Mythic is too tight, guilds are dying

[Marrilaife]

and yet there are people who defend blizzard decision on not merging the factions because "muhlore". even tho we have 4-5 racial/faction leaders fully in bro hood with eachother.

People who wanted factions to merge: mostly alliance because they struggle to find any recruits.

People who wanted factions to stay separate: mostly horde, so they can keep ganking alliance, keep all the advantages of being the more numerous faction, and feel the "faction pride" after having basically every important alliance guild faction change to horde, so they can keep lording over whatever is left on alliance "git gud and fill that hall of fame already, we wanna our cross realm pugs!"

Who is gonna Blizzard listen to? Obviously the people who have the majority, so the horde.

It also allows them to keep milking mythic raiders for realm transfers and faction changes.

They should brought back reasonable Limited attempts toward killing on final boss instead hundreds of mindless wipes till nerfs on it to be able to kill it.

They shouldn't because it gives advantages to guilds that mindlessly split raid. Split raids are already a scourge upon mythic raiding, by shortening the gearing curve for top guilds and creating a dilemma who do you tune the boss around: split raiders making it shit for everyone else, or normal players and let split raiders trivialize gear checks?

Except split raiding there are other ways of cheesing gear, but it's one of big contributors.

[Mukind]

That's what is happening and that is what is causing a dwindling of the mythic raid scene. I'm all for there being this difficulty, but at some point it will become not worth it to invent a new raid with it because the development time and headache will literally not be worth the effort.

So, take your pick: increasingly shrinking audience that is getting fed up and giving up on the pursuit altogether, or a lesser difficulty that might not satisfy allstar teams like method for more than a few hours, or something in between that time gates it like the ICC buff.

I have no issues with people clearing the MTC after I did at like 930 with nearly faceroll levels of DPS. I got my achievement with time stamp so I can shit talk those who had to wait for the buff, but they at least had hope of being able to achieve their goal, so it worked out for everyone.

Oh no the plebs who can't deal with basic mechanics are gonna unsub

Why even let them taint your thoughts lol

[BeepBoo]

Oh no the plebs who can't deal with basic mechanics are gonna unsub

Why even let them taint your thoughts lol

Because eventually bliz will stop making content if you're too strict or stringent. They're already CLEARLY putting more into other garbage pieces of the game, as opposed to raids being the king shit they used to be. I personally don't want that to happen. They need something that flows nicely up the food chain. Not something that goes from highschool sports to pro sports.

[Mukind]

Because eventually bliz will stop making content if you're too strict or stringent. They're already CLEARLY putting more into other garbage pieces of the game, as opposed to raids being the king shit they used to be. I personally don't want that to happen. They need something that flows nicely up the food chain. Not something that goes from highschool sports to pro sports.

They can always not do mythic, your view has made a lot of idiots think they are much better than they are. And now you have to live with it. This will change give it time.

Just give them nothing, if they whine say the obvious.

"git gud"

WoW didn't die in naxx it'll be fine

[Yunaqt]

Pretty much this, in the past you knew that if you kill 5 bosses, items dropped will give you small boost and you will have a chance to kill 6th boss, difficulty was scaled accordingly. Now thanks to titanforging blizzard is forced to tune bosses for higher ilvls, so top guilds won't stomp the raid in first day and get bored. So in order to have chance to progress, you have to grind m+ for titanforged items, while regular loot from that few bosses you are able to kill is often useless to you.
tldr: mythic is too tight because of large ilvl range between seasons.

Personally I felt pacing well well on par with what you would expect.

First 3 bosses were a joke, next few medium level (although maybe just QC was a bit too easy) and last 2 bosses being the big bosses.

- - - Updated - - -

Because eventually bliz will stop making content if you're too strict or stringent. They're already CLEARLY putting more into other garbage pieces of the game, as opposed to raids being the king shit they used to be. I personally don't want that to happen. They need something that flows nicely up the food chain. Not something that goes from highschool sports to pro sports.

