Your promise unfortunately failed like 2 expansions ago. Its not even new thing, exact same thing happened in WoD with blackhand simply because it was way overtuned raid compared to amount of bosses.
It certainly has everything to do with raids difficulty. Or to be more precise, it is tied to how fast guilds can progress each boss.
Just count how long does it take for top 1000 guild to clear last boss. Guilds around top 1000, difference between mythic release and first kill of last boss.
- - - Updated - - -
No. I've been progressing since SoO and it is definitely tied to how long does it take to clear entire raid tier.
BRF had this problem
HFC didnt = because it was moving smoother than BRF.
EN/TOV/Nighthold didn't have that problem
TOS did
Antorus didn't (cause top 1000 guild cleared it in 167days, 11 bosses) - empowered artifacts helped as well so it was like-a-nerf.
Now we are at 864 guilds, clearing EP ( so ~140 short to 1000) while this raid has been up for ~168 days and has only 8 bosses.
So quick comparison.
Antorus was ~15 days each boss
EP is ~21 days each boss (and not even top 1000)
This is a huge difference.
Didnt you read @123youshowme posting? The whole community is "mad because bad" and out of a sudden a huge part of the community just got bad, since the numbers indicate a difference to the past. Its not the difficulty and prep its the player!
-
I think difficulty is fine but agree that there should be more power progression through the tier so that slower guilds feel fights getting easier each week. Even when it's a small upgrade on gear pieces and procs like HFC.
Anyways, I think that raiding is dying due to the artificial barriers set to raiding.
We now have cross realm mythic raids but by the time it's unlocked a lot of people have given up on the tier, why not have it earlier? After top 25 world guilds kill the final boss for example. No one would get screwed up by that.
The same can be said of the lockout of mythic, it could work the same as heroic after a couple of guilds kill the last boss.
Finally, the biggest offender is not having cross horde/alliance raiding, there have been perfect lore excuses for making this happen, at worst it could be handled like in BoD or as it's already handled in battlegrounds where you play as the other faction. At this point all it really does is dampening progression and having lots of dying servers. The only way that a lot of guilds have to recruit is though expensive transfers that people don't want to pay.
Za'qul didn't have any meaningful nerf. Lowering damage share mechanic did make it easier, but no one really wiped on that part anyway. It's still all about tentacles and Delirium. Maybe you'd avoid couple wipes to a tank death on 10%, but getting there meant you dealt with Split already and it was just a matter of time anyway.
Snarky: Adjective - Any language that contains quips or comments containing sarcastic or satirical witticisms intended as blunt irony. Usually delivered in a manner that is somewhat abrupt and out of context and intended to stun and amuse.
Mythic Azshara is a joke now though, and has been since the first nerfs. All of them has been quite significant for her difficulty. At the beginning you had to plan every single soak because you could steal soaks from eachother. Now you just take 5-6 stacks and ignore the mechanic completely.
M'uru was mechanically challenging for the time. It may not be anymore. Was in US top 10 at the time.
Most of the biggest issues were threat vs dps mechanics. The elemental adds spawning and being picked up in time before a healer was killed was a problem. Paladin tanks were used for this reason.
The side adds were similar. They'd spawn in and if you were in the wrong spot you'd be dead before they even fully rendered for a tank to establish aggro. Every mistake was a oneshot to the player. Side adds were typically stunned so the tank had time to pick them up before they got loose into the raid. And you have the DPS teams assigned to the different add spawns or tunneling the boss to push.
Either someone would mess up an add spawn and a random person would get oneshot (wipe) or you'd get it all done and fail to push the boss because you had too much downtime on adds (wipe). Lots of pulls were a percent to two away for a while, everyone felt they needed just the right RNG to get it.
- - - Updated - - -
Cool, but that doesn't have anything to do with raid tuning at launch...
Snarky: Adjective - Any language that contains quips or comments containing sarcastic or satirical witticisms intended as blunt irony. Usually delivered in a manner that is somewhat abrupt and out of context and intended to stun and amuse.
It takes 4 weeks to get clf3
takes 3 weeks to get iris3
3-5 weeks to get c&s3
2 weeks to cof3
You take just as long to get appropriate itemlevel gear in each slot.
- - - Updated - - -
raid tuning at launch has absolutely nothing to do with this conversation. Every time azshara was nerfed, scores of guilds got their first kill.
I don't think it's constructive to use guilds >500 as reference. there are an enormous amount of external factors effecting progress. guild leadership, for example. decision making, player bias, loot decisions, roster decisions, game knowledge, egos, superiority complexes, and organization are all extremely important. these are all very common issues in lower ranked guilds, and they very rarely get resolved from tier to tier. these problems, by themselves, can completely destroy guilds and they're controlled by only a handful of people in each guild. if your GM/raid leader/officers don't proactively solve these issues, then there's very little chance you're going to kill azshara/jaina/ghuun in a timely matter. the only way you can bypass these factors, is if you make them irrelevant.
then you can factor in attendance from less committed players. it's very difficult to get 20-25 people to consistently show up until a boss is dead if everyone isn't on the same page. people have families, school, work, kids, they get bored, they stop enjoying the game. these are just two scenarios out of a dozen that can hamper progression and prevent you from killing end bosses. it's not everything to do with difficulty as you so claim. making the statement bold doesn't make it true, it just makes it a statement that you put zero effort into defending. arbitrary statistics that could be proven weak with a 101 math equation don't work, either.
if you want bosses to be so easy that none of these factors are relevant, then the bosses need to be easy enough that little timmy JR the third can come in with very little prep and catch up to the guy who has done X number of pulls. the fights need to be so simple that GM Jim John doesn't need to do any prep or raid call or organize a roster properly or properly handle the politics of a guild, because everyone is expendable. so, what you're asking for, essentially, is that every boss be at most a 50 pull boss. rank 1k guilds fall apart on fights like QC and orgo, and those fights are relatively simple.
good luck enticing strong players to commit to the game if they know they're just going to come in and finish a tier in 2 weeks, then forget about the game for 5 months.
mythic raiding is designed to push the engines of the game to it's limits, not cater to "mythic raider #20157" who puts 10 minutes of his week into looking into his class/raid mechanics. there will ALWAYS be guilds that are close to the end, who aren't skilled enough, and who fail to reach it or take the entire patch cycle to clear the tier. always. unless you tune it like it's heroic, at which point the game isn't being pushed to the limit.. at which point serious players stop caring and your game turns into a day care for casual players.
This tbh, whenever we had something kinda resembling an endless progression (legion), the outrage was downright hilarious, "the game is all about grind now" "i want to be done with my character, why introduce this endless progression", blizzard heard the complains.
Now in BFA, "we need some sort of endless progression to overcome the walls like ashvane and mid tier bosses" lmao, so to the wow community i say you reap what you sow, as simple as that.
Of course it is constructive to use > 500. Like, there is literally no point in using top < 500 guilds because scene and most people that are in tough spot is exactly 500-2000.
You say bunch of useless stuff completely ignoring the whole point. Its not about decision making blabla, it is purely because people quit mid raid progression because they are burned out.
And from my experience it looks like it is tied to time it takes to clear raid tier.
You are not getting strongly committed players in top > 500. You get average raiders. Still average raider is players doing 60-80 performance. Just playing less.
There is literally no point in making mythic raids for entitled elitists.
And mind you, I've been in top ~200 guild. We had exact same issues in Legion and in BfA that guild just perished.
Joined them mid WoD, quit mid Legion. Since that time, squad changed so much, only 3 people from original one remained.
And now playing in top ~1000 guild, people just openly say they don't want to progress EP anymore (merged guilds 2 times during single raid tier).