Are barriers to mythic raiding worth it?

[Spotnick]

Not really, what people dont get is that mythic raiding isnt that sought after anymore. People can do heroic with their friends instead. Lowering it to 15 will make this alot easier for groups of skilled friends do mythic instead of seeking for larger guild where they don't feel they belong. Its an old game, and people have made friends through the years.

So no, lowering it will make more groups of those who only do heroic because they dont have the numbers, to do mythic, thus more people will do mythic raiding overall.

Lowering it to 20 did nothing to be honest. Recruiting is the same damned thing, and groups who couldn't have 25 online now has the same issue with 20.

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Isn't heroic enough? Isn't +15 mythic dungeons enough? Why do things need to endlessly scale. Listening to some players they'd be happy with a +15 mythic raid. How many people are going to actually do that nonsense.

Heroic doesn't last more than a week or two.. so no, it's not enough.

[KaPe]

You mean artifact power grind?

Those were the traits from the first kill.

Which was the one moment when we didn't need to grind anything, because Concordance - beyond first rank - had very minor effect. Now, instead of being smartass, link the Crucible.

[Corroc]

Which was the one moment when we didn't need to grind anything, because Concordance - beyond first rank - had very minor effect. Now, instead of being smartass, link the Crucible.

You do realise that crucible is just extra power that those guilds didn't obviously need?

Edit. let me clarify, if you are not killing the bosses right now its not because your raid dont have enough traits.

[Myztikrice]

Lowering it to 20 did nothing to be honest. Recruiting is the same damned thing, and groups who couldn't have 25 online now has the same issue with 20.

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Heroic doesn't last more than a week or two.. so no, it's not enough.

It obviously did something, you don't reduce the requirement for 2500+ people (500+ mythic raiding guilds) needed to Mythic raid and not have it affect something. If nothing else it enabled more guilds to think they were Mythic capable.

[KaPe]

You do realise that crucible is just extra power that those guilds didn't obviously need?

Edit. let me clarify, if you are not killing the bosses right now its not because your raid dont have enough traits.

You do realize that this doesn't matter in the context of grind, right? You cherry picked one part of the expansion where AP was worth almost nothing, without acknowledging that the rest of expansion was very different. Oh, sure, in theory, you don't "need" it. In reality, you're going to grab any decent advantage. If Blizzard introduces yet another step in the AP grind, we'll be grinding it after 75.

[Corroc]

You do realize that this doesn't matter in the context of grind, right? You cherry picked one part of the expansion where AP was worth almost nothing, without acknowledging that the rest of expansion was very different. Oh, sure, in theory, you don't "need" it. In reality, you're going to grab any decent advantage. If Blizzard introduces yet another step in the AP grind, we'll be grinding it after 75.

Methods first kill proves the point that "grind" is not a barrier to those kills. If someone says "we cant kill this boss when people are not at XY traits" then they are creating artificial barrier for themselves and people that play with them. Its not just in theory when people have killed those bosses with lower trait levels. This is all the same complain that has been going on all expansion where players say blizzard is forcing them to grind to be succesful. Artifact power is character progression that's not just for high end raiding but only the high end raiders are complaining it because they have turned RPG element in to performance threshold.

[KaPe]

Methods first kill proves the point that "grind" is not a barrier to those kills. If someone says "we cant kill this boss when people are not at XY traits" then they are creating artificial barrier for themselves and people that play with them. Its not just in theory when people have killed those bosses with lower trait levels. This is all the same complain that has been going on all expansion where players say blizzard is forcing them to grind to be succesful. Artifact power is character progression that's not just for high end raiding but only the high end raiders are complaining it because they have turned RPG element in to performance threshold.

Method is also the kind of guild who has much higher skill level and combines it with crazy class stacking (including race changes), thus achieving output that's not accessible to the vast majority of mythic raiders. Just because something is technically possible for them doesn't mean much. Other guilds need help, either through gearing (which is vastly inferior in this expansion), boss nerfs - which were quite severe and yet didn't turn them into pushovers - or additional powerups, be it item upgrades or new traits/crucible.

Plus, again - you cherry picked the only part of expansion which didn't have AP grind. The fact is that extra Concordance ranks sucked. No one bothered with them, since it offered minimal gain for significant effort. The same cannot be said about the Crucible. But yeah, sure, let's go with "if the best players in the world don't need X, then clearly the same can be said for less skilled raiders..." Do you not realize how absurd this argument is?