Well that's why there's also LFR, Normal, Heroic instead of a single difficulty like there was from Vanilla > Mid WotLK

So people can choice the level to play that best suits them.

[vsb]

What would suit me is raid Mythic- mode. After hall of fame is filled (and forget about alliance, this faction does not exist, horde is enough), cross realm mythic is opened and every week there's a stacking debuff in the raid which reduces enemy HP and damage for 3% per stack. Raid leader should be able to toggle between this mode and ordinary mythic. Achievements like ahead of the edge and mounts require killing end boss without stacks and to access boss without stacks you need to kill all bosses before. But gear drops are the same.

[Yunaqt]

What would suit me is raid Mythic- mode. After hall of fame is filled (and forget about alliance, this faction does not exist, horde is enough), cross realm mythic is opened and every week there's a stacking debuff in the raid which reduces enemy HP and damage for 3% per stack. Raid leader should be able to toggle between this mode and ordinary mythic. Achievements like ahead of the edge and mounts require killing end boss without stacks and to access boss without stacks you need to kill all bosses before. But gear drops are the same.

Speak for yourself, Horde is dead and Alliance is basically the only faction you can go where i'm from :P

[trapmaster]

They shouldn't because it gives advantages to guilds that mindlessly split raid. Split raids are already a scourge upon mythic raiding, by shortening the gearing curve for top guilds and creating a dilemma who do you tune the boss around: split raiders making it shit for everyone else, or normal players and let split raiders trivialize gear checks?

Except split raiding there are other ways of cheesing gear, but it's one of big contributors.

What if they just could make limit attempts account wide instead each character to go ham to see if succeed. IF you don't succeed, BETTER LUCK on next reset! GIT GOOD! It would be my worst idea....

[Raone]

What would suit me is raid Mythic- mode. After hall of fame is filled (and forget about alliance, this faction does not exist, horde is enough), cross realm mythic is opened and every week there's a stacking debuff in the raid which reduces enemy HP and damage for 3% per stack. Raid leader should be able to toggle between this mode and ordinary mythic. Achievements like ahead of the edge and mounts require killing end boss without stacks and to access boss without stacks you need to kill all bosses before. But gear drops are the same.

Completely agree, I don't know why they stopped doing this after Cataclysm after how successful it was in ICC/Dragonsoul. The new targeted nerf mode is not enough and if your on a boss that isn't targeted it feels lame. They could even split over the raid so earlier bosses get the debuff earlier so the final boss has 0 stacks for longer. Like the first half could be at 3%, then after a week or two the second half minus the last boss gets 3% and the first half gets 6%, then 2 weeks later, the first half is at 9%, 2nd half is at 6% and final boss is 3%. Or the debuff could be boss specific and it gets stronger the more that boss is killed by other guilds and higher credit if its mythic, this could be further increased by doing WQ's and Daily quests in the outside world and giving stuff to specific npcs like the Warfront Daily quests or Broken Shore stuff.

Turning off the debuff could increase the amount of items dropped and guaranteeing the coin to give an item.

[trapmaster]

They shouldn't because it gives advantages to guilds that mindlessly split raid. Split raids are already a scourge upon mythic raiding, by shortening the gearing curve for top guilds and creating a dilemma who do you tune the boss around: split raiders making it shit for everyone else, or normal players and let split raiders trivialize gear checks?

Except split raiding there are other ways of cheesing gear, but it's one of big contributors.

What if they just could make limit attempts account wide instead each character to go ham to see if succeed. IF you don't succeed, BETTER LUCK on next reset! GIT GOOD! Mind you it should only be on last boss not every single bosses lol.

[dacoolist]

Let me reply from the opposite end of the spectrum. My guild finished US 52 in AEP, and I basically agree with you.

