Originally Posted by
NineSpine
There are numerous serious problems with the current raid design:
1. It encourages farming one difficulty to get through the higher difficulty. As you are supposed to, or you want to go back raiding Molten Core while you are in AQ40? Raiding Normal <new raid that just released> is 10 times more interesting than raiding the 1 year old raid for the 70th time.
2. It causes huge amounts of gear inflation. Inflation is non-existent, the game design has changed to seasonal 10 years ago, said this to you before, a person returning and being able to catch up in a few days is their design for the whole system, they said this back when ICC dungeons proved sucessful and the design was expanded upon.
3. Flex actually makes running small groups very difficult. I agree that this is a legit problem cause we had this issue multiple times the last 7 years, but at the same time there is a very thin line between an ability becoming "irrelevant", basically for this to be fixed completely they just have to completely remove soak mechanics by number of people which is actually a worse solution.
4. Since each difficulty is a watered down version of the next highest one, LFR ends up feeling incredibly bland and uninteresting. LFR is literally there for people to see the graphic design and the area, and experience what it "feels" like to raid without actually being challenged, its not there to replace guild raiding, just because it replaces guild raiding for burnt out players or non-evolving players, doesnt mean is its purprose. You are still supposed to guild up and do organized raiding, thats why Normal is called "Friends and Family" difficulty, even by them, themselves.
5. The raids are generally so large that it is difficult to have a relaxed raid schedule. Yes, this happens and doesnt, i mean this by the fact that we end up clearing the full raid in 2 hours eventually, so its a skill based/learning issue, not as much the raid, although i would prefer if they split the raids so i can choose where to focus etc during progress so i can agree with you, but end result is more like that people are slow to learn.
6. We are still fighting trash and running back to our corpses in 2022. ToC is the worst voted raid ever for this reason, some trash is okay, Sepulcher trash volume isnt, generally i agree with you but i am pretty sure our opinion is based around the fact you only want to play a certain time and not a second over, i am the same, most people arent.
7. There is way too much overlap in difficulties because there are too many settings Which is good, cause majority of guilds, are not good enough to clear the content when its intended, getting the extra gear helps them clear it, if Vault didnt exist to gear up my better players to carry the worst players i wouldnt be playing WoW for years now.
I don't think the OPs suggestion necessarily solves any of these problems, but the current model is probably the worst one they have ever had and it is amazing that it has gone on this long without being fixed.