Should raiding be easier across all difficulties?

[Celement]

I always enjoyed playing at the higher levels of wow though I noticed a lot of bosses are being released in arguably broken states then nerfed into being reasonably completable.

I am not talking a massive tuning down across the board but something more like mop level difficulty. Rather then slowly nerfing down encounters.

[Loveliest]

Yes. Things should be consistent and balanced. A guild that was capable of killing a hc boss in x amount of time one expansion should be able to do the same next expansion. Making things harder / take longer makes people quit.

[Nymrohd]

Imo Mythic should remain as hard. Normal has varied but is trending harder and a bit out of reach of friends and family groups so maybe it should become a bit easier. I think Heroic should be adjusted somehow to have some granularity

[Accendor]

Sepulcher was completely overtuned across the board. Ignoring that, in general heroic is too easy and mythic is too hard in comparison.

[Progenitor Aquarius]

I believe so. We play video games for entertainment, not to suffer and wipe for hours due to a lack of new content that keeps us subscribed. It must be challenging enough to be pleasant and not tiresome.

[slime]

If I took your question literally, I'd say no. LFR is already very easy it needs no nerf. The different difficulties are the answer to your question. I feel LFR > Normal is fine. Heroic gets more, 'you better pay attention and react quicker', and then Mythic is the top level of that type of growth.

[grandgato]

Mythic and LFR are fine I think. Heroic could be a little more accessible, especially the earlier bosses.

Normal really needs to be more accessible across the board.

1.) Easier to put groups together
2.) Tuned easy enough so players don't feel like they have to excessively screen people
3.) Mechanics simplified so you aren't required to watch a 10-15 min video per boss to not be a detriment to your raid group.


The risk/reward/effort are severely out of balance when compared with the mythic + counterpoint.

[Lochton]

I always enjoyed playing at the higher levels of wow though I noticed a lot of bosses are being released in arguably broken states then nerfed into being reasonably completable.

I am not talking a massive tuning down across the board but something more like mop level difficulty. Rather then slowly nerfing down encounters.

Nah, it is fine as it is. I would like a disconnection between addons and raid but I feel that if we were to do so, we'll just go back to the more dull setup.

[Orwell7]

We need a "solo" raid -> LFR
A friends/family/pug difficulty -> Normal
A progress difficulty -> HC/Mythic

However the reward structure needs to be changed. We don't need power upgrades within a tier like this. It hurth both pve and pvp.

Raids should have multiple wings, not just in LFR, but with actual HC/Mythic raids.
Lockouts should be for those only, not the whole instance.
Heroic+ should be a thing with affixes like we have now in S4 raids.
These wings should be spammable, just like M+ now (1 wing could be 3-4 bosses with trash, only finishing the wing gets you loot)

Heroic (and hc+) should reward Mythic-ilvl in the Vault, just like M+ drops lower ilvl than the respective Vault option.

High-level HC+ can be harder numbers-wise than Mythic, but tuning this shouldn't be a priority, regular Mythic should be the pinnacle of raiding difficulty.
And yes, mythic-only phases and mythic-only bosses, please.

Killing Mythic bosses should reward dinars and maybe upgrade items for bad luck protection, killing 2 (3?) resets worth of mythic bosses should reward you with your bis trinket, weapon or something like that.

[hulkgor]

Nah, i don't think so, as a whole.

That said, they sometimes get the tuning wrong. Sanctum of Domination was an extremely easy raid tier, opposed to Sepulcher which was one of the hardest ones.

There is a middle ground between those. No one wants another Emerald Nightmare which was disappointingly easy at the time, with the easiest end boss ever, i think.

[munkeyinorbit]

We need a "solo" raid -> LFR
A friends/family/pug difficulty -> Normal
A progress difficulty -> HC/Mythic

However the reward structure needs to be changed. We don't need power upgrades within a tier like this. It hurth both pve and pvp.

Raids should have multiple wings, not just in LFR, but with actual HC/Mythic raids.
Lockouts should be for those only, not the whole instance.
Heroic+ should be a thing with affixes like we have now in S4 raids.
These wings should be spammable, just like M+ now (1 wing could be 3-4 bosses with trash, only finishing the wing gets you loot)

Heroic (and hc+) should reward Mythic-ilvl in the Vault, just like M+ drops lower ilvl than the respective Vault option.

High-level HC+ can be harder numbers-wise than Mythic, but tuning this shouldn't be a priority, regular Mythic should be the pinnacle of raiding difficulty.
And yes, mythic-only phases and mythic-only bosses, please.

Killing Mythic bosses should reward dinars and maybe upgrade items for bad luck protection, killing 2 (3?) resets worth of mythic bosses should reward you with your bis trinket, weapon or something like that.

I like the sound of splitting up the wings of a raid for non mythic raids. Makes the raids more accessible. Allows a player to target a wing instead of having to sit through 8 bosses to get to the 9th with your loot.

Make it that you can't go for the end boss unless you clear the other wings (for a time) or release the whole raid AND with the wings released on the LFR schedule so after 6 weeks you can go straight to end boss.

Because of the ease of mythic+ gear, I see nothing wrong with players being able to *spam* the wings.

[Nymrohd]

The way I see it we should have normal and LFR be about the same; an easy setting that we can take friends and family who are hopeless at this game also used for matchmaking. Mythic works pretty well imo and doesn't need to be touched. Maybe if Blizzard wanted to help the Race they could do a tournament realm but that would completely transform it (I'd still love to see it as an experiment even if for just one tier).

