The 3 things that will make PvE epic again.

[hulkgor]

You and i have completely different opinions on what would make PvE "epic", and i for one am very happy that you don't decide anything regarding WoW.

[Biomega]

ff14 works fine with 8 man raids

FF14 is a different game. Its boss design is entirely different, for example - it takes place in tight, regulated spaces with very little expansive movement. It also has far less class/spec variety that plays into composition problems. And I think it has no flex option for raid sizes either?

Those are just some of the things that kill 10-man design in WoW; at least when it comes to high-end content (which was the proposition here).

Now, could you design SOME fights to specifically be 10-man viable? Sure. But it would forever be a novelty, because it couldn't translate well into mainstay design. You'd have to do something like Kara, which is more dungeon than it is raid - and no surprise, that's exactly what it ended up becoming, because small spaces and cramped quarters like that are more suited for dungeons than they are for raids.

Why are people so damn obsessed with 10 man? It wasnt great back then, you can do it now and most people run a 14 man min.

I think the main reason is social. It's easier to have a close-knit community with fewer members. It makes for a more intimate atmosphere, and people feel like they matter more. I raided in a pure 10m guild during ICC and Cataclysm, and it was hands down the best guild I was ever in (in terms of social dynamics). It was a lot more fun to raid with a tight team like that, and we also performed better. But it was clear that there were problems with raid design - massive, ultimately insurmountable problems (*cough* Al'Akir *cough*).

10-man is a great IDEA, it just doesn't quite work out in practice if you also want to have high difficulty. As I keep saying: on low difficulty, this isn't a problem, and you can still do 10m normal/heroic raiding right now if you want.

[deenman]

So everything but instanced PvE is fucked in WoW now? Interesting, interesting.

its the only thing wow does better than all mmos's,literaly everything else other mmos do better,combat,graphics,open world,pvp,housing etc etc....hmm MAYBE the collectables tab is also done better than most

[Tech614]

its the only thing wow does better than all mmos's,literaly everything else other mmos do better,combat,graphics,open world,pvp,housing etc etc....hmm MAYBE the collectables tab is also done better than most

There is no MMO with good graphics. You must be mistaking something targeting a different art style for being better because hell, WoW is using more advanced rendering techniques and options than most of them at this point. WoW has never even tried to look realistic though so you think the graphics are "worse". Or you're falling for bullshots from those korean mmo trailers when the game only looks like that if you're running it at 10 fps. Most of them still have loading screens between zones and city districts lmao look at that amazing open world right there btw. Competitive pvp seems like an afterthought and irrelevant in every mmo but WoW so also lol. Like sure there are a few MMOs with a bigger focus on pvp than WoW but those games entire player base is still a fraction of just the pvp portion of WoW. I will give you the housing though, WoW definitely sucked for the only time they tried that with garrisons.

[crusadernero]

Yes lets start fixing what's not broken again. Instanced PvE is probably the only thing that's not fucked in WoW now and is a reason it's still a thing. Last thing I'd need Blizz to put their hands on it and make a pigsty out of it.

Very true. Blizzard have done some fucked up things over all these years with wow, but pve (dungeons & raids) have always been good. Always.

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its the only thing wow does better than all mmos's,literaly everything else other mmos do better,combat,graphics,open world,pvp,housing etc etc....hmm MAYBE the collectables tab is also done better than most

No idea why people are upset about wow graphics. Its an artistic choice to have it "cartoony"(lack of better word). People moan about wow having to look like real life or something. The graphic in wow is unique. It wont change, ever. Stuff will look better and get updated, but the fundamental artistic choice will always be there.

Btw, everything you said is a subjective view. I have tried almost every MMORPG out there and 99% of them I find horseshit. I've also noticed that MMORPGs with prettier graphics(high end pc req) are the worst ones.

[Biomega]

No idea why people are upset about wow graphics. Its an artistic choice to have it "cartoony"(lack of better word).

There's more nuance to it. Certainly WoW's art style is deliberate, and it's distinct. That's a good thing. But there's also graphics in terms of performance and fidelity that's on top of that - you don't have to suddenly get photorealistic to improve the look of the game. You could update the graphics and still maintain the art style. WoW currently doesn't look like WoW Vanilla after all. Or WoW OG Beta. Or WarCraft 3. And yet the "feel" is preserved even as graphics get better - that would work in, say, a new engine, too.

