WotLK to MoP: A Trend Analysis of Raiding Difficulty.

[ObiChad]

All the way up to T11 you could basically underman normal modes and anyone who fucked up died themselves but caused very little overall harm, allowing you to drag people along to see what they are like.

That to me was the biggest change from Wrath raiding to Cata raiding that I noticed. And for me, what kills a friends/family type guild.

[Deleted]

Well, so what? you'd expect a higher clear rate if everyone who isn't pro is left out of raiding.

What did you smoke? You dont need to be pro to be 1/12. Anyone that is 1/12 is included in the data.

Same deal. If raiding is now the preserve of the hardcore, you'd expect to see this. Why? Because all the guilds who gave up after 40 wipes on stone guards don't feature in your stats.

Neither does all guilds that wiped 40 times on magmaw, beasts etc. I am not claiming it do be a perfect data set, but so far it is the best we have seen.

Oh, i see. We measure how difficult the raids are based on the top tier of players, but not when it come to skill levels of players.

What? We measure the difficulty of raids by checking how many players cleared normals and how many players that killed the first boss in normal in 1 month. To kill 1 boss in normal in 1 month is hardly top tier. We are talking about average players here. Not top tier.

All the way up to T11 you could basically underman normal modes and anyone who fucked up died themselves but caused very little overall harm, allowing you to drag people along to see what they are like. You can't even do that much on jin rokh.

We 5 manned entire MSV first week in ToT.

You could pretty much kill guards with 2 tanks 2 healers and 1 dps at release week.
Same goes for jin'rokh. Even progressing guilds usually kill jin'rokh after the second storm. They could for sure do it with less players.
You can easily underman most of the normal mode bosses. It is not harder or easier than before. I dont know where all this bull is coming from. You do not need 10 players performing at 110% to kill normal modes.

I don't need to prove something so obvious. If you insist, log into wow and start randomly asking people "is tot harder than molten core?"

Wait for laughter.

Who said shit about molten core? See, no you realised you are wrong and have to bring up MC, lovely. Nobody here is argueing that raiding is easier than MC.

Absolutely, first month post expansion average players will still be levelling. Course, Firefly knows all this. Conclusions first, data afterwards.

Remember that MoP feautured gating in MSV that allowed for people to level up their characters. Cataclysm did however not do this which I already mentioned before. Still, people should still reach the first boss in raids after a month, it should only lower the overall kill success as less players have time to reach the final boss.

As T14 had one of the highest success rates of all raids ever, this was obviously not the problem.

[ObiChad]

The point of the metric is that not everyone have cleared it. Checking after 1 month is the best timeline possible as you still have a lot of people that did not clear it

That works if you assume the type of person/guild that clears in a month can show us how difficult a raid tier is for everyone. I suppose this is where we disagree.

[Deleted]

What did you smoke? You dont need to be pro to be 1/12. Anyone that is 1/12 is included in the data.

You did need to be very good/dedicated to have killed SG in the first month.

it's the same for all the other tiers. Raiders who are slower won't feature in your figures, and raiders who are slower are the ones most likely to be effected by difficulty changes. Lets say ICC releases, it's going to take a few weeks for your casual players to get their gear in order/do the 5 mans etc before they go in.

Theres no reason for you to know this, ofc, being a hardcore type yourself, but it takes time for the less skilled/less dedicated to get a group together and geared, a single month might not be enough for some tiers and definitely won't for an expansion.

Neither does all guilds that wiped 40 times on magmaw, beasts etc. I am not claiming it do be a perfect data set, but so far it is the best we have seen.

It's rubbish data because it excludes the very people who matter in measuring difficulty. lol

What? We measure the difficulty of raids by checking how many players cleared normals and how many players that killed the first boss in normal in 1 month. To kill 1 boss in normal in 1 month is hardly top tier. We are talking about average players here. Not top tier.

having 10 players ready to raid post expac is a dreamland for most casual/average raiders. And these are the guys who will be playing catch up every patch, your data excludes the only people who matter when checking for difficulty - the people who can't do T11 easily but can do T13 - the "swing voters", if you will.

We 5 manned entire MSV first week in ToT.

Awesome, good for you. Completely irrelevent though.

You could pretty much kill guards with 2 tanks 2 healers and 1 dps at release week.

Not the experience of the average player. Think more like 40 wipes before the tanks understand the fight, then all the extra wipes while everyone else learns it.

Same goes for jin'rokh. Even progressing guilds usually kill jin'rokh after the second storm. They could for sure do it with less players.

No mate, no.

You can easily underman most of the normal mode bosses. It is not harder or easier than before. I dont know where all this bull is coming from. You do not need 10 players performing at 110% to kill normal modes.

Can be done =/= doable for the average.

Who said shit about molten core? See, no you realised you are wrong and have to bring up MC, lovely. Nobody here is argueing that raiding is easier than MC.



Remember that MoP feautured gating in MSV that allowed for people to level up their characters. Cataclysm did however not do this which I already mentioned before. Still, people should still reach the first boss in raids after a month, it should only lower the overall kill success as less players have time to reach the final boss.

As T14 had one of the highest success rates of all raids ever, this was obviously not the problem.

