Are raids becoming less popular?

[Biomega]

First raid I ever really did was ICC, which I cleared on the second highest difficulty.

You mean normal mode. You cleared normal mode.

But now I'm significantly, significantly better, and the best I can do is... still the second highest difficulty

Which is heroic mode.

You keep phrasing it as "second-highest difficulty", almost conspicuously so. This is highly misleading because the difficulty differentiation has significantly changed over the years, and it's GROSSLY fallacious to try and match it.

The most egregious example would be someone who's cleared Molten Core complaining that "they used to do raiding at the highest difficulty level" (true - one raid difficulty was all there was, so it was also the highest) but can't raid "at the highest difficulty level" now (which is mythic). And however technically correct that kind of labeling may be, it's just, you know, TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS which are brought into ostensible equivocation purely by an intentional obscuring of differentiation.

You get better and it feels like it doesn't matter.

Because you intentionally set yourself up to feel that way. You've moved from normal to heroic raiding. That is a step up. Present-day heroic is not the same as WotLK-era normal. Not even close. It's much more difficult. AND YOU MADE IT THERE.

Lamenting that you're still "at the second-highest difficulty" instead of celebrating that you're now a heroic raider is a choice you are making for yourself.

I'm always going to be encountering mythic players moonlighting in heroic, casually doing more dps/hps/etc than me because they commit to a schedule that most humans would find very extreme.

I think we've identified the crux of the issue here.

You're not sad you're "only" doing heroic - you're mad there's people doing bigger numbers than you.

And here's something to ponder: if you had the gear they do, you'd STILL find people doing bigger numbers than you. Because there's always someone. Someone with more time, more experience, more skill, a better PC, less familial obligations, a bigger bank account, a longer penis and probably a dog that loves them more, too.

That is a you problem - you're having trouble looking at your own performance in your own context, and are instead compelled to measure up against others. That's always going to cause issues, no matter how the raids are designed. You want to artificially level a playing field that is never going to be level, in order to bring other people down closer to your own personal level because you can't handle that someone is doing something better or more than you.

Get over it. That's the only way to solve this - not through design, but through attitude.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have never liked doing the same raid over and over again for months on end. Never will. I tour the raids once and then never do them again unless it was to progress the MoP or WoD legendary questlines, or if I want a transmog. I don't do mythic dungeons either. Again, I tour the dungeon once. No intention of doing the same half dozen dungeons over and over again for two years.

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Raids have never been popular. They introduced LFR to justify continuing to spend money on making cool raids because such a small percentage of the population does them.

LFR is a casebook example of bolshevik marketing. You have a stark division between what people like, and what the devs push for. Rather than producing more of what people wanted (outdoor content and questlines), Blizzard instead poured their efforts into developing raids and trying to get non-raiders to raid. The culmination of this being "it would cost us a raid tier", as if raid tiers was the most desired content WoW players wanted.

[iamthedevil]

Let me have an AI personality and I'll just press the buttons lol

[Val the Moofia Boss]

This is why I'm enjoying ff14 raiding, 8 man is just more wieldy, approachable and intimate as a social engagement. Cleared TOP, DSR, p1-8 with the same roster and we're doing 9-12 when it lands. I miss raiding cutting edge with 9 other dudes, trying to get back into it in BFA was just too painful an experience for me.

I raided Eden savage with my FC during Shadowbringers. I found FF14 raids to be far more unenjoyable than PUGing raids in WoW. In FF14, all eight players have to perfectly execute every mechanic, or it's a wipe, either because botching a mechanic kills other people or because of the DPS loss which means you will die to the hard enrage. FF14 raiding is an exercise in frustration, wiping over and over again until you get that one run where 8 players execute every mechanic perfectly.

