Mythic is too tight, guilds are dying

[Hctaz]

I agree with you completely. I'm old raider from WotLK times. I actively raided full WotLK, Cataclysm, parts of Pandaria, Legion and BfA. It really started in Legion and got worse in BfA. My guild stopped raiding because we did not have any progress, farm reclears were as hard as second kill and sometimes even harder because of raider turn-around. It was completely different back in the day. Raid was getting stronger every week. You could easily get few recruits who could fail anything but a very core mechanics, die two times and still kill the boss. Current raids are tuned around very top level guilds and developers just don't care about anyone on level below. I changed guild 3 times since Legion, because they just can't survive. It's getting frustrating. I love the game as much as 10 years ago, but I can't raid alone, I have my skill limits and time investment limits.

Classic did not have any significant influence on our raid. Few players tried it myself included, but just to get some classic feels and that's about it.

Honestly there's a pretty obvious explanation for why Wrath-;arts of Pandaria all felt like your raid was gaining power over time and why Legion and BfA doesn't... It's titanforging mostly but also combined with mythic plus as a constantly repeatable source of said titanforged gear.

In past expansions, the best gear came from the raids. The gear that dropped from finishing a boss was the only thing that was ever going to drop of that power level. Over time, your guild would slowly start to accumulate their BiS pieces off of the bosses you were killing allowing you to down new bosses for new BiS gear. Each week of a new raid, SOMEBODY was getting SOMETHING relevant to the powerlevel of your entire raid even if it wasn't a BiS piece. Maybe your Fury warrior got a new 2 handed weapon that wasn't BiS but was better than the BiS from the last raid. Maybe you had a really powerful trinket drop and your tank was now godly.

But now you aren't guaranteed to keep getting better gear. I don't know how bad it is in BfA, but I know there were several players in my guilds in Legion who would walk into Mythic difficulty wearing items that were nearly identical in power to the baseline mythic gear. We did actually kill bosses for the very first time on a new difficulty without a single player getting an upgrade. They maybe already had a titanforged piece of gear or a warforged piece that rolled with a socket and was better than the default mythic pieces of gear.

Or you could have a BiS piece drop for your raid, but the useless piece nobody needs might have titanforged instead of it. It's even worse now that masterlooter is gone. You can't funnel specific pieces to the right players anymore, and item level "upgrades" might not always be an actual upgrade for the player or your raid. Maybe you get (and this is just random numbers) a piece of 230 gear and you have a piece of 220. Great! It's an upgrade!... but the stats are kinda bad and you have another player in your raid who is using a 190. You'd rather have given that piece of gear to him to catch him up, but you can't trade it to him because you don't have an item level equal or greater to the gear you just got.

That's a situation that would come up in raiding guilds that even casual groups would have been able to identify and handle without there being some dumb drama.

It seems to me that they are trying to balance their game not by putting in additional time and effort, but by removing the player's ability to make choices. They've been doing it since Cataclysm honestly. Removal and dumbing down of talent trees, forcing you to wear specific armor types or take a penalty to your main stat, removal of hit and expertise, removal of reforging (which is also a mess combined with the last point**** see below), trying to make each secondary stat functionally identical to the others for every single class, adding RNG to gear so you can't make a BiS list, and now the removal of masterloot.

I honestly have no idea who they're balancing this game for anymore. They claim Titanforging was added as a benefit to casual players so that you could get an exciting upgrade from anywhere and not just from raiding. I don't really think that's true. I think they put it in the game as a way to incentivize the hardcore players to play more. They would clear the raid in less than 2-3 months, get BiS in another month on their mains, and then possibly unsub or log out for the next several months while they waited for the PTR to come out with raid testing. In fact, titanforging in it's initial implementation was actually CITED to be for this very reason. They wanted to give raiders a reason to feel good about reclearing bosses that they had already beaten.