[Volitar]

You make it sound as if Mythic raiding an sich is actually hard. It's mostly about time investment and learning effects after dozens of wipes. If you want to raid Mythic, you can put aside the time for it, then you're certainly able to raid mythic.

In before: "not everyone is able to get world first man"

It's not just time investment, most mythic guilds raid about the same as what a heroic raid would do. It obviously has some skill involved but I think the biggest thing is attitude

[Corroc]

Method is also the kind of guild who has much higher skill level and combines it with crazy class stacking (including race changes), thus achieving output that's not accessible to the vast majority of mythic raiders. Just because something is technically possible for them doesn't mean much. Other guilds need help, either through gearing (which is vastly inferior in this expansion), boss nerfs - which were quite severe and yet didn't turn them into pushovers - or additional powerups, be it item upgrades or new traits/crucible.

Plus, again - you cherry picked the only part of expansion which didn't have AP grind. The fact is that extra Concordance ranks sucked. No one bothered with them, since it offered minimal gain for significant effort. The same cannot be said about the Crucible. But yeah, sure, let's go with "if the best players in the world don't need X, then clearly the same can be said for less skilled raiders..." Do you not realize how absurd this argument is?

You are just repeating yourself now. You dont need help, you need to get better.

[Deleted]

You are just repeating yourself now. You dont need help, you need to get better.

method and exorsus are a on a whole different lvl then even rest of the top 5/top 10 let alone all the rest of the raiders, just cause method and exorsus can kill something (on which they complained it was overtuned/ridiclous fight) doesnt mean it its fine for evry one else.

[Corroc]

method and exorsus are a on a whole different lvl then even rest of the top 5/top 10 let alone all the rest of the raiders, just cause method and exorsus can kill something (on which they complained it was overtuned/ridiclous fight) doesnt mean it its fine for evry one else.

You are right. But wow is not fps game where you need to have crazy reflexes or something like that. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from gettin better at this game if you are still struggling with the current tier. No one is saying that the current tier is not doable. Its hard, maybe even too hard for some people.

And you also have to remember that it has been over 3 months since the boss was killed first time. Your character should have been progressing all this time and the bosses have received nerfs.

[shaunika123]

Methods first kill proves the point that "grind" is not a barrier to those kills. If someone says "we cant kill this boss when people are not at XY traits" then they are creating artificial barrier for themselves and people that play with them. Its not just in theory when people have killed those bosses with lower trait levels. This is all the same complain that has been going on all expansion where players say blizzard is forcing them to grind to be succesful. Artifact power is character progression that's not just for high end raiding but only the high end raiders are complaining it because they have turned RPG element in to performance threshold.

it was true in ToV and NH tho
you needed at least 35 for helya and needed 54 for star augur at least but i think already krosus

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

Would indeed sort out at least part of that problem. And more people would find out that they're actually not truly cut out for Mythic beyond 3/9 (hey, I include myself there)

I know some of us care less about how far we get than we do just having a next boss to work on. Getting stuck on M-Mistress, but being able to work on the fight, beats zerging H once a week with nowhere else to go. For some of us at least.

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A few of the comments in here smack of epeen and miss the original point. If every raid team that cleared H could attempt M, would all of them be equally successful? Of course not. Would all of them fail? Also of course not. It's ridiculous to say that everyone on a smaller raid team is a bad player not ready for M.

If you're in a happy guild that enjoys raiding 2/week (probably the average), you just want something to do when you log on for raid night, something the team can keep working on. Doesn't matter if you're as good as the guilds that already beat those bosses with less gear; all that matters is that you and your friends have something to keep working on, at whatever pace you can manage.

[meekus]

Should just bring 10 man raiding back,thats all.

Yes, please. So many people would come back for that. Pretty much everyone I played with quit because we don't wanna bother with 20 man. Playing with a smaller group of people that you actually know is just so much more fun.

[Allenschezar]

imagine mythic KJ on 10man

it'd be either hilariously overtuned cos stuff like armageddon would be too many for so few people
or hilariously easy because the armageddon size would scale with people so you only need like 2-3 people soaking
get 2-3 rogues in 10man and soaking is basically not part of the fight


raising it to 20 people gives them more space to design mechanics that would not work well in a 10man environment

I'd love if there was 10man raiding again, trust me, but it's just not a feasible option

yea sure with the current bosses it's not really an option. But they were not designed with 10 man mythic in mind anyway.

