Does raiding need dramatically reviewed?

[Weeps]

Mythic is growing now instead of shrinking, and by growing i mean it started to draw media and fans attention, its spiked when method started streaming the mythic world first race, that even blizzard themselves track and congrats when they finish it, even though they do not support it.

if anything, mythic is a free promotion for blizzard done by method and the other horses that are racing, good thing? i guess so, having something majority of people cannot achieve is healthy for the game, atleast there is something some people might dream about, "one day, i'll be a cutting edge raider"

Trust me. I get it. I like to raid mythic. I agree that a high difficulty is good for the game.

I'm not saying get rid of hard mode.

For example, vanilla had one mode of difficulty and it's still hailed as one of the greatest parts of WoW.

Right now mythic is 9/9M but the first 8 bosses are walk overs with maybe 1 bottle-neck boss (stormwall for example).

Cthun was unkillable until people had gear and that took a while.

There are ways to make raid difficulties better. I'd like every single mythic boss to be tough as nails but can be beaten with higher gear not 400ilvl like Limit and Method complained about.

But... I also see how decreasing the overall difficulty of mythic a notch or two will enable more bosses to be tougher but beatable with higher ilvl. You should be mythic ilvl to beat the later bosses of a raid.

This is entirely an opinion, though. There are as many valid counter-arguments and I accept that.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

Yes because I feel like we keep getting powered down every raid. At the end of Legion we literally fought at the seat of the Pantheon of the universe. Now we are fighting regular people again, but somehow we are weaker and it takes a whole raid to beat some Paladin and some Monks and some Mages.

We have been powered down since Legion. We not only lost the artifacts, but the Titans themselves were empowering us during that fight. It was never our strength to begin with.

[DazManianDevil]

They just need new mechanics. They have been using the same shit for a decade. It is time to bring that new AI into raids and make something cool. Right now it is just doing the same mechanics over and over and over. Most don't even skip a teir before been reused.

Did someone say Tier9 Faction Champs using Sneaky Pete AI? Count me in!

OT: I'm of the opinion personally that we don't need 4 raid difficulties. Let's say we bite the bullet and keep LFR, tune Normal to feel like a real difficulty instead of what it is, and tune Heroic to be closer to Mythic and just remove Mythic.
I personally haven't attended a raid schedule since Uldir and only got 5/8 Heroic and that was for a few weeks so feel free to bashe the casual :3

[Senen]

I'm baffled that Mythic is still in this "20-man only" state. Many guilds I know (including mine) have more or less stopped doing Mythic with WoD and the removal of 10/25.

It seems very weird to me that nowadays, with NM and HM being 10-30 flexible (and have been for 2 expansions and a half), MM is still 20-man only. Sure, it's far better for the race, but that's a big stop for most people. Especially with cross realm being disabled for such a long time.
That's the one thing I would change with current state of Mythic.

[Argorwal]

I don't understand why guys you act like mythic difficulty stays the same during a whole tier. During the first week, Jaina might be for "Method only" but people who haven't done 6 heroic splits with ridiculous amounts of planning and getting 3 professions to craft 3 pieces of gear on every alt get geared in time and it does get nerfed. There are 1700 guilds with mythic G'huun kills, why would you want to remove that especially at a time when world first race created good amount of viewers?

Method did 18 BoD heroic splits and 9 mythic Uldir splits (27 total).

Just pointing out the absurdity in the prep work they do.

[Freshouttajail]

Vanilla was a "casual kidde game with bright colours" compared to other True MMOs of the time.
Hardcore players laughed at it (I remember doing so myself).

But then everyone went to play it anyway, because all the nice casual QoL features were actually nice.

You're putting a lot of very badly used words together there. Casual and kids have absolutely nothing in common, if anything kids today are far more hardcore than adult players. Hardcore only means people who play a lot, and casuals mean people who don't play much. It's factually what it is, I make games for a living, this si the terms we use to describe these players. It has nothing to do with age or skills.

Yes WoW had a more "kid friendly" cartoonish look, but then again, it only followed the WC3 artistic direction, this has nothing to do with other MMOs of the time or even to target the game to specific people. It's only aesthetic continuation within the franchise.
Hardcore players (by definition) didn't laugh at WoW, it's old players who laughed at because they thoguht it was made for kids. Once they were done laughing at it they were right back to watching Avatar the last air bender or Pixar movies. The irony. None of these things are "made for kids". They're for everyone, thinking you're too old for that is just showing your lack of maturity.

