How would you like to handle the "gap" between LFR and Normal raiding?

[nekobaka]

The concentrated enjoyment of a few doesn't make up for the lack of enjoyment of many.

Or, another way. People can't have fun in raids they don't get to go to.

Rest of your post was nonsense that told me you never played vanilla or TBC.

Just because a player gets to do something and does it doesnt mean they enjoy it. There is a significant number of players that Blizzard knows will follow where the loot is as long as the effort required is fairly low.

Before LFR there was more calls for the reduction or complete removal of raid content and for raid gear to be placed on a vendor purchasable with currency earned outside of raids than there was for calls for allowing more players to see the content and that they wanted to raid because they enjoyed it. GCs statement that the change of the color of LFR would drive a lot of players away already shows that there is a significant portion that participates in LFR for the gear over the enjoyment of raiding. What do you think would happen to LFR if Scenarios started to reward all the same gear at a similar rate?

Beyond that the other arguments are "I want a more social raid", these people don't realize you can just bring friends to your LFR or use vent if you really want to. There's no logical argument at this point really for the easy mode raids, this thread is just beating a dead horse.

There is a difference between being a small group among many strangers among different realms and having a small group of friends that can control the pace that a group is going. Have you ever played with friends or players you have befriended in WoW?

[Deleted]

I would argue that LK10 is way harder than Lei Shen10. Lei shen was a joke and went down within 10 tries.

I actually agree with this. We wiped far more on LK10N than LS10N. And our raid team was better geared and more skilled in WotLK.

---------- Post added 2013-05-26 at 02:03 AM ----------

No normal modes are not accessible as it is. Again you are so far in denial about this you are now also arguing against the developers who are basically saying raiding isn't accessible enough and was better served in the ICC model.

Did you read (actually read) the long post I made further up.

What do you think of a proposition like I made there? Making further nerfs to T14 raids, T14 gear cheaper to VP upgrade and removing LFR. This would allow you to raid more with your friends instead of 24 random idiots.

The raiding progression would be

T14N--------T14H--T15N---------T15H instead of
LFR---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------T15N------------T15H

You would have an easier time transitioning into T15, would this be something of interest?

[Leonard McCoy]

As a long time raider, I do not think raiding has become harder. I think the raiding population has become worse due to the reasons I mentioned before.

Each expansion, people spend less and less time raiding, because they are forced to spend more and more time doing content that is not raiding to prepared for raiding. I do not know if you read my long post. But if we instead make raiding prepare raiders for raiding, people would become better raiders.

The current model of "You should not raid to become a raider" has made people worse.

We tried to put together a new raid team with our old ulduar raid team, and we were quite frankly amazed of how terrible the raiding population was. Players that 4 years ago we would not even have considered as they were 'not good enough', are now the perfect raiders. The average raider has become so much worse in the past few years.

You say all you read is 'denial denial denial'. I got to say the same to you. You say you ask for appropriate content. We have been steamrolling through normals with newly dinged alts. Using random pugs that were completely carried, having a raid team geared with about 490ilvl, we easily cleared ToT normal. A pug had to leave on Dark Animus, we proceeded to 9 man Dark Animus with an average item level of about 495 at that point. Was not even an issue. I am rather sure we could 8 man ToT with 495 ilvl.

Our raiders were complaining in 490 gear at how easy the bosses were and that it was no fun, no challenge.

Then I ask you, if we can do that? How is the content not appropriate? This is not bragging. This is an honest question. The content is not harder then ever. This is not an armsrace between heroic raiders and devs. This is the results of the raiding community being catered far to much resulting in them becoming worse and worse.
It is time to push the little birds out of the nest and let them fly.

Christ the developers are telling you the icc model made sense because it had EASIER 10 MANS. In the view of this statement your experience is basically you plugging your ears and screaming in denial. Or better said I'm a long time raider myself and I can tell you that the actual process of raiding a boss has never been as difficult. Everything outside the game is pretty smooth (although gearing is a pain in the asshole now) but the bosses themselves are more complex then ever and the level of complexity has also increased over time (also the developers admission) to keep heroic raiders interested. Well this is unsustainable and will have to be corrected.

how did you do it? Well i don't know maybe your all nietzchean uber mench here to save us from the plebian masses who can't handle piss easy normal raids. I'll turn that back on you how do you want me to answer such a ridiculous question? Honestly think about what you asked me and you'll come to the answer yourself (here's a hint YOU MAY BE BETTER THAN AVERAGE)

The content is harder than ever. Period. This is why the developers think another difficulty is needed. I don't agree that another difficulty is needed, simple that normals and heroics be easier and if that's to bad for you it's to bad for you.

