I'm Ready For 5 man Raids

[oland138]

I wouldn't mind seeing a new dungeon similar to BRD.

[Airwaves]

I, too, am ready for the return of Cata-style heroics. Challenge mode is not an adequate replacement. Heroic scenarios aren't either. If they can scale 3 versions of each raid, why can't they have another tier of 5-mans?

3 versions? With Flexi added there is 18 different versions of seige.

[Deleted]

If they scale raids to 5 man then it limits the mechanics they can use. No more 2 tank bosses, or bosses where your raid group must separate.

[Concequence]

You know they used to have this.

Vanilla was filled with Raid Like 5 mans. BRD ... Gigantic... full of bosses. Very very long if done from beginning to end. LBRS/UBRS maniacally large, like really crazy big. So many bosses. ... Stratholme Live and Dead sides. Mauradon... enormous.

If they had week long lockouts, raid quality loot (hell maybe even a plethora of challenge mode sets), and made it challenge mode difficulty. 5 man "raids" could work.

The problem is committing the developer resources to build this. It really would end up for a limited audience. Would it be worth it to commit so much for so few? ... Challenge modes were an easy in, take the normal 5 mans, scale gear down, scale difficulty up, time them. Not much in terms of resources.

But new content? too many resources. rebuilding old content. not viewed as "new" enough. ... Its a hard spot. I love the idea of the old style of zones. Massive places that really felt alive, with a large amount of content. But its just not in the cards for the audience that plays today. Many people had the audacity to complain about places like BRD ... being "too large"... you couldn't complete them in a sitting. You were forced into doing a small "path" through the zone. ... In a way. I loved that... The place did feel alive. BRD felt like a giant undeground city. It was a thrill as a rogue to solo the zone to the emp... it was one of the most satisfying things ive encountered in the game.

[Zatetic]

I'm all for early cata difficulty 5 mans. Or ZA/ZG rerelease difficulty 5 mans. I wouldnt call them raids, but I would love some more difficult dungeons. I enjoyed having to cc mobs and strategize. I think it brought the level of player skill up. When you just run through and aoe everything the games population becomes lazy and useless. Compare dragon soul lfr to any lfr since. Even the most atrociously bad players in ds lfr still did alright. Most people did close to 60%+ of what they should be doing. Now most people do like 60-80k.

[clevin]

I would love hard 5-mans that i could run with my friends. Only problem i see with this is group composition, where some comps might be vastly overpowered. They could address this by changing mechanics depending on how many melee/ranged you brought, and what type of healer/tank.

Sure they could do a shitton of coding and balance work for 5 man dungeons, but FUCK THAT I WANT 3 MANS. Not 9 or 24 or 4 others, just 2. Hell, I know couples that play together a lot. TWO MAN RAIDS! So me an my honey never have to talk to other people...


No. At some point, the game is what it is and can't cater to every single whim out there. If you're too lazy or socially maladjusted to find a mere 9 other people then you get scenarios and dungeons.

[Eats Compost]

It'd be very difficult to actually make 5-mans as difficult as heroics. Most of a raid's challenge is to do with co-ordination, as maxing out healing and damage/reacting to bad swirlies on a personal basis isn't that hard. A one-healer, one-tank setup heavily simplifies tanking and group healing, and ends up making it much, much simpler to co-ordinate the group as a whole. You're not going to see 5-mans made with a heroic raid difficulty level because the things that make heroic raids difficult are inherently diminished in a 5-man environment.

Why in the blimey balls are people referring to Cata heroics as "challenging", anyway? They required CC for trash because of pack damage output. That's about as "challenging" as it got - if you actually used CC, it was never hard. It was tedious, not engaging. If you really want to see challenging 5-mans, make 5-man fights that have the same hazards as rank 7/8 Brawler's Guild bosses or equally individually taxing mechanics. We're talking Ahoo'ru/Nibbleh/Disruptron level shit-on-the-ground, here.

[Snorkles]

Heroics Scenarios seemed to have worked out quite well outside of the LFD tool so perhaps we'll see a return of 'harder' heroics that only premade groups can tackle. Perhaps even add a trigger for 'hard modes' which rewards better loot or something, or a bonus boss (or even timed bosses like Shattered halls).

[Hexz]

same hazards as rank 7/8 Brawler's Guild bosses.

Incoming new dungeon boss Hexos 2.0!!! if you thought 1 maze was hard, now every party member has one! Think that's not enough well he comes with multiply mobs to, get down, and lots to heal can you do it! Well that is not all, there is also lasers on the floor so make sure you jump em!