People very quickly found out that WoW was absolutely not made for casual gaming at first. The game was extremely time consuming and raids were hard, required lot of cooridnation, organisation, and a schedule. None of that is part of casual gaming. Casuals still played the game because they enjoy being part of the mass and the game offered a lot of things to aim for, maybe they never reached these goals but at least along the way they did a lot of stuff anyway, it's about the journey, not just the end even if the game is far more designed for hardcore than casuals.

[Arainie]

Last tier, 6300+ guilds killed Mythic Zek'voz. Consider that most guilds run with more than 20 players, but offset that with the fact that guilds overlap in players due to disbanding or player rotation you can easily count 20 players per guild. That equals at least 126000 players participating in organized Mythic raiding. If you consider Taloc & Mother, that number is over 11-14k guilds and that's not even counting all of the pugs doing it.

Nah, Mythic raiding or equal difficulty has its place. It's the driving force for many of us to even play the game (and has been ever since we started raiding wheter it was just 40man, 25man, Heroic or Mythic).

[Aggrophobic]

No, it does not. You are not in Limit or Method.

[DazManianDevil]

I just think M+ and raids just overlap too much. In my opinion raids should just drop better gear - but specifically for raids (and open world as a consequence which is not really an issue).

Example for Azerite Powers which is the current implementation: raid specific traits should be just flat better than M+ drops in raid. This way M+ can be a big staple to character gearing without making raids useless. However, these traits should just be inactive in M+ (or heavily nerfed) to avoid the opposite situation where to get to higher M+ you absolutely need to raid.

This way both contents can be relevant on their own without overlapping; currently M+ have way too much importance imho due to the sheer amount of drop chances one can stack up (every dungeon drops even if not in time plus weekly cache) and the fact many classes simply have a plethora of BiS items dropping in M+.

M+ are a really good competitive environment imho and make for a way better endgame content structure than raids under some aspects. However due to this fact they're overlapping with raids meaning that a) raid drops (which are the main drive for doing them) become less relevant/useful and b) people have to run M+ to get better raid perfomance.

While ilvl may not mean a lot, having people decked with high ilvl gear beforehand makes the raid challenge/balance a little bit skewed (in my mind raids should be balanced for people have an ilvl inferior to the one that actually drops).

This kind of reminds me of Wrath of the Lich King. You had Raids and Arenas. Arenas had finite gear that was tailored to itself, pvp.
Then you had Raids, with limited gear that fit itself, pve. Mixing the two could have powerful outcomes that catered to player skill and ingenuity without one activity invalidating the other.
Obviously nostalgia is a large factor, but could we have something even as stupid as Cata's PVP Power but for Mythic+? Like the origination Array that only works in Uldir but a Mythic+ one.
"While in a Mythic+ Dungeon, this item scales to x ilvl" I think was something WoD did for pvp gear, correct me if I'm wrong.

[Khallid]

Given that Mythic is essentially unnecessary for the game’s community, is there a strong reason to even see it continue, given that it’s not even pleasing the minority it’s aimed at?

But should Blizzard be trying to create content that is aimed at such an extremely small percentage of its players?

I’ve said before that raiding should see only two settings – LFR, and a flexible group setting that starts ‘Normal’, has its second half as ‘Heroic’, and then has a couple of activated ‘Mythic’ bosses as it worked in Ulduar. Such a stance would dramatically improve so many problems, particularly the ludicrous item level scaling, and we’re now in a position where the most committed raid players can only have two outcomes:

1. They master the game to the point where everything becomes too easy.
2. Difficulty is upped to where an even smaller percentage ever participates.

So… What should be aimed at?

Raid content is for everyone. They don't design "additional content" for mythic raiders. It's the same content with a higher difficulty level. You would never complain of having multiple difficulties in any other game, all you do is set the difficulty to the level that you enjoy the most and that's it.

What do you mean it doesn't please the minority it's aimed at? I'm enjoying it a lot. Dazar'alor is a pretty cool raid. I couldn't care less how fast Method clears the raid. It does not affect my enjoyment of the game.