It's crazy that it's come to these conspiracy theories, but honestly I think Blizzard has put in titanforging and removed Masterloot under the guise of being a benefit to the casual player when it's actually designed to force the hardcore players to play longer. "But why would they lie about it? That wouldn't make any seeeeense?!" says the casual player not being affected by the changes in any negative way. Well sir, it's something that happens all of the time in the real world. If they put in a mechanic that only punishes hardcore players, hardcore players will complain, nobody will argue against them, and Blizzard will look stupid if they don't revert the changes. By claiming the change was made to BENEFIT casuals with the unfortunate side effect of hurting hardcore players INSTEAD of the change being made to hurt hardcore players with the added benefit of also sometimes maybe helping casual players, you're now creating an "us vs them" mentality every time somebody who is hardcore speaks out against it.


***The whole reforging situation was handled with one of the dumbest arguments I've ever heard. They claim to have removed reforging because it didn't feel fun needing to go back to town to reforge all your gear for the optimal hit and expertise caps before you could wear it... and then also they got rid of hit and expertise in the SAME EXPANSION. It didn't make any sense to anybody.



Wow. Long post. Lots of anger and resentment built up. These 26 minute AV queues in Classic WoW really give me time to rant.

[Izenhart]

This is just a thread filled with casuals who pat themselves in the back in the attempt of bolstering their echo chamber of "mythic bad, casuals good" as the excuse why their raid/guild died or is stuck on a boss

1900 guilds killed mythic jaina - 2000 guilds killed mythic gul'dan

825 guilds killed mythic azshara - 890 guilds killed mythic kil'jaeden, with months and months left to catch up on this

Not to mention participation of unique characters in M+ is also beating/evening out Legion, even though BFA M+ isn't used for AP grinding


Which is interesting because last time I checked people were praising Legion and considering it a good expansion, yet I keep reading everwhere that "MUH RAIDS" even though ACTUAL NUMBERS are proving you wrong, that apparently players are leaving everywhere, that Classic, the almost dead game, is apparently 3x the size of BFA and the playerbase at this point is in the hundreds.

Incredible how a dying game is still even with the numbers of Legion, huh?

If anything, the conversation should actually be about the casual guilds and the ways to obtain gear below mythic level, since even though the mythic numbers are the same, the HC numbers are +9000 for Nighthold and +7000 for ToS

[Garymorilix]

Honestly there's a pretty obvious explanation for why Wrath-;arts of Pandaria all felt like your raid was gaining power over time and why Legion and BfA doesn't... It's titanforging mostly but also combined with mythic plus as a constantly repeatable source of said titanforged gear.

In past expansions, the best gear came from the raids. The gear that dropped from finishing a boss was the only thing that was ever going to drop of that power level. Over time, your guild would slowly start to accumulate their BiS pieces off of the bosses you were killing allowing you to down new bosses for new BiS gear. Each week of a new raid, SOMEBODY was getting SOMETHING relevant to the powerlevel of your entire raid even if it wasn't a BiS piece. Maybe your Fury warrior got a new 2 handed weapon that wasn't BiS but was better than the BiS from the last raid. Maybe you had a really powerful trinket drop and your tank was now godly.

But now you aren't guaranteed to keep getting better gear. I don't know how bad it is in BfA, but I know there were several players in my guilds in Legion who would walk into Mythic difficulty wearing items that were nearly identical in power to the baseline mythic gear. We did actually kill bosses for the very first time on a new difficulty without a single player getting an upgrade. They maybe already had a titanforged piece of gear or a warforged piece that rolled with a socket and was better than the default mythic pieces of gear.

Or you could have a BiS piece drop for your raid, but the useless piece nobody needs might have titanforged instead of it. It's even worse now that masterlooter is gone. You can't funnel specific pieces to the right players anymore, and item level "upgrades" might not always be an actual upgrade for the player or your raid. Maybe you get (and this is just random numbers) a piece of 230 gear and you have a piece of 220. Great! It's an upgrade!... but the stats are kinda bad and you have another player in your raid who is using a 190. You'd rather have given that piece of gear to him to catch him up, but you can't trade it to him because you don't have an item level equal or greater to the gear you just got.

That's a situation that would come up in raiding guilds that even casual groups would have been able to identify and handle without there being some dumb drama.