Then I would consider even if for just one season to have a different take on Heroic. Start it easier, harder enough from normal that people realize they need to pay attention but significantly far from Mythic. Then add some concept on top of it to let you scale the difficulty of Heroic. NOt just simply number scaling but something closer to affixes. Perhaps add 3 achievements per boss instead of just 1 and make a challenge mode where each achievement completed while on Heroic increases the amount of loot (not the quality) at the end of the run (and if you do them all you get Cataclysm levels of "It's raining gear"). Or have a way to add a loosely tuned version of a Mythic mechanic for that week. Or just have rotating challenges that need to be completed each week. Just make Heroic feel fresh. I feel guilds that do normal often cannot do much more than that. Guilds that do Mythic will usually take a while to clear it. But in the middle difficulty of Heroic there is a large number of guilds that clear it fast but can never progress much into Mythic (either due to skill or organization) and are then stuck on farm (or really, just do fast clears in one night and then go back to doing M+ which is more rewarding).

[Ashana Darkmoon]

There are so many different levers and aspects to difficulty that it could mean a lot of different things.

Personally I don't think DPS or healing requirements should be lowered, I think there's actually a decent argument for them to be increased (in heroic and mythic). Especially healing actually, it is way too boring in most content.

Mechanics are a different issue. I think in this day and age the vast majority of mechanics on a boss should be something you can react to because of incredibly obvious visuals without having to know stuff in advance. A 30 second explanation and a couple symbols on the floor should be the most anyone needs to figure stuff out in heroic and lower if they are paying attention to visual mechanics and doing good DPS.

And in mythic there should be virtually no mechanics where one person can wipe the raid, no mechanics where weak auras are necessary to automate mechanics, etc.

[Utrrabbit]

I always enjoyed playing at the higher levels of wow though I noticed a lot of bosses are being released in arguably broken states then nerfed into being reasonably completable.

I am not talking a massive tuning down across the board but something more like mop level difficulty. Rather then slowly nerfing down encounters.

No. Difficulties should be a significate increase in difficulty. If anything it was way to easy. Both lfr (shouldn't even be considering a raid) and normal are baby mode, heroic is not even remotely difficult. Mythic is the only difficult mode.

If anything both normal and herouc should be made harder to be brought closer to mythic so the jump isnt so high.

- - - Updated - - -

Mythic and LFR are fine I think. Heroic could be a little more accessible, especially the earlier bosses.

Normal really needs to be more accessible across the board.

1.) Easier to put groups together
2.) Tuned easy enough so players don't feel like they have to excessively screen people
3.) Mechanics simplified so you aren't required to watch a 10-15 min video per boss to not be a detriment to your raid group.


The risk/reward/effort are severely out of balance when compared with the mythic + counterpoint.

Both normal and heroic are already super easy and basically the same difficulty. If anything, normal can stay the same and heroic needs a 50% increase in difficulty to bring it closer to mythic.

[VinceVega]

No. Making Mythic viable for the standart hero guild you have to nerf it into the ground. In the end helping no one just taking content away fromt he topend to slightly above middle who kill a few bosses in Mythic.
And in turn making normal completly useless. It allready is laughabl easy in a way that any guild that even remotly reads any tactics can kill everything while being drunk.
Heroic only gets more difficult in the end. While Anduin etc being an outliner in difficulty.

Making EVERYTHING easier just because one raid was a bit more difficult (sepulcher) helps no one and makes overall content worse taking some people out of the game because it was their content ( no matte how mayn people actually finish said content ) or making it boring or impossibel for others like normal guilds who suddenly nearly breeze through normal but cannot clear heroic.

TLDR: Difficulty of raids is fine. One outliner doesn't make a rule.

[Tyrathius]

Honestly I think they should drop the Normal/Heroic/Mythic model in favor of something more akin to M+ -Scalable difficulty levels that increase infinitely to a point where the dungeon becomes mathematically impossible.

Four difficulties (really three) is too few -You end up in an awkward situation where Normal and Heroic are too hard for casuals but not rewarding enough for experienced players.

[Nymrohd]

Honestly I think they should drop the Normal/Heroic/Mythic model in favor of something more akin to M+ -Scalable difficulty levels that increase infinitely to a point where the dungeon becomes mathematically impossible.

Four difficulties (really three) is too few -You end up in an awkward situation where Normal and Heroic are too hard for casuals but not rewarding enough for experienced players.

Keep the low end separate and available with matchmaking (So combine Normal and LFR). Keep the high end and keep it brutally hard (Mythic as is in Sepulcher). Take Heroic and find a way to make it scalable so it covers a wider range of difficulty (starting from just above Normal, ending at just below Mythic).

[Relapses]

No. Mythic raiding does not need high participation nor does it need to be nerfed. There's Heroic raiding for the people who want to raid but also do not want to commit to actually being good at the game. We also have M+ for accessible endgame rewards.

The current raid paradigm has worked for going-on five expansions and there is absolutely no need for Blizzard to reinvent the wheel at this point.

[kranur]

Yes. Even for the world first people, 2-3 weeks of non-stop raiding and billions of gold spent is just too much lol.

Also, tuning content for <1% of the people is pretty dumb.

[djoac]

Normal needs to be toned down, not to LFR level though, but it doesn't feel 'Normal'

Heroic needs to be harder to prepare you for mythic, or kept the same i guess

Mythic needs to be impossible to down first boss with pugs, and Mythic should never be nerfed ever from its first iteration, walls should stay walls

sorry but Mythic needs to be a team effort, Heroic needs 1-shot mechanics so you prepare for Mythic

overall im a masochist