I've been GM/Raid leader of my guild since Sunwell without interruption, which probably makes me one of the most experienced raid leaders in the US Top 100 now that I think about it. And let me tell you... Blizzard's walking down a really questionable road when it comes to the difficulty of raiding, in the medium term. Let me preface by saying I'm really not concerned about its direct effect on my guild or me. We've cleared every instance US Top 100 except Uldir since 2007. We'll beat whatever Blizzard throws at us. That isn't the issue. The issue is the effect on the overall raid community.

In older video games, it used to be clear where the line was between "hard" and "cheap". Artificial difficulty was generated by having computer controlled opponents be able to do abilities faster, or have them travel slightly quicker than they should, or engage in visual trickery. You'd be playing, and even though its hard you'd feel challenged... until you came up to a "cheap" boss at which point the fun stopped and the joy of achieving something was overcame largely by the satisfaction of being done with it.

World of Warcraft has had essentially that, more than ever in the last two expacs - particularly in BFA - for an assortment of reasons. A lot more fights have artificially difficulty put into to them at the cost of interesting complexity. Overall the raid game has become cheaper, less interesting and more straight forward. There are several mechanisms by which this has been brought about.

First and foremost, Blizzard has created an extremely throughput-centric mode of gameplay in Mythic raids. In the past there were throughput heavy fights and you had to hit some kind of explicit or soft frenzy, but now nearly every fight is typified by multiple internal throughput checks and extremely protracted periods of people essentially being required to stand and attack or heal. This is fairly popular among the raiding community - we live in an extremely metricized raiding community for good or for ill. But it straight jackets what Blizzard can throw at you, thus simplifying fights. Another way to put this is that if the fight's enrage timer and healing requirement requires you to stand and cast for as long as we are doing so now, then the fight cannot simultaneously ask you to do many things beyond stand in case. Compare Mythic Orgozoa (in which you do max throughput and mix in shuffling for the entire encounter besides a single run down a ramp) to Xhul'horac in HFC or Dark Shaman in Siege or Heroic Alysrazor, or Heroic Dark Animus.

Part and parcel of this was slowing down gameplay to bring about a very-ill advised "Neo-Classic" feel (Blizzard felt they moved too far away from WoW's core gamplay), particularly in BFA. Big fucking mistake. Having longer casts, more things on GCD, and most importantly in my view, the two or three expac process of breaking the ability to do meaningful damage while moving by most healers and ranged DPS, implies that, now, to do maximally efficient DPS, you have to be planted, and for a fight to be hard, you need to be doing maximally efficient DPS. Therefore the fights all have to be less dynamic and much more slower moving, or be filled with periods where you can do nothing but stand your ground and cast.

Coupled with this their now two-expac crusade to break the power of mods (particularly WAs) and also simultaneously by putting abilities in all sorts of weird boss ability ques and timers to insert artificial difficulty in fights through abnormal and artificial pacing to create ease (see: Mythic Jaina in the Spring of 2019, Za'qul more recently). The breaking of mods started largely as a response to what the community came up with for Mythic Kormrok and Mythic Archimonde in HFC. They broke the ability to tell coordinates are in game space in a raid instance. In Legion, we saw EnemyFrames broke early, and then they broke some stuff for Mythic Star Augur with nameplates. This expac we saw some more nameplates features broken (evidently for Ashvane beams, which is a total joke to break anything for).

It's been such a weird fixation in their part. It reminds me, many years ago, of their pathological obsession with breaking the concept of people having to look online for the "right thing to do" to get "cookie cutter specs" (a crusade they eventually gave up on, because their end goal was, ya know, impossible). If people are creative enough to come up with brilliant mods and by implication, brilliant strategies to defeat their encounters... that's fantastic! If it trivializes a fight here and there... big deal. It's not like all fights are winners in the current model anyway. I'd argue it was as cool executing the Mythic Archimonde beam spread WITH the WAs than it would have been without it. But Blizzard devs never like being one upped by us, their paying customers. It's like an ego thing.