I don't see why raiding "should" see any specific amount of difficulties. Your experience is not devalued because there are difficulties that you don't participate in. 2 is a bit narrow. Almost every game ever has between 3 and 5 difficulty settings.

Your "2 outcomes" don't make any sense. The reason multiple difficulties exist is exactly to avoid the best players getting bored because it's too easy and the worse players being annoyed because it's too hard. Blizzard is catering to all audiences at once. WoW is not Dark Souls where you get good or you can't play. Why is that so hard to understand?

[DazManianDevil]

So show a little more courtesy to your fellow players. It is probably is hard for you. Probably harder than mythic raiding.

Can this be a thing, for real? I mean, poster on the office wall by the water cooler kthx.

[Torvald]

I'm baffled that Mythic is still in this "20-man only" state. Many guilds I know (including mine) have more or less stopped doing Mythic with WoD and the removal of 10/25.

It seems very weird to me that nowadays, with NM and HM being 10-30 flexible (and have been for 2 expansions and a half), MM is still 20-man only. Sure, it's far better for the race, but that's a big stop for most people. Especially with cross realm being disabled for such a long time.
That's the one thing I would change with current state of Mythic.

This is a point that should be talked about more.

Does anyone know a single person who subscribed to WoW because watching the world first race on twitch peaked their excitement? I personally have never met a single person who subscribed or re-subscribed for that reason. I know people who come back for major patch releases, or because the pull of various friends continuing to play the game caused them to want to return, but never anyone that got enthused to play the game because of the world first race. Not saying such people don't exist, but I can't imagine there are many. The strict 20-man size adds a small benefit to precision tuning, and it certainly benefits the world first race spectacle by having a consistent and large size on their raid teams, but I'm not sure how worth it those benefits are.

On the other hand, many guilds stopped raiding when Blizzard re-organized the difficulty names (renaming "flex" to "normal", "normal" to "heroic" and "heroic" to "mythic") at the start of WoD and destroyed high-end 10-man raiding. And in the present, you hear stories of various guilds collapsing on every server, every tier cycle because they managed to clear heroic (with its flexible raid size), but couldn't make the recruitment jump to mythic (or they only make the recruitment jump by virtue of taking in people not quite up to mythic levels of skill, stagnate, and just collapse a little later due to frustration over lack of progress).

The real question isn't whether the game should have raids as hard as mythic is right now (because there is a significant chunk of the playerbase for it), it's whether the format delivering those raids is actually the best option. There is something inherently ridiculous in the notion that just as a guild kills the last boss on heroic, continuing on requires them to potentially as much as double their roster (and somehow recruit people of equal or better skill up to the task of mythic, especially in an environment where there are always mythic guilds further advanced constantly looking for such people). No one would think of such a system as making much sense if they designed it from scratch. You would think the natural flow of game design would have you size down, not up. "Great job clearing this mode, now take your very best players and clear the next one!" makes much more sense than, "Great job clearing this mode, now take all your players, do even better, and also maybe as much as double your number with people just as good or better, who you can hopefully attract over all those other groups trying to recruit those people who are further than you."

But this is apparently where the game went. Such a weird trajectory, the route WoW's highest raiding difficulty format took.

Have hard shit that gets easier with every week. AP kinda does that already, getting more gear in general does that, but both of these are way too slow for the general playerbase (as could be seen back in Tomb of Sargeras where just getting a bit more AP and a bit more gear wasn't enough for most people to get past Avatar and/or KJ). Compare that to Hellfire Citadel and what Legendary rings did to the place.

Have the place be rock hard for the first week. Have it even be rock hard for week 2. And week 3. Like, seriously, have these places be so tough that it is actually as mathematically impossible as Fallen Avatar. And then add some stupid shit like Reorigination Array (but not in the stupid Uldir way that took a trait slow away from everyone). Instead of getting the nerf bat out and nerfing every hard encounter by 10% after 2 weeks... just have everyone get progressively stronger (getting 1 piece of gear and 1/17th of a neck level on everyone in your raid doesn't make fights noticeably easier).

This is certainly another aspect of the current system not talked about nearly enough. In most threads, titanforging gets talked about more for its effect on incentives (threads along the line of, "why would someone run mythic when they can get something just as good from heroic titanforging?") But I'd say the more significant impact of titanforging is what it functionally replaced, which was the valor upgrade system.

