vocal about thinking the exact opposite. But honestly the exclusivity of mythic raiding is miserable.

And the fact that you say "Not worth discussing then" sort of proves it. So a small percentage of people get to participate in the only thing "worth discussing" means this expansion is massively flawed.

Either every difficulty is "Worth discussing" or every difficulty should be accessible by anyone who wants it. (That means even those people who really try their hardest but might never be really good enough for the current "Mythic" difficulty)

SoO was accessible. Dragon Soul was accessible. Most of MoP was accessible by just about anyone. Even in Pugs. And Im sure the next person to respond is going to say they did all of the Mythic Hellfire bosses in a Pug... which is lies. That is not a pug. That's a overpowered guild who has had folks leave and find enough people and bring in a couple folks to fill in spots.

Either way... this season has not be the most fun. It's been rather depressing to be honest.

[zephid]

Except you don't need to beat it on mythic to beat the encounter. Mythic is just a harder version of the puzzle.

It's not just a harder version, since it's not just a difference when it comes to the numbers, it also contains more things. Things that are missing from the normal mode puzzle.

It's for those players that want to be challenged and has the most rewards from it. In no other game, hell in no other RPG will you find this idea that somehow completing it on the highest difficulty gives you a better understanding of the game itself.

That's because bosses usually don't have more/less abilities depending on the difficulty setting. Usually they only scale the HP/damage up or down. That's why you don't have this discussion in most RPGs. You will however find this discussion in every game where a boss have more abilities on a harder difficulty.

The boss encounters largely stay the same going from normal-heroic-mythic with obvious increases in things like mechanic difficulty or numbers difficulty. It's not as if the boss suddenly becomes completely different from heroic to mythic, it's still the very same puzzle that takes more time and effort to complete.

There are plenty of fights in which you can't use the same strategy when it comes to handling different mechanics in the fight because of the increased difficulty. That could be because stuff do more damage etc but it also happens because abilities doesn't always do the same thing in mythic mode. An ability that might just deal damage in normal mode might also debuff you in mythic, making it impossible to handle the same way etc.

That sort of elitism is unbecoming of this community, with the ideal that the only way to even comment on an encounter design is to beat it on the highest difficulty.

If you want to make comments about the whole fight you have to experience the whole fight.

[SinAscendant]

But it's not the same picture since they contain different things. For your puzzle analogy to work the only difference between a mythic and a normal mode encounter would be the numbers, Boss HP, boss damage etc.

When in reality it's more like you are trying to piece together a puzzle but you can only complete the picture in mythic mode. When you do the puzzle in normal/heroic mode you will be missing pieces, making it impossible to get a complete picture.

No, it's not. Adding one mechanic or maybe two makes the fight more complex, but it does not make it a different fight. And in any case, the point of the thread is to compare it to something that did not have a Mythic version, so it would make more sense to use Heroic as a comparison

Less than 1% of the player base plays Mythic. To pretend that Heroic is not a real fight in and of itself is to say that Blizzard is catering ONLY to that tiny percentage of players and no one else, which is clearly false. You're looking at this from the wrong viewpoint. It isn't that Heroic is incomplete; Heroic is meant to be the base difficulty. From there, they make it easier to do Normal; and they make it harder to do Mythic. They don't start on Mythic and remove mechanics, they start on Heroic and add mechanics.

The difference is that Heroic would be a 1000 piece puzzle, and Mythic would be that exact same 1000 piece puzzle but with "Bonus 100-piece extra scene!" It's extra, it is not needed to get the intended experience, but it is nice to have and a pretty neat addition.

[Lamortykins]

That's because heroic = the old normal mode

Uhhh no. Current normal is harder than flex was, and current heroic is harder than normal was.

[Ielenia]

No not really, I used to raid at a mythic level, and I don't anymore, I do everything else. I can say if you have raided mythic, and downgraded to everything else, you will know that a good meaningful chunk is missing in every other difficulty.

It's still meaningless. 'Normal' and 'Heroic' is still raiding, in every sense of the word. And even if you never, ever stepped into mythic (heroic, back then), you can still assess with a fair degree of certainty, if the game is indeed harder today than it was before, by comparing similar difficulties. For example: Cataclysm's normal with today's heroic. ICC's heroic mode with today's Mythic modes.

[zephid]

The difficulty of a singular encounter has everything to do with your argument

Actually it doesn't. My claim is that you have not experienced the whole encounter until you have beaten the boss when he has all of his abilities. Which means that right now you have to beat it on mythic mode.

and hell by your logic we can only compare normal HFC to gruul/mag/kara because obviously BT, SWP and Hyjal were the highest difficulty of the era.

They were not even the same raid tier.

Commenting on the design of an encounter and spreading an opinion about it should not be bound to this rhetoric of someone beating it on the highest difficulty. If you do that, then the only people talking about boss encounters will be the only people that want raiding to be brutal for everyone.

If you want to comment on the entire encounter you should have to beat the boss when he has all of his abilities.

- - - Updated - - -

Uhhh no. Current normal is harder than flex was, and current heroic is harder than normal was.