Basically, this straightjackets boss abilities to be things that 20 people can respond to only in a semi-dynamic manner. So they have to be relatively simple. A good example of that is soaking the wards on Azshara. Instead of having to make a non-overlapping grid dynamically sorted by a WA (but still high-risk), we have replaced it with a list of soakers that someone on discord reads out. Ho-hum.


We also have to throw into the pile the elimination of useful raid CDs down to a bare bone few. The raid game was better with Smoke bomb, with Aspect of the Fox, with Anti-Magic Zone, Amp Magic, Roars on all druids, Skull Banner and so forth.

It should be clear right now where i feel the problem is: Blizzard has replaced a fairly dynamic puzzle which had a lot of moving parts in order to complete the picture, with a fairly simple puzzle that became difficult through increased throughput requirements.

Let's talk about two specific fights in AEP.

First Orgozoa. What the hell is this mutant disaster of a fight. So for (during Prog) a maximum of 4 minutes and 20 seconds you stood in this small Oval and your job was to just do damage and do heals and tank swap, as hard as you can. You had to not be an idiot and spread a periodic debuff, but the goal was to get the boss down to 40% before the number of raid debuffs became unmanagable to the healers. They tank also got destroyed by Boss damage. That's what passes for phase 1 of the 5th of 8 bosses. You stand your ground, and throughput to get the hell out of there. And then you go down a long ramp, just once, and your only goal is to not get knocked off of it. Then at the bottom, Orgozoa has her Phase 1 abilities, and adds that do some interesting things. But because you have to do <40% of the boss's health, you end up, even during prog, only killing the first set of adds (that just got cleaved down with one mob interrupted and one mob soaked) and ignoring the second set while you burned boss. Awesome end fight mechanics /sarcasm.

This mangled mess of a fight is the encapsulation of everything wrong with WoW raiding in BFA. Why is phase 1 four minutes of pure throughput-centric entirely static gameplay (and also the hardest part of the fight)? Why is the interesting ramp utilized only to rush down in about 20 seconds? Why is his transition point 40%? Why are the P2 adds so meaningless that you can ignore the second set on prog? Why is Phase 2 so not dangerous that most guilds killed the boss after seeing P2 a few times?

Here's a better version of Orgozoa. Phase lasts until 70%. It's mostly the same... maybe the debuff's go out a bit quicker if you want to make a DPS thing. But you're out of the first room by 2:30 during prog. Then, you have to SLOWLY snake down the ramp as a group. Orgoza is tanked and dragged along (there is a frontal cleave!). You have to kill eggs (which will otherwise swamp the raid in the last phase), dodge swirlies as a group, and get Orgozoa from 70% to 50% before you reach the end of the ramp. In the last phase, you have to move Orgozoa around the room and cause her to break her own eggs, and you have to kill the adds inside of the eggs too (in adition to the Naga adds that are already part of the fight). The eggs's adds (let's say, 6 of them) are fixated and have to be kited by a bunch of raiders and killed as a group. Breaking the eggs causes slime to spill out, thus shrinking the fight area. The end. Something like that. We have no made better use of everything they have there.

Now let's discuss Queens' Court. This is a pretty dark good fight. I like it. I like raid leading it. What I didn't like was the 7:30 frenzy. Almost every guild during Top 100 prog killed it between 7:20 and 7:38 or so. And for the life of me, I can't understand why. The fight had a lot of interesting mechanics and overlaps... it had a legit good Raider-IQ testing design. So how dumb is it to get to the very end, and wipe at 4% due to enrage? The challenge is their HP pool all of a sudden? Because for the rest of the fight, the challenge was the actual fight mechanics. This illustrates the cognitive dissonance Blizzard has regarding some of these fights. What is the point of the Queen's Court Fight? Is it a DPS check fight? Is it a mechanics check fight? Is it both? If both why both? Is the fight enhanced by it being both?