The thing that's most concerning is actually not the visuals per se, but the technical capabilities of the engine. WoW's engine has been and is being updated as we go, but it's still a particular engine with its own quirks and limitations. At some point it's no longer feasible to make it do the things you'd like it to do. One of the chief reasons we don't have housing in WoW, for example, is that the engine makes it prohibitively difficult to do (read: too expensive). And there's other things, too, that WoW has run into over the years in terms of engine limitations - everything from layering/phasing to cross-faction play had to work around engine limitations. Sometimes you can just patch/upgrade the engine and it'll work; but sometimes it's just too much work to be worth it for a particular feature. This has resulted in somewhat stale design, because the truly bold, truly different things are just too hard to do given the tools they're working with. At least until those tools improve, which may or may not happen and can take years even if it does.

So it's not unreasonable for people to wish WoW had a new ENGINE - but that's not the same as saying WoW should change its AESTHETIC. Engine, graphics, and art style are distinct and different things.

[Tech614]

There's more nuance to it. Certainly WoW's art style is deliberate, and it's distinct. That's a good thing. But there's also graphics in terms of performance and fidelity that's on top of that - you don't have to suddenly get photorealistic to improve the look of the game. You could update the graphics and still maintain the art style. WoW currently doesn't look like WoW Vanilla after all. Or WoW OG Beta. Or WarCraft 3. And yet the "feel" is preserved even as graphics get better - that would work in, say, a new engine, too.

The thing that's most concerning is actually not the visuals per se, but the technical capabilities of the engine. WoW's engine has been and is being updated as we go, but it's still a particular engine with its own quirks and limitations. At some point it's no longer feasible to make it do the things you'd like it to do. One of the chief reasons we don't have housing in WoW, for example, is that the engine makes it prohibitively difficult to do (read: too expensive). And there's other things, too, that WoW has run into over the years in terms of engine limitations - everything from layering/phasing to cross-faction play had to work around engine limitations. Sometimes you can just patch/upgrade the engine and it'll work; but sometimes it's just too much work to be worth it for a particular feature. This has resulted in somewhat stale design, because the truly bold, truly different things are just too hard to do given the tools they're working with. At least until those tools improve, which may or may not happen and can take years even if it does.

So it's not unreasonable for people to wish WoW had a new ENGINE - but that's not the same as saying WoW should change its AESTHETIC. Engine, graphics, and art style are distinct and different things.

There is no modern main stream rendering tech that is not supported in the current WoW engine except DLSS but it will probably have that eventually. The people that talk about it as a bottleneck have no idea what they're talking about, it is constantly updated and kept modern and the last time the engine was actually an issue was before the multithreading update way back during legion. Since then the engine has been pretty modern, even too modern for an MMO tbh when you have certain fights in the raid that monster PCs drop to 20 fps on because of the demanding ass particle effects on screen that is just a massive cpu bottle neck no engine can fix.

Save me the bs about needing some new engine for housing, FF has that with its garbage ass in house engine that requires loads between zones and cities and can't even handle a true open world. That is just something blizzard doesn't want to devote massive resources to like FF did, period. It's not an engine issue and saying so is a hard cope with no basis in reality.

[Biomega]

There is no modern main stream rendering tech that is not supported in the current WoW engine

But that's just one aspect of an engine. It's not just about rendering or graphics. It's also about physics, infrastructure, file architecture, etc. etc.

They've repeatedly mentioned engine limitations as a reason features were abandoned or delayed. Cross-faction play is just one of the latest examples - cross-faction guilds STILL aren't in, partly because the game was never meant to have them and it's hugely complicated to patch it so that works.

Graphical fidelity and FPS are just one concern among many.

Save me the bs about needing some new engine for housing, FF has that with its garbage ass in house engine that requires loads between zones and cities and can't even handle a true open world. That is just something blizzard doesn't want to devote massive resources to like FF did, period. It's not an engine issue and saying so is a hard cope with no basis in reality.

That rant just tells us you have no idea how these things work. It's not just about raw "engine power", it's about an infrastructure that allows this to work properly, in the way they want it to work to be good. Nobody says it CAN'T BE DONE in WoW - only that it's too expensive for the benefit it would bring. But that is not just because of design resources, it's also a function of technical effort - an engine developed from the start with that capability in mind would naturally make it much easier to implement, even if it sucked in other respects. That's just not how any of this plays out. You don't just do some superficial comparison that amounts to effectively looking at a number and going "this has 5,000 engine power, this has 3,000 engine power, so clearly housing must be easier to do in the first!".

[Tech614]

snip

Dude you're literally going off on some tangent about backend infrastructure and how the online aspects of the game work after replying about graphics and then citing the engine as some huge issue. There are massive coding issues with the back end for things like cross faction stuff and if they ever added housing of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the rendering engine or graphics which was what we where discussing but nice goal post shift. Those issues would still be there if they ported the code into a completely new engine and also need addressed. Those are not engine issues, they are just legacy issues that come with a game that is 20 years old and was never designed with those features in mind.