Challenging 5man dungeons would be interesting, not to sure what type of mechanics they could use to make the bosses interesting, also when it comes to 5mans compared to raids the trash is much more important, but simply needing to cc trash because damage is high, isn't exactly fun, give the trash some interesting stuff and it could be useful.

If you were talking longer then the 1day heroic lock out, i think 3 days is most you would want to go, if they got the difficulty right just have them drop gear around the current flex item level or so.

Given they increasing the team sizes, i'm pretty sure with next expansion we will be getting 5mans with raid tiers, or in-between them, they said they wanted monthly content, a hard 5man could fill that gap.

But well yeah how hard would, well who knows, but i think some sort of timed event in each would work well. Bear runs 2.0 plz

[rinleezwins]

So you want early Cata type heroics? With tough bosses, interesting mechanics, long dungeons, and gear that was awesome at the time and appropriate, because it was rare to complete those through LFD? I'm all for it.

Hey, where do I sign? Tanking early cata in blues with random groups was one of the most enjoyable experience I had in this game.

[Siri]

Having only five players limits what kind of mechanics you can put in it. It will never be on the level of heroic raids.
It also further emphasises composition. People will bitch more than ever about balance.

[Ealyssa]

Challenge mode is for you. You want hard 5 man content and you dismiss what allready exist. Sound weird to say the least.

[Deleted]

Not sure what people found challenging about early Cata/ZA/ZG/hcs tbh.

Anyway, regarding the concept of 5 man raiding. With a group of 3 dpsers, 1 tank and 1 healer you're not fighting raid bosses/mechanics, just a lookalike of them that's insanely simplified. Plus you can just use the most overpowered classes at that time for the added troll element.

[Rabian]

Challenge mode is for you. You want hard 5 man content and you dismiss what allready exist. Sound weird to say the least.

He stated that he does not want challenge mode because it provides no real gear rewards other than asthetics and does not have the same sense of progression that raids do.

Personally I think 5 man raids would be awesome, I used to run a 10 man raiding guild but then people got distracted by Master's Degrees and children and whatnot, so now there are only a few of us left.

[Dilbon]

Normal raiders' epeen factor would be diminished if 5 man groups could do raids.

[Sky High]

You mean we had 5 man raids, you are thinking of vanilla BRD and strattholm. I'm all in favor of tough 5 mans but that is what challenge mode is for.

[Nobleshield]

What you want is Nightmare Dungeons, or something like RIFT's "Master Mode" dungeons (a shame they never added more of those); dungeons that drop high-end loot as an alternative/supplement to raids, aimed at groups that like challenge but don't want the hassle of large raids, or for example a group of real-life friends who enjoy playing together but don't want to add others to the mix.

Personally... I think that the future of MMOs is going to be this, and the era of large raids is coming to a close. The idea of large raids is a relic from the old Everquest days anyways. The only large raids IMO should be things like world bosses or world boss events (think Volan in Rift), with the primary content being highly challenging and rewarding small group content.

[clevin]

You know they used to have this.

Vanilla was filled with Raid Like 5 mans. BRD ... Gigantic... full of bosses. Very very long if done from beginning to end. LBRS/UBRS maniacally large, like really crazy big. So many bosses. ... Stratholme Live and Dead sides. Mauradon... enormous.
The problem is committing the developer resources to build this. It really would end up for a limited audience. Would it be worth it to commit so much for so few? ...

I was thinking about why this is because the resource issue is very real. Why did they commit dev resources to huge 5 mans then, but not now? I think there are two main reasons:

1) So many people were leveling in Vanilla and even through TBC. It made sense to add leveling content since people were actually using it a lot then. Add to this that the rewards from there were really very good in the context of the gear you could get.

2) There wasn't a ton of raid content, what there was was gated by gear (you couldn't ding 60 and walk into BWL or Naxx) and there was only one difficulty setting and size.

[Haywire5714]

That's 4 people too much

World first race for 1 man raids:

- Starym: Aaaaaand coming in at World #2817 the first class to clear 12/12H that isn't a Blood dk!!!!!!

[Vladimeir]

That's 4 people too much

And Mione just ended the thread

But really, a raid by definition requires a large group of people. Thats the difference. 5 man is small and hardly considered a raid.

I guess the real point though is the request for longer dungeons which is fine except I would keep them out of LFD randoms. Maybe have them drop half a tier above heroic dungeons or something to compensate for the length and commitment.

I think many would probably think BRD, UBRS, Kara type length for 5 people which would be great but the incentive to do them would be minimal and anything more than minimal would be problematic.