[Keoren]

Were asking for appropriate content. Again all I read is denial. denial denial denial.

Yet at the same time you are talking about obliterating the content designed for a whole demographic of people. There is a reason why this thread is progressing nowhere and is just people yelling at each other.

[Leonard McCoy]

Did you read (actually read) the long post I made further up.

What do you think of a proposition like I made there? Making further nerfs to T14 raids, T14 gear cheaper to VP upgrade and removing LFR. This would allow you to raid more with your friends instead of 24 random idiots.

The raiding progression would be

T14N--------T14H--T15N---------T15H instead of
LFR---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------T15N------------T15H

You would have an easier time transitioning into T15, would this be something of interest?

Yes I did. It amounted to further denial of what the developers are actually saying. It amounted to a tired defence of the tiered raiding model, telling raiders who have been stuck on normals of the previous tier to go back and do the previous tier and expect to be happy so the tiny minority of raiders who find this level of difficulty appropriate can be catered to. I'm not sure why you should expect them to be happy with less and have you get so much more? I'm not sure why you sohuld expect them to constantly be a patch behind BASED SOLELY on complexity of fights (and not on catch up which they do in lfr and outside of the game now).

---------- Post added 2013-05-26 at 02:08 AM ----------

Yet at the same time you are talking about obliterating the content designed for a whole demographic of people. There is a reason why this thread is progressing nowhere and is just people yelling at each other.

A very tiny demographic sure. I mean the developers can create another tier of difficulty in between normal and lfr but it'll just stratify and divide the community up further. In the end the problem is still the same. Difficulty and complexity as a curve cannot simple go up and up and up and never correct itself because at some point even the hardcore raiders won't be able to continue. It'll just be method and paragon.

[Raone]

I am not asking for heroic raiding to be the only content. So your second point is kinda mute. Normal modes are accessible as it is. I wish T14 raids to take the place LFR has currently. T14 is easily accessible for anyone.

And I do not expect my example to be that extreme. If we keep nerfing, nerfing, nerfing, that is where we would end up.
Do you honestly believe more people would be happy? This is just me. I know maybe about 60-80 people playing WoW. So that is a small sample size, but without exaggarating 0% of the people I know enjoy LFR. A majority of them are the opposite, very vocal about how much they hate it.

Have you ever been in an LFR and thought "Damn this is fun?". Do you sense the enjoyment in LFR? Everyone is happy, only happy faces. Granted, I have only done about 200-300 LFRs in MoP. But I cant recall one of them that did not involve swearing, people being mad at eachother. People afking, "KICK X" "NO KICK Y". etc.

Is that enjoyment for you?

I do not believe I am a minority since I am yet to meet this "LFR raiding is the best thing that ever happened" person in-game or in real life.

Except lots of players are doing LFR, and less and less people are doing normal. Personally I despise it but that's because after 3 weeks on my alt I haven't gotten a single drop ... but that's a different story lol

You can say LFR sucks and everyone you know says it sucks and the guy down the street says it sucks however, except for finding healers the que times are really quick meaning people are queing for it. LFR is very successful for what it was created for and will be here for a long long time.

If they didn't enjoy LFR why would they que? To get gear? But you can just do normal mode ToT to get gear ... yet even with that choice they are choosing LFR ... hmmmm? I'm choosing LFR because I don't want to create another full group just for 10m normal when I already have one on my main, I don't want to go threw all the stress of doing it all over again and rather just solo que as my alt. If there was an easier difficulty I would gladly grab some friends and some pugs and do that instead of LFR. LFR is here to stay and it's never going anywhere despite what you guys say or do and because of that the raid will be "cleared" quickly by those "raiders".

The goal of an "easier" difficulty is to NOT nerf current difficulties while adding a "nerfed" version that has a shared lockout with normal/heroic. Once 5.4 hits (or earlier) they will nerf 5.2 raids, they wouldn't need to if there was already a nerfed version.

And for adding a 4th difficulty it wouldn't be that hard to balance at all, a 20% debuff and there you go :P Hell it could be a 10% debuff that increases over time.

[Thelxi]

Just reading the title of this thread, there barely is a gap between normal and LFR as far as difficulty goes.

