5man instances are overused; people can't fill up their 20mans; the solution is clear

[lordjust]

It's pointless to want a world race to be first, where people would not even know who is first and they would be constantly infighting online who had the coolest or hardest kill which was exactly what was happening in this very forum too when 10man and 25man coexisted in shared instances.

Flex has the same issue because it's inevitably impossible for devs to balance it with random numbers of characters.

Why would people go through the pain of a hard mode difficulty without even knowing who was the best?

Even world first raider say it would be healthier for the game if mythic was cross server, per boss lockout and had flex difficulty. Max from team liquid said it in one of his streams, scripe from echo said the same thing in one of his streams. If they make it flex and blizzard says base tuning is for 20 people, then they will do it with 20 people and everyone else can do it with whatever group size they want. RWF is big enough that the top guilds and their organisations make the rules for it and if you want to participate you either play by their rules or wont be recognized by them.

[Relapses]

I do wonder though, would making Mythic 10-30 flex after the Hall of Fame closes be catastrophic? Oh it would be a balance hellscape but would the ease of access trade off make it worthwhile? I'd love to see them do the experiment for 1-2 tiers or maybe a full expac, with full disclaimers from the start that this is an experiment and if it doesn't work they are scraping it.

Even if the bosses were tuned for 20 for HoF they'd still have to design every Mythic encounter with the prospect of it flexing at some point in the future. Farm still exists post-HoF, too, so you'd see all sorts of weird degenerate group size swapping on bosses. It has all the downsides traditionally associated with Flex with really no upside other than kind of retaining some of the relevance for the HoF.

[Nymrohd]

Even if the bosses were tuned for 20 for HoF they'd still have to design every Mythic encounter with the prospect of it flexing at some point in the future. Farm still exists post-HoF, too, so you'd see all sorts of weird degenerate group size swapping on bosses. It has all the downsides traditionally associated with Flex with really no upside other than kind of retaining some of the relevance for the HoF.

Yeah I guess it is very likely you would end up on farm with different sizes being preferable for different bosses and quite a few bosses on Mythic don't really become farm content and can always kill you.

[Relapses]

Yeah I guess it is very likely you would end up on farm with different sizes being preferable for different bosses and quite a few bosses on Mythic don't really become farm content and can always kill you.

I do support Flex in theory I just... I've seen nearly two decades of endgame raiding degeneracy so I feel my skepticism is pretty well placed; while it would help make Mythic more accessible it comes at the cost of... well, pretty much everything else. It's one of those high level ideas that gets thrown around whenever the topic of logistics and accessibility comes up but loses its appeal quickly when you realize how it'd actually pan out. I've kind of come to the conclusion that Mythic raiding is not accessible by design and it seems Blizzard is pretty unwavering in their desire to change that. And as long as the RWF keeps the game relevant every 6-8 months I can't see it changing any time soon.

[Nymrohd]

I do support Flex in theory I just... I've seen nearly two decades of endgame raiding degeneracy so I feel my skepticism is pretty well placed; while it would help make Mythic more accessible it comes at the cost of... well, pretty much everything else. It's one of those high level ideas that gets thrown around whenever the topic of logistics and accessibility comes up but loses its appeal quickly when you realize how it'd actually pan out. I've kind of come to the conclusion that Mythic raiding is not accessible by design and it seems Blizzard is pretty unwavering in their desire to change that. And as long as the RWF keeps the game relevant every 6-8 months I can't see it changing any time soon.

I kind of liked the idea of a downranked Epic 10man mode that was thrown around. As many of the Mythic mechanics as can work for the 10man version on a shared lockout with Mythic.

[Zantos]

Even when MoP was a shitshow with 10 and 25 man.. It was one of the best raiding we had. We didn't really care about the imbalance, that Garrosh had to be 1 healed on 10 man to have enough damage. That sometimes 10 man was easier than 25. If they care about the race, then make it so if you have 10 and 20 man Mythic modes, if you kill a boss in one you are locked to that mode.

You and I have vastly different view points on that. I saw a ton of people complaining about how unbalanced the fights were when comparing 10Man and 25Man. Heck, I remember back during Wrath the massive crap show that it caused and how progession guilds would take a week, run two 10 man groups to gear them up with gear that was easier to obtain then on 25normal.

