Should raiding be easier across all difficulties?

[munkeyinorbit]

look i get the issue completely, but in organized guilds this isnt an issue at all. you soul stone before pull and thats about it. but in a perfect world yes rezzing at boss or at a close by checkpoint would be nice addition. personally though this doesnt really apply to me. My guild always soul stones and we continue to push within 30secs-1.5min max

They tried this in MoP. People hated it. They need to change it from a release button to a dialog that also includes a release at boss button. Surely this will please everyone.

[Goatfish]

Criticizing the idea of fun as an important part of game design is not a "legitimate criticism". It is a demonstration of values so insanely far removed from anything I care about that it makes conversation useless. If you walked into a design meeting and said that, everyone would laugh you out of the room. "Is this fun" is very nearly the only thing we would talk about in design meetings. It's the only priority.

You just aren't a person interested in any kind of discussion. You are interesting in screeching belittlements and insults while pretending to be the arbiter of logic. No thanks. I'll talk to you when you learn how to talk to people, and you can start by not saying laughable shit like "Bro, like, what even IS fun broooooooo" while acting like you have the greatest insights this forum has ever seen.

I can't even begin to imagine why you get pleasure from just spewing hate on these forums day in and day out. You would think more than a decade of refusing to engage with anyone and insulting them based off your own strawman would get old.

You are not the audience for LFR. I am also not the audience for LFR. You're essentially a vegan going to a steak restaurant and complaining they don't have more vegan options. Not everything has to be fun for you. The universe does not revolve around you. You are not special. What you think is fun means jack shit to the designers of LFR and to me.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

However they do it, it's good to have a variety of difficulties. People play the game for different reasons, and one size doesn't fit all.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

...it's important to consider raid representation in a game with completely 38 unique class/spec combinations. We already have people bitching constantly about the "same comp" in MDI/TGP or in general feeling like certain classes' kits simply are not compatible with certain content, constraining this further by capping raid size at 10 players would be disastrous unless Blizzard were to homogenize classes. Considering they're on record saying they want to do the opposite of this, I'd say a world where raids are capped at 10 players is not one we'll be realizing any time soon.

I'm not really a Max fan per se but everyone was linking his dragon fight class stacking video today. Feels like some posters here could benefit from watching even like 3 min of that lol

More generally though, the less specific abilities are needed the more classes feel homogenized even if they aren't. It's a real consideration and don't understand how people can pretend otherwise.

[Celement]

You do realize MoP had early raid bosses that were guild breakers right??

Currently raid boss difficulty is about the same

Not really siege did the first few weeks especially 10 man that had bosses incorrectly scaled for group sizes.. only other example I can see us the amber golem fight but that was more awkward vehicle mechanics over difficulty.

[tomten]

Or you just don't tune the content to require those class-unique features. This problem is solved a lot easier than you guys think it is. Having unique class mechanics does not obligate Blizzard to design content that requires those mechanics. They manage to design dungeons that don't require them. We don't even need to get into all the other games that have similar designs yet don't have this problem.

Define required please. Because dungeons (m+) "require" quite a lot of them. Not having hero? No battle ress? No gateway/cookies? No shroud? And so on, and even if you try to make a point for invis pots, engi ress or whatever, you still fail to prove they're not required for dungeons/content in general.
And having every content designed around not having any class ability matter? Yikes, how insanely boring and identical most fights would be and no one would feel unique or needed. Did you really think this through? I doubt it.

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I'm not really a Max fan per se but everyone was linking his dragon fight class stacking video today. Feels like some posters here could benefit from watching even like 3 min of that lol

Got link for that?

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Define required please. Because dungeons (m+) "require" quite a lot of them. Not having hero? No battle ress? No gateway/cookies? No shroud? And so on, and even if you try to make a point for invis pots, engi ress or whatever, you still fail to prove they're not required for dungeons/content in general.
And having every content designed around not having any class ability matter? Yikes, how insanely boring and identical most fights would be and no one would feel unique or needed. Did you really think this through? I doubt it.

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Got link for that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEGVjsX1ZRA&t=4s

Basically talking about how you'd slot classes and why it is going to be unlikely to stack in DF compared to other versions of the game

[phattsao]

IMO, normal should be totally puggable without voice chat.

Heroic should be generally tuned for guilds and voice chat, but still puggable by good players.

Mythic should be pretty much the way it is now, the absolute top tier of content. Maybe a TINY bit more accessible after the first wave of nerfs, it does seem like a lot of wasted dev time if only 1% of people actually clear it.

As it is, normal is currently the problem. They've had a nasty habit these last few xpacs of making the last few normal bosses harder than the first few heroic bosses, which doesn't make a ton of sense.

Sepulcher is also just a mess in terms of tuning, most normal groups break up at Anduin in my experience.

Raids also need to be more rewarding than Mythic +. I know that burns a lot of beavers, but come on. A 5 man should not drop better loot than a raid, period.

