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

[Rageonit]

People often have the delusion life should only be easy and fun

Why would you even mix up life with games? Nobody's saying life should always be easy and fun, but games should - because we play them to forget about the bitch that's life. Or are you trying to say playing games is your whole life?

[Sting]

Why would you even mix up life with games? Nobody's saying life should always be easy and fun, but games should - because we play them to forget about the bitch that's life. Or are you trying to say playing games is your whole life?

You can play to zone out, other people enjoy taking on a challenge. There is room for both in this game.

[Rageonit]

You can play to zone out, other people enjoy taking on a challenge. There is room for both in this game.

That's not what he's saying, though. You can even zone out while having a challenge, those things are not mutually exclusive, but why compare it to life and pretend we need it difficult because we're "hardwired to struggle"? I mean, if you don't have any challenges in your real life, than maybe it's true, but extending your situation on other players is not fair.

Don't get me wrong, I do myself enjoy a good challenge, but the reasoning seems a bit naive. Go tell the guy who logs on after a stressful day that he should have it difficult, because games ain't made to make it fun and easy for him.

EDIT: Oh, and he can be a Mythic raider too - and he has every right to believe that a 100+ pulls boss is a goddamn waste of time (because it is). Instead, he has to acknowledge that he's wrong, because life shouldn't be easy and he needs a bigger challenge? Cool.

[TbouncerT]

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

fun is also subjective, pal. so hard/challenge can be fun for someone, while casual easy stuff can be fun for another.

[Sting]

That's not what he's saying, though. You can even zone out while having a challenge, those things are not mutually exclusive, but why compare it to life and pretend we need it difficult because we're "hardwired to struggle"? I mean, if you don't have any challenges in your real life, than maybe it's true, but extending your situation on other players is not fair.

Don't get me wrong, I do myself enjoy a good challenge, but the reasoning seems a bit naive. Go tell the guy who logs on after a stressful day that he should have it difficult, because games ain't made to make it fun and easy for him.

The whole life analogy is pretty weak, that's true. 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. Again, player choice is key here.

Anyway, back on topic, I do think the hardest content should be fixed at a single group size, but having the different sizes for different raids that we had with vanilla and TBC was great design and we lost some of that magic going into WotLK with the same bosses being rebalanced for different raid sizes.
I think retail has just moved on way beyond just adding different smaller raids that are less difficult, there isn't the budget to keep cranking out those instances alongside the "full" raids and the occasional dungeon.

[TbouncerT]

Whatever makes more raiding more accessible is what needs to happen. If this means lowering the barrier to entry great, if this means making the fights less dark souls and more WoTLK then by all means. Raiding has been dying and will continue to do so until some drastic steps are taken. I would rather have a more inclusive end game paradigm then one that is exclusionary since people have shown they wont look for better guilds when friends stop playing, they will just quit themselves.

I wont raid because i only want to play in 45 min to 1 hour and a half segments which is perfect for mythic plus with no real commitment required since i pugged KSM every single season this expansion.

Raiding has gotten more accessible than ever. The fact that you only want to play for up to 1.5 hours (which is totally fine) but it is not their fault. This is a good spot for M+, since you can get pretty awesome loot depending on if you can get to at least a 10-15 in that timeframe (which you mentioned). Most of these issues are community-created rather than on Blizzard. Most people can be content with Normal/Heroic with a dab of M+ in there to get the challenge they need. This Mythic Raiding is just more ridiculous epeen ego booster than anything. Not everyone needs to do mythic raiding (or if you do, find a dang community/guild that does it), most of the time Normal/Heroic gets to be fun and gets the point/story across.

[jeezusisacasual]

Raiding has gotten more accessible than ever. The fact that you only want to play for up to 1.5 hours (which is totally fine) but it is not their fault. This is a good spot for M+, since you can get pretty awesome loot depending on if you can get to at least a 10-15 in that timeframe (which you mentioned). Most of these issues are community-created rather than on Blizzard. Most people can be content with Normal/Heroic with a dab of M+ in there to get the challenge they need. This Mythic Raiding is just more ridiculous epeen ego booster than anything. Not everyone needs to do mythic raiding (or if you do, find a dang community/guild that does it), most of the time Normal/Heroic gets to be fun and gets the point/story across.

Yea i get KSM every season, i just finished this seasons earlier today with a 17 Gambit. But the point being is that now i am done until Dragonflight which is fine but i was just spelling out problems with raiding that is not found in FF14 or Lost Ark which handle the time commitment far more and to me it appears the 3 hour blocks is a bit outdated this is not like a lame dungeon and dragons game with visuals. If they could make WoW more like those games and less like MMO's in the early 2010s or earlier the better imo, pick up and play not long form etc.

