Flexible Raiding: A retrospective from a player and raid leader perspective.

[MidnyteTV]

Up until MoP, I had a really difficult work schedule that did not allow me to fully dedicate to raiding. During Wrath, I was delegated to my guilds alt runs and constant pugging. It wasn't totally bad, I was able to play quite a bit during Wrath.

When i came back to the game during MoP, I was estatic for the new flex feature introduced in 5.4. As a player, I found it very difficult to raid because of the constant need for the 10 or 25 players to fill the raid.

My ICC experience in a nutshell: Fill 25 players for ICC, kill Saurfang, have somebody fly back to Dalaran to pug 6 people.

Flex in SoO was great. The difficulty was perfect for pug groups.

So in WoD, I decided to start a guild again and make it a purely Heroic-Flex guild. No more issues with filling spots. Just bring what we had and go for it. I was a GM/RL from WoD through ToS. Here is what I have concluded from flex raiding.

It was 80% blessing, 20% curse.

Like i said, it was mostly a blessing, but there was elements of the flex system that actually hampered my efforts to raid lead.

First and foremost is the healer/DPS ratio needed. Some fights on Heroic from WoD through Legion could allow you to overheal or underheal, while most required 1 healer per 5 players.

Secondly, the fact that we were completely flex meant that players ultimately did not feel the need to truly dedicate themselves to raiding. They would leave early when they felt like it, or not show up as often as they did before.

The 20% curse lied in the fact that your raid spot wasn't dependent on your dedication or ability to last throughout the night. You no longer had to play until the end of the raid time. People's raid spots weren't in jeopardy, ever. During Wrath, I was in a guild in which your raid spot would be lost if you missed one night because there were 5 people waiting for you to NOT show up.

The blessing was clear, we never had to shut down a raid night due to lack of people. In my 3 years as a GM (outside of holidays) we cancelled 3 raid nights total due to lack of attendance, and 2 of those instances we had 12-14 people, but only 1 healer.

While I seldom agree with him, Asmongold did make a good point on his stream the other day. He said in effect: "Before flex raiding, you had to bring in a bad player just to fill a spot, because that player was better than nothing."

What is your overall experience with flexible raiding on a guild level?

[potis]

What is your overall experience with flexible raiding on a guild level?

It gives me my fix of raiding, without having to deal with delusional players that require 100 tries to learn what i learn in 1, without having to wipe 20 extra times so the overall wipes at 300 instead of 200 , because some raid member(s) is(are) playing on a toaster and similar things,while i dont have the mentality or patience for myself to tryhard and go back into top 25-100 world raiding where when i say "Yeah, wedding this Sunday and i need to leave 1 hour early next Wednesday" wont have them kicking me out of the guild.

I dont call it guild, i call it raid group, but eventually people transfer and gather up etc so you end up in a guild.

Flex raiding, whether normal or HC has the Vanilla/TBC raid mentality, aka half the raid, carrying the other half raid, pugs are the same, which is why ton had a problem with G'huun curve and now they cant get past Mekkatorque.

You can have 30-40% of the raid full of "Not so good" players, as long as you make sure there are at least the exact number of people needed to deal with the mechanics that you are 100% sure if you assign people from that 40% pool, you will wipe +10 extra times till they get it.

BFA has been extremely punishing in this matter with G'huun and Mekkatorque where you cant do everything yourself, or with the 2-4 other people that you know 100% wont fail and it gets really tiring at times.

But most of my raid group is IRL friends, gf , and e-friends i met over the years that get their raiding fix, so me and the few others are tolerating the overall exhaustion required this expansion cause of that.

In BFA we had to recruit a few people mostly because some bosses are simply down right retarded with a small group, like Conclave, where its 4 Raptors with 10 people, and 10 Raptors with 30, and before the usual retarded argument about "They get more health", there is a massive difference, 40% of your raid having to move, and only having 2-3 stuns in the raid, versus 10% of your raid moving, and having 12 stuns in the raid

[Flurryfang]

It has been....somewhat of a mixed experience.

With the introduction of flex raiding, i find that my guild have lost the need to recruit. We are pretty much just a bunch of people, friends and family, who raid 2-3 times a week, taking in the people who are online and go to kill bosses. This is a very casual experience, even though many of my guildies are able to do raiding at a hardcore level and did before.

The thing is simply, that flex raiding has made us more casual. We no longer need to get people in our guild to fill a raid roster, which have reduced the amount of work we put in the game overall. People are not pushing themselves very much, because there is not really a spot, they are fighting for or trying to earn their keep. We are very much less dependent on each other, since if a healer have to go or is missing, we just go down in DPS spots, with them doing something else. While this has made us more relaxed, it has also made it so that we lose people all the time. Before we would fight to keep people on, to keep people active and interested, because if they left, we had to find somebody to fill their spot. Nowadays, when people say they think about taking a break or leaving, most people just have a "meh" attitude towards it, often just saying do what you want or talk about other games instead.

So yeah, good and bad. There was stress in the past about fixed raid spots, but it was kinda good stress. Engaging stress. The core officer team had a purpose, that i don't really see outside of mythic guilds anymore. All i can say is, that it has left me and my friends ALOT less bound to WOW, as we are not encouraged that much anymore by people around us to meet up for raids.

[Twdft]

Flexible raid size for heroic is in my eyes right up there with mythic+ as a great new game device.

Dixed size meant someone always had to sit out because your roster is bigger. Or if your roster is small the raid had to be called if someones RL made them miss a raid (we didn't like pugging people). Now with a roster of about 18 players you can always raid even if 4 people have something come up IRL. I love it.

Secondly, the fact that we were completely flex meant that players ultimately did not feel the need to truly dedicate themselves to raiding. They would leave early when they felt like it, or not show up as often as they did before.

Set the expectation to stay the whole raid and don't take them next week if they just leave early. You can do nothing about pugged players, but guild mates should follow the rules even if it is totally flex size.

Not having to show up as often as before is a great thing IMO. It helps preventing burn-out. With fixed raid size/evenings whenever something happened IRL the first thought is "if I don't show the raid might get called" and players would sometimes sacrifice RL over game even if you have a guild rule that RL is more important. Have a raid pool big enough that a couple not showing up is irrelevant.

BFA has been extremely punishing in this matter with G'huun and Mekkatorque where you cant do everything yourself, or with the 2-4 other people that you know 100% wont fail and it gets really tiring at times.

I'd say that's a problem with raid design and not raid size (btw I agree, up to heroic should only have "1 fail=wipe" mechanics that you can assign to players before, let mythic have personal responsibility for absolutely everyone).