If your 25man LFR group could 1shot Lei Shi that same group could relatively easily clear most of ToT on normal.

There really is no gap to be filled, if anything abolishing normal modes and replacing them with LFR seems more likely.

[phyx]

Christ the developers are telling you the icc model made sense because it had EASIER 10 MANS. In the view of this statement your experience is basically you plugging your ears and screaming in denial. Or better said I'm a long time raider myself and I can tell you that the actual process of raiding a boss has never been as difficult. Everything outside the game is pretty smooth (although gearing is a pain in the asshole now) but the bosses themselves are more complex then ever and the level of complexity has also increased over time (also the developers admission) to keep heroic raiders interested. Well this is unsustainable and will have to be corrected.

how did you do it? Well i don't know maybe your all nietzchean uber mench here to save us from the plebian masses who can't handle piss easy normal raids. I'll turn that back on you how do you want me to answer such a ridiculous question? Honestly think about what you asked me and you'll come to the answer yourself (here's a hint YOU MAY BE BETTER THAN AVERAGE)

The content is harder than ever. Period. This is why the developers think another difficulty is needed. I don't agree that another difficulty is needed, simple that normals and heroics be easier and if that's to bad for you it's to bad for you.

If you make normals and hcs easier you get normals to LFR and heroics to normal levels. Where's the point in that?

[Deleted]

Yes I did. It amounted to further denial of what the developers are actually saying. It amounted to a tired defence of the tiered raiding model, telling raiders who have been stuck on normals of the previous tier to go back and do the previous tier and expect to be happy so the tiny minority of raiders who find this level of difficulty appropriate can be catered to. I'm not sure why you should expect them to be happy with less and have you get so much more? I'm not sure why you sohuld expect them to constantly be a patch behind BASED SOLELY on complexity of fights (and not on catch up which they do in lfr and outside of the game now).

That is not what I wrote. My suggestion would actually bring easier catch up as upgraded MSV HC gear is 510 ilvl and HoF/ToES 517ilvl compared to ToT LFR 502.
I suggested it as a stepping stone, not as being constantly one tier behind. Though your denial is so far up your ass it feels like you lost the ability to think.

Having T14 as stepping stone rather than T15LFR would
1. Provide more iLvL.
2. Give your raiders more raiding experience. Baby steps.
3. Allow you to play with your friends more.

All of which would prepare you better for T15. I am not asking for raiders like you to be behind one content constantly. Though to maybe farm T14 + 6/12 ToT for 2-3 weeks before getting 12/12. That seems like a reasonable compromise. If you are unwilling to learn to play properly, why should it hurt the demographic that actually put effort into their play? What would nerfing T15 further accomplish. Normals are already as easy as they have ever been in the past 4 years. Why make it easier? Normals are at the stage where a seasoned raid team could 8 man normal with 490 ilvl. What point you want it to get to? Being able to 6 man with 463 gear? What is appropriate tuning. Normals is accessable for anyone. You can not deny that. There is not a single raider that I do not know that I could not take a two hour sit down to make him good enough to easily clear 12/12 normal. In fact as I mentioned earlier, I think I could take players that have never played WoW before, give the a 90, learn them to play that class at a level that is required for 12/12 clear in an hour or two.
It really is not harder than that.

What you also need to think about. What if normals became even easier. 1 year down the road, your raid team would get stuck again, and ask for further nerfs. You would just get worse and worse. While the serious raiders are still as good as they have ever been. And that is a problem, the more your nerf content, the further the difference becomes between the lower end of the raiding pool and the upper end.

---------- Post added 2013-05-26 at 02:20 AM ----------

Except lots of players are doing LFR, and less and less people are doing normal. Personally I despise it but that's because after 3 weeks on my alt I haven't gotten a single drop ... but that's a different story lol

You can say LFR sucks and everyone you know says it sucks and the guy down the street says it sucks however, except for finding healers the que times are really quick meaning people are queing for it. LFR is very successful for what it was created for and will be here for a long long time.

If they didn't enjoy LFR why would they que? To get gear? But you can just do normal mode ToT to get gear ... yet even with that choice they are choosing LFR ... hmmmm? I'm choosing LFR because I don't want to create another full group just for 10m normal when I already have one on my main, I don't want to go threw all the stress of doing it all over again and rather just solo que as my alt. If there was an easier difficulty I would gladly grab some friends and some pugs and do that instead of LFR. LFR is here to stay and it's never going anywhere despite what you guys say or do and because of that the raid will be "cleared" quickly by those "raiders".

