Originally Posted by
Sageless
Out of touch much. Your ego must really have its own room with how full of yourself you are.
It can't be denied that raiding has shifted in design. Where in the past you really saw a big impact on how bosses felt as you geared in the instance, that is no longer the case. There are hardly any enrages left, or just straight up dps races.
Instead most bosses have become mechanical fights, where one misstep will kill you independant of your gear. Also if someone messes up it is likely to ripple more as there are a lot more mechanics that not only punish the person that messes up, but also the rest of the raid.
What this means is that a lot of fights don't really get onto the "farm" status that they were before. This means reclears take more time (for the average raider, I am sure Spotnick just multi boxes his raids as they are so easy) as kill times don't really change after the initial kill and one person not paying attention (on farm) can result in a wipe.
This also means that "fun runs" where you just go in with overgeared mains and some alts aren't really as big a thing anymore.
Which I find to be a shame.
Part of this is due to how gearing has changed. With so many sources of gear and titanforging, if raids could be brute forced they could be the second week they come out with the amount of gear players have access too. So the only way to keep the lifetime of raids longer is to make gear mean little in there and focus on fights where the difficulty lies in the mechanics.
Major downside is that "farming" raids, which is quite a large part of raiding, now requires high levels of concentration and focus, resulting in tired raiders for the progress boss. Combine this with the fact that for most raiders there are hardly any gear upgrades to look forward to that would make the progress boss easier, raid teams hit walls quicker and raiding fatigue sets in.
I do think there is a major issue with the effort to reward ratio of raiding at the moment compared to other sources. Having alts that haven't stepped into Mythic+ or raiding running around at item level 400 feels wrong, especially with how much effort it takes to get your raiding main to above 415 itemlevel.
If this keeps up it will kill normal and heroic raiding even more than it already has.