Most raiders in WoW do not have the power to doom the whole run. Botching a mechanic in a WoW raid boss usually just means that you take some damage. At most, you die, but only you. Only a small handful of people can doom the whole attempt, such as tankers or people assigned to special mechanics (ie the conveyor belt on Siegecrafter). WoW raiding is a lot less stressful. Also, with the introduction of flex, you can just have people drop in and drop out at while. No needing to have exactly 8 or 10 or 25 people and then having to stop and find a replacement or hang the group if someone drops.

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sure. but FF raiding is total different to WoW. I enjoy wow more because you dont get bombarded with Mechanic after Mechanic

Also this. WoW-clones are already extremely intensive to play because you have your rotation to manage. In WoW, you only have to manage a boss mechanic maybe once every 10-20 seconds, so most of the time your eyes can just rest on the bottom of the screen staring at the cooldown timers and procs. In FFXIV boss fights, there is no relief. Your eyes are darting back and forth every second between your hotbar at the bottom of the screen, tracking cooldowns and resource meters, and the middle of the screen looking for AoEs.

[enigma77]

1. there are 4 difficulties, starting with LFR which is brain-dead easy, only mythic (and occasionaly some HC bosses) are difficult, and yet raiding is not "super duper popular"...
2. before LFR, specialy in vanila times, raiding wasnt difficult, and yet LFR was intoruduced as raiding was not popular enough to "pay for itself" so to speak...

so you are simply incorrect

Yes I know there are multiple difficulties, which is a terrible thing because it only segregates the playerbase. Personally I've gotten most Cutting Edge fos from the last couple of years and I'm telling you raiding is supposed to be a social, communal experience, not an overly challenging one.

1 difficulty that is doable for just about everybody > 4 difficulties where the two that drop good gear are obnoxiously difficult.

Classic literally has better design than retail and that is so sad to see.


P.S. Mythic raiding in particular is 10 times harder than m+ 20s, yet rewards pretty much the same loot, or at times even worse loot, since it's possible to get 415 Mythic raid items out of the vault, while the vault reward for a +20 is always 421. And no I'm not saying the obnoxious degen difficulty should reward more loot, I'm saying Mythic raiding needs to be made significantly easier and more fun.

[Aresk]

You mean normal mode. You cleared normal mode.


Which is heroic mode.

You keep phrasing it as "second-highest difficulty", almost conspicuously so. This is highly misleading because the difficulty differentiation has significantly changed over the years, and it's GROSSLY fallacious to try and match it.

The most egregious example would be someone who's cleared Molten Core complaining that "they used to do raiding at the highest difficulty level" (true - one raid difficulty was all there was, so it was also the highest) but can't raid "at the highest difficulty level" now (which is mythic). And however technically correct that kind of labeling may be, it's just, you know, TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS which are brought into ostensible equivocation purely by an intentional obscuring of differentiation.

Heroic 25 (it's debatable if Heroic 10 is equivalent, since it rewarded and thus required lower ilvl gear) in the days of ICC is equivalent to Mythic presently; starting in Trial of the Grand Crusader, we had two distinct difficulties (with Ulduar being the first instance of harder and easier boss modes, but there was only one difficulty at the time). In Dragon Soul, they added LFR as a lesser difficulty. Once we got to Siege of Orgrimmar, they added a new difficulty between LFR and Normal called Flex: we had Heroic, Normal, Flex, and LFR. Then in Highmaul, they renamed them to the current Mythic, Heroic, Normal, LFR. Anything referred to as "Heroic" in WoD and onward is equivalent to "Normal" in everything prior to that (with possible exception for the 10/25 discrepancy specified above). So referring to the "second-highest difficulty" is actually clearer when the nomenclature changed partway through one's raiding career. Based off the expected skill at the time, Normal Molten Core = Normal ICC = Normal Siege = Heroic Highmaul and onward.

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P.S. Mythic raiding in particular is 10 times harder than m+ 20s, yet rewards pretty much the same loot, or at times even worse loot, since it's possible to get 415 Mythic raid items out of the vault, while the vault reward for a +20 is always 421. And no I'm not saying the obnoxious degen difficulty should reward more loot, I'm saying Mythic raiding needs to be made significantly easier and more fun.

