20 man mythic recruitment killing my guild...what about you?

[Relapses]

5 man Raiding would be dope. Take mythic + and remove the trash. Call it Boss Gauntlet mode

Call it Trial of the Crusader. Or the cure for sleep deprivation.

[Elbob]

what you also have is record breaking sub looses - and one of the reasons is ridiculously overtuned content because blizzard for some reason blizz decided that its good business decision to cater to only 100-200k players who have nothing better to do then play 1 game over what will soon be nearly 20 years of their life.

there needs to be a point where blizz just admits - "you guys are just to good at game we cannot waste resources on your - gg you are that good - go play something else when you are done with cotent in 2 weeks"

We don't have access to the reasons for sub losses, its speculation to put any significant weight on the raid size change. I'm sure some people quit because of it but as for how many we probably will never know if it can even be determined. The sub loss is much larger then the number of 10man Heroic players that were clearing back in MoP,so if you can show me the memo or announce that 500k, 1mill or however many players quit because of no more 10m heroic(mythic) I'm super down to have my opinion on this changed even though I pref 20+man raiding atm.

[Relapses]

We don't have access to the reasons for sub losses, its speculation to put any significant weight on the raid size change. I'm sure some people quit because of it but as for how many we probably will never know if it can even be determined. The sub loss is much larger then the number of 10man Heroic players that were clearing back in MoP,so if you can show me the memo or announce that 500k, 1mill or however many players quit because of no more 10m heroic(mythic) I'm super down to have my opinion on this changed even though I pref 20+man raiding atm.

It's imaginary bullshit made up by a player desperate to prove that his opinion is validated by the fact that the game "is dying" because his singular viewpoint isn't personally addressed by the billion dollar gaming company.

[Gaidax]

It's imaginary bullshit made up by a player desperate to prove that his opinion is validated by the fact that the game "is dying" because his singular viewpoint isn't personally addressed by the billion dollar gaming company.

The guy's just one of these vengeful exes shitposter trying to tie one thing he can't verify to another thing he can't verify with logic leaps that would make Hulk blush.

Clearly the 20 man mythic raiding, activity done by low single digit % of playerbase, is TEH ISSUE that drives all them MILLIONS of players from WoW in Shadowlands. Not like it's something we already have for soon frikkin' half of WoW's existence. Clearly it is the devil there.

[Nalam the Venom]

So what would you rather have a realm first achievement, famed slayer or gear that has to constantly change each patch, acheivements are killing bosses are what drives mythic raiders, gear is easy to get and only a means to making the content easier.

If gear is your only reward for playing then you have been playing the game wrong, when a bit of gear drops you need its nice but when you kill that boss you have been struggling to kill or your getting a limited title is the reward for raiding. If your not in the top 100 then your reward is clearing the content and getting CE.

I'm just gonna quote this other guys since what he said made a lot of sense

different people raid for different goals.

Maby you should consider that one as well?

[God Save The King]

Just chiming in on Classic vs. Shadowlands recruiting.

Classic recruiting is substantially easier since it's basically getting 40 warm bodies and it's fairly easy to get 15/15 Naxx. Naturally that raid is difficult enough that you can't just faceroll it, but my guild runs 5 raid teams on classic and we've been 15/15 on all 5 since the second week of Naxx's release. I rotate in and raid with all 5, and I can say that about 210-220 of the ~230 members we have would fail miserably at mythic SL raiding. Out of five full raid teams, I doubt we could build single mythic raid team that even had a chance at fully clearing the current raid tier and getting Cutting Edge. We're also the top guild on my server, and our 5 raid teams are all in the first 10 clears of our realm (our 3 best teams are #1, 2, and 3), so these are essentially the cream of the crop players of our realm. We're fairly high population too, with loads of guilds having cleared 15/15 at this point. Classic raiding is just vastly easier and the only difficulty is coordination and organization. If you can actually get 40 bodies in the raid with the correct equipment (either resist gear or consumables or whatever else) you can easily clear it.

Shadowlands Mythic raiding is very competitive and requires not only similar coordination efforts, but also a tremendous amount of practice and skill. Players constantly guild hop up the ladder because, unlike classic, guilds clear content at widely different paces. We managed to get in the Alliance Hall of Fame so we're not terrible players. Even for us we lose a decent amount of raiders to top horde guilds that just clear faster than we do. Classic lacks that incentive with the separation of PvE and PvP servers, the long cooldown period, and the ease of the content.