To OP, as someone who raided through that. No. It was horrific. The imbalances between 10h and 25h were huge. Some fights were just stupidly more difficult in one setting or the other due to either space limitations or comp limitations. The fact is that mythic fights are easier to design around 1 floor plan with a set number of players. Trying to design a raid boss that is an equal challenge to both 10 and 25 man with the mechanics is not easy to do. Take Valithria in ICC for example. Easy to keep both sides and the tanks healed in 25 due to the number of healers you can have. Stupidly difficult to do in 10 man due to the limited healer capacity if you don't want to get overwhelmed with adds.

5 man instances are not hindering anything. If people are more drawn to that, then the issue is with raid design. More often then not though, people who do mythic+ probably have no interest in going into a raid to begin with.

[epigramx]

All this does is make it even more difficult for those who want to do the 20 man content have an even harder time finding people because they have another option. Just splitting the player base for no good reason.

No, because the maps will be unique in 20man. People would want to do them because only 20man would have them.

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more difficult for 20M content to exist.

No, because 20man will have unique maps. People would want to do them because only 20man will have them.

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Nobody's saying life should always be easy and fun, but games should

No, because if 20man mythic should be easy then the race (and any other rankings below it) would be meaningless and people would hate that.

As I said: people have a delusion they want everything easy but in reality: competition would not exist at all if it was easy.

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Video games aren't life pal. They were literally invented to be fun....

Absolutely not necessarily. This is strictly about hard mode. If 20man hard mode was easy then the race (and any other rankings below that) would be meaningless and it would ruin the competition and all the excitement people get from that.

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You can even zone out while having a challenge

You absolutely cannot, at the highest levels of competition. You are confusing the top 1,000 guilds with the top 50 guilds.

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Idk though, I can have pretty stressful work days on my raid days but sometimes they are the best ones since my brain is just incredibly focused.

People are just unaware how "masochistic" human nature is in reality. E.g. everyone has the delusion they want to sit on a couch all day and watch TV.

They hate it within a few days because humans are hardwired to have challenge and it's not necessarily consciously obvious that they need that.

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Never once cared who was the best

It doesn't matter what you claim you want, since countless of others do not want that. Also low-rank guilds are often hypocritical when they say "ranks don't matter" because the exact same guilds are celebrating for two hours in chat how are now "10th best in the realm instead of 100th best like last year!".

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If you go smaller than 20 the raids just don't have as epic of a feel, and mythic raiding should feel epic.

That argument doesn't stand in today's Blizzard design, because they extremely overuse the 5man format and its maps.

A 10man hard mode format with its own unique maps would be way more epic and grand scale than so much 5man.

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its pointless to design around race to world first when like 9 people watch it.

No; that's a fallacy. It has little to do with just the world first memery. It's also the small guilds that celebrate they are now 10th in their realm instead of 100th that definitely care about rankings and competition (even if they have not turned it into a literal job (they still love it)).

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and what will be the outcome?
1. mythic raiders wont be happy, as some people will leave the "pool" of potential mythic players to rather engage in this new activity
2. 10m raiders wont be happy bcs they still wont get the "regular" raids just with less people
3. if the difficulty wont be the same (which is imposible) mythic raiders wont be happy if the rewards are the same
4. if the rewards wont be the same 10m raiders wont be happy either
5. people who dont care about 10m pseudo-mythic raiding (probably VAST MAJORITY of playerbase, as vast majority dont even raid mythic) will not be happy bcs blizzard will waste time and resources on ANOTHER content most will never do...

so who will be happy, other than YOU PERSONALY and handful of likeminded people? seems like waste of time and work and potential content for others just to please few of you...

Those arguments are weak. If there are unique maps of 10man hardmode then even the 20man guilds would definitely make groups for them and some 5-man-only people would definitely have people for them now and even some new guilds will be created from scratch so they definitely will create more people actually playing.

The difficulty related arguments are void since it's even worse with 5man now; it's extremely overused and its rewards are extremely good; a 10man hard mode would balance that.

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Chill Nietzche; it's a video game, not a Sisyphean struggle

You have the delusion "it's only fun", but it's absolutely proven by players' own actions that is definitely for the challenge above all else in this case.