I disagree with this. Mythic Eranog feels easier than SBG20, to me. Mythic Council feels about the same as CoS20. The only difficulty I've really felt in Mythic Raiding is getting 4x the number of people, which has nothing to do with the challenge of the content and everything to do with logistics. Admittedly, I've only done the first few mythic raid bosses, but there were people in the raid group that I would never take into a M20 dungeon (e.g. healers who refuse to DPS or change up any of their talents based on the content they were doing).

[Unlimited Power]

I've always liked raiding in a fixed group, just as I like doing m+ in a fixed group.

Unfortunately I rarely get to do either in a fixed group nowadays, and m+ is simply more approachable for pugging.

[Nathreim]

They are far too difficult for the rewards given. Blizz needs to tone down the ability bosses have most have way too many.

[exochaft]

Yes I know there are multiple difficulties, which is a terrible thing because it only segregates the playerbase. Personally I've gotten most Cutting Edge fos from the last couple of years and I'm telling you raiding is supposed to be a social, communal experience, not an overly challenging one.

1 difficulty that is doable for just about everybody > 4 difficulties where the two that drop good gear are obnoxiously difficult.

Classic literally has better design than retail and that is so sad to see.

I've had a long hardcore raiding career with 25man heroics then later mythic raiding in the top 30- 50 US for many expansion... and I completely agree that the older raiding model was way better than what's being pushed now. The older model had its issues, but the fundamental design goals were much better realized. Their current model diverges from what made WoW explode back in the day: WoW was way more accessible to the average player than any other MMO out there that was worth anything. Over time, WoW has increased its difficulty, and while an increase in difficulty wasn't necessarily a bad thing I feel Blizz has overshot the difficulty by a mile. Also, Blizz tuning and scaling content over time with respect to RWF guilds and higher tier guilds is just contrary to what made WoW what it is. While I did enjoy the challenge, not only did I realize that I was in the extreme minority in that regard, I realized that the raiding content started feeling more exclusive and overall annoying because the difficulty kept amping up (even if I personally found it easy). The real enjoyment was always the friends you made along the way and interactions with them, raiding was just a vehicle for it.

In that regard, that's probably been the major downfall of WoW over time: the game has become so impersonal and logistically annoying that it eventually sucks the fun out of whatever you're doing. Sure, the story issues didn't help, game mechanics could be underwhelming to downright terrible, the list is endless. Be that as it may, as long as people can enjoy the content while socializing with others, you will keep people playing your game. Instead the game feels like it's being designed to be exclusive in many regards, and in conjunction with Blizz's obsession with tuning/balancing to the nth degree the quality of the experience of many players has probably decreased. I know I was the last holdout from all of my friends and fellow hardcore raiders when it came to quitting WoW, but Shadowlands was the straw that broke the camel's back (I had been playing nonstop since vanilla) after years of watching WoW slowly decay from their design philosophy. While there were issue before his tenure as the head WoW director, Ion is probably the main cause of many of the issues based upon his background and its influence on his design goals and tendencies... also when you're the top dog, you're responsible for everyone below you as you have to sign off on everything. It's very obvious that the game has morphed into what he personally loved doing in his earlier hardcore raiding days, but such love is only held by an extreme minority of players.

All that being said, Dragonflight does have quite a few quality of life improvements that are good for the game right now... however, it's either a case of "too little, too late" or their core design philosophy still hasn't changed. Every since prior to 9.1.5, I had a sneaking suspicion that the rest of Shadowlands and mainly Dragonflight was going to have Blizz attempting to placate to players and their longstanding requests that haven't been answered from months to even years. In the end, I called it as that's exactly what happened in 9.1.5 and Dragonflight. The unfortunate reality is that this doesn't mean Blizz has changed for good (as I mentioned, their core design philosophies have not changed), and the game could revert back into something less desirable. Also, there's the implication that Blizz had a list of known issues that players wanted to address and only decided to implement them when things reached emergency status... which doesn't bode well for things to come. Doesn't mean there aren't people at Blizz who are striving to make the game better for everyone, but that doesn't mean those voices and their actions will ever make it into WoW.