This is what I was saying by a "feeling cheap". When a guild wipe son enrage during Queen's Court prog, they don't feel like they got legitimately beaten by the fight, especially since they would have had to execute all the mechanics. They feel like they got sucker punched.


Now for guilds like mine... we just deal with it. I mean, I'll raid and run my guild until Blizzard stops putting out raids. We'll keep being consistently between US ~50-80 (hopefully the upper end, but you know how life is). We'll continue to have a great time in the process.

And the raids aren't even bad right now! AEP was overall a pretty good raid, as was BoD. Uldir had a few good fights but was largely a fucking fiasco due to the same reasons I've outlined here (did Zek'voz and Fetid Devourer, otherwise fine fights really need to be that tightly tuned in the first raid of the first tier for bosses #3 and #5 respectively?). I've tested all the mythic Nyalotha bosses to considerable success so far. I think it's going to be a very good raid overall. But the same pitfalls are potentially there. Does Blizzard have a plan for what they want Mythic Vexiona to be? Or Mythic Hivemand? Because they have to choose to do it right.

So I absolutely get why the raiding community has shrunk. It's like what I've long said, since Highmaul - raids have to be a compelling advertisement for why raiding is a fun, worthwhile hobby that people should keep doing (particularly the first raid of an expac). I consider Highmaul to be pretty much the worst raid ever released (and it isn't close). A ridiculously mistuned, visually boring instance, at the start of an expac, where one of the "Warlords of Draenor" is a pushover first boss and the last boss, Imperator, was a 15 minute snoozefest that was cheap, not hard. It was coupled with the 10 minutes without interrupts missing or you lose fight (Brakenspore), the "Camera Angles are still bad in 3D games in the 2010s" fight (Tectus), and the "so badly tuned guilds exploited" fight (Butcher). Highmaul was an advertisement for why people should quit raiding. And they did. In massive numbers.


And here we are again. Uldir was an advertisement for why raiding can be a stupid, waste of time hobby where you get frustrated off of cheap mechanics from mistuned bosses in ugly looking dungeons. BoD and AEP mostly got it right. Nyalotha will also mostly get it right.

I like AEP. But I've raided without stopping since 2005. But putting myself in the shoes of a newer player, or someone who is still progressing and raids one day week - people who very well might join my guild and guilds like mine a few years from now if the game continues to engage them - I totally get why they might say "fuck this" after the frustration of Ashvane was followed by Orgozoa, then by Queen's court and Za'qul.

I think the solution for Blizzard is rather simple. Blizzard needs to figure out what they want these fights to be on an individual basis. Some SHOULD be tight DPS and healing checks. That is part of the game. But do they all? By loosening up the gameplay of the game, by loosening up their mindset about what they want players to accomplish, I think they'll find people get a lot more satisfaction from what they are producing. They should ask players to do more moving (and empower them to be useful while doing so), do more fight-specific gimmick game play, and push fights that require complex solutions via through de facto mod/WA requirements and CD organization (and number of CDs).

Basically there is a happy medium between the MoP model of raid gameplay and where we are now they should aim for. But Blizzard needs to be receptive to the idea that people saying "fuck this, I feel trolled, not challenged" have had an argument all expac.

Holy shhhh it's the Boss of Tyranny Lothar from the good ol days!

bigUP this guy

[Marrilaife]

Speak for yourself, Horde is dead and Alliance is basically the only faction you can go where i'm from :P

Everything's upside down in Australia, eh? Wish I was there tbh.

What if they just could make limit attempts account wide instead each character to go ham to see if succeed. IF you don't succeed, BETTER LUCK on next reset! GIT GOOD! It would be my worst idea....

What if... Method and the likes pay for extra accounts and transfer their split alts there? Then you have p2w = pay for more accounts, get more attempts. That's gonna bring amazing publicity to Blizzard...