If they would bring it back it has to be in the new expansion. But flex shows how big of a mess tuning is on some bosses if you run 10 man goups. So i guess that shows how much they want to bring 10 man to the table.

[HuxNeva]

I know some of us care less about how far we get than we do just having a next boss to work on. Getting stuck on M-Mistress, but being able to work on the fight, beats zerging H once a week with nowhere else to go. For some of us at least.

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A few of the comments in here smack of epeen and miss the original point. If every raid team that cleared H could attempt M, would all of them be equally successful? Of course not. Would all of them fail? Also of course not. It's ridiculous to say that everyone on a smaller raid team is a bad player not ready for M.

If you're in a happy guild that enjoys raiding 2/week (probably the average), you just want something to do when you log on for raid night, something the team can keep working on. Doesn't matter if you're as good as the guilds that already beat those bosses with less gear; all that matters is that you and your friends have something to keep working on, at whatever pace you can manage.

My guild is exactly there. Clearing HC rather late, but still facing a long period with nothing to do but re-clearing in one raid night, and hen have nothing for night 2. So there is definitely room for something, but should that be Mythic? Because, if it was, then the whole premise of creating a tier tuned for tight nit fixed size well prepared teams is out the window. So some HC+? Other option is to switch modes at some point later in the tier, but that would screw over teams genuinely progressing on M at that point. With the 11 week cadance, the problem is not solved but lessened as raids follow each-other pretty rapidly.
Personally, I think most teams underestimate the need for a bit of a breeder in the schedule. It might not feel like it in the short run, as you're used to 'raid night' and suddenly there's not realy anything but 'achievement runs' and you see people signing more tentative and declining and thinking it is all because of 'no new boss to work on'. But quite a few might be silently looking forward to a few weeks of pause.

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At this point, normal could be removed or merged with LFR without any detriment to the game.
.

I disagree strongly. Normal is meant as a first step into organized raiding. People are there as a group that all want the same thing. LFR is anonymous unorganized queued content. People are there for different reasons, some are even there just to troll and try to make it fail, others aren't even realy there, and despite all this, content is tuned so the group will still have a high chance to succeed.

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WHAT IF... They got rid of flex H? Yeah it would cause short term disruption, but players would eventually settle into guilds with 20 teams - i.e., fewer guilds but bigger raid teams - so they wouldn't clear H and be stuck.

Trying to envision a game where clearing the instance on one difficulty would naturally lead to starting it on the next, without having to leave/break up guilds to do it.

Flex has been a blessing for casual raiding teams. I don't think my guild is atypical and wouldn't survive if it weren't for flex.

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Everyone saying flex would be too hard to balance: are you saying then that H is not balanced now? Is it somehow harder to balance M than H?

At the high end where you want to push the extremes, you need to be able to take some constraints into account in your tuning exercise. Besides, if you did not, that would just introduce 1 more parameter into the strategy for the teams to find the 'optimal scaling size' for each boss. So in essence, this would amount to 'fixed size' but with the size being determined per boss.

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There are groups that start in Normal and progress onto Heroic, clearing that near the end of the tier. Your suggestion would cockblock those.

The basic problem you are struggling with is that high end mythic raiders are a tiny fraction of the customer population, smaller than any other of these parts. In the past Blizzard has had the flexibility to foolishly cater to this tiny group, but now as they struggle with an aging and declining game they don't have the slack to continue to do that. At some point they will just stop bothering, at all.

That is not how it works. The effort to add Mythic is marginal. They design for HC and the other difficulties are just variants. Having fixed size for M makes it even easier as they can ignore scaling factors. In your reasoning you should do away with all high end events in anything, being games, sports, science, culture whatever. Just be left with mediocre 'Einheidswurst' as the lowest common denominator of life.

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Just going to echo the sentiment that 10 player Mythic solves a lot of the issues with guild stability.

WoW has an aging player base, when most people playing it were in their teens and early twenties it wasn't unreasonable to have 40 player raiding, students have a lot of free time. Now that those same players are in their late twenties to early forties it's just not doable anymore. It's too hard to balance real life commitments with the organisation required to run the 22 - 30 player roster needed to maintain steady raiding.

People are quite used to setting aside specific nights each week for certain non-solo activities. Whether it is sports practice, music lessons, sewing clubs or poker night. Why would WoW raiding as a hobby be different? Not saying that for casual participants having one or two persons absent would break the event, things happen, so that is what flex is for. But having raiding night as something you might do if you feel like logging and have noting better to do, then maybe you should look more into more solo or simply queued (moba) games. M+ might also be better suited.