These same issues exist, to a lesser degree, in more casual Normal/Heroic guilds as well. Regardless of the difficulty of the content, any raid in the last ~10 years or so are far more difficult than any Classic raid (save for maybe some of the more easy LFR raids compared to Naxx).

If your guild is dying I'd wager one of three things are happening (or a combination of them):

1. Challenging content beyond the skill of your team. If you're trying to push mythic raids as a team of people who struggle with clearing Heroics, you're going to have a very hard time. Usually people walk into mythic with the intent of pushing themselves, and if they feel your guild is holding them back, they will ladder hop. This results in bleeding your top players and as the tier progresses you struggle to bring in competent people because they've already ladder climbed and aren't interested in a 1 or 2 boss mythic guild.
2. Unusual hours. If you raid at weird times, raid far too much or too little, you will also struggle to retain members. While late-night and daytime raiding guilds exist, those are unusual and often struggle to fill their raids. Also if you're a guild that can't clear mythic in under ~6 weeks but wants to raid 12+ hours a week, no one is going to want to join. That's too large a time commitment for too little results. My guild raids 12 hours a week until we clear mythic, but then we only raid ~90 minutes or so, so people don't mind as much. The same issue can occur if you only do one raid night for ~2-3 hours. Unless you're godtier players, you're not going to have much progression and people are going to be turned off. I find a good sweet spot is ~6-9 hours a week for progression unless you're a top-end guild.
3. Toxic Culture. This can be a lot of things, but some of the top ones: drama, loot drama, favoritism, nepotism, cronyism, ridiculous trial procedures, cliques, exclusionary practices, bigotry, and more.

[Zyky]

So raiders only care about gear and dont care about clearing content, the only reason to even raid is to clear the content so stop talking BS, if your raiding gear is irrelevant as you get that easily, you only go after gear so you can make your preferred content easier, gear is not the reward because you can easily get gear and the last few bosses only drop slightly better items of which most relevant players would have obtained through PvP anyway.

Simple fact clearing content is the reward not gear.

You have multiple people that you're wrong. The gear is the ONLY thing that matters, especially in tiers that don't have a mount. Gear makes everything easier, it enables you to parse(which is a driven culture in this game). Not one guild that's 10/10M will take you just because you've cleared the raid, you need decent parses, and to get decent parses you need GEAR. I know this might seem like rocket science to you, but clearing the content is not a reward.

- - - Updated - - -

No shit, if your constantly in the top5% of players you can find good guilds... what a revelation.
For the other 95% of Mythic raiders, Cutting Edge is something they can show off to show they likely have some clue how to play the game.

Read above, Cutting Edge means nothing. If you can't parse you're not going to get into a new 10/10M guild if your guild decides to replace you for being trash.

[Relapses]

You have multiple people that you're wrong. The gear is the ONLY thing that matters, especially in tiers that don't have a mount. Gear makes everything easier, it enables you to parse(which is a driven culture in this game). Not one guild that's 10/10M will take you just because you've cleared the raid, you need decent parses, and to get decent parses you need GEAR. I know this might seem like rocket science to you, but clearing the content is not a reward.

It's a bit of Column A and a bit of Column B. The guy you're quoting both hates 10M Heroic and feels like prestige is the only thing that raiders care about (because that's what he cares about). The reality is that some raiders are motivated by gear, some by prestige and most by a varying degree of both. It probably doesn't feel that good getting a CE when it's relevant but as an example, I have T14 and T17 CE and both of those in hindsight are pretty rare. It didn't feel like a lot at the time, but it feels way more special now that most of the people who played back then have moved on.

[Kralljin]

-> MCs on Blast Furnace

-> Tomb of SOAKgeras

-> G'huun's dependence on Warlocks

-> N'Zoth's heavy immunity requirement

I think the only example that holds is MC on Blast furnace and frankly, Blast Furnace was a fine fight.

