Developer Feedback - Accessibility of Raid Mechanics and Addons

[Swnem]

Seriously, how does one do LoD without the weak aura? Even on comms it's a mess with multiple people talking at the same time.
LoD is evidence that things have gone too far. Actually, it is shocking how they place a fight in the game that cannot be beaten without a weak aura.
It would've actually been a very interesting case study if no one actually made a weak aura. I'd like to see how much they would nerf the encounter to make up for it.

[exochaft]

Seriously, how does one do LoD without the weak aura? Even on comms it's a mess with multiple people talking at the same time.
LoD is evidence that things have gone too far. Actually, it is shocking how they place a fight in the game that cannot be beaten without a weak aura.
It would've actually been a very interesting case study if no one actually made a weak aura. I'd like to see how much they would nerf the encounter to make up for it.

I'd say there's been evidence for years they've gone too far in many cases. To go one step further, I think there's a culture that addons and WA's need to be used by players in every scenario to solve every raid problem, even when they don't need to be. A lot of this is trickle-down raid strats, which even those who make them will tell you they're commonly designed for their specific raid team in mind... people just tend to ignore it and think it's the only way to do things.

When it comes to being able to do something w/o a WA or addon, everything is technically possible... but one aspect they don't address is the learning curve in relation to mechanics and tuning. Regardless if you are a RWF guild or as casual as you can get guild, there's always a learning curve when it comes to fights. Your progression is basically tied to your weakest link: you tend to beat encounters when your weakest person finally learns the fight (or you get lucky). To boil down this point without creating a wall of text, WA's and addons speed up the magnitude of this learning curve... and Blizz absolutely does design around this when they really shouldn't. When you design your game around the existence of WA's and addons, you will get some really terrible mechanics and/or mechanics that will require external help, especially the parity mechanics.

If you've been raiding for the last several expansions, one of the biggest headaches when it comes to mechanics is the combination of pure randomness and parity raid-wiping mechanics. Personally, I've always been an insanely fast learner for raid mechanics, and I'd typically be the one on autopilot while others are still struggling to comprehend what's going on. When you reach this point, as many others probably have, you are afforded the ability to look around and pinpoint issues with why you keep wiping on an encounter (typically this was my job in my hardcore guilds: figure out why we're wiping and come up with a fix). Unfortunately, one of the hardest things to fix is when your weakest raiders get randomly chosen for complex and/or parity mechanics, especially when they're still learning the fight and/or don't respond well to unscripted mechanics.

This has a nasty social side effect that's probably felt in many raids, and that's everyone starting to notice their weakest links being the source of their wipes. Now, if we were still a game where players weren't treated as NPCs by others, you could work with this... but WoW is not that game. Even the weaker players themselves can start building up guilt because they know they're wiping the raid constantly when getting picked for random mechanics. I should point out this doesn't just affect weaker players overall, but anyone who has trouble multitasking... or loves to tunnel DPS. Long gone are the days where you could reliably have your chosen core DPS people who pewpew no matter what, and a chosen core team of people who will always nail the mechanics every time. Blizz changed that a long time ago for whatever reason, and I still don't see anything wrong with breaking up roles like this, so we get a bunch of mechanics that target random people that are so insanely deadly that such design causes unnecessary stress to raids/guilds.

If you want a prime example of how randomness is the bane of raiding, look no further than the Jaina fight in BfA. While I wouldn't call it the most complex of fights, it highlighted the people in your raid who really struggle with learning or are the slow learners in your raid. Blizz introducing spell queuing isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it absolutely becomes a problem with mythic tuning... or heck, just how they tune in general as it caused issues at all levels of raiding. The first phase spell queuing changed the fight and timings pull-to-pull, and while some people can pick up on that and adjust, a lot of people cannot. Having a different fight basically ever pull where people were randomly targeted for potentially raid insta-wiping mechanics was a very dumb idea, and Blizz eventually realized this and removed the spell queuing at the very end of the raid's patch. While the non-queued order of abilities in phase 1 wasn't actually the easiest you could get, it was consistent... and that consistency makes clearing content easier and faster, even if the mechanical lineup itself was harder on average.

[mrgreenthump]

I'm quite sad that mekkartorque is viewed this way. I've had had a really good time on this boss. I'm used to raiding with hearing-impaired and deaf people, so I know a bit what struggle they deal with.