[Tradu]

Massive very interesting post

I've had the exact opposite experience when it comes to throughput vs mechanics. There's more and more mechanics that you have to deal with, while the throughput required(and the difficulty of achieving said throughput) has plummeted. Sure, there's occasional DPS checks, but by week 2 or 3 of mythic, gear have basically made them a joke. Healing checks basically don't exist, because the few times you need a lot of healing you just assign a healing CD or 2.
Orgozoa is an exception to the general fight design(sort of? P1 is an okay DPS check and only really becomes intense healing-wise for the last minute or so of P1). And yes, Court is absolutely enhanced by being both mechanics and DPS. You know why? Because if it isn't, you have Sisters of the Moon, a fight that in theory is about mechanics, but the DPS checks are so irrelevant that you can just bring something dumb like 8 healers and nullify any danger from the mechanics.

I also think the movement/long casts/GCD change things suck to play with, but I don't really agree that they've made for more fights where you just stand still and nuke. Essentially every ranged spec is braindead to play in a vacuum, but the challenge comes from dealing with movement, which is pretty noticeable on fights like Conclave, Cabal, Uu'nat, Za'qul etc.

I completely disagree that the game was better with more raid CDs. Things like Stormlash and Skull Banner were pretty uninteresting because you just used them on CD or for obvious burn phases, and we already have Lust for that(which is more interesting because it's typically a once per fight type of thing). Playing healer with more raid CDs is also much less interesting, because it just amplifies the current issue of there being nothing to heal ever, and if something does happen you just cover it in so many CDs that it didn't really achieve anything.

As a DPS player primarily, I definitely like having a fight each tier that's essentially just a numbers check(think Patchwerk, Baleroc, Ultraxion, Butcher), but that's not enough. Other fights also need to have DPS be relevant throughout, otherwise you end up with garbage like the first 2 phases of G'huun where your DPS is basically irrelevant, or shit like Za'qul and Azshara where you stop DPS entirely.

[Skroe]

I've had the exact opposite experience when it comes to throughput vs mechanics. There's more and more mechanics that you have to deal with, while the throughput required(and the difficulty of achieving said throughput) has plummeted. Sure, there's occasional DPS checks, but by week 2 or 3 of mythic, gear have basically made them a joke. Healing checks basically don't exist, because the few times you need a lot of healing you just assign a healing CD or 2.
Orgozoa is an exception to the general fight design(sort of? P1 is an okay DPS check and only really becomes intense healing-wise for the last minute or so of P1). And yes, Court is absolutely enhanced by being both mechanics and DPS. You know why? Because if it isn't, you have Sisters of the Moon, a fight that in theory is about mechanics, but the DPS checks are so irrelevant that you can just bring something dumb like 8 healers and nullify any danger from the mechanics.

I think week 2 or week 3 is a slight exaggeration. Mythic Ashvane was still intimidating Week 2 and modestly scary still week 3. And Orgoza stayed obnoxious until we dropped a healer. But more generally, is there anything particularly wrong anything with, as you put it, Sisters of Moon? I would say an emphatic 'no'. The interesting part of raiding, at least to me, is solving the puzzle piece by piece. Understanding the problem and them shaping the solution. Throughput-centric mode of gameplay has ALSO driven a necessarily homogeneous strat design. You can do Asvhane, Orogozoa, Queen's Court and Zaqul pretty much one of two ways (and almost everyone did both one way during prog). But guild to guild, every successful execution looks nearly identical.

For my guild's part, we found a strat for Ashzara from some obscure Chinese guild and a few European guilds that was entirely different from the "consensus" strat of Azshara. I'm referring to of course, the whole "do Phase 3 in a set order" strat where you have all the ranged and healers start on the opposite side of the Serena beam (if it were to come up) and you have melee immune through the beam if needed... basically you learn one phase 3 strat instead of two. First, it gave us a big qualitative advantage over the opposition - we did Azshara in 270 pulls versus ~330 for the other guilds around our level. Second it was exciting to me, at least, that our guild was doing something completely different from almost every other guild out there. It made raiding also kind of a competition between strats, not just between guilds. It gave us satisfaction in being the 3rd US guild to do it our way (to my knowledge).