It seems to me that they are trying to balance their game not by putting in additional time and effort, but by removing the player's ability to make choices. They've been doing it since Cataclysm honestly. Removal and dumbing down of talent trees, forcing you to wear specific armor types or take a penalty to your main stat, removal of hit and expertise, removal of reforging (which is also a mess combined with the last point**** see below), trying to make each secondary stat functionally identical to the others for every single class, adding RNG to gear so you can't make a BiS list, and now the removal of masterloot.

I honestly have no idea who they're balancing this game for anymore. They claim Titanforging was added as a benefit to casual players so that you could get an exciting upgrade from anywhere and not just from raiding. I don't really think that's true. I think they put it in the game as a way to incentivize the hardcore players to play more. They would clear the raid in less than 2-3 months, get BiS in another month on their mains, and then possibly unsub or log out for the next several months while they waited for the PTR to come out with raid testing. In fact, titanforging in it's initial implementation was actually CITED to be for this very reason. They wanted to give raiders a reason to feel good about reclearing bosses that they had already beaten.

It's crazy that it's come to these conspiracy theories, but honestly I think Blizzard has put in titanforging and removed Masterloot under the guise of being a benefit to the casual player when it's actually designed to force the hardcore players to play longer. "But why would they lie about it? That wouldn't make any seeeeense?!" says the casual player not being affected by the changes in any negative way. Well sir, it's something that happens all of the time in the real world. If they put in a mechanic that only punishes hardcore players, hardcore players will complain, nobody will argue against them, and Blizzard will look stupid if they don't revert the changes. By claiming the change was made to BENEFIT casuals with the unfortunate side effect of hurting hardcore players INSTEAD of the change being made to hurt hardcore players with the added benefit of also sometimes maybe helping casual players, you're now creating an "us vs them" mentality every time somebody who is hardcore speaks out against it.


***The whole reforging situation was handled with one of the dumbest arguments I've ever heard. They claim to have removed reforging because it didn't feel fun needing to go back to town to reforge all your gear for the optimal hit and expertise caps before you could wear it... and then also they got rid of hit and expertise in the SAME EXPANSION. It didn't make any sense to anybody.



Wow. Long post. Lots of anger and resentment built up. These 26 minute AV queues in Classic WoW really give me time to rant.

Hit and expertise were boring af useless binary stats.
All you literally did was stack them til capped and forget about it. Very interesting.

Reforging too. Bullshit binary system. There were zero decision making involved and it was just tedious.

Your point is self defeating also.
If secondary stats are the same for everyone then how the fuck is a 230 Ilvl item not strictly better than a 220 Ilvl one?
Thats because secondary stats are not at all the same and a bis stat will beat out a non bis stat regardless of Ilvl.

You literally disprove your own point in the same sentence.

Your example of loot drama is also an understatement.
There were exponentially more cases of ML abuse than that one example you mentioned. Ask all the people who didnt get a single piece of loot for months.

Maybe stop looking for conspiracies and see the faults that have been fixed.

Your issue is that other people can get gear. Mythic raids still drop the best gear. Noone took that away. Why do you care if others can get hc gear from m+.

[Gorsameth]

You're actually representative of the type of person I'm asking about.

So you've raided mythic for at least 13 weeks now, yet are 4/8. You have over 100 item level above where Method was, significantly more powerful essences, significantly more stam/stats, and significantly more time invested on fights that have been nerfed significantly from their original versions- yet are still 4/8 (with that 4th boss just being downed a month ago).

What's stopping you from the full clear? Is it player incompetence? Lack of some sort of tools? Is your group really *that much* less competent than Method? They're just humans... are they really that good at the game? At least, that much "better" at the game than you? What keeps you going for that 14th week of beating your head against the same boss? Do you find the fights are actually that difficult?

I have a hard time believing the fights are actually that hard, or that Method is just that good. Surely the common folk can do just as well with the huge handicaps they have now, right?

Method ilvl at world first Azshara 435.
Last several kills between 440 and 443.

100 item levels, or as reality calls it 5 to 8.

[Nefarious Tea]

*snip*

The problem with EP isn't that the fights themselves are hard. I mean, Mythic Orgozoa has like three mechanics the raid needs to watch out for. You kill the adds, you dodge incubation fluid, you spread for the electrical discharge. Tanks have to manage their stacks and make sure they soak the pools from dead adds instead of dealing with the discharge because it doesn't go on tanks.