[Biomega]

If the person were doing higher numbers because they were better than me, I'd respect it. But I have no respect for the mythic raiders who get there because of the time they commit - I actually think it's crazy to organize your life that way.

Cool. You're free to get mad other people can spend more time and get more out of it. What exactly makes this unfair, though? Isn't that how it's SUPPOSED to work? More effort = more reward. Your only argument here is envy, and that really doesn't fly does it.

they make heroic pugging a nightmare because they often aren't nearly as good as they think they are and then they scream at everyone else when things fall apart.

Sounds like a classic case of "the only thing holding me back is gear"/"the only reason they're doing better than me is gear" kind of copium. You're projecting your own feeling of inadequacy.

Will there be assholes in PUGs? Absolutely. And that is never going away. You could have everyone at the same level of gear, skill, and time, and you'd STILL find assholes in PUGs. Because that's how people work, and how consequence-free ad-hoc relationships work. If that's a problem, restrict yourself to more confined social groups that you can vet thoroughly, like guilds. If that's not something your life or circumstances allow for... tough shit. Life's not fair.

This is also a unique aspect of Wow.

Oh it so, so, SO isn't.

[Ludek]

I raided Eden savage with my FC during Shadowbringers. I found FF14 raids to be far more unenjoyable than PUGing raids in WoW. In FF14, all eight players have to perfectly execute every mechanic, or it's a wipe, either because botching a mechanic kills other people or because of the DPS loss which means you will die to the hard enrage. FF14 raiding is an exercise in frustration, wiping over and over again until you get that one run where 8 players execute every mechanic perfectly.

Most raiders in WoW do not have the power to doom the whole run. Botching a mechanic in a WoW raid boss usually just means that you take some damage. At most, you die, but only you. Only a small handful of people can doom the whole attempt, such as tankers or people assigned to special mechanics (ie the conveyor belt on Siegecrafter). WoW raiding is a lot less stressful. Also, with the introduction of flex, you can just have people drop in and drop out at while. No needing to have exactly 8 or 10 or 25 people and then having to stop and find a replacement or hang the group if someone drops.

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Also this. WoW-clones are already extremely intensive to play because you have your rotation to manage. In WoW, you only have to manage a boss mechanic maybe once every 10-20 seconds, so most of the time your eyes can just rest on the bottom of the screen staring at the cooldown timers and procs. In FFXIV boss fights, there is no relief. Your eyes are darting back and forth every second between your hotbar at the bottom of the screen, tracking cooldowns and resource meters, and the middle of the screen looking for AoEs.

That’s very similar to how I feel about XIV raiding.
While I like the initial concept of it - like having less random stuff and generaly slightly bigger spectacle, they are very tiresome.

They seems to be fun to prog at first - learning mechanic by mechanic, but when you reach the halfway point, which is typically the „big mechanic taking 10 out of 15 min guide” everything just spirals. You wipe, then you have to spend another 5 mins of focus just to reach the point you wiped and then you have like 10 seconds to react to the mechanic you are progressing on, hoping that people learned it already.

This can be somewhat mitigated by those sim sites which allow you to practice mechanics, but me, or my static are not that fond of them due to their clunkyness.

When you finally kill the boss for the first time it is very satisfying, sure, but then the dreaded reclears happen, where you need to pay the very same attention as on progess because with how the fights / rewards are designed there is almost no difference between your starter and BiS gear in terms of clearing - sure, it will allow you to maybe skip 2-3 mechanics in the end, but you are not supposed to cheese anything during the fight either due to one shot or too many damage downs.