Before fights were so throughput centric it was great pulling up a video and a log (if they existed) and seeing the sheer number of cool approaches different guilds came up with. One of my proudest moments, many years ago, was how my guild got US 13th Paragons of the Klaxxi and Dark Animus. But now, almost every video, every strat is broadly same because the fights constantly require a certain number to be produced to proceed, rather than execution of some kind of act within the fight.

Very simply, I think if at the end of the second tier of Shadowlands, we find that all 10 bosses of that raid have minimal variation to them, and videos be largely indistinguishable from each other, I think we'll be hard pressed to say "raiding is healthy". I want raiding to make me think more about how to optimally solve the Puzzle (again, like Dark Animus) or do interesting things (like all of Durumu) that about how to "find additional DPS to make enrage", which is something we seemingly have to often do, even for my high DPS raid guild. I think that's almost never an interesting question to ask. But we're often asking it now days.

If raids get rolled because people figure out the strat and execute it cleanly, that's great. That's fine. So long as people are feeling satisfied and fulfilled in doing it and not feeling like they got screwed, as many people did on those pointless 4% wipes on Queen's court.

- - - Updated - - -

Holy shhhh it's the Boss of Tyranny Lothar from the good ol days!

bigUP this guy

o/

/10char

[GringoD]

I feel like the point of Mythic is that it's designed so that every slot in the raid has to have someone performing at the highest level.

Just go to heroic mode if you want to play with the people you want to play with.

That's just not a serious suggestion. We'd be done in a week and bore ourselves to death. There has to be something in between for the multiple thousand guilds in our shoes, and that's basically what this post is about.

have you ever considered that mythic simply isnt for everyone?its the hardest content,its not designed to be completed by 100% of the raiding scene in the first weeks

Who are you talking to? Who wants mythic to be for everyone and cleared by 100% of raiders in the first weeks? I sure don't.
It's curious that some people seem to only be capable of thinking in extremes.

[Kralljin]

They shouldn't because it gives advantages to guilds that mindlessly split raid. Split raids are already a scourge upon mythic raiding, by shortening the gearing curve for top guilds and creating a dilemma who do you tune the boss around: split raiders making it shit for everyone else, or normal players and let split raiders trivialize gear checks?

Split raids are currently barely a thing (outside of the actual world first competitors) anymore due to PL and you get a shit ton of Heroic gear from M+ anyway.
They were big from WoD to Legion, because Blizzard split up lockouts from different difficulties.

Previously, you couldn't split raid outside of the first Normal Mode ID, as you could only could kill a boss once per lockout on Normal or Heroic.

[deenman]

Split raids are currently barely a thing (outside of the actual world first competitors) anymore due to PL and you get a shit ton of Heroic gear from M+ anyway.
They were big from WoD to Legion, because Blizzard split up lockouts from different difficulties.

Previously, you couldn't split raid outside of the first Normal Mode ID, as you could only could kill a boss once per lockout on Normal or Heroic.

split runs are far better now lol,its actualy extreme,wanna gear your main rogue?make a grp full of rogue alts,someone will 100% get the dagger he needs,repeate for every main

[Marrilaife]

Split raids are currently barely a thing (outside of the actual world first competitors) anymore due to PL and you get a shit ton of Heroic gear from M+ anyway.

If limited attempts were a thing again, be sure top guilds would throw multiple teams at them, starting with the weakest team to survey the waters. If limited attempts were account wide, be sure they'd just circumvent it by buying extra accounts. What then? Ban multiboxing? I bet all the herbing druid packs are gonna be happy about that one?

[GringoD]

Let me reply from the opposite end of the spectrum. My guild finished US 52 in AEP, and I basically agree with you.

I've been GM/Raid leader of my guild since Sunwell without interruption, which probably makes me one of the most experienced raid leaders in the US Top 100 now that I think about it. And let me tell you... (...)

Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's good to hear from a veteran raidlead that us guilds a few thousand spots behind aren't crazy.
What you said about Orgo and Court was incredibly spot on, it's like they slapped the idea of patchwork fights as dps check onto any boss after the halfway point. King Rastakhan and Conclave last tier felt way more organic and I wish they'd chosen that route with Court.
I haven't looked at Ny'alotha yet, but if I understood you correctly they're still working on it. I hope it'll be more engaging.

[Tradu]

I think week 2 or week 3 is a slight exaggeration. Mythic Ashvane was still intimidating Week 2 and modestly scary still week 3. And Orgoza stayed obnoxious until we dropped a healer. But more generally, is there anything particularly wrong anything with, as you put it, Sisters of Moon? I would say an emphatic 'no'. The interesting part of raiding, at least to me, is solving the puzzle piece by piece. Understanding the problem and them shaping the solution. Throughput-centric mode of gameplay has ALSO driven a necessarily homogeneous strat design. You can do Asvhane, Orogozoa, Queen's Court and Zaqul pretty much one of two ways (and almost everyone did both one way during prog). But guild to guild, every successful execution looks nearly identical.

For my guild's part, we found a strat for Ashzara from some obscure Chinese guild and a few European guilds that was entirely different from the "consensus" strat of Azshara. I'm referring to of course, the whole "do Phase 3 in a set order" strat where you have all the ranged and healers start on the opposite side of the Serena beam (if it were to come up) and you have melee immune through the beam if needed... basically you learn one phase 3 strat instead of two. First, it gave us a big qualitative advantage over the opposition - we did Azshara in 270 pulls versus ~330 for the other guilds around our level. Second it was exciting to me, at least, that our guild was doing something completely different from almost every other guild out there. It made raiding also kind of a competition between strats, not just between guilds. It gave us satisfaction in being the 3rd US guild to do it our way (to my knowledge).

Before fights were so throughput centric it was great pulling up a video and a log (if they existed) and seeing the sheer number of cool approaches different guilds came up with. One of my proudest moments, many years ago, was how my guild got US 13th Paragons of the Klaxxi and Dark Animus. But now, almost every video, every strat is broadly same because the fights constantly require a certain number to be produced to proceed, rather than execution of some kind of act within the fight.

Very simply, I think if at the end of the second tier of Shadowlands, we find that all 10 bosses of that raid have minimal variation to them, and videos be largely indistinguishable from each other, I think we'll be hard pressed to say "raiding is healthy". I want raiding to make me think more about how to optimally solve the Puzzle (again, like Dark Animus) or do interesting things (like all of Durumu) that about how to "find additional DPS to make enrage", which is something we seemingly have to often do, even for my high DPS raid guild. I think that's almost never an interesting question to ask. But we're often asking it now days.

If raids get rolled because people figure out the strat and execute it cleanly, that's great. That's fine. So long as people are feeling satisfied and fulfilled in doing it and not feeling like they got screwed, as many people did on those pointless 4% wipes on Queen's court.

I definitely think fights where the DPS check is so lax that you can just bring enough healers to outheal any mistake(like Sisters) are dumb. It's not clever or anything, you're just brute forcing it at that point. Figuring out how to squeeze out more DPS is part of the puzzle of raiding, and as a DPS player one of the more interesting ones. Having to find 4% more DPS on Queen's Court also essentially meant doing the "dance" more efficiently, which sounds like something you'd enjoy, honestly.
I didn't progress with the Azshara strat you're talking about, but my current guild did(and still does that strat, obviously). I don't think that strat is particularly interesting(at least not more than other strats), and if anything it's more heavily leaning into the throughput aspect which you seem to dislike(because the check on console add is harder, thanks to melee having less time on it).
To me it's more that fights have more gimmicks with only 1 real way of dealing with them(Azshara wards, G'huun orbs) which heavily limit what you can really do in terms of creative strategies.