That being said i think MMO's might not be for me anymore which again would be fine.

[Rtrain]

Even back in the 10/25man raid days, difficulty could vary based upon size either way. Benefits of a 25man raid were having access to any class/spec for buffs/utility/damage (and a certain amount of stacking) and role proportion flexibility that made certain encounters much easier than 10man, but room size restrictions (i.e. the ability to spread out) and having to coordinate more people would make some encounters much harder than the 10man versions. I did both 10H/25H back during Cata with different guilds and found that some 10man fights were easier than 25man, and vice versa. Nothing wrong with things being like that, it's something you can't really balance/tune around beyond a certain point. Get them roughly equal and call it a day, it doesn't have to be complicated.

I suppose that's really what it comes down to in the end: Blizz has a raging hard-on for constantly amping up the damage and difficulty of the highest difficulty of content, which requires them to fix the raid size as well as spend a lot of time balancing and tuning with this in mind. Essentially, they're making their lives harder and need to spend more time on content that has an increasingly shrinking crowd due to their design philosophy. If they'd ease up on their tuning, their options open up greatly in terms of attracting more people to the content, as well as allowing for more freedom of design.

One aspect of WoW that seems to have been forgotten is that the game was the most casual MMO when it came on the scene, which drew in a lot of existing MMO players that thought the others were too hardcore into WoW. Furthermore, it allowed their potential audience to greatly expand because it was just that more accessible. Fast forward to today: can anyone say with a straight face that WoW is the most casual and accessible MMO out there? Hell no. In fact, I'd go so far is that they try to tune some of their content towards being the most hardercore and restrictive, the complete opposite of what their original goals were. While there's many more direct and indirect ways Blizz designs/philosophizes the game that tie into this point, I think the overall issue is that the current direction of the game is being envisioned by a person or people who are way too niche in their mindset.

Personally, I'd love to see 10man raiding come back again as mythic in parallel with 20man mythic raiding (assuming no other changes to mythic occur, otherwise there's other changes done to mythic in general). The only difference between the two should be their sizes and some adjustments due to raid size differences... other than that, just leave it alone and don't try to balance them to be always equal. Despite all my years clearing every raid in the game on the hardest difficulties at the time, I'd say the introduction of mythic raiding was my least favorite due to how it's designed, balanced, and implemented. 10man has always been my favorite for a variety of reasons, with 40man coming in second, 25man in third. In essence, the order is influenced by how much of a pain in the butt it is to organize the different raids (despite having way more bodies required for 40 and 25, the tuning of these raids is nowhere near as tight as a 20man mythic currently is), but I've always liked the more tight-knit group sizes.

I raided in a top 20 world guild(25m) and casually raided on alts in 10m(our 10 man was top 10 in the US at one point in ToT) through-out mop. Plenty of people claimed some 10m versions of the boss were more difficult, I just always found in 25m you were carrying a good portion of your roster even at our level. In 10m it was just much easier to carry that portion of your roster, so I always found it easier. Honestly, I think it's fine if a few 10m fights are more difficult because of logistics, because the majority of the time the 20m encounters will be more difficult.

[Beefhammer]

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?

Never once cared who was the best, world first, or server first. Just cared about my group doing well.

[Palapop]

Or maybe remove some difficulties?

Like, make normal and hc dungeons. and HC+. why do we need mythic AND mythic+ dungeons?

LOWER the amount of gear in game.

Make HC + dungeons lock your ilvl just as they did with CMs and disable all tier set bonuses and/or "legendary" items.

[garicasha]

I like it the way it is, heroic raiding being flexible from 10-30 is very forgiving.

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

Really hard raids under 20 people, especially as low as 10, make composition super important. Raid encounters are incredibly hard these days because the players...well hell I've grown old with this game, we've got 15+ years experience! But yah when the raid encounters are incredibly hard as a baseline then you start getting in to positions where Boss X is a 150 wipe boss if you have classes 1, 2, and 3 but a 300-wipe boss if you don't.

[Biomega]

Or maybe remove some difficulties?

Like, make normal and hc dungeons. and HC+. why do we need mythic AND mythic+ dungeons?

Honestly, just make dungeons ONLY be M+ and call it something else like idk Dungeon+.

Retune things so 1-4 is normal-mode easy, 5-10 is for people who like heroic-ish content, 11-15 is for people who like mythic-ish content, and 15+ is for the pushers. Or whatever, numbers are just illustrative. You can even make it so 1-10 aren't on a timer at all, to take pressure off the lower tiers.