A hard mode 20man or 10man or 5man is meaningless for the world first race but also the lower rankings if anyone could just be first the first day.

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I do wonder though, would making Mythic 10-30 flex after the Hall of Fame closes be catastrophic? Oh it would be a balance hellscape but would the ease of access trade off make it worthwhile? I'd love to see them do the experiment for 1-2 tiers or maybe a full expac, with full disclaimers from the start that this is an experiment and if it doesn't work they are scraping it.

It's an experiment that has been done for years and it's not worth it. 10man and 25man coexisted in shared maps and devs never managed to balance it well (because it's mathematically impossible in most (almost all) boss designs) and people (in this very forum as well) were constantly having flamewars about which of the two had the most prestigious/hardest/coolest kills.

That is why I suggest 10man hard mode on its own unique maps; 5man has them; and it's overused for little reason.

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Even world first raider

That's just a lie/misleading(not every one of them says it), and it's an appeal to authority fallacy anyway. Come up with arguments yourself (and not "big guy X that I admire said it").

[Rageonit]

No, because if 20man mythic should be easy then the race (and any other rankings below it) would be meaningless and people would hate that.

The sooner the notion that the race is somehow important for the game dies, the better for everyone. It hasn't brought anything of value for the vast, vast majority of the players, and it has degenerated the game for many. Even Blizzard ackonwledged this after the 9.2 shitshow.

There is a fine line between "challenging" and "frustrating". You make it sound like struggling in a game is some kind of virtue, and it's not. If it's the challenge that we so desperately need, than I guess a +1000 wipes boss is ten times better than a +100 wipes boss, right? No, it's not. There's a point where the challenge turns into frustration, because in a PvE game tuned for the best of the best, there are very few winners. If you seek a challenge, the world has invented the proper answer ages ago, and it's called sports. Go compete against other players that seek the same challenge, and you can set the bar for eachother as high as it is humanly possible. You can do that in WoW, too - that's called PvP, and the value of the challenge presented there is much, much greater than in PvE, because you have to compete against a thinking being that can adapt to your strategy, whereas PvE is just training your muscle memory in a mundane task until you can beat the script. Tuning the script to be beaten by 0,01% of players is counter productive, because you create an environment in which the vast, vast majority of players will cross the line between challenging and frustrating before they are able to win. Even in a game where one seeks challenge, one has to feel the goal is attainable. That's why designing encounters that take over 300 pulls for the best of the best, running almost BiS gear, is stupid and defeats the purpose of the game.

[Keldion]

The archaic Mythic lockout system needs to go, otherwise I don't mind the current 20 player paradigm.

[Kallisto]

LOWER the amount of gear in game.

Right because lack of gear wasn't a major shit show at the start of the expansion.

*checks foruns" oh wait it was a major shit show obviously

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I do wonder though, would making Mythic 10-30 flex after the Hall of Fame closes be catastrophic? Oh it would be a balance hellscape but would the ease of access trade off make it worthwhile? I'd love to see them do the experiment for 1-2 tiers or maybe a full expac, with full disclaimers from the start that this is an experiment and if it doesn't work they are scraping it.

What would happen is "OK calculations show this boss is easiest with 15 people with these x, y, z specs. "

People will just optimize the fun out of it.

[Loveliest]

It's pointless to want a world race to be first, where people would not even know who is first and they would be constantly infighting online who had the coolest or hardest kill which was exactly what was happening in this very forum too when 10man and 25man coexisted in shared instances.

The race is pointless anyway. It's not official, does not reward anything ingame being first, not even an achi, we always have the same pointless debate about the head start.
They bearly put the effort in to do ANY scaling as it is. On jailer mechanics affected 10 players no matter your raid size. Maybe if everything is flex, they will bother instead of making it harder and harder for smaller guilds to exist.

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Mythic needs a 20M because this is a game with 38 individual specs and classes and you're lying to yourself if you don't think that poses a risk to its overall reception. Blizzard is moving away from homogenization, not towards it. 10M raiding is fundamentally at odds with WoW's current design direction.