I think the solution to THAT is simply to do what they do with PvP gear - have mythic + loot scale up in mythic dungeons only. If you take your mythic+ gear into a raid or PvP, it should be knocked down to a lower level to actually preserve the rewards from that content.

[tomten]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEGVjsX1ZRA&t=4s

Basically talking about how you'd slot classes and why it is going to be unlikely to stack in DF compared to other versions of the game

Thanks, if I don't wanna watch the full 25 minutes, any idea what part to get some highlight/big picture from?

[Revamp Man]

Not really siege did the first few weeks especially 10 man that had bosses incorrectly scaled for group sizes.. only other example I can see us the amber golem fight but that was more awkward vehicle mechanics over difficulty.

Stone guards, garalom, and Horridon are the ones that stick out in my memory

Stone guards because of the group that complained about it being overtuned and GC told them to git gud
Also the fact tanks needed to taunt correctly

Horridon because it killed three guilds that eventually became my first raid team

Garalon was annoying because of the constant movement requiring much like the rest of these fight...people not being stupid

[Relapses]

I could not possibly care less about any of the esports shit. It has nothing to do with the regular people playing the game. Tuning the game for MDI rather than the hundreds of thousands of other people playing the game is a ridiculous notion on its face.

Everything you are describing is a problem with how Blizzard designs content, not a problem with raid sizes. Let's just skip the whole thing and I'll summarize the rest of the conversation because it always goes exactly the same way:

Me: "There are tons of other similar games that have solved these problems that you are describing"
You: "WOW IS A SPECIAL UNIQUE SNOWFLAKE AND NO PRINCIPLES OF GAME DESIGN APPLY TO IT! IT CANT LEARN ANYTHING FROM ANYONE! HAVE YOU SEEN HOW HARD MYTHIC JAILER WAS? I HAVENT PLAYED THESE OTHER GAMES BUT I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT THE PRECIOUS UNIQUE SNOWFLAKE THAT IS WOW IS EXEMPT FROM ALL RULES OF LOGIC. CAUSE AND EFFECT HAVE NO PLACE HERE BECAUSE OF HOW UNIQUE AND SPECIAL WOW IS. HAVE YOU SEEN HOW HARD MYTHIC SYLVANAS WAS? HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT PROBLEMS EASILY SOLVED IN OTHER GAMES COULD POSSIBLY BE SOLVED SIMILARLY IN WOW! MYTHIC DENATHRIUS WAS VERY HARD!"
Me: "Good talk."

I really don't know how you expect me to respond to this. It's brazenly off-topic and particularly unhinged, even for your standards. Nowhere did I mention eSports, I only brought up the MDI/TGP as an example of something where players dislike "meta" comps and how this is particularly at odds with the developers' stated intention of making the game's classes more diverse from one another. We've had homogenization before, in MoP, and class balance even then wasn't particularly more or less effective than it is now. (It made CModes easier, so there's that I guess?) Personally, I think the game is better when each individual class has its own strengths and weaknesses and shoving all of that out the door on the altar of accessibility is not the way forward.

[Celement]

Stone guards, garalom, and Horridon are the ones that stick out in my memory

Stone guards because of the group that complained about it being overtuned and GC told them to git gud
Also the fact tanks needed to taunt correctly

Horridon because it killed three guilds that eventually became my first raid team

Garalon was annoying because of the constant movement requiring much like the rest of these fight...people not being stupid

I didn't really consider any of those difficult though could be a perspective thing... I was raiding world 7th-56th depending on tier back then.

[Revamp Man]

I didn't really consider any of those difficult though could be a perspective thing... I was raiding world 7th-56th depending on tier back then.

Definitely perspective lol
Most stats from back during ToT showed Horridon as the wall boss and my guild was Definitely not amazing...apparently vocalizing tank swaps was revolutionary

[NineSpine]

I really don't know how you expect me to respond to this. It's brazenly off-topic and particularly unhinged, even for your standards. Nowhere did I mention eSports, I only brought up the MDI/TGP as an example of something where players dislike "meta" comps and how this is particularly at odds with the developers' stated intention of making the game's classes more diverse from one another. We've had homogenization before, in MoP, and class balance even then wasn't particularly more or less effective than it is now. (It made CModes easier, so there's that I guess?) Personally, I think the game is better when each individual class has its own strengths and weaknesses and shoving all of that out the door on the altar of accessibility is not the way forward.

You are talking about homogenization when I never said anything about homogenization, while you brought up MDI as a counterpoint and then claimed you never brought up esports. You are so difficult to talk to that I don't really know what to tell you. You are constantly having conversations with some phantom rather than the person you are speaking to, and then retroactively changing the things you said whenever you have to lift a finger to actually defend a point. It's maddening and not very constructive.

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Define required please. Because dungeons (m+) "require" quite a lot of them. Not having hero? No battle ress? No gateway/cookies? No shroud? And so on, and even if you try to make a point for invis pots, engi ress or whatever, you still fail to prove they're not required for dungeons/content in general.
And having every content designed around not having any class ability matter? Yikes, how insanely boring and identical most fights would be and no one would feel unique or needed. Did you really think this through? I doubt it.