Drop the whole keystone nonsense, and just have a drop-down menu at the font to select what you want to do. 1-14 can be freebies, and from then you have to beat timers to unlock the higher levels. If you're worried people will only be doing the same key, make it so you have a rotating bonus thing that changes every dungeon and gives you extra currency or whatever at the end - but in reality we're pretty much already at a point where people WANT to rotate for their rating and spamming is only done for valor or very specific items at the start of the season (and the valor thing is toxic anyway and should be changed).

Presto chango, you no longer need to faff about with normal, heroic, m+ dungeons and have a single system with a numeric scale that can adapt to what you want to play.

It's not as easy for raiding, though. IDK if the normal/heroic/mythic system has outlived its usefulness or not, or how horizontal segmentation should work there. Normal feels a bit weird right now, as does LFR. I have no good answer.

[Palapop]

Honestly, just make dungeons ONLY be M+ and call it something else like idk Dungeon+.

Retune things so 1-4 is normal-mode easy, 5-10 is for people who like heroic-ish content, 11-15 is for people who like mythic-ish content, and 15+ is for the pushers. Or whatever, numbers are just illustrative. You can even make it so 1-10 aren't on a timer at all, to take pressure off the lower tiers.

Drop the whole keystone nonsense, and just have a drop-down menu at the font to select what you want to do. 1-14 can be freebies, and from then you have to beat timers to unlock the higher levels. If you're worried people will only be doing the same key, make it so you have a rotating bonus thing that changes every dungeon and gives you extra currency or whatever at the end - but in reality we're pretty much already at a point where people WANT to rotate for their rating and spamming is only done for valor or very specific items at the start of the season (and the valor thing is toxic anyway and should be changed).

Presto chango, you no longer need to faff about with normal, heroic, m+ dungeons and have a single system with a numeric scale that can adapt to what you want to play.

It's not as easy for raiding, though. IDK if the normal/heroic/mythic system has outlived its usefulness or not, or how horizontal segmentation should work there. Normal feels a bit weird right now, as does LFR. I have no good answer.

And how would people level in instances?

I semi-agree with you.

I still believe that normal/hc dungeons should exist. And then add just "Dun+" type of thing where you can choose the difficulty and your gear scales down (just as in CM).


I COMPLETELY agree with keystone system. Been saying it for quite some time, actually.
M+ duns are extremely punishing now. Heard MANY stories where some randomly would purposely leave the group right after someone inserts their key.

Then they have to repeat everything again, but on lower difficulty.
And they won't get the same key once they bring the level back up. Which is extremely punishing.

I really don't understand why more people don't talk about this issue?!

About raids- I'm fine with having just 1 raid difficulty. BUUUUUT I guess that would be too easy for some and tooooooo hard for others.

So, instead, keep normal and HC only. With HC being overbuffed AF. And as time passes, you buff players with 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30...% dmg/healing done. And nerf bosses at the same time with -5, -10, -15, -20, -25, -30....% dmg/healing done and HP overall.

[ZazuuPriest]

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?

its pointless to design around race to world first when like 9 people watch it. More people watch 13 year old anime nerds play genshin at any given time

[RobertMugabe]

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.

It's probably the other way around. The fact that you have to attempt a boss 100+ times could be the reason why people actually don't think mythic raiding is fun and that's why nobody plays this game mode anyways.

[Lolites]

It's strictly about unique new maps for 10man.

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...

[Nymrohd]

Honestly feel that Mythic raiding is one of the few things in this game that is largely fine as it is? Only thing it needs is a little help with some restrictions loosened up to make it less miserable for the recruitment officers. We have cross-faction, add cross-realm, maybe move achievements and everything to communities so those who care are not limited and you'd increase participation. Sepulcher was a bit of a fluke but they responded with nerfs fast enough.

[Venziir]

People often have the delusion life should only be easy and fun; life must never be hard because it is a "sin"; we must always strive to make it easier and more fun and more flawless without any difficulty because that's always superior supposedly.
That's a blatant case of cognitive dissonance in this case (i.e. a contradiction of sentiment); you want to go through the hardest raiding in the game which is explicitly hard and painful; at the same time you proclaim you want it painless.
Since you're not a pathological masochist: you do it because you want it hard, because humans are hardwired to struggle, and in that frame of thought they care about rankings that are fair because they rank their painful work.

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

[Razorice]

So rather than trying to incentivize 20M content your solution is to ensure everybody is equally miserable with 10M content?

Sorry friend, take off the Cata/MoP nostalgia goggles. 10M Heroic raiding is not coming back and it is not the savior of raiding you're implying here.

- - - Updated - - -



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.

Why'd you have to shatter my hopes and dreams in such brutal fashion? I just want to Raid, man!!!

[Nymrohd]

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.

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.