You know, it does not need to anything. In guilds that care, they are gonna class stack. I guilds that don't, people will play what is fun for them.
Our guild used to raid 10m normal and then do hc until the end of the expansion. When mythic got introduced, it would mean normal, hc and then break. Long breaks means less money. Long breaks also means you realize you don't mind not playing WoW. Less subs.

Yeah, make a fixed size in the name of balance or fairness or whatever. But what do you prefer? have more people playing or less?
Nowadays if a Mythic guild survives more than 2 tiers it is impressive.

[Nymrohd]

What would happen is "OK calculations show this boss is easiest with 15 people with these x, y, z specs. "

People will just optimize the fun out of it.

Come on, that's really no excuse. Some people ALWAYS do that and will continue to do so in whatever scenario you hand them. Most will be HC guilds that will not have something to do. They will probably never get cutting edge but at least they will be able to clear the first half of the raid and more importantly, they will have some raid progression that gives them gear; for many Heroic guilds (mine included) Heroic just doesn't have much to offer after the first month or two. Oh we might farm some bosses for a specific drop or two if the skips help but most just move to M+ or alts.

[epigramx]

sooner the notion that the race is somehow important for the game dies, the better for everyone.

It's inevitable that you are wrong, since even the smallest guild is celebrating when their realm-rank raises.

People love saying competition doesn't matter: until they become better than others.

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The race is pointless anyway

The top 5 guilds are of little importance, but even the smallest guilds celebrate when their rank in their realm raises.

So people can pretend rankings don't matter all they want but they all care when their rank is up.

[Rageonit]

It's inevitable that you are wrong, since even the smallest guild is celebrating when their realm-rank raises.

Telling how you've only commented on a point that can be debated to no end, because there's no definite answer, and ignored everything else.
Want a challenge? Go compete againts the best players, in player versus player content. It's fair, it's self balancing, and the bar is always set by your opponent, not by a dev who arbitrarily decides that this boss should require this much DPS and this much healing, because that's his rough guesstimate.

[epigramx]

no excuse. Some people ALWAYS do that

The problem with that reasoning is that we specifically talk about hard mode only and not all difficulties. If you have a hard mode that is completely chaotic in terms of "who was the best" then you ruin the entire process of people ranking for it.

And it does not only affect the biggest guilds in the world by the way; e.g. plenty of realms had 10man and 25man guilds at the same time; it wasn't great to have constant infighting about which of the two top ~2,000 guilds was the best.

[Accendor]

Well yeah, retail could have faceroll raids as well, but I don't think that'd be fun. Especially when we've been conditioned to pull a boss 100+ times to kill it on mythic. One thing I'd like to get back is raid logging though. Was a lot easier to keep a roster going with not having to grind 20+ hours a week to be relevant for 15 hours of raiding.

Raidlogging should never ever happen again. It's literally the worst thing that can happen to the game.
Whatever they do, they need to prevent raidlogging, everything else is secondary.

[mrgreenthump]

Raidlogging should never ever happen again. It's literally the worst thing that can happen to the game.
Whatever they do, they need to prevent raidlogging, everything else is secondary.

I dunno, it's incredibly hard to have a casual guild when you have to do more stuff outside of the raid than in the raid. Maybe raid logging is an extreme scenario, but I would certainly welcome it over having to grind Korthia over getting incredibly strong conduits that some classes had.

[Relapses]

Honestly who even already cares about the race to world first? Do I have to say it again that balancing a game for 20-60 people when MILLIONS play it is just asinine at best.

Blizzard isn't balancing the game for the RWF (outside of the first few resets) but I'd say that they definitely care about all the free exposure their game gets from it. They aren't just going to throw that away.

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I kind of liked the idea of a downranked Epic 10man mode that was thrown around. As many of the Mythic mechanics as can work for the 10man version on a shared lockout with Mythic.

If you're asking for a 5th raid difficulty I'd suggest yeeting Normal from the equation first (that way we stay at four). And even then, I don't really see an "almost-Mythic" raid difficulty going over very well because it'd have to thread the line between Heroic and Mythic which is already pretty close. If the rewards aren't good enough it'll suffer the same fate as 10M did back in WotLK where it's really only ever used by larger raid groups to gear up. If the rewards are too good it'll have some pretty massive negative impacts on the existing Mythic raid scene.

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No, because 20man will have unique maps. People would want to do them because only 20man will have them.