Nevertheless the answer shouldn't be to shut down good implementations like mekkartorque's.

It was pretty ass as colorblind, I did map the colors to the binds as they were the same each time. Hence I could do it, but I couldn't shout the colors without first translating to a bind on the bottom, then from that number to a color. So annoying. But it didn't require fast execution, so it was just annoying.

Yes I could use colorblind mode but it doesn't really help to say: Yeah it's "light grey" when you mean green.

[TobiasAmaranth]

Seriously, how does one do LoD without the weak aura? Even on comms it's a mess with multiple people talking at the same time.
LoD is evidence that things have gone too far. Actually, it is shocking how they place a fight in the game that cannot be beaten without a weak aura.
It would've actually been a very interesting case study if no one actually made a weak aura. I'd like to see how much they would nerf the encounter to make up for it.

I mean, I wrote a talking-not-required strategy earlier in this post. Put simply, no one should be talking during that phase except for saying "yes", or responding to a RL asking for names under certain conditions (from specific players).

I remember around week 5 or so, someone with a big ego from another pug group was joining us for a quick Normal clear, and the dude could not listen at all to the strategy we were using which minimized yapping. Throughout the pull he would try to say "no" or "I see [unrelated player]" and it just made a huge mess that we had to filter out. I think there's more to the problem at hand than just a complex mechanic. There's also a lack of trust in others that's present beyond the game itself. Hell, I'm guilty of that sometimes, too. I will try to speak up about things when it can be saved for later or isn't actually important. "Clear comms" is a tough skill and requires leadership you can trust. And well, how many times have you seen the dumber or lazier people be RL in pugs?

To be clear, the group I ran with never bothered with any Weak Aura for it. Not sure if they ever swapped over, cuz I stopped shortly after week 5 due to being bored.

I'd say there's been evidence for years they've gone too far in many cases. To go one step further, I think there's a culture that addons and WA's need to be used by players in every scenario to solve every raid problem, even when they don't need to be. A lot of this is trickle-down raid strats, which even those who make them will tell you they're commonly designed for their specific raid team in mind... people just tend to ignore it and think it's the only way to do things.

When it comes to being able to do something w/o a WA or addon, everything is technically possible... but one aspect they don't address is the learning curve in relation to mechanics and tuning. Regardless if you are a RWF guild or as casual as you can get guild, there's always a learning curve when it comes to fights. Your progression is basically tied to your weakest link: you tend to beat encounters when your weakest person finally learns the fight (or you get lucky). To boil down this point without creating a wall of text, WA's and addons speed up the magnitude of this learning curve... and Blizz absolutely does design around this when they really shouldn't. When you design your game around the existence of WA's and addons, you will get some really terrible mechanics and/or mechanics that will require external help, especially the parity mechanics.

If you've been raiding for the last several expansions, one of the biggest headaches when it comes to mechanics is the combination of pure randomness and parity raid-wiping mechanics. Personally, I've always been an insanely fast learner for raid mechanics, and I'd typically be the one on autopilot while others are still struggling to comprehend what's going on. When you reach this point, as many others probably have, you are afforded the ability to look around and pinpoint issues with why you keep wiping on an encounter (typically this was my job in my hardcore guilds: figure out why we're wiping and come up with a fix). Unfortunately, one of the hardest things to fix is when your weakest raiders get randomly chosen for complex and/or parity mechanics, especially when they're still learning the fight and/or don't respond well to unscripted mechanics.

This has a nasty social side effect that's probably felt in many raids, and that's everyone starting to notice their weakest links being the source of their wipes. Now, if we were still a game where players weren't treated as NPCs by others, you could work with this... but WoW is not that game. Even the weaker players themselves can start building up guilt because they know they're wiping the raid constantly when getting picked for random mechanics. I should point out this doesn't just affect weaker players overall, but anyone who has trouble multitasking... or loves to tunnel DPS. Long gone are the days where you could reliably have your chosen core DPS people who pewpew no matter what, and a chosen core team of people who will always nail the mechanics every time. Blizz changed that a long time ago for whatever reason, and I still don't see anything wrong with breaking up roles like this, so we get a bunch of mechanics that target random people that are so insanely deadly that such design causes unnecessary stress to raids/guilds.

