4th raid difficulty, Easy Mode, should it happen?

[Xjev]

That is a terrble reality of how low the skillbase has sunk.

Skillbase is not an issue, people can adopt and learn. The think which has changed is mindset of players, instead of thinking about downing bosses and challenges etc all ppl nowadays think is the ilvl numbers. Game and goal of mass has become all about these numbers which I think is very boring.

[anaxie]

I have read over all of this and need to ask one question: Why do care?
This topic doesnt effect you at 532 ilevel so why are you all up in it?
If "casuals" or "lesser" raiders want a easier mode than normals or want normals to be a bit easier like FL and DS were, whats the big deal? You clear normals first week and then do Heroics for the rest of the expac... it effects you not at all.

Well... it will effect you once the numbers keep dropping and you dont have a game to play anymore because less than 1% of the WoW pop is at your level of progression... but lets not talk about that... lets keep pretending that your a god and those lesser beings mean nothing.
The fact is you wouldnt have a game to play without the 99% of others and many of those would like normals to be more like they were.



So?
Again why and how does this effect you? Stay up on your high horse bro... everyone thinks your cool and you can sit in Org on a rare mount with your shiny 535ilevel heroic gear and look down your nose at the lesser scrubs... Im sure it does wonders for your self esteem. It still has no place in this discussion.



Not to beat a dead horse but: So?

The fact is, without that low skillbase customer, you wont have a game... so instead of being a insulting prick, how about realize that in the real world games are made to make money, 50 thousand raiders out of a 10million sub base do not dictate policy or how much money Blizz makes...
The mindless masses you are so ready to insult and browbeat are the ones that carry this game for you to puff up your pride with... know that!
The next time you feel the need to put everyone not at you play level down (prob in the next 5 mins in response to this post...) try and understand that you need us... we dont need you at all and neither does Blizz.

It most certainly does affect me. I'd like newer players to be asked to gain some level of skill. Recruitment never ends.
I personally try to improve the skillbase among my spec. Take a look at the Paladin forums sometime doubt you miss my thread.

You also sound mad, I'm going to prescribe you some Chill-Out

[btlcryct]

Send one toon in to die over and over to ramp up buff... get rest of the group in to ROFstomp the boss with 7-8 stacks...move on to the next boss... So in essesnce normal mode would be LFR easy with normal mode loot drops, you would not need to learn the mechanics and everyone will be on heroic content in no time and totaly stone walled due to not learning how to do it on normal properly!

No ...just NO!

Easy solution is the boss has to be engaged for 2 minutes for a stack to be added. No one toon will survive alone for 2 minutes against any raid boss.

[Magner]

Definitely dont think this should happen..

[anaxie]

Skillbase is not an issue, people can adopt and learn. The think which has changed is mindset of players, instead of thinking about downing bosses and challenges etc all ppl nowadays think is the ilvl numbers. Game and goal of mass has become all about these numbers which I think is very boring.

What are you talking about. Lowbar skill is the issue.

[btlcryct]

It would create another problem. You said 6 stacks of buff - that's 60% more power to you. Even your super casual guild would probably clear raid instance in one month.

Scale it down. Make each stack 5%. Or make each stack scale. 1st stack is 10%, 2nd is 8%, 3rd is 5%, 4th is 3%, etc.

[Nobleshield]

I do agree there should only be one difficulty... And it should be around the level of normal, pre-nerf Dragon Soul.

[btlcryct]

Send one toon in to die over and over to ramp up buff... get rest of the group in to ROFstomp the boss with 7-8 stacks...move on to the next boss... So in essesnce normal mode would be LFR easy with normal mode loot drops, you would not need to learn the mechanics and everyone will be on heroic content in no time and totaly stone walled due to not learning how to do it on normal properly!

No ...just NO!

Easy solution. Boss has to be actively engaged in combat for 2 minutes to gain a stack, just like LFR has a time limit. No one can solo a raid boss for 2 minutes. Not in a casual guild anyways.

[ComputerNerd]

LFR is aimed at players with other time commitments.
The fact that it is easier is questionable, somewhat splitting the community on what its actual purpose was.
Its intent was not to be an easy mode, but that being a consequence instead.
A lower difficulty is not required.

And it most certainly shouldn't have its own loot lockout.

[HeedmySpeed]

I like how even the LFR huggers are saying "no" to this idea.

Stop pushing players into raiding. You only learn to love it when you actually feel accomplished by a kill.
That's why LFR fails to keep players interested. Even though some players who have no chance of doing a real raid (or pretend they do) LFR is only what.. 1 hour long? Per week?

Don't trivialize raiding and add something else to the game.

[Dole4011]

5.3 will hit and a lot of guilds that are at a brick wall should be able to make some more progress with 16 ilvl upgrades per week from spending 1k valor.

Ofc, a lot of the guilds that are stuck don't take full advantage of all the options at their disposal anyway. And some mechanics need to be dealt with properly as opposed to brute forced. /shrug

At any rate, I do feel the OP's argument. Personally, I have enjoyed the tuning. While I'm not an amazing player, I am above average, and I can see why making normal mode a little more accommodating might encourage more people to tackle the content. There would be unintended consequences if it went that route, and I don't really know if it'd be worth it or not. At some point though, people are going to hit a wall if any of the content is relatively difficult; that's just the nature of the beast.

[notorious98]

Isn't LFR practically an "easy" mode?