Under the valor upgrade system, raids knew that each week their aggregate gear level would go up slightly even if they were stuck at a boss. As gear got replaced, players would upgrade the new pieces of gear over the next week or so. The process was quick enough that each week the change was noticeable, but slow enough that it took a long time for a guild to max out their potential and truly reach a point where it was obvious if they would never beat that next boss (and it actually was combined with warforging, for a potential boost of 5 ilvl on an item)

Titanforging does the same thing the old upgrade system did for guilds.... except with great inconsistency. Offering the potential of higher gear upgrades for guilds stuck at a new boss from what they obtain on farm bosses. But some guilds win the titanforging lottery, some guilds lose it. A guild stuck at a boss that's particularly hard for them may have little luck on their farm bosses, and so do worse than they would have under the old system. And that combines with one other reality, which is that because titanforging is dependent on re-clearing farm bosses, it means more of a guild's raid time has to be spent on farm, whereas under the valor upgrade system, you might lose less by extending the raid ID to just work on the new boss, because the guild's gear would still go up naturally from the valor they earn through other sources in the week.


In a nutshell: While gear acquisition has always been RNG, I'd say they struck a good chord during MoP and WoD with a counter-balance to RNG in the form of valor upgrades, and in Legion onwards, that counter-balance was abandoned in favor of adding a new level of RNG, which has had a bad effect, and I would guess that this impacts mythic difficulty more than any other.

[darklogrus]

For some reason I read that Limit blog and I never seen anyone while in such a humble way xD

But no, we don't need any changes. Maybe tune the first bosses a bit for more Mythic, but that's it. Raiding is still great.

Naa, it brings to light 1 of 2 things. Blizzard in house testers are LFR caliber players with very little understanding about classes and comps or 2. Blizzard purposely kept changing shit to cause the race to be closer then it needed to be.

[Halicia]

Last tier, 6300+ guilds killed Mythic Zek'voz. Consider that most guilds run with more than 20 players, but offset that with the fact that guilds overlap in players due to disbanding or player rotation you can easily count 20 players per guild. That equals at least 126000 players participating in organized Mythic raiding. If you consider Taloc & Mother, that number is over 11-14k guilds and that's not even counting all of the pugs doing it.

Nah, Mythic raiding or equal difficulty has its place. It's the driving force for many of us to even play the game (and has been ever since we started raiding wheter it was just 40man, 25man, Heroic or Mythic).

Your math is flawed. Guild kills do not mean different characters which in turn does not mean different players.

10 guilds has a MAXIMUM of 200 players involved in the kills, when in reality it could just be the same 20 players across (a maximum of) 10 different alts apiece.

While I'm not arguing that its just 20 players for the 6300+ guilds involved, a 10-20% cut to the numbers you cite is a pretty substantial number of a fairly insubstantial percentage of the playerbase to begin with.

[Arainie]

Your math is flawed. Guild kills do not mean different characters which in turn does not mean different players.

10 guilds has a MAXIMUM of 200 players involved in the kills, when in reality it could just be the same 20 players across (a maximum of) 10 different alts apiece.

While I'm not arguing that its just 20 players for the 6300+ guilds involved, a 10-20% cut to the numbers you cite is a pretty substantial number of a fairly insubstantial percentage of the playerbase to begin with.

It doesn't matter how many kills alts in the same guild parttake in, the number would only flip from one to two if a decent number of alts are all in another guild together. 6300 guilds killing Zek'voz means that 6300 different guild tags have killed it in a group consisting of mainly guild members, so I believe I am right in the grand scheme. Most people really don't raid in multiple guilds. Whether my 126k number is in fact anywhere else between 100k or 150k is complete guesswork though.

Claiming that 126k is not a substantial part of the playerbase is a bit silly considering MMOC believes the game has less than 1.7M subs. We're most definitely not talking 1% regardless like people have claimed in the past.

[Azerate]

The people who are displeased as you said, are the two top guilds. This isn't the whole community that mythic raiding is aimed at. There are plenty of lower end mythic guilds, which will be happily raiding mythic for months to come.

[Halicia]

It doesn't matter how many kills alts in the same guild parttake in, the number would only flip from one to two if a decent number of alts are all in another guild together.

You're still doing the math wrong. Let's say *only* two guilds kill a certain boss the whole expansion. Once its on farm, people have more time and get bored, half of them use that time for "other stuff", but half of each guild really like raiding, so ten of each guild kill the boss in a third guild composed solely of alts.