Not by much. Current Heroic mode is much closer to the old normal mode than it is to the old heroic mode.

[Manabomb]

It's not just a harder version, since it's not just a difference when it comes to the numbers, it also contains more things. Things that are missing from the normal mode puzzle.


That's because bosses usually don't have more/less abilities depending on the difficulty setting. Usually they only scale the HP/damage up or down. That's why you don't have this discussion in most RPGs. You will however find this discussion in every game where a boss have more abilities on a harder difficulty.



There are plenty of fights in which you can't use the same strategy when it comes to handling different mechanics in the fight because of the increased difficulty. That could be because stuff do more damage etc but it also happens because abilities doesn't always do the same thing in mythic mode. An ability that might just deal damage in normal mode might also debuff you in mythic, making it impossible to handle the same way etc.


If you want to make comments about the whole fight you have to experience the whole fight.

It contains more difficult mechanics, but the over all design of the boss encounter remained the same. They tacked on other things to make it harder than the other versions, or changed the functionality of a key mechanic to a different mechanic. Again, that doesn't completely change the boss fight. It may change the way you handle the strategy for a bossfight, but that doesn't change the encounters design, aesthetically nor does it variate very much mechanically.

The debuff that was tacked on in mythic does not somehow cause mythic to be a complete version of the puzzle if the ability in the previous versions is hard enough to handle to those it was designed for. That's not how encounter design works.

But people -have- experienced the whole fight. On the difficulty that best suits them. The only reason there are even additional mechanics in WoW's mythic raiding is because, as I said before, raiding in the higher difficulties in WoW is more geared toward group effort instead of the individual. The metric on which the difficulty those mechanics add is measured the same way as simple health and damage increases would effect the individual.

And what you suggest would only cause stagnation in design encounters, as someone previously posted, the pretentious elitism involved with inviting the idea that the only form of raiding that matters and therefor the only form of raiding worth talking about being mythic is an extremely flawed and shortsighted argument.

[Mormolyce]

Apart from maybe Kael and Black Temple Illidari Council. TBC has some of the most boring fights in all of WoW mechanic wise.

WoD's raids were great, most bosses felt quite different which after 10 years of boss mechanics is still quite a feat.

I still like throwing footballs in the Vashj fight :P

But yeah TBC raid mechanics are used as dungeon mechanics these days. Some dungeons are considerably more complex than TBC raids in fact.

[Grapefruitsnz]

Remember Gruul? Simple fight by today's standards but was incredible fun when you did him the first time. Remember the fishing boss in SPC? Very cool concept. Then Leotheras with the ranged tanking him and him spinning around the room. Kael'thas and his followers walking toward you, and using legendary weapons to beat him. Shade of Akama, simple yet exhilarating. Teron Gorefiend with the ghost mechanics.

The problem with this point though is that it applies to pretty much every boss WoW has had. I remember seeing the Gunship fight in ICC here on mmo-champ when ICC was being revealed and thinking "holy shit, fighting an airship, whilst on an airship? this is going to be great" and it ended up being an extended mid raid break after the 3rd or 4th time. Same goes for a fight like Flame Leviathan; never really seen before in terms of concept but got boring quick. A lot of the BC fights you've listed weren't that great either, both in hindsight but also when they were current. Shade was literally adds, something you mentioned as okay mechanically but aren't interesting. Teron Gorefiend, not only did it spawn a free browser game to try and help with the ghost killing, but early success on that fight was purely down to who gets to kill the ghosts and who doesn't.

[satimy]

HFC isnt that fun IMO. BRF was amazing and highmaul was middle of the road. Raiding is just the only thing that doesnt suck, so it looks better by comparison.

[Polarthief]

WoD has the best raiding of the "decline expansions" (Cata - WoD). That said, it's significantly worse than BC/LK, and will be EASILY forgotten in Legion, in Expansion 7, 8, etc.

The thing about raiding is that people remember only three types of raids:
- The Good: Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel for example. People will always remember the near-unanimous good raids. (I'd have added BC raids to this list, but not many people raided until LK).
- The Bad: Trial of the Crusader and Dragon Soul (examples). People will always remember the raids that were just terrible and/or extremely buggy.
- The Nostalgic: Molten Core, Karazhan, Naxxramas (10/25) (examples). People will always remember their first raid or raids from "the old days". They may not necessarily be good or bad, but they're very reminiscent of these raids purely because they were the 'originals' to them.

The WoD raids do not fall under any of these 3 categories, and therefore will be forgotten, like Obsidian Sanctum, Eye of Eternity, Blackwing Descent, Mogushan Vaults, etc.

[Concequence]

Actually it doesn't. My claim is that you have not experienced the whole encounter until you have beaten the boss when he has all of his abilities. Which means that right now you have to beat it on mythic mode.

So why not have Blizzard change it in the next expansion so every mechanic is present in every difficulty. (except LFR obviously) But have those mechanics be less difficult to handle on easier difficulties. Then we could all have a conversation about "the fight".

Of course then you'd say something like, "Well its a gear check, that is really tight, on Mythic" ... And then we couldn't all talk about it until all of us have the gear.... Right?