I don't really know how to respond to the notion that if content is not designed with specific abilities in mind, the content needs to all be the same. You know there are other video games out there, right? You know that 99.99% of them don't have this problem and I assure you that they have content in them. If you want to talk about game design, it is much healthier and more productive to actually play other games once in awhile, so that you don't look like a baseball fanatic trying to understand football by asking questions like "BUT WITHOUT A BAT HOW DO THEY HIT THE BALL THE PITCHER THROWS?!?!?!?!"

[Xath]

I believe so. We play video games for entertainment, not to suffer and wipe for hours due to a lack of new content that keeps us subscribed. It must be challenging enough to be pleasant and not tiresome.

You can complete all content in lfr normal or even heroic stop trying to take away the one thing that has challenge in a large group and makes the game unique and fun.

[Netherblood]

Mythic is mostly fine, SoD was too easy and SoFo a bit too hard before the nerfs.

Heroic should be easier or reward better gear, or M+ gear capped weekly or nerfed. The problem atm is M+ is killing heroic raiding. Why go do heroic raids when you can do easier +15s and get same gear basically.

Anduin heroic week 1 was insanely hard, bosses like that should never exist on heroic, my guild spent like 30 pulls on it and failed to kill, meanwhile we got Horde HoF on sylvanas in 84 pulls.

Normal should have no instant wipe mechanics, like normal fatescribe having rune mechanic shouldn't be a thing. Otherwise normal is usually tuned fine.

[Xath]

Except they weren't significantly worse at all. This is just hating on the past so you can feel a sense of supremacy of the present. I see this fallacy constantly and it's just bullshit. Athletes from the first Olympics wouldn't compete against the current day (for the most part), but they are still easily in the top 5% of humanity. The way this guy likes to consistently phrase this is that the people pushing world firsts in ICC may as well be average players by todays standards. It's just not true.

I would actually argue that modern players are potentially worse because of things like kill video's and guides. We used to have to figure these things out on our own. I rate adaptability as one of the highest skills in a players arsenal and it's only more recently that I've noticed a more significant version of the player base who are reliant on guides telling them what to do rather than figuring it out themselves. I can't even count how many groups I've seen brick a key for instance because they want to try the MDI strat or play a meta class but don't have the skills to actually make it work. Instead of trying to do something that actually fits their skillset and works for them, they come to the forums complaining that the game sucks because they can't do what the guide says and are too lazy to figure it out themselves.

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What is fun? What makes a fun game? My grandma seems to absolutely love playing Farmville but I think it's incredibly not fun and trashy. Fun is a subjective term, and it's not my fault if you can't formulate a response to any legitimate criticism.

To be transparent, I also don't think LFR is fun, but I weigh my opinion on that the same as yours. Zero. I enjoy being pushed to the limits of my skill so it makes no sense to weigh my opinion on how fun the games easiest mode is with any merit.

Wow players were absolutely worse in vanilla gamers in general were. A great example of this is a play called an insec in league of legends. It's using a q into ward hop to get a super long range lee sin kick of a squishy target back into your team. When this play first happened people went absolutely nuts it was considered an insane level of skill expression by a top tier pro. Now gold Lee Sins do it regularly often adding in a flash to further extend range. There is a giant gap between average skill level now and even five years ago let alone a decade ago.

[Netherblood]

Wow players were absolutely worse in vanilla gamers in general were. A great example of this is a play called an insec in league of legends. It's using a q into ward hop to get a super long range lee sin kick of a squishy target back into your team. When this play first happened people went absolutely nuts it was considered an insane level of skill expression by a top tier pro. Now gold Lee Sins do it regularly often adding in a flash to further extend range. There is a giant gap between average skill level now and even five years ago let alone a decade ago.

As a league player can confirm the playerbase got insanely better in last 10 years. Though the improvements do taper off. As in the biggest improvement is like first 4-5 years and then it slows down.

[Progenitor Aquarius]

They could add some borrowed powers, as they did in Torghast, so that we might solo mythic raids and feel like godlike champions. Haha!

[Relapses]

You are talking about homogenization when I never said anything about homogenization, while you brought up MDI as a counterpoint and then claimed you never brought up esports. You are so difficult to talk to that I don't really know what to tell you. You are constantly having conversations with some phantom rather than the person you are speaking to, and then retroactively changing the things you said whenever you have to lift a finger to actually defend a point. It's maddening and not very constructive.

The earth-shattering irony of you accusing me of having a "phantom argument" after I replied to a post where you straight-up had a fucking conversation with yourself about how things were going to escalate between us is... well, it's amusing. I guess I should have expected it, I quoted you so I opted into this.

I'm not going to repeat the points I've already made again sp I'll just say it like this: What you're asking to achieve is impossible unless Blizzard does a complete 180 on their current design ethos. That is incredibly unlikely to happen. Because of this, Blizzard will not be capping raids at 10M. I stand behind my assertion that class representation in raids does matter, though it is to-be-debated whether the current polar opposite of homogenization is the right direction.