Also I think the savage mechanics are just some random BS I guess? Like in normal raids or extreme trails you can more or less guess what to do when boss does something. But on savage, especially on later fights, the „dance” is just some random movement here or there because the guide said so.
Yes, this is mostly a problem just for the world first race guys or those ones who go blind as normal people will just use the guide.
Yet it kinda breaks my immersion with the game - I know when spell A happens, as an offtank I have to go to blue marker, but not because boss did something I can predict and counterplay with my skill, it’s because the random asspulled AoE patter will not touch me if I’m on blue (and other 7 people are also on their markers) - why? Because the guide said so.

[Temp name]

People realised they can get the same (or close enough) gear from m+, so people who only raided for loot stopped doing it.

Mythic raids still offer the highest ilvl loot in the game from the last 2 bosses though, with 424+ loot, while m+ is capped at 415 farmable or 421 from vault

[Nymrohd]

If M+ has no lockout, raiding should have no lockout either

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LFR is a casebook example of bolshevik marketing. You have a stark division between what people like, and what the devs push for. Rather than producing more of what people wanted (outdoor content and questlines), Blizzard instead poured their efforts into developing raids and trying to get non-raiders to raid. The culmination of this being "it would cost us a raid tier", as if raid tiers was the most desired content WoW players wanted.

The crazy thing to me is, why did it never occur to them to make dungeons and raids accessible as outdoor-style content like e.g. ESO's public dungeons.

[kranur]

Of course they are, but then again they were really super popular when they were the only form of progressing your char.
It's not really the rewards, cause raiding still gives the best rewards, but the strings attached to it are just too much for a lot people. And I'm not talking only about skill, but mainly the time constraints where you can't really log it randomly and have a mythic raid going.

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If M+ has no lockout, raiding should have no lockout either

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The crazy thing to me is, why did it never occur to them to make dungeons and raids accessible as outdoor-style content like e.g. ESO's public dungeons.

Because they could be made easier by having many people around. Blizzard can not allow that to happen.

[Nymrohd]

Because they could be made easier by having many people around. Blizzard can not allow that to happen.

I did not say make them open to clear them as the raid with the rewards of the raid.

[Mysterymask]

If M+ has no lockout, raiding should have no lockout either

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The crazy thing to me is, why did it never occur to them to make dungeons and raids accessible as outdoor-style content like e.g. ESO's public dungeons.

....you know when wow came out EverQuest did that right?

And it led to guilds sabotaging each other simply because if guild a did X raid then guild b got fucked

Instanced dungeons were a SELLING POINT for wow

[Nymrohd]

....you know when wow came out EverQuest did that right?

And it led to guilds sabotaging each other simply because if guild a did X raid then guild b got fucked

Instanced dungeons were a SELLING POINT for wow

The areas, people. Make the areas available for outdoor style content for people who don't want to do the instanced version. Not with the raid content, just as additional zones.

[Mysterymask]

The areas, people. Make the areas available for outdoor style content for people who don't want to do the instanced version. Not with the raid content, just as additional zones.

Sounds like a lot of extra work for very little payoff

[shise]

They were never popular, which is why LFR was introduced. For myself, I’ve been raiding since I started playing the game in 2010, and have only missed a few tiers. Still enjoy it and don’t like M+ very much at all.

2010... you are a new player to many eyes if you didn´t play vanilla and BC, which was the core of World of Warcraft. Raiding did matter then. Even in Wrath it did matter a LOT, and in the following 2 ex packs it was still a great deal. It was only when they created mythic raids that shit went dowhill with raiding... too many versions when we just need 1.
Then we got the cancer that is M+ 5 man dungeons and that was the biggest hit raiding suffered. People don´t want responsability, they want to pop in a group and pop out, somewhere where they can swear and alt f4 anytime without penalties.

[shane brannigan]

time investment.