People that always cite "omgz the engines!" usually have no clue what a game engine actually does. The same people that when a new gen comes out thinks "omg unreal "insert number" is revolutionary! and then proprietary in house engines at Naughty Dog, Rockstar and other devs usually end up out classing it faster than the hype was built up. RAGE was made around the same time as Unreal 3 but with its updates was getting better results than Unreal 4 by the end of last gen. People that think you should abandon a perfectly working engine instead of updating it are clueless. Constantly trying to make new engines is what caused Square Enix to almost go bankrupt. It's what got Kojima fired from Konami. It's a terrible practice and a waste of development time.

[epigramx]

constraints on 10m design to make it feasible for high difficulty
[..]
5-man is a meaningful content segment

You contradict yourself. If 10 is too small then why would 5man be great. I'm not suggesting 5man is perfect or 20man is perfect or vice versa; I'm saying they both have their advantages (5man: easy to form; 20man: more epic/more complete/less meta'ing) and disadvantages (5man: extremely easy to have metas that dominate (on high difficulties); 20man: very hard to form for most people who don't have many friends); the point is to have something in between as a middle ground because now it's extreme: you can only go tiny 5man or big 20man (for hard modes).

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A 10 man raid would consist of:

At least 1 demon hunter
At least 1 Monk
At least 1 Mage
At least 1 druid
At least 1 Warrior
At least 1 Warlock
At least 1 Priest
At least 1 Enhancement shaman
At least 1 Evoker

That is 9 slots

That strengthens my argument (because it now wants 9 specs instead of 5 in 5man). I'm not saying 10man won't have metas; I was saying from the start 5man is the worst at meta'ing because the best teams will only look for 5 specs (not even classes by the way (for all sizes)); 20man is the least impacted by that because most people can get the 5-6 most important utilities and then get almost randoms.

10man would be a middle ground (between hard-to-find -people-for but best-at-avoiding-metas(not entirely) 20man and small 5man); for high difficulties the metas will be there but not as ludicrously restricted as 5man's; and for more middle-ground difficulties it would be extremely better than 5man because only 5 or max 6 classes will be "must haves".

[Woobels]

5 man metas are not as " ludicrously restricted" as you seem to believe they are and the idea 10 mans would be a middle ground with less "must haves" as you state above is also wrong.

[epigramx]

5-man is never not going to be the go to again. Because it's a lot easier to organize, create long term teams, gear up ppl and so on.

I'm not saying to remove 5man. I'm saying there's a middle ground needed. People that way are not restricted to the easy to form 5man - but also easy to be dominated by a handful of specs (on high difficulties) - and more complete (in using the most classes) 20man - but hard to form unless you have a lot of friends.

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5 man metas are not as " ludicrously restricted" as you seem to believe they are and the idea 10 mans would be a middle ground with less "must haves" as you state above is also wrong.

saying "no" is not an argument. the world records of 5mans are consistently with the same specs while the world records of 20mans are always extremely diverse (or at least for the most part).

and don't say "I don't care about high difficulties" because you'd be off topic (the thread is only about hard mode).

[Biomega]

You contradict yourself. If 10 is too small then why would 5man be great.

Because they're different forms of content. That was the Kara experiment - turns out, it works a lot better as a dungeon than a raid.

Also, I didn't say 10-man wasn't possible in parallel with 20-man, every now and then. Just that it's not a viable replacement, because it has too many design constraints.

the point is to have something in between as a middle ground because now it's extreme: you can only go tiny 5man or big 20man (for hard modes).

And there's a reason for that. It's easier to make challenging 5-man content and 20-man content than it is 10-man content. It's no surprise that there'd be an awkward middle; that's fairly common. Too big for a dungeon, too small for a raid, no real place in between that is sustainable. In PvE, that is.

Or what are you suggesting that is meaningfully distinct from dungeons OR raids in some way? Is there some kind of unique design element you're proposing that makes 10-man work?

[epigramx]

Because they're different

[..]

not a viable replacement

[..]

easier to make challenging 5-man content and 20-man content than it is 10-man content. It's no surprise that there'd be an awkward middle

1. on the first quote above: "just cause it's different" is not an argument; if you implied: because they designed it better for 5man and 20man: that's a fallacy; they can design it "better" for 10man too (to fit).

2. that's a strawman because I never suggested to replace either 5man or 20man; I said there's room between two extremes; now we are restricted to either extremely-small-5man or the-big-20man.

3. that's just a superstition of yours (or more likely something to throw at me without thinking it over); being "in the middle" is absolutely not "awkward"(or hard to design); it's like saying "5 is awkward because it's not 1 or 9" (if anything it might be easier to design because it wouldn't reside in the extremes).