The problem with EP is that almost every fight is so tightly tuned from a numbers output vs boss HP standpoint (or number of people required to handle a mechanic) that as soon as one person dies, the attempt is over and you have to wipe. EP's problem is that everyone has to have absolutely perfect execution, every time, to kill a boss. I expect that of the end boss, and rightly so for I have lived it. But to expect that of every boss is silly.

Ashvane's really bad for this... if a couple of people have to run really far away because one coral randomly spawned out in the boonies, and they aren't full HAM DPSing the boss for 5-10 seconds, even if nobody fucks up you might not meet the DPS check for being able to actually kill her. The attempt is over, stand in razor coral pools and die. That's not even someone fucking up; that's the game's own RNG going "you don't get to kill her this pull because "reasons". "That's why Ashvane broke so many guilds.

A hard as fuck boss where one person screwing up can wipe the group? Sure; people will learn and adapt, and people will kill it.

A hard as fuck boss where the RNG calculator for the game can wipe the group? There's no way to beat that. You can't fight the underlying math that builds the universe. THAT is why Ashvane got nerfed. But it should have been done weeks before it was. Ashvane should have been changed in the first two weeks; not two months later.

[Marrilaife]

They claim Titanforging was added as a benefit to casual players so that you could get an exciting upgrade from anywhere and not just from raiding. I don't really think that's true. I think they put it in the game as a way to incentivize the hardcore players to play more. They would clear the raid in less than 2-3 months, get BiS in another month on their mains, and then possibly unsub or log out for the next several months while they waited for the PTR to come out with raid testing. In fact, titanforging in it's initial implementation was actually CITED to be for this very reason. They wanted to give raiders a reason to feel good about reclearing bosses that they had already beaten.

Any reason to chase titanforges after progression is done died somewhere mid-legion when they upped the gear gap between raid tiers from +15 to +30, meaning all the time you spent chasing titanforges meticulously is just invalidated within 2 weeks of the next patch and nolife m+ spam (2 weeks because 1st usually has a lower cap on m+ gear).

Maybe it has some use for method who usually is done with mythic raid progression by week 2 or halfway week 3, but for everyone else who isn't at their level, titanforge from the previous patch won't be of much help in the next one.

[Frozenbro]

Ashvane's really bad for this... if a couple of people have to run really far away because one coral randomly spawned out in the boonies, and they aren't full HAM DPSing the boss for 5-10 seconds, even if nobody fucks up you might not meet the DPS check for being able to actually kill her. The attempt is over, stand in razor coral pools and die. That's not even someone fucking up; that's the game's own RNG going "you don't get to kill her this pull because "reasons". "That's why Ashvane broke so many guilds.

This is not exactly true, thats blaming the encounter for having bad players and bad execution, when you see ashvane kills pre nerf with plenty of blue and green parsing players, you know the myth about her being *so hard* is false, guilds that disbanded for ashvane didnt disband cause of her, they disbanded cause their green/blue parsing meme players didnt step up their game.

[asil]

Mythic being too tight has led to the ridiculous amount of simming / min-maxing that players enforce on every form of content, so yes, absolutely it has led to (one of) the reasons the game is as bad as it is right now.

Why would you not want to play the game as well as you can, lol?

People are going to min-max any game, it's part of the fun of an RPG.

- - - Updated - - -

These is not exactly true, thats blaming the encounter for having bad players and bad execution, when you see ashvane kills pre nerf with plenty of blue and green parsing players, you know the myth about her being *so hard* is false, guilds that disbanded for ashvane didnt disband cause of her, they disbanded cause their green/blue parsing meme players didnt step up their game.

I'd say ashvane for a 4th boss was over-tuned. We killed her before any nerfs, and we wiped more on her than orgo, queen's quart, and za'qul.

A 4th boss being that hard is a bit absurd.

I could absolutely see guilds with sub-par dps struggling hard on ashvane before the 2nd nerf.