The goal of an "easier" difficulty is to NOT nerf current difficulties while adding a "nerfed" version that has a shared lockout with normal/heroic. Once 5.4 hits (or earlier) they will nerf 5.2 raids, they wouldn't need to if there was already a nerfed version.

And for adding a 4th difficulty it wouldn't be that hard to balance at all, a 20% debuff and there you go :P Hell it could be a 10% debuff that increases over time.

Yes, lots of people are doing LFR. That does not make it a success. Read the last post (#720) on this page.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...raiding/page36
It should explain most of what you said.

Humans are human, path of least resistance. LFR requires 0 effort and gives free gear. Of course they run LFR.
Because people are spending more and more time in LFR, they get less and less time to raid normal modes.
You see the evil circle here?

People do LFR to get gear. Yes you can get gear in normal, but you can get gear in both normal and LFR.

It would be fun to see how many people did LFR if it shared lockout with normal and heroic.

[Leonard McCoy]

What you also need to think about. What if normals became even easier. 1 year down the road, your raid team would get stuck again, and ask for further nerfs. You would just get worse and worse. While the serious raiders are still as good as they have ever been. And that is a problem, the more your nerf content, the further the difference becomes between the lower end of the raiding pool and the upper end.

No it wouldn't. If the developer REALIZES that increasing complexity is unsustainable then fights won't increase in complexity and a year from nobody would get stuck. Now YOU might get bored and I play a small tiny violin for you but for others this difficulty would be just right and it would broad enough to get enough players into it.

---------- Post added 2013-05-26 at 02:22 AM ----------

If you make normals and hcs easier you get normals to LFR and heroics to normal levels. Where's the point in that?

No you don't. That's the whole point of their being a gap. Nobody is asking for normals to be lfr like. We want normals to be somewhere between lfr and current normals and then current normals to be heroics and if hardcores or the tiny minority of players (for whom current content is approrpriate for) leaves then that's the cost of doing business. Somehow I doubt they will leave, their to hooked on the game anyway.

[Deleted]

Seriously. I get tired of this "increasing complexity" shit. Are you really that far into denial? Reality check. Raiders got worse, not raids harder. Raiding is as easy as it has ever been. I would actually say it is easier now than before.

Please tell me which fight is that incredibly complex that it is miles beyond fights in previous expansions.
Which fight has suffered from this armsrace between devs pushing their raiders?

Lei-Shen N was a complete joke in comparison to other end bosses like Nefarian 10N, Cho'Gall 10N, LK10N, Yogg'Saron 10N.

[lizon]

No we can't. We've had to sit players because they aren't up to snuff. WE helped them and supported them and tried desperately to work with them but as I said before the increasing complexity being created to cater to heroic raiders is unsustainable. It leaves older raiders who weren't as good but good enough for the relatively less complex mechanics (and player rotations) in the dust and more so than that it punishes NEW raiders who don't have a wealth of experience behind them. Not everybody is a super star, not everybody is cut out for this difficulty and they get let out in the cold because of it.

Man you must think were some kind of fucking idiots. Were asking for appropriate content. Again all I read is denial. denial denial denial.

I'm sorry if you think that but this is a player generated problem, not a design problem. The fights now are not inherently any harder than they were back during BC/Wrath or even late Vanilla. Heck some fights back then were harder than the current fights. The only thing that is different about ToT vs previous tiers is that you can't ignore mechanics except for a few glaring exceptions (Twins, Megaera, and Primo). The tradeoff is that there are no real hard dps or healing requirements for any of the fights which actually makes the tier more approachable from a gear standpoint.

If you want a raid difficulty where you can ignore boss mechanics and still get gear you run LFR.

Maybe they should make it so that you can "raid" a normal raid but at LFR difficulty but you still only get LFR drops. It would be a shared lockout with normal/heroic. You can do any boss on normal difficulty if you like but to do heroic you must clear it all on normal. That way ppl can still get gear if they like, it just won't be normal gear. If they want better drops they need to learn normal mode.

[Osmeric]

Just reading the title of this thread, there barely is a gap between normal and LFR as far as difficulty goes.

This is obviously not the case. The developers are saying this is not the case. How are you reaching this ridiculously wrong conclusion?