Your math would dictate that since 3 guilds killed the boss, that means 60 characters and 60 players behind those characters, when in actuality its only 40.

Especially on dead servers, its quite common to find the entire top 10 guilds populated by only a couple dozen players.

[Arainie]

You're still doing the math wrong. Let's say *only* two guilds kill a certain boss the whole expansion. Once its on farm, people have more time and get bored, half of them use that time for "other stuff", but half of each guild really like raiding, so ten of each guild kill the boss in a third guild composed solely of alts.

Your math would dictate that since 3 guilds killed the boss, that means 60 characters and 60 players behind those characters, when in actuality its only 40.

Especially on dead servers, its quite common to find the entire top 10 guilds populated by only a couple dozen players.

It's really not though, you can speculate about the numbers all you like but in my first post I account for both player rotation inflating the number and the fact that most Mythic guilds have 25 or more raiding members. My math is just fine, whether my estimate is good enough we can only speculate and you apparently disagree so let's leave it at that.

[Spotnick]

I don't understand why some people still argue about removing any difficulties in this game. I mean, seriously, the problem isn't difficulties, it's that Blizzard forces you to do more than one... open mythic week 1 and make heroic drop 385 gear and mythic 400 gear and we wouldn't even consider difficulties an issue.

There are ways to fix this, which would be to open mythic first. This would kill the split races and all other crap people can think of.. then open heroic once the worst 1st is achieved. Normal later and IMO LFR would be opened around the time cross-realm mythic opens because it's supposed to be the tourism mode for those unable to defeat the bosses in the normal raids.

The issue with this system is obviously the first tier, because you can't throw people into mythic with dungeon gear, it's expected that you have heroic gear. They would have to buff all the raid gear every time they open a difficulty to address that I guess.

This would fix split raids, this would fix people thinking they need to do lower difficulties.. only "problem" is people unhappy they have to wait for the raid to open even more, but right now we wait already, so if you release mythic on day of the patch, it's pretty much the same time gating.

It won't happen of course, most people probably enjoy doing progression from lower difficulties and then redo them on a higher difficulty. Sadly back in the days, they had casual raids and hardcore raids, and they though resources for hardcore raids were not well spent, but they never though about making them more available LATER.

If they released Karazhan and Black Temple today together on the same date, Karazhan being normal/heroic and Black Temple being mythic only, and a couple months in they would open Black Temple heroic/normal, would anyone complain with such a model?

Naxxramas heroic/normal and Ulduar mythic and 3 months later Ulduar heroic/mythic.

That would probably make it more interesting for the playerbase which would gain more content through a "season".

Another example... Mogushan Vaults normal/heroic and Heart of Fear Mythic released at the same time... later could open Heart of Fear heroic normal/heroic and open Terrace of Endless Spring mythic... and later ToES heroic/normal.

In other words, this is what they did with Karazhan in Legion, or Court of Stars/Arcway.. those were mythic only for a while, but this works only if you have heroic content available too.

[Trend]

I’ve said before that raiding should see only two settings – LFR, and a flexible group setting that starts ‘Normal’, has its second half as ‘Heroic’, and then has a couple of activated ‘Mythic’ bosses as it worked in Ulduar. Such a stance would dramatically improve so many problems, particularly the ludicrous item level scaling, and we’re now in a position where the most committed raid players can only have two outcomes:

1. They master the game to the point where everything becomes too easy.
2. Difficulty is upped to where an even smaller percentage ever participates.

I literally have no idea what you think this would accomplish other than getting a lot more people to quit. There are a lot of raids that enjoy progressing through normal. There are a lot of raids that enjoy progressing through heroic. There are a lot of raids that enjoy progressing through mythic. You would be screwing them all.

And your whole theory is based off an absolute minority of the mythic raiding population ... just a tiny little fraction of the number of mythic raids find mythic raiding too easy. Just bizarre.

And you keep going on about how it's a small percentage of total players that raid mythic. But it's still hundreds of thousands of players. I never get the people who want Blizzard to remove the things they don't personally use. I don't do pet battles, but I have no desire for Blizzard to take pet battles away from people who like them.

But based on your other responses, I don't think you wanted any feedback that doesn't agree with you 100% anyway, so whatever.