I would personally support a reduction in addon capability at this point. In addition to the burden it puts on raid encounter design, there's the meta stuff with Overwolf, making money from hobbies, etc that I think does more harm than people realize. To that end, if Blizzard put bans in place for people developing addons (note: not sure through what manner they could even accomplish this, but the end goal being to return it to volunteer hobbyism only) then the quality of addons would go down by a lot, and from there, so would dependence. An extremely harsh solution, obviously, but the alternative is Zero Addons. And well, even FF14 players find ways to utilize addons.

Setting that controversial view aside, another really good way to help out those bottom players would be to incorporate more of the boss mechanics into trash. Safer, less deadly ways to experience mechanics. Give us a ton more mini-bosses in raids. Lock the doors, send us through gauntlets, teleport random players away to handle boss-like tasks. Give people ways to learn where they don't have that pressure. Turn some of the stuff into quests and stop babying players so much on outdoor mechanics. Remember MoP? Remember those rares? Remember how they would *absolutely* one shot you if you screwed up their telegraphed moves? Where did that go?

Give players ways to actually learn and practice aside from some random thing that happens to them once every five attempts, six minutes into the boss fight when they're super stressed.

And yes, many WoW players are getting older, and are less able to handle the complexity or the multi-tasking. That's why I only worry about Normal raids these days, with a push into Heroic until I get bored. I give myself the mechanical challenge and when I feel like I've mastered it, I move on or stop. Beating my head against the group cohesion aspect isn't fun anymore in the way it used to be. :P

(Also, what's with all that random double-spacing?? XD Over 50 instances.)

[Rageonit]

I'd say there's been evidence for years they've gone too far in many cases. (...)

This is a very well written post, and my thoughts exactly. Recently, we've been discussing this a lot in our group of friends. I've run a couple of F&F guilds since WotLK, and lately it's been increasingly difficult to enjoy raiding together with casual players (which is the sole goal of those guilds existence). Those parity and insta-wipe mechanics are getting harsher and harsher, to the point where it becomes frustrating both for guild/raid leaders and those causal people, who feel like they simply don't belong. And no finger pointing is even needed, because everybody knows damn well who is responsible for the wipe, there's simply nowhere to hide. And the worst part is, we can't do anything to help! At some point you just start to pray the player X doesn't get targeted with Dark Eclipse or whatever too often, because if he does, we're dead.

I also discourages PUGing a lot, for the same reason. Nowadays, if you need to replace a couple of people on a progress fight, you're bound to regress (with no guarantee the new people won't leave after a wipe or two).

[Skildar]

It was pretty ass as colorblind, I did map the colors to the binds as they were the same each time. Hence I could do it, but I couldn't shout the colors without first translating to a bind on the bottom, then from that number to a color. So annoying. But it didn't require fast execution, so it was just annoying.

Yes I could use colorblind mode but it doesn't really help to say: Yeah it's "light grey" when you mean green.

I've played with a colour blind person on this fight and we were using the symbols instead og colours. It worked pretty fine on our side.

[Coldkil]

The funniest part to me is that they specifically took Lords of Dread as an example.

The mechanic sucks - but not because it requires communication (while someone would argue it's "mandatory" to use voice chat, there's one included in the game so everyone has the option to do that). It sucks because it requires an absurd amount of communication to just identify the two targets and because the game doesn't show them well enough nor gives you the tools to deal with it - hence someone came up with a WA that makes the hole process much more understandable and thus easier.

One simple "solution" would have been to have the shadows colored differently. The two targets who see the fake shadows would see them as red instead of blue so they would be easy to call immediately without all the nonsense votes and crap. you can make this harder by having like 3 colors in HC and even random 3 colors in Mythic (so it's not an automatic red=bad kind of situation).

I know it's not something that helps colorblind people or ones that have other disabilities, but it would make the mechanic immensely less reliant on addons.

The major issue at stake here is that while addons are really important for some people as they really need them to fully enjoy the game, this means everyone else can use those and simplify the encounters one way or another.

The point is that Blizzard really needs to do a better job to make mechanics clear to understand and execute. This is the only way to make addons less important - it's not that addons are bad by default, but we reached this point where there's people part of the RWF teams that are literally paid to develop weakauras for the racing team so they get an advantage.

