Originally Posted by
Dismayxz
Trying not to make this too long, but let's run down a few quick points on WoW's difficulty.
There's a lot of talking the talk but not walking the walk presented in the Thread (not surprising, this Thread crops up every expansion and it's always the same mix of bullet points and weird presentation of how both sides have actual [sorry, Mods, don't bonk me Moana] mental retardation flowing into their veins via IV on a daylie basis.
Mythic Raiding is not hard. First and foremost, to both the people defending difficulty AND the people ceaselessly raking on the mild requirement for two working sets of eyes and half a brain: You are not World First Raiders. I am not a World First Raider, you are not a World First Raider. The Mythic Content you play, or on the flipside, at best, observe, is not the Mythic Content a majority of the minority that makes CE Guilds plays and beats. Most rotations, most priority lists for Classes are not hard. We're not looking at strictly static rotations that require insane upkeep or need to constantly be refitted to match the fight you are currently Progressing on a fundamental level, like in some of the other MMORPG's currently on the market (FF14 has a lot of Jobs that work off of strictly static rotations, ESO has both, with the static rotation being easy but still effective and dynamic WoW style rotations, which require a little more upkeep for a mild gain in DPS).
Fundamentally, playing your Class in WoW, inbetween all the resources available and the very basic concept of how things work, is not hard. While difficulty is subjective for sure, this is outside of the idea of subjective or objective difficulty. It is easy. It is very, very fucking easy to be effective on most Classes in WoW. Some could probably learn enough about their class to do basic CE Mythic Raiding, if they spent the time bitching and crying on MMOC actually .. learning what's there to learn instead.
Second, most CE Raiders over the course of a Tier do not play the original, hard versions of the Bosses. My guild is currently on Halondrus. In this Tier, this places us somewhere in the general WR 150-250 range, depending on when we kill it. We have no ranking goal and we just skipped a raid day because of IRL related noshows. Let me tell you, that the one remaining hard thing on Halondrus, compared to what we saw on WF Streams, is playing the bombs. A mechanic that at this point boils down to 1.) Not dying 2.) just kind of generally knowing rough times for when you want to swap the bombs.
The concept of consistency during Progression is still something that most Mythic Raid Leaders probably loose sleep over, because I can tell you half their rosters don't even know what they are doing and the Content still eventually falls. If you want to boil it down to numbers such as 1% and 99%, let me tell you that the difference between most of the supposed "1%" and the supposed "99%", is that the former spends their time halfheartedly trying to do something, rather than spending their time ceaselessly and insufferably bitching and whining into the vacuum of space, subsequently putting more time into said bitching than into actually trying something in the game for once.
If you are fine with not trying, you should probably not have much to bitch about and thus, for the sake of stating the obvious, probably aren't actually being adressed by this point or.. well, most of them, actually.
Every other mechanic, we have seen in some shape or form before. Beams of death going around a boss arena, isn't new. A spread mechanic, isn't new. A raidwide damage burn, is not new. This is raiding 101. Ladies and gentlemen: A "wall" boss... by the way.
Please go ahead and bring out the ages old excuse of "Elitism", or on the flipside, "BUT BUT BUT".
Noteworthy mentions of things nobody ever says in Raiding, since the birth of time, in MOST "Hardcore" guilds: "Oh sorry, I was greeding." "Ah, you know what, I don't care about my parse." "Oh,... I fucked up, I'll do better."
If you have some mythical (no pun intended) idea of Raiding in this Game being so hard to grasp, politely and respectfully: Fuck off and at least be genuine about your agenda here. You don't want to learn, you don't want to spend a single moment using a brain cell, otherwise you would. And that's fine.
The cosmetic angle is also a fair point to make, but let's be real here as well. While it is a fair point to make, some people wouldn't be sitting here (and some definitely would) complaining about Mythic only Tier cosmetics or animations, if any of the actual casual content in the game actually had halfway decent cosmetic rewards. But please, let's not keep this farce going when we're slowly but surely approaching the 20 years of WoW and still come up with shit like the content needing nerfs, when you know perfectly well that you are coping hard, when you say you could definitely do it and still sit here not doing anything. "What, I'll have to farm the transmog next expansion instead? The world is ending in fire and flame. WEE WOO WAAH." A very, very thrilling discussion, I'm sure.
Bringing Elden Ring into the discussion doesn't do anything either. Talking about Elden Ring being a PR success is the funniest take yet. Souls games are souls games. If you don't like what they offer and the game is still too hard with Summons, overleveling and everything, the game is not for you. Get the hint or keep wasting your time complaining about it, if something in a game not being for you is a huge deal or problem that needs fixing, I'd try to get your ego and narcissism in check first and foremost. It has no relevance in a WoW Discussion about difficulty. The difference between WoW and Elden Ring that fundamentally makes the point moot, is that both the Devs and the Players of Souls Games know what they want to offer and consume, respectively and have done so for way too long for people to still keep bringing it up. It's getting fucking weird.
Touching on another point, that Moana sort of made. I wonder who here remembers the time (Ghostcrawler, I believe?) a WoW Dev straight up and very clearly said, that the reason they were moving away from evergreen content and systems, was because it was unsustainable to keep adding and adding and adding things onto the Game every expansion at the rate everything was going. It's not like people were particularly fine with them pruning and reshuffling things either, to accomodate new additions, especially on the Class side. Every single time, the forums got flooded with bitchy whiny idiots, because they lost the button nobody but them pressed once in a blue moon or because they somehow managed to get attached to that one square on their bloated ass action bars. Pray tell, which portion of the playerbase generally runs to the forums whenever something new comes around, since time immemorial, and then ask yourselves "why the fuck nobody is listening at Blizzard".
The game doesn't need shit in terms of difficulty adjustments. What the game needs, plain and simple, is some deterministic additions to the reward structure and a return to offering the little, fun things you can do on tight schedules. The problem isn't that existing content is too hard, the problem is that the people who don't want to engage with the "hard" content, have nothing feasibly meaningful to do outside of that content to progress their characters properly, which means that the usual whiny, bitchy crowd runs around aimlessly, calling for the only content there is, to get nerfed so they can still suck at doing it just a little more effectively.
Adding more options for Normal-to heroic iLvL gearing from casual-oriented variety content, benefits everybody, at the end of the day.
Nerfing harder content doesn't benefit anybody, because the people doing it and that it's designed for, get fucked and the people calling for the nerfs will keep bitching and moaning until the content is irrelevant, whilst still not touching it with a mile-long prod stick if they can avoid it, whilst simultaneously gloating over the fact that it's worthless now, because their little e-wiener finally isn't getting hurt by the notion that the Content exists, just as, ironically, people seem to get hurt by the fact that another Souls-like hypetrain release isn't catering to their needs.
Hint: With both, the content exists exactly for people that probably aren't "You", and no that is not a infringement on unwritten cosmic law pertaining to the planet sized ego, of little casual dude on a one hour a month schedule and no interest in the fundamental idea behind the content.