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Perhaps another way to phrase/look at the question:

"Is there any good way to make the transition from one raid difficulty to the next more of a curve and less of a cliff? So that guilds can continuously move from one challenge to the next, with their barriers being game play rather than social ties and not wanting to break up the band?"

You mean like they did with M+ dungeons? Works fantastic there, but I'm not sure HC+ raids would be as attractive. Could be though.

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Min-max guilds would try to find the exact amount of people you need to have it easier, and that would end up benching a lot of people for no reason.. which is not fun for anyone... nobody wants to be benched because 17 people will make the fight easier.

I however would love if you could make it flexible when it's on farm, because benching people on farm stuff is stupid. Progression I get it, but a boss you have killed a few times, why not.

Even for causal HC guilds people were initially benched on FA as the scaling favored smaller group sizes so much

[Osmeric]

That is not how it works. The effort to add Mythic is marginal. They design for HC and the other difficulties are just variants. Having fixed size for M makes it even easier as they can ignore scaling factors. In your reasoning you should do away with all high end events in anything, being games, sports, science, culture whatever. Just be left with mediocre 'Einheidswurst' as the lowest common denominator of life.

They wouldn't stop because of the effort required; they'd stop because of design tradeoffs required.

You see this already starting to happen in Legion. The tradeoff of "giving everyone something to do" and "not making high end raiders feel like they have to do too much" was shifted away from pleasing the high end raiders.

Analogies of the game with things from real life are, of course, retarded. Sports has a totally different business model (people pay to watch, not play, and is PvP not PvE). And the difficulty of "science" or "culture" (whatever that would mean) is not something that can be nerfed. Tell me: if the difficulty of life *could* be nerfed, wouldn't it be utterly monstrous not to do so? Doesn't technology do precisely that?

[rulem]

What I would love to see is mythic raiding be completely redesigned. Make Heroics much more difficult than their current iteration (tighter limit on titan-forging could do this). Once cleared, you can enter the mythic difficulty (like it is now). Create mythics like the old challenge mode dungeons, where item level and gear is standardized (this would hopefully prevent the need for split raids, thus less time commitment to join a mythic guild). I would personally like to see it moved to 15 man content, where 3 tanks and 3 healers are actually necessary. Make the rewards for clearing mythic achievements, mounts, etc., and not based on gear.

I would also like Blizz to support it more by streaming the top teams in 3rd person view and maybe even restricting raid times so people can watch the race. Make clearing heroics the first week the 'buy-in' and then the next week is the race, and would be limited to the guilds who finished in the top x (5?). Tournament style I guess. If you didn't finish in the top x, you could still run mythic the next week but wouldn't be part of the official tournament and regulated by blizz on hours to allow streaming the race.

I'm sure there are a multitude of issues with this that I have not thought of but this just an idea of what I would personally like to see.

[HuxNeva]

They wouldn't stop because of the effort required; they'd stop because of design tradeoffs required.

You see this already starting to happen in Legion. The tradeoff of "giving everyone something to do" and "not making high end raiders feel like they have to do too much" was shifted away from pleasing the high end raiders.

You assume they were focussd on 'pleasing high end raiders' before then? Putting in features that benefit a lott of players but make it harder for top end players is not somthing that equates to 'stopping mythic'.

Analogies of the game with things from real life are, of course, retarded.

Why? Is gaming a less 'real' activity then badminton, soccer, band practice ...?

Sports has a totally different business model (people pay to watch, not play, and is PvP not PvE).

In fact very little of the money in sports comes from direct ticket sales or subscription to sports channels. Most is inderect though advertizing or merchandizing.

And the difficulty of "science" or "culture" (whatever that would mean) is not something that can be nerfed.

That doesn't seem to stop people trying by trying to make them into just popularity contests. [/QUOTE]

Tell me: if the difficulty of life *could* be nerfed, wouldn't it be utterly monstrous not to do so? Doesn't technology do precisely that?

Not participating is the ultimate nerf. People aren't looking for the easiest option all the time. They are looking for many things, just as in real life that sometimes it is just zoning out (grab pills and booze or whatever), but often times they also want to challenge themselves. They can also just enjoy the idea that challenges beyond their abilities are even there and enjoy that people are tackling them just for the love of it.

[Deleted]

Yes, they are worth it. You cant balance encounter difficulty to be same as 10p or 30p. You cant just do it. every time some fight would be easier as 10 or as 30.