Addons are 1000x less useful if everything they tell you is already clearly provided by the game. One can argue addons are not really needed at lower difficulties (which is true) but the overcomplication born to combat them at the cutting edge is bleeding down to lower difficulties making fights less entertaining and unnecessarily complex.

Fight/games can be hard without being mechanically complex.

[conkrete]

I have never actually pugged Lords of dread on any difficulty above LFR. I killed it multiple times with my guild on normal & heroic using voice chat and a weakaura. How do you actually do that fight without an addon or voice chat in pugs, serious question.

On another note I am in charge of doing assignments for my mythic guild and we are about to start anduin mythic progression, the amount of preperation and assigning, that is neccesary this tier is absolutely overwhelming - thank god nowadays there's a bunch of premade assignment sheets out there to help out. No idea how I would do without them.

This is bonkers to me. The idea that a game should feel like a part-time job is asinine to me. There's a maniac at Blizzard making these decisions and he has to be stopped. not that this is him but, I saw a dev after Jailer WF enjoying the whole ordeal, with a smirk on his face on how it took that much time and effort to defeat the last boss. At what cost?

A significant amount of people playing this game are 25 and older, a group highly likely to be parents. If I'm the developer, I'd love people to enjoy the experience I'm offering BUT to also have a life, and especially not to feel shame afterwards. There's so much time that one has to put in order to do basic functions of the game, it's absurd.

[kamuimac]

a wall of usless text.

raids are to hard by good 30-40 % overall - nerf them by this and remove all 1 shot/wipe mechancis and we are gucci

untill then why would i raid when i can chill in +15 ?

they shoudl fire all those guys trying desperately to tell playerbase "git gud" and nerf raids to make them enjoyable again

[Soikona]

a wall of usless text.

raids are to hard by good 30-40 % overall - nerf them by this and remove all 1 shot/wipe mechancis and we are gucci

untill then why would i raid when i can chill in +15 ?

they shoudl fire all those guys trying desperately to tell playerbase "git gud" and nerf raids to make them enjoyable again

I disagree, the challenge is why I do mythic raids. I don’t do keys, because they are not challenging.

[conkrete]

That's actually an impressive solution.
Still way too complicated for a normal bossfight, though. And it also requires everyone to know this tactic and to know how the bosses actually work, which is not information Blizzard gives to us. I for one have explained this mechanic multiple times and read at least 4 guides, but did not yet know the exact numbers here.

Lords of dread is the only encounter that really can't be learned by reading the dungeon compendium.

Absolutely, it's toxic and goes against common sense, the idea that games should be about bringing people together not apart.

Maybe the hardcore raider should be the lead tester at Blizzard, not the game director.

[Otimus]

As someone who pugs, please speak up. If you get removed, the group wasn't for you to begin with. But people can't can give help when there's no one speaking up about needing a bit of help.

There's also a level of entitlement in people who pug to skip straight to the end. I have a friend who will raid only on Heroic. I tell him, please, at least go run through Normal and experience the fights first, but he won't because he's an M+ pusher. He does well with many things, but there's always some mechanic or other that isn't obvious and he will mess it up and get yelled at, which he then gets upset by.

Hopefully there will be some level of shift in pugging if people use the newish "group type" qualifiers properly. After the first two weeks you get people who have already gone through group after group of teaching people stuff and are exhausted in doing that. Don't join those groups if you don't have experience; if you do, realize that you're joining a group of people who are exhausted from spending hours and hours cycling through person-who-can't-learn after person-who-won't-ask after person-who-won't-even-care and we just want others who have had that experience.

That's the core problem with pugging, after all. There has to be a better way to handle this that doesn't ultimately end up in "Either play the pants on head easy mode that rewards you with nothing worthwhile at all, or join a guild and shut up". I sure don't have a solution to that, though, and I haven't really played any other MMOs long enough to ever do anything resembling a raid to know how they handle this. Seriously though, unless you're hyper adaptive to an absurd degree, or have super thick skin, or are in an active guild, pugging just isn't worth it.

[Rageonit]

That's the core problem with pugging, after all. There has to be a better way to handle this that doesn't ultimately end up in "Either play the pants on head easy mode that rewards you with nothing worthwhile at all, or join a guild and shut up". I sure don't have a solution to that, though, and I haven't really played any other MMOs long enough to ever do anything resembling a raid to know how they handle this. Seriously though, unless you're hyper adaptive to an absurd degree, or have super thick skin, or are in an active guild, pugging just isn't worth it.