Given that the first boss in T14 was a guild breaker, nope.

[Deleted]

That works if you assume the type of person/guild that clears in a month can show us how difficult a raid tier is for everyone. I suppose this is where we disagree.

The data does not check only guilds that cleared the instance. It checks everyone that killed atleast 1 boss.

So it shows how hard the raid is by the guilds that killed 1 boss, not the entire raid.

Checking data after 1 month would only include more ghostguilds, nerfs etc. Most guilds have killed atleast 1 boss after 1 month.

[Darmalus]

I honestly think it's never been better. That might sound bizarre, but the players at the top are doing things they've never done before. Where this "talent base" is drying up is at the bottom where, if someone suggested to me the players have never been worse, I'd have a hard time disagreeing.

I'd argue that the player base at the bottom has remained largely unchanged. LFR just brought a broader section of the pre-existing player base into raiding via LFR. It looks worse, but the same really good high end raiders are still there, you can just see all the other players too now. Before LFR they were invisible, now you see what has always been there.

[Deleted]

It's rubbish data because it excludes the very people who matter in measuring difficulty. lol

Until you can come up with better data your opinion is kinda mute.

---------- Post added 2013-06-03 at 09:22 PM ----------

Awesome, good for you. Completely irrelevent though.

Ofc it is not irrelevant. You just said you had to 10 man bosses in MoP. Obviously you dont.

---------- Post added 2013-06-03 at 09:23 PM ----------

Not the experience of the average player. Think more like 40 wipes before the tanks understand the fight, then all the extra wipes while everyone else learns it.

Guess what. Being able to 8-9 man bosses in T8-T13 was not also the experience of the average raider

[DakonBlackblade]

Its quite hard to analise all this data realy, diferent periods in game make for vastly diferent playing habits, theres also the issue with the number of player and stuf. I do think however that figths have gone increasingly more complex (that doesnt necessarely means hard, complexity is diferent tham dificulty) and this is pushing ppl away, there are fights that are complex for the sake of beeing complex, ppl cant expect a friends and family kind of guild to like Dark Animus, theres so much planing involved on your first few trys you sit there for hours listening to ppl and trying to figure out a strat, this simply scare new players away.

They trying to increase complexity to follow the increase in players skill/efectiviness of third parties add ons but theyre forgetting that scares new players away. I love that I have a blast with a fight that makes me think about strats as much as it requires good play, new players dont quite like it at all tough, theyre not in my level of gameplay yet, they havent beeing "growing"with this game since Wrath, its ludicrous to expect that a new raider will just understand all that goes on on Horridon fast: "okay man this is the second boss of the instance, he has 700 skills you have to interupt this, stun that, aoe this, focus fire that, avoid this, kill that first, them hit this this and this and finaly burn boss while avoiding his atatcks and if you get charged do this, and after him its council, its a total clusterfck and we expect you to handle all thats beeing thrown at you at once perfectly even tough youve never raided before".

It doesnt realy work well for the raidding comunity if new ppl arent comming in, and I know this for a fact, new ppl arent comming in. My server is basicaly constituted only of mid tier guilds, we raid heroics, not always clear everything on a tier on heroic but go far like 80% over, only raid 2-4 nights a week tops varying 6-12 hours of weekly raiding with players of decent but considerably distinct skill levels on the same raiding team (some are quite good, some are okay some are mediocre but can follow instructions), and in the event one of these guilds loose a memeber it has been helll to replcae, ppl come to the raid and they perform poorly cause theyre new to raiding and they feel bad and dishearthened, even the mediocre players of our teams outperform this new generation of raiders by a mile, and thats cause these guys are ages behind us, they havent learned from simple bosses and mechanics and progressed slowly, theyve been thrown on a raid enviroment where every boss does way too many things at once and theyre expected to follow it, so they quit and go back to LFR or to not raiding at all.

It doesnt amaze me one bit that ppl on LFR dont execute mechanics well, a lot of them are beginners, they dont understand all that stuf thats happening, its too much of a step up form 5 man dungeons and scenarios for example, on LFR it doesnt result in a wipe tough but they still dont understand wtfck is going on and they just roll with it.

TLDR: too much complexity in bosses nowadays to acount for increased playerbase skill and addons, newer players fear raiding normls and such and when they do they underperform, as a result the raiding comunity is shrinking.

[Deleted]

Sadly there is no data for how many guilds are wiping on the first boss in each tier. If there was I would gladly use it. However as this cannot be provided, you just have to check the second best. Which is guilds that killed the first boss.

[DakonBlackblade]

Sadly there is no data for how many guilds are wiping on the first boss in each tier. If there was I would gladly use it. However as this cannot be provided, you just have to check the second best. Which is guilds that killed the first boss.

The first boss this time around is Morchok easy tough, we even nicknamed him the "Thundering Morchok" on my guild, wich makes things worse cause ppl feel encouraged by Jin Rock them Horridon walks over theyre faces hehe, they did nerf Horri alot wich helps but most of the damage had been done already.

[Deleted]

I don't need to prove something so obvious. If you insist, log into wow and start randomly asking people "is tot harder than molten core?"
Wait for laughter.