[Deleted]

No we can't. We've had to sit players because they aren't up to snuff. WE helped them and supported them and tried desperately to work with them but as I said before the increasing complexity being created to cater to heroic raiders is unsustainable. It leaves older raiders who weren't as good but good enough for the relatively less complex mechanics (and player rotations) in the dust and more so than that it punishes NEW raiders who don't have a wealth of experience behind them. Not everybody is a super star, not everybody is cut out for this difficulty and they get let out in the cold because of it.

Man you must think were some kind of fucking idiots. Were asking for appropriate content. Again all I read is denial. denial denial denial.

Then you should accept the fact that you just ain't good enough. Dumbing down content is not the answer. What about next time you hit a brick wall? A new rading model once again? Sorry, but your logic is flawed. LFR is created for you to enjoy the content.

[Keoren]

then current normals to be heroics and if hardcores or the tiny minority of players (for whom current content is approrpriate for) leaves then that's the cost of doing business. Somehow I doubt they will leave, their to hooked on the game anyway.

It is worth noting that this game as it is has just about the highest quality raid content on the market. That is one of the flagships separating it from the rest and an attraction in itself. Losing the current heroic difficulty would most likely affect the public image of the game negatively.

A lot of player-created content such as add-ons, guides, and websites is also often born out of the needs, desires, and efforts of the high-end demographics. I hate to speculate with this, but I would further expect that a majority of the bunch would give up on the game if they lost the content aimed at them. Some would of course switch to PvP or go 'casual'.

I don't see losing all this and more as being a healthy choice. Considering that most of the designs are shared with LFR and normal, the extra effort required in order to create the heroic content is probably not as big a share of the cake as you think it is. If it was necessary, I would rather shift some resources into the creation of a new alternative than remove one of the old ones.

[Deleted]

Just for fun I wanted to check how big this "minority" of hardcore raiders is.
I count 25 man guilds as 2.5 guilds because they get 250% more players.
Will present numbers as say 10 (2/5) means 10 'guilds', two 25 man and five 10 mans.
Checking on my realm:

Guilds above 10/13HC: 13 (4/3)
Guilds between 6/13 and 9/13HC: 7 (2/2)
Guilds between 12/12N and 5/13HC: 45.5 (3/38)
Guilds between 6/12N and 11/12N: 24.5 (1/22)
Guilds between 2/12N and 5/12N: 22 (0/22)
Guilds at 1/12N: 24 (0/24)

Guilds in heroic content: 65.5 (9/43)
Guilds in normal content: 70.5 (1/68)

What to notice here is that there are a lot of 'ghost guilds' between 1/12N and 12/12N, guilds that do not exist anymore. Just checking through those guilds the guilds that are actually still raiding in normal content is about half, around 30. One of those 'ghost guilds' is the pug my alt is running in that is 11/12N, that is not a guild, just a pug yet registers at 11/12N.
So there is probably around 60 guilds in heroic content and 30 in normal content (counting 25 mans as 2.5 guilds to compensate for the increased players)

But what we get from this? The average guild is actually between 12/12N to 5/13HC.

So sorry Leonard. I am not in the minority. A majority of the raiding guilds are clearing normals. The people not doing so are the minority.

[Thelxi]

This is obviously not the case. The developers are saying this is not the case. How are you reaching this ridiculously wrong conclusion?

Please show me a blue quote pointing out how big the gap is between LFR and normals. Go on I'll wait

How do I reach the conclusion that LFR and normals are not that far apart in difficulty? having done ToT on all difficulties. It is very obvious that the gap between LFR and normals is substantially smaller than the gap between normals and heroics.

The above is not echoed in ilvls (20 and 13), which was my point to begin with

[Definition]

Normal is as easy as its always been O.o

[Osmeric]

Please show me a blue quote pointing out how big the gap is between LFR and normals. Go on I'll wait

The devs would not be talking about the issue if there was "barely a gap".

One also need only count the number of people who raided in Wrath, vs. the number doing normal mode raiding now (and who haven't given up). The difference is large.

---------- Post added 2013-05-26 at 03:26 AM ----------

Normal is as easy as its always been O.o

Obviously not.

[Deleted]

Obviously not.

True it is easier now than before.



You have not stopped to consider that the devs do not think the problem is the 'gap' (since it does not exist). As Thelxi mentioned, the gap between N and HC is larger than LFR and N. Maybe the Devs think the problem is the raiding model in itself?