But it's been done before, and Blizzard knows how to do this. And it's really super simple: do not randomly pick people for insta-wipe mechanics. This way, if we're 10 guldies and need to get 5 more for whatever reason, we can allow them to DPS and handle the mechanic ourselves. Got a friend who's new to WoW and wants to join a raid? Same thing - give him personal responisibilites that can result in him getting killed, but don't desing mechanics that allow that one person to wipe the whole raid. Leave that for Mythic. Or maybe not even there...? I enjoy raiding as a GROUP RESPONSIBILITY activity. As a raid and guild leader, I know my guildies well enough to simply assign them to certain mechanics. But the modern raid takes control away from you, as a raid leader. You have no power as to who handles the mechanics - and you often stand next to the PUG that's going to explode with Dark Eclipse, while being right next to a hole, and tears flow down you cheeks, because you're powerless.

[Raisei]

"How severe is the punishment for failure, and is it binary or granular?"

Fuck any boss ability where one single raider wipes the entire raid. Like the trash rygelon mechanic. It promotes kicking people, which the game shouldn't. We are a small guild and we have to bench players due to mechanics like this. If they die on bosses, we can still finish the raid. But bullshit mechanics like this just festers toxicity and anger

This. Absolutely.

This design is absolute bullshit. We got some people in the guild and raid team that have been with us for over a decade and some of them have eye problems that are worsening, making it very hard for them to see some raid mechanics. On fights like Rygelon it is nigh impossible to keep them in the team, because they have a hard time seeing the black circles to not nuke the raid. We try to help them, but the time is so short, that there is not much we can do.

So what are our options? Benching people that have been with us for years for something that is beyond their ability to control? I find that incredibly distasteful and I would feel super bad about it, so I am advocating against it when talking with the other officers. But at the same time there are other people who complain that we have about 100 wipes on this boss already because of this mechanic. The officers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Not that every wipe is the fault of those people, not even close, but it contributes. And the structure of the fight is such that even if we get through 99% of it without an issue, one debuff applied to the wrong person can still cause a wipe at 1%.

The amount of grief and anger this boss has caused my guild and me personally just stands in no relation to the rewards we are getting for killing him.

And in case you thought differently, I am talking about the HEROIC version.

If this was Mythic I can accept this design. Going into Mythic you know that everyone has to perform at max and that people have to be benched even for things like playing the wrong class.

I don't want to make such decision for a fucking Heroic boss that doesn't even drop any decent loot. Creating guild drama and hurting people over this bullshit will be such shit and I am not sure Blizzard leaves us any other choice with their design.

So, Blizzard, at the tiny chance you are reading this:

THINK MORE ABOUT YOUR MECHANIC DESIGN AND HOW IT AFFECTS GUILDS

Maybe we wouldn't need all those addons if your design wouldn't make it impossible to solve such mechanics unless you see them coming a mile off.

[kamuimac]

This. Absolutely.

This design is absolute bullshit. We got some people in the guild and raid team that have been with us for over a decade and some of them have eye problems that are worsening, making it very hard for them to see some raid mechanics. On fights like Rygelon it is nigh impossible to keep them in the team, because they have a hard time seeing the black circles to not nuke the raid. We try to help them, but the time is so short, that there is not much we can do.

So what are our options? Benching people that have been with us for years for something that is beyond their ability to control? I find that incredibly distasteful and I would feel super bad about it, so I am advocating against it when talking with the other officers. But at the same time there are other people who complain that we have about 100 wipes on this boss already because of this mechanic. The officers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Not that every wipe is the fault of those people, not even close, but it contributes. And the structure of the fight is such that even if we get through 99% of it without an issue, one debuff applied to the wrong person can still cause a wipe at 1%.

The amount of grief and anger this boss has caused my guild and me personally just stands in no relation to the rewards we are getting for killing him.

And in case you thought differently, I am talking about the HEROIC version.

If this was Mythic I can accept this design. Going into Mythic you know that everyone has to perform at max and that people have to be benched even for things like playing the wrong class.