First of all, when comparing normal modes, you shouldn't be comparing them to anything pre-Ulduar. By doing that you're just shooting yourself in the foot. For example nothing in normal mode ToT beats out Sunwell/Naxx40 stuff.

Other than that, normal mode ToT in 496(?) gear surely doesn't beat out Ulduar 25man in 213 gear, Icc no-buff in 245 gear or tier 11 in 346 gear. I'm inclined to say that Icc/tier 11 beats out any MoP normal mode difficulty.

[Osmeric]

Just over 86k 10-man guilds killed the Northrend Beasts, while just under 59k managed it on 25-man: Total 145k.
84k guilds did Lord Marrowgar on 10-man, with 25-man guilds accounting for 59k kills: Total 143k.

Please don't do that. You can't add the 10 and 25 man figures in Wrath, since just about every 25 man guild was already represented in the 10 man figures.

If you're trying to compute total number of raiders, do something like M x 10 + N x 15, where M is the 10 man figure and N is the 25 man figure (the 15 is the "extra" the 25 man guild has.) Even this ignores bench/multiple raid teams.

[Deleted]

Other than that, normal mode ToT in 496(?) gear surely doesn't beat out Ulduar 25man in 213 gear, Icc no-buff in 245 gear or tier 11 in 346 gear. I'm inclined to say that Icc/tier 11 beats out any MoP normal mode difficulty.

Which the data supports it does, by a fair margin

[painweaver]

I don't even know what you are trying to say because the first thing I noticed is that you are using a different scale for each graph, which is the shit politicians and the media do to manipulate data. I'm sorry if you actually had a relevant point, but don't show me a visual trend analysis with graphs scaled differently.

Other remarks:
The analysis is lacking important variables, i.e., number of days each raid was current content, buffs (including, number of days the buff was released and the strength of the buff), bugs that made any single boss unbeatable at any given point in the raid's lifetime, etc. As someone else mentioned, you are comparing 10 apples with 5 oranges and 20 carrots.

[Deleted]

Please don't do that. You can't add the 10 and 25 man figures in Wrath, since just about every 25 man guild was already represented in the 10 man figures.

If you're trying to compute total number of raiders, do something like M x 10 + N x 15, where M is the 10 man figure and N is the 25 man figure (the 15 is the "extra" the 25 man guild has.) Even this ignores bench/multiple raid teams.

Also that data is still kinda irrelevant as the tier was out for over a year, cant check how many guilds cleared it after 12 months and call it relevant data ^^
Guilds disband and reform.

[nekobaka]

Just over 86k 10-man guilds killed the Northrend Beasts, while just under 59k managed it on 25-man: Total 145k.
84k guilds did Lord Marrowgar on 10-man, with 25-man guilds accounting for 59k kills: Total 143k.

At least on my server Northren Beasts on 25 man was being one shot by PuGs on launch day with the first four bosses in ICC 25 man being cleared by PuGs on launch day as well. There really should not be much variance with those along with Marrowgar and I think ToC being part of the weekly raid quest which means that players who would also not bother with raiding would still do them and bail.

Also that data is still kinda irrelevant as the tier was out for over a year, cant check how many guilds cleared it after 12 months and call it relevant data ^^
Guilds disband and reform.

And are these numbers from when the content was current or does it include players who went back after the expansion and did them?

[theturn]

Im from a casual guild and frankly we have about 15 players carrying the other 10. We have cleared all normal modes and will sometime in the future start working on heroic modes. We are by no means leet or hardcore. I personally don't find normal modes hard. However I will say that the current teir specifically has alot of personal responsibility checks where if you make a mistake you will wipe the raid. So progression becomes harder and harder because its so easy for a weak link to hurt you.

[Deleted]

And are these numbers from when the content was current or does it include players who went back after the expansion and did them?

Think I mentioned it in every post, but it is basically 1 month after the content being released (with some adjustment on T8, T9 and T10 due to gating.)

Should be explained in the posts.


Edit: referring to my numbers. His numbers are after guilds went back and cleared it 1 year later.

[Deleted]

I've just realised this last bit is squid ink.

Anyone want to go back to the OP and talk about that?

[Tsuna]

"That's a bigger topic, but I think the whole endgame model needs a rethink. Too much effort is being expended on too few people, and I don't see how that helps the game in the longer term; especially when players are disappearing so quickly.

Of course, that's NOT to say that the lost subscriptions are purely because of harder raids. I just think too much effort is being spent keeping happy too small a percentage of the player base."

But do you know where the unsubscribers are? What if the people un-subbing are NOT the ones raiding the current content but are instead guildless LFR junkies that are satisfied they've "beaten" the game by killing lei-shen (possibly while afk). There are plenty more issues with this analysis that really need to be addressed. The perceived difficulty increase is actually just skill atrophy due to the prior tiers having training wheels (ICC buff, DS Nerf + LFR) strapped to them. With the looming elephant that is LFR still clinging to the raiding culture player skill will only continue to get worse and worse, Normal and heroic mode content will be cleared by less and less people, and the long subbing players who find "home" in WoW in a great guild will slowly die.