[Kralljin]

Hit and expertise were boring af useless binary stats.
All you literally did was stack them til capped and forget about it. Very interesting.

I'd like to add, those stats did have a point where gear and customization of that gear wasn't that common.

In Vanilla (and to some extent, TBC) Hit / Expertise was the shit, because so few items actually had those stats.
Shard of Contempt (the Melee trinket from Magister's Terrace) was super awesome because it was one of the few items with a shitload of Expertise on it.

Reaching Hit / Exp cap wasn't exactly that easy in TBC, let alone Vanilla.

But once those stats became more common and more ways (Gems;Reforging) were opened up to reach those caps, these stats just became a meaningless checklist for your character to fulfill.

Returning Expertise / Hit doesn't make sense, let alone because rotations became more complex but the concept of having some sort "gold standard" stat that is rare but extremely meaningful would be interesting to explore in my opinion.

[Frozenbro]

I'd say ashvane for a 4th boss was over-tuned. We killed her before any nerfs, and we wiped more on her than orgo, queen's quart, and za'qul.

A 4th boss being that hard is a bit absurd.

I could absolutely see guilds with sub-par dps struggling hard on ashvane before the 2nd nerf.

Yep, for a 4th boss she was a bit too much, thats why i said its not exactly true, but the post i was referring to was about guilds disbanding because of her, and their subpar dps are at fault for that, not ashvane in particular, the moment they said "we arent meeting the dps check, fuck this" and disband, you know it was their meme dps fault for taking that approach instead of actually improving and not doing laughable green/blue parses.

[Garymorilix]

I'd like to add, those stats did have a point where gear and customization of that gear wasn't that common.

In Vanilla (and to some extent, TBC) Hit / Expertise was the shit, because so few items actually had those stats.
Shard of Contempt (the Melee trinket from Magister's Terrace) was super awesome because it was one of the few items with a shitload of Expertise on it.

Reaching Hit / Exp cap wasn't exactly that easy in TBC, let alone Vanilla.

But once those stats became more common and more ways (Gems;Reforging) were opened up to reach those caps, these stats just became a meaningless checklist for your character to fulfill.

Returning Expertise / Hit doesn't make sense, let alone because rotations became more complex but the concept of having some sort "gold standard" stat that is rare but extremely meaningful would be interesting to explore in my opinion.

You mean exacly what Corruption will be in 8.3?

Good news, we're getting it.

[Deja Thoris]

You're actually representative of the type of person I'm asking about.

So you've raided mythic for at least 13 weeks now, yet are 4/8. You have over 100 item level above where Method was, significantly more powerful essences, significantly more stam/stats, and significantly more time invested on fights that have been nerfed significantly from their original versions- yet are still 4/8 (with that 4th boss just being downed a month ago).

What's stopping you from the full clear? Is it player incompetence? Lack of some sort of tools? Is your group really *that much* less competent than Method? They're just humans... are they really that good at the game? At least, that much "better" at the game than you? What keeps you going for that 14th week of beating your head against the same boss? Do you find the fights are actually that difficult?

I have a hard time believing the fights are actually that hard, or that Method is just that good. Surely the common folk can do just as well with the huge handicaps they have now, right?

His ilevel is 14 above what method killed the final boss with. At least inject some honesty into your posts.

[Dizzeeyooo]

Wow. Long post. Lots of anger and resentment built up. These 26 minute AV queues in Classic WoW really give me time to rant.

Your issue is that other people can get gear. Mythic raids still drop the best gear. Noone took that away. Why do you care if others can get hc gear from m+.

The irony of you calling out Blizzard for weaponizing casuals to defend titanforging, to then be immediately attacked by a casual defending titanforging
Infracted

[Kralljin]

You mean exacly what Corruption will be in 8.3?

You mean random lottery fiesta 2.0?

No thanks, ignoring the concept of the negative impact of corruption.

[Garymorilix]

The irony of you calling out Blizzard for weaponizing casuals to defend titanforging, to then be immediately attacked by a casual defending titanforging

You're calling me a casual?

I'm not a mythic raider per-se, only 3/8 cuz I pug, but I ain't no casual.
Difference is, I don't fckin care what gear other people get for their runs in M+ or whatever. Why do you?