Weak argument. We saw from WotLK to Cata that a eye-watering 80% of 20M guilds disappeared in a single tier. The same exact thing would happen in your suggestion, only Blizzard would be spending twice as much time developing raids. Large and small raid sizes cannot coexist in this game.

[justandulas]

The OP is right, but they should be unique dungeons. Not flex.

Make 5 man content, 10 man, 20 man, 40 man (maybe not that much) etc. that was part of the secret sauce of early wow. Group flexibility combined with variety, and gear that’s useful in every content scattered in them all.

Wow is too one size fits all now with little flexibility. There’s m+ and mythic raiding really. That’s about the entire endgame. I’d make smaller and middle sized group unique raid content a thing, and make it more fun and laid back than m+ And mythic raiding.

If they could do it in vanilla and tbc, why not now?

[TrollHunter3000]

No, because the maps will be unique in 20man. People would want to do them because only 20man would have them.

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No, because 20man will have unique maps. People would want to do them because only 20man will have them.

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No, because if 20man mythic should be easy then the race (and any other rankings below it) would be meaningless and people would hate that.

As I said: people have a delusion they want everything easy but in reality: competition would not exist at all if it was easy.

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Absolutely not necessarily. This is strictly about hard mode. If 20man hard mode was easy then the race (and any other rankings below that) would be meaningless and it would ruin the competition and all the excitement people get from that.

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You absolutely cannot, at the highest levels of competition. You are confusing the top 1,000 guilds with the top 50 guilds.

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People are just unaware how "masochistic" human nature is in reality. E.g. everyone has the delusion they want to sit on a couch all day and watch TV.

They hate it within a few days because humans are hardwired to have challenge and it's not necessarily consciously obvious that they need that.

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It doesn't matter what you claim you want, since countless of others do not want that. Also low-rank guilds are often hypocritical when they say "ranks don't matter" because the exact same guilds are celebrating for two hours in chat how are now "10th best in the realm instead of 100th best like last year!".

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That argument doesn't stand in today's Blizzard design, because they extremely overuse the 5man format and its maps.

A 10man hard mode format with its own unique maps would be way more epic and grand scale than so much 5man.

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No; that's a fallacy. It has little to do with just the world first memery. It's also the small guilds that celebrate they are now 10th in their realm instead of 100th that definitely care about rankings and competition (even if they have not turned it into a literal job (they still love it)).

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Those arguments are weak. If there are unique maps of 10man hardmode then even the 20man guilds would definitely make groups for them and some 5-man-only people would definitely have people for them now and even some new guilds will be created from scratch so they definitely will create more people actually playing.

The difficulty related arguments are void since it's even worse with 5man now; it's extremely overused and its rewards are extremely good; a 10man hard mode would balance that.

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You have the delusion "it's only fun", but it's absolutely proven by players' own actions that is definitely for the challenge above all else in this case.

A hard mode 20man or 10man or 5man is meaningless for the world first race but also the lower rankings if anyone could just be first the first day.

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It's an experiment that has been done for years and it's not worth it. 10man and 25man coexisted in shared maps and devs never managed to balance it well (because it's mathematically impossible in most (almost all) boss designs) and people (in this very forum as well) were constantly having flamewars about which of the two had the most prestigious/hardest/coolest kills.

That is why I suggest 10man hard mode on its own unique maps; 5man has them; and it's overused for little reason.

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That's just a lie/misleading(not every one of them says it), and it's an appeal to authority fallacy anyway. Come up with arguments yourself (and not "big guy X that I admire said it").

So you're really going to sit there and tell me literally no one is going to choose to just do 10 man content rather than 20 man because it's easier to get 10 people together? Isn't that literally your entire fucking argument for why they should create unique 10 man content lmao. Holy fuck you're stupid.

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Raidlogging should never ever happen again. It's literally the worst thing that can happen to the game.
Whatever they do, they need to prevent raidlogging, everything else is secondary.

Why? I think the ability to raid log, if one chooses, helps keep more people sticking around for raids. Raiding is the only enjoyable part of the game for me. Fuck farming dailies, badges, azerite, torghast or whatever the fuck else. Technically, all optional, but if you wanted to actually be in a competitive guild then it wasn't.