The others are just incompetence on part of the encounter designers.
ToS => Too many fights with soak mechanics and the insane amount of immunities required kill it
G'uun => 2 Warlocks, okay, 4? Not so much.
N'zoth => See ToS

Having 1-2 Priests on Blast Furnace for the MC is one thing, but if you design a fight where 10+ Immunities are basically required to beat it pre nerf, that's just stupidity.
How Mechanics that read "split among players" on very challenging encounter makes it past QA is beyond me.

[Zyky]

It's a bit of Column A and a bit of Column B. The guy you're quoting both hates 10M Heroic and feels like prestige is the only thing that raiders care about (because that's what he cares about). The reality is that some raiders are motivated by gear, some by prestige and most by a varying degree of both. It probably doesn't feel that good getting a CE when it's relevant but as an example, I have T14 and T17 CE and both of those in hindsight are pretty rare. It didn't feel like a lot at the time, but it feels way more special now that most of the people who played back then have moved on.

My only issue is that Cutting Edge doesn't really offer anything special. I think back to like ToGC where it had two Heroic exclusive mounts that both got removed from the game. Prestige just doesn't take you anywhere anymore, I have 16 total Cutting Edges and all they do is prove "I did that" and that doesn't matter in this game anymore, prestige doesn't matter to the vast majority of the playerbase, that's because parse culture has taken over and it doesn't matter if you've achieved every single Cutting Edge in the game, guilds won't take you if you're not parsing decently and your guild will keep your spot available for if they get an app from a better player of the same class. This isn't even the mindset of "just the top .1%" This goes all the way through most Mythic progression guilds. There's guilds in the top 2000 with these absurd expectations/standards and they're nowhere near pushing top world raiding. Prestige used to mean a lot in this game, same with mechanical prowess, but now people only look at your parses and they determine based on that if you're a good or bad player, when in reality parsing just means you didn't do mechanics, you didn't get bad RNG, you padded on adds, ect.

[Uvania]

guild died back in february when we were done with heroic CN, left today since last time someone else then me were online was last saturday...

[Gorsameth]

My only issue is that Cutting Edge doesn't really offer anything special. I think back to like ToGC where it had two Heroic exclusive mounts that both got removed from the game. Prestige just doesn't take you anywhere anymore, I have 16 total Cutting Edges and all they do is prove "I did that" and that doesn't matter in this game anymore, prestige doesn't matter to the vast majority of the playerbase, that's because parse culture has taken over and it doesn't matter if you've achieved every single Cutting Edge in the game, guilds won't take you if you're not parsing decently and your guild will keep your spot available for if they get an app from a better player of the same class. This isn't even the mindset of "just the top .1%" This goes all the way through most Mythic progression guilds. There's guilds in the top 2000 with these absurd expectations/standards and they're nowhere near pushing top world raiding. Prestige used to mean a lot in this game, same with mechanical prowess, but now people only look at your parses and they determine based on that if you're a good or bad player, when in reality parsing just means you didn't do mechanics, you didn't get bad RNG, you padded on adds, ect.

You seem to be completely unable to separate what someone personally cares about and what the game around them cares about.

You keep talking about how CE won't get you into guilds and complete ignore that people are not getting CE to get into guild but simply for their own personal accomplishment.
If you 16 CE's and don't care about them because your not getting orange parses every raid that is a problem between you and your psychiatrist.

[Relapses]

I think the only example that holds is MC on Blast furnace and frankly, Blast Furnace was a fine fight.

The others are just incompetence on part of the encounter designers.
ToS => Too many fights with soak mechanics and the insane amount of immunities required kill it
G'uun => 2 Warlocks, okay, 4? Not so much.
N'zoth => See ToS

Having 1-2 Priests on Blast Furnace for the MC is one thing, but if you design a fight where 10+ Immunities are basically required to beat it pre nerf, that's just stupidity.
How Mechanics that read "split among players" on very challenging encounter makes it past QA is beyond me.

I like Blast Furnace, too. I think it's about as close to a perfectly designed raid encounter as Blizzard has ever gotten. But the reality is that a lot of players didn't like the two MC requirement because they either simply didn't have two Priests; or if they did, their Priests weren't mechanically strong enough to do the mechanic properly. (I'd know, I mained a SPriest this Tier. >_>) I agree that there are a lot of questionable mechanics that Blizzard lets through but I think the encounter design team is generally pretty cognizant of how players respond to certain mechanics and that's the only reason I can think that they've avoided these type of mechanics since.