- - - Updated - - -

You mean random lottery fiesta 2.0?

No thanks, ignoring the concept of the negative impact of corruption.

So you want a random rare golden universal stat but when Blizz puts exactly that in the game it isn't good.

I see.

[Kralljin]

So you want a random rare golden universal stat but when Blizz puts exactly that in the game it isn't good.

Quote me where i said random.

[Garymorilix]

Quote me where i said random.

*the concept of having some sort "gold standard" stat that is rare but extremely meaningful *

There.

[exochaft]

Yep, for a 4th boss she was a bit too much, thats why i said its not exactly true, but the post i was referring to was about guilds disbanding because of her, and their subpar dps are at fault for that, not ashvane in particular, the moment they said "we arent meeting the dps check, fuck this" and disband, you know it was their meme dps fault for taking that approach instead of actually improving and not doing laughable green/blue parses.

The fight is certainly doable with green/blue parsing DPS, because those rankings are completely relative and dependent on what strategy you use (longer strats tend to make the group parse worse). However, as some have mentioned, the fight is a combination of mechanics checks and DPS checks. For a 4th mandatory boss that blocks the rest of the instance that early, the bar was likely set way too high. My group killed it prior to nerfs and when there were still bugs occurring regularly, such as the mystery orb spawning from the ground and not from corals... but even then, the fight design was pretty unforgiving and prone to RNG. I know personally my DPS could swing massively depending upon how often I got targeted by bubbles and when it came to breaking corals and soaking puddles, and layer on all this happening during burn phases and the fight could be very inconsistent because screwing up a mechanic (especially early in progression) usually meant a wipe.

Overall, that's the issue: most mechanics checks nowadays are approaching or are literally binary, in that if you screw up a mechanic it's almost always a wipe instead of a setback that can be overcome. Layer on top DPS checks with the non-forgiving mechanics checks and you get some pretty nasty fights where you feel like you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't stack DPS classes that do 10-20k more damage/healing than the pack *cough* spriests and hpallies *cough* and a healthy amount of immunities and DR cooldowns. I think this is where the disconnect with the community is right now: it's accepted that you need to change/alter your comp in order to tackle mythic content else you're not playing the game right, when the reality should be (and sometimes is) that encounters shouldn't feel like a joke stacking classes because of mechanics/disparity between classes. For example, Queen's Court and Za'qul on mythic with 4-5 spriests versus none are insanely different fights, and that's an issue of not only class balance but also mythic raid design.

[Kralljin]

*the concept of having some sort "gold standard" stat that is rare but extremely meaningful *

Yeah, but you can't leave out random and still call it corruption.

Corruption is at its core still a system that is heavily reliant on RNG, which has still extreme variance on terms of value.
If you are class that doesn't want X, the Corruption effect that increases stat X will be terrible.

Not to mention that the corruption procs on some items are so damn high that they are utterly unuseable unless you cleanse them.


Corruption is a far shot from a system that is makes you say "oh, i got that item, that's an upgrade!".

[Garymorilix]

Yeah, but you can't leave out random and still call it corruption.

Corruption is at its core still a system that is heavily reliant on RNG, which has still extreme variance on terms of value.
If you are class that doesn't want X, the Corruption effect that increases stat X will be terrible.

Not to mention that the corruption procs on some items are so damn high that they are utterly unuseable unless you cleanse them.


Corruption is a far shot from a system that is makes you say "oh, i got that item, that's an upgrade!".

'Rare' as a stat on an item pretty much means random.

Stop trying to back pedal. Those are your own words. You literally described Corruption as a stat as something you want, and now you try to twist it cuz "buh datz nuh wha I meant".
Be real bruv.

And corruption might be random, but so what. You can cleanse it and you get guaranteed corruption items in your weekly chest AND raid weapons.
Plus we don't know how rare a corruption proc will actually be once 8.3 hits. That's also a major detail you choose to ignore just so you can scream "RNG is baaad".

It's all a trade-off at the end. You either use a corrupted item and deal with the negatives or you cleanse it. You can even call it reforging at that point if you like that word better. Who cares.