I don't want to make such decision for a fucking Heroic boss that doesn't even drop any decent loot. Creating guild drama and hurting people over this bullshit will be such shit and I am not sure Blizzard leaves us any other choice with their design.

So, Blizzard, at the tiny chance you are reading this:

THINK MORE ABOUT YOUR MECHANIC DESIGN AND HOW IT AFFECTS GUILDS

Maybe we wouldn't need all those addons if your design wouldn't make it impossible to solve such mechanics unless you see them coming a mile off.

i honestly respect people who even try to raid in wow anymore

after painsmith mythic progress i just said - "nope nope nope f.. this garbage design " and this tier i just m+ on 12 alts. cba to waste even 1 minute more on raids with current design and tuning.

[shise]

"How severe is the punishment for failure, and is it binary or granular?"

Fuck any boss ability where one single raider wipes the entire raid. Like the trash rygelon mechanic. It promotes kicking people, which the game shouldn't. We are a small guild and we have to bench players due to mechanics like this. If they die on bosses, we can still finish the raid. But bullshit mechanics like this just festers toxicity and anger

Exactly.

Game should be more basics focused and less complexity focused.

Difficulty can still be achieved if things are properly tuned.

Having to DPS hard or to heal your heart out on basic mechanics can be hard, fun and rewarding. Specially when you are on the fne line between enrage timer or actually killing it.

No need for complex crap.

[Aydinx2]

a wall of usless text.

raids are to hard by good 30-40 % overall - nerf them by this and remove all 1 shot/wipe mechancis and we are gucci

untill then why would i raid when i can chill in +15 ?

they shoudl fire all those guys trying desperately to tell playerbase "git gud" and nerf raids to make them enjoyable again

Raids are enjoyable. You're just not good at them. Plenty of people enjoy being challenged.

And the reason you wouldn't just chill in a +15 is because raid loot is, generally, better. Higher ilvl but also special items with effects that put them ahead of other items at the same ilvl.

[mrgreenthump]

I've played with a colour blind person on this fight and we were using the symbols instead og colours. It worked pretty fine on our side.

It did work for me too, just I had to take the extra step to translate what was said, becauce my guild used colors. But honestly it isn't anywhere as bad as Mythic Odyn in legion.

[Loveliest]

I disagree, the challenge is why I do mythic raids. I don’t do keys, because they are not challenging.

Yes, Mythic, but not hc. Raid wipe mechanics if one person fails will make ppl not do the hc raid. You get better loot from M+. So this type of challenge keep it for Mythic and make normal and HC less punishing. The effort / time spent vs reward is simply not worth the frustration on anything lower than Mythic.

- - - Updated - - -

Raids are enjoyable. You're just not good at them. Plenty of people enjoy being challenged.

And the reason you wouldn't just chill in a +15 is because raid loot is, generally, better. Higher ilvl but also special items with effects that put them ahead of other items at the same ilvl.

Yes and no. Depends on the difficulty and where the challenge comes from. If you're raiding Mythic, fine, you have a standard. But if you do normal and hc, frustrated ppl will just lose interest. On Rygelon, we can bearly scrape 5-6 dpses, mostly melee and no immunities and that fight is not scaled properly for such a comp. And then you get this raid-wipe mechanic that wipes the raid. I'm a tank so I never cause a wipe on this boss because that mechanic does not target me. It's frustrating seeing it all unfold, so would you think I consider this challenging? It's challenging when it's in your hands, it's not when you can't really do anything about it.

[Rageonit]

Raids are enjoyable. You're just not good at them. Plenty of people enjoy being challenged.

And the reason you wouldn't just chill in a +15 is because raid loot is, generally, better. Higher ilvl but also special items with effects that put them ahead of other items at the same ilvl.

You obviously don't understand the issue. It's hardly about the challenge - raids can be challenging without being frustrating. But imagine this: you've mastered the damn Rygelon fight and kill it with your guild with ease. Then you get two new people to the guild. And here are your options: you either prevent them from raiding said boss or you go there knowing damn well you will have to re-progress it until the new guys learn. And it will happen every single time you get anyone new to the game. It's bad design. It's horrendous for the social aspect of the game. At some point, you will start hating your own guildies - or you'll just decide to not to try it ever again, or not to allow any new players joining your raid. No matter how you look at it, it's extremely bad for the game.