[Biomega]

1. on the first quote above: "just cause it's different" is not an argument

And that is not my argument. I responded to your comment about "if 10 is too small why is 5 fine" - because those are DIFFERENT FORMS OF CONTENT. One is a raid, the other is a dungeon. Those work differently, with different expectations, constraints, and delivery systems. You can't just arbitrarily change the size - it's delineated by the structure of the content in question.

2. that's a strawman because I never suggested to replace either 5man or 20man; I said there's room between two extremes; now we are restricted to either extremely-small-5man or the-big-20man.

Room for WHAT?

I asked you, specifically: "what are you suggesting that is meaningfully distinct from dungeons OR raids in some way?"

Don't try and build this up as a strawman when I put it forward WITH A SPECIFIC QUESTION. Answer it.

3. that's just a superstition of yours (or more likely something to throw at me without thinking it over); being "in the middle" is absolutely not "awkward"(or hard to design); it's like saying "5 is awkward because it's not 1 or 9" (if anything it might be easier to design because it wouldn't be in extremes).

I gave you reasons. Limitations in movement and available space. Meta concerns. I gave you examples from the past, like Kara or Al'Akir. How about you explain how your proposal solves something they recognized as an inherent problem and gave as a reason for why they changed things? We've been in this place before. They TRIED THIS. It didn't work, for various reasons. The least you could do when trying to go back is to explain why THE REASONS THIS PREVIOUSLY FAILED are no longer a problem, and/or how you're addressing them.

Don't just handwave shit away with "there's 5 and there's 20 surely there must be 10 it's right in the middle!". They've TRIED. It FAILED. Show why yours wouldn't.

[anon5123]

That is 9 slots just off valuable buffs that every raid is going to want otherwise they're handicapping themselves.

Where do people get this idea that if you don't have EVERY SINGLE BUFF, that if you are missing just one buff, you are "handicapped"

retail players are weird man

[Noctiphobia]

Why are people so damn obsessed with 10 man? It wasnt great back then, you can do it now and most people run a 14 man min.

I mean, if you don't like the idea of smaller groups, it probably wasn't great for you. For me it was the best raiding. If Blizzard allowed 5 man group raids, I'd rather do that.
Most people run 14 man because of the way it scales.

[Biomega]

Where do people get this idea that if you don't have EVERY SINGLE BUFF, that if you are missing just one buff, you are "handicapped"

retail players are weird man

It's often blown out of proportion to be sure, but this is, in fact, intended design by Blizzard. The actual performance gain from a lot of the buffs is so massive that yes indeed you ARE lowering your performance considerably if you miss out - enough so that at the high stages of optimization (for very difficult content in very competitive settings) it majorly influences group composition. To the point where now most raids are "fixed" at a good number of slots.

That being said, unless a guild is at a point where that's what's left in terms of optimization, it's probably not a huge deal compared to things like just having good players. But that's not because the buffs aren't impactful - it's because having intelligent pilots is even more important Once that is taken care of, buffs very quickly become one of the bigger concerns in contemporary raid comps.

[Stormwolf64]

At last i agree about the vertical progression. It leaves no room for people to ascend from casual to regular raider without a guild. I'd rather see casuals obtain the same gear at a slower pace. It's like that in PvP, i'm sure they can do it for PvE also if they put their minds to it

LFR could for example only reward currency for you to purchase gear with instead of drops to combat LFR players obtaining normal gear quickly. Which would additionally help people obtain elusive drops

The more blizzard helps people be on par with the rest the more people will be interested in participating in difficult content.

Wreck normal or heroic and let it be LFR, Normal or heroic, Mythic.

I think though that mythic should still drop exclusive gear so that people have a reason to do it.

[Azharok]

Where do people get this idea that if you don't have EVERY SINGLE BUFF, that if you are missing just one buff, you are "handicapped"

retail players are weird man

Because you're holding back on free damage, extra hp buffs.

"A 10 man raid would consist of:

At least 1 demon hunter : to buff ranged
At least 1 Monk : to buff melee
At least 1 Mage : intel for days
At least 1 druid : free vers + CR
At least 1 Warrior : free ap
At least 1 Warlock : extra "oh shit button" and CR
At least 1 Priest : PI for days, extra stam
At least 1 Enhancement shaman : to buff melee some more
At least 1 Evoker" : cool utility strong heals, decent prio burst.

It's not that you NEED any of those specific classes to kill bosses. But you'd be gimping yourself from a progress POV if you didn't bring at least one of each of those.

You are handicapping yourself, it's not "just an idea".

Same for 5 man, if you don't bring a lust class, you are gimping yourself, would you run keys without one ? Doing a 10 ? sure who cares, pushing 20s without a lust ... why bother ?