[Zyky]

You seem to be completely unable to separate what someone personally cares about and what the game around them cares about.

You keep talking about how CE won't get you into guilds and complete ignore that people are not getting CE to get into guild but simply for their own personal accomplishment.
If you 16 CE's and don't care about them because your not getting orange parses every raid that is a problem between you and your psychiatrist.

You keep making assumptions about me that are contradicting to what I've been saying, so I'm just going to block you and not worry about your trolling anymore

[Wheeler]

Wow's current subscribers vary insanely from patch to patch(much more so then it used to).

This is probably the reality of it. Just such wild swings on a patch-to-patch basis that so many guilds are going to get killed they can never become "established" enough to maintain consistency.

[cool_freezer]

The problem here is not the amount of player but the broken gearing system, where a few weeks into mythic nathria everyone was expected to have better gear then that, that was available from bosses you are progressing. Back in the days you needed to raid and kill bosses to get that gear that you now are expected to have before you ever set a foot into that raid. M+ is a good replayable content but ulimately leads to this mess you have now. Bring back challenge modes from mists and get rid of that gear fiesta and only will you have a healthy raiding playerbase.

[BeepBoo]

10man>>>>>>>>20man

Why stop there? If you're making that argument, can't you just skip all the way down to 5 man, 3 man, 1 man? 10 seems like an oddly arbitrary number.

The fact is, that at any group size, you're going to have these types of struggles. Destiny has 6 man raids. We have like 10 players in our squad and we STILL struggle to put together a regular raid roster, even with planned nights and such. We also always beat it in the first week. We've come close to first day clears. We're all competent, etc. The fact is that social gathering and scheduling is a pain and it should stay that way. That's what it means to be committed.

[Kralljin]

I agree that there are a lot of questionable mechanics that Blizzard lets through but I think the encounter design team is generally pretty cognizant of how players respond to certain mechanics and that's the only reason I can think that they've avoided these type of mechanics since.

Can only agree to some extent.

I cannot fathom how something such as N'zoth still happens, especially when they also then provide reasons like "it supports the identity of classes with immunities" (or something like that).
Immunities are one of the strongest abilities in the game, they can be abused on almost any encounter, they don't need *additional* mechanics that favor them, pretty much every encounter already has a plethora of situations where Immunities save for fucking skin, no need for mechanics that basically are "You have an immunity or you're fucked", especially on the most difficult encounters of a tier where switching on alt or getting benched is even more painful.

I've been raiding hardcore as Shaman for over a decade and this whole immunity business has felt like a bad prank on Blizzards end, you feel so fucking left out the moment you realize that yet again that an immunity is OP on a fight and necessary on almost every raidmember.

[HolyCowBro]

Why stop there? If you're making that argument, can't you just skip all the way down to 5 man, 3 man, 1 man? 10 seems like an oddly arbitrary number.

The fact is, that at any group size, you're going to have these types of struggles. Destiny has 6 man raids. We have like 10 players in our squad and we STILL struggle to put together a regular raid roster, even with planned nights and such. We also always beat it in the first week. We've come close to first day clears. We're all competent, etc. The fact is that social gathering and scheduling is a pain and it should stay that way. That's what it means to be committed.

By Blizzard's definition; anything larger than a 5 man is considered to be a "raid" anything else is just personal opinion. Now I think anything lower than 10 man is just asking for trouble, but 10 man was a sweet spot for me personally. Maybe it's nostalgia, or maybe it's because I could raid comfortably every week and replacing people wasn't such a difficult task, plus the content was in my opinion very challenging at the time. I would love to keep an open mind and see what Blizzard could do with 10m current content, but I am not a developer, and most of these people commenting aren't either, so our opinions don't really matter lol.

[Zig Zug]

this whole immunity business has felt like a bad prank on Blizzards end, you feel so fucking left out the moment you realize that yet again that an immunity is OP on a fight and necessary on almost every raidmember.

Agree completely.

"Super important XYZ in 10 seconds, in 5....execute"

"Super important XYZ in 10 seconds, immunities, cheese it."