Yes. In fact, a more practical approach would be to implement a 10 man LFR mode for the smaller casual guilds. That way they can still run 10 man LFR with a group of guildies and not be shoved in with 15 other people who could ruin the experience they'd like to have in a more secluded atmosphere.

[anaxie]

I do agree there should only be one difficulty... And it should be around the level of normal, pre-nerf Dragon Soul.

Considering the amount of guilds that did 8/8HC DS that can hardly kill a heroic boss now. Ima go ahead and say that would be a nail in the coffin.

[Deleted]

I've mentioned something like this to my guild, but had a different solution. My guild has about 300 toons, but only 10-11 want to raid. Several of us have gone through several guilds together, while picking up a few new people along the way to get to where we are now. Our youngest raider is 34 (with a 5 year old and a 1 year old) and our oldest is a 67 year old with a terminally ill husband who plays WoW to escape for a while from the things going on her real life, while still being available for her husband. So given real life happenings, we are the definition of casual. We raid 1 night a week for 3 hours, but do it to have fun as a guild run. We're never going to do heroic, and guessing most that fall into our category never will either. So my solution? Add the determination buff to normal, only normal mode. We've been stuck on Elegon/1st boss in HoF for 4 weeks or so. We've gotten to the point where we:

-Kick people out of the raid that are underperforming in order to make progress. But this defeats the purpose of running with friends if you now need to alienate some. One of these is the 67 year woman, and no one wants to kick their Grandma to the curb.
-Keep banging our heads.
-OR-
-We give up raiding as a guild. Not very casual/social/friend friendly.

By adding the determination buff to normal, it allows the heroic raiders to keep their prestige (they blow through normal in 1-2 weeks anyways to get progressing in heroic), while allowing normal/casual players to eventually advance at a pace suited for their skill. Beat Elegon with no buff, great for you! Can't quite get it? Well, you will eventually be able to clear it with friends, just may need 5 or 6 stacks of a buff.

This also would help Blizzard out by not needing to make an "above LFR but below current normal" version of the raid. It would allow normal to scale, by boss, on the skill level of the guild.

To me, problem solved.

In my opinion the solution to the problem would probably be to bring back the wrath raiding model. 10 man normal mode as the casual easy social mode /beer league mode and 25 man for people who want a challenge.

[Deleted]

Must or bad players won't have anything social to to.

[Deleted]

I like how even the LFR huggers are saying "no" to this idea.

Stop pushing players into raiding. You only learn to love it when you actually feel accomplished by a kill.
That's why LFR fails to keep players interested. Even though some players who have no chance of doing a real raid (or pretend they do) LFR is only what.. 1 hour long? Per week?

Don't trivialize raiding and add something else to the game.

I love the way you put it

[Deleted]

Everyone knows that Blizzard releases a raid, makes normal mode semi-difficult, then nerfs the raid by 10-20% at the next tier, so casuals and less experienced guilds can pug/run them. But how about, instead of doing this nerf, Blizzard releases a fourth raid difficulty alongside there raids, an easy mode.

Easy mode will essentially be the instance after its nerfed 20%, but released alongside normal and heroic. This ensures two things:
1) Raids don't have to be nerfed
2) Pugs can happen as the raid is relevant.

The gear could be in between LFR and Normal gear. The difficulty will be above LFR and below Normal (Obv). It is pretty much normal mode, but you can do it with worse gear/slightly less coordination.

I can't see what problem people would have with this, as it takes almost no time to implement. TBH, I miss the days of Wrath pugging the first half of Uld and ICC. Same thing doesn't happen now a days with ToT, or even MSV. Pugs are there, but they are rarer. There needs to be a middle ground for people who legitimately don't have enough time to follow a raid schedule, but wan't more to raiding than the botfest that is LFR.

Let me start by saying that I disagree that any idea/solution for getting more people to raid is to make raids easier.
Imo people need to be trained to become able to do normal raids, instead of making said normal raids easier.
Making raids easier only results in subsequent raid instances needing to be easier or people who can only do these easy raids are convinced that they are not able to raid until a raid has been nerfed by XX%.
On the other hand, improving people's play will allow more people to roll into normal raiding, there will be less of a need to nerf raid instances, and it will help feed guilds with a good pool of potential new raiders to recruit from.

Back in the days of Wrath, there was no LFR. They introduced hard/heroic modes for the "better" raiders. Everyone else who wanted to raid had to do it in normal mode. For the beginners there were the first bosses that were easy, and the more advanced players would be able to progress further into the raids.
If players weren't skilled enough to be able to raid normal modes, they either didn't or they got carried.
Nowadays, there is LFR for those people. They can just join a "raid",press random buttons, see the content and have access to some loot.

There needs to be a middle ground for people who legitimately don't have enough time to follow a raid schedule, but wan't more to raiding than the botfest that is LFR.

This middle ground exists, it is what MSV/HoF/ToeS are right now. People pug it, some guilds are still progressing through it with the nerfs in place, people are gearing up alts through those raids.

IMO LFR is too easy. Forget for a second that it often feels mandatory for raiders, to gear up alts/get set bonusses faster, to do them for VP or for whatever reason.
Imagine (your are Blizzard and) you want to majority of "raiders" to be doing normal modes. (I might be totally wrong on this and they want the majority for be LFR raiders instead)
In order for more people to be able to join the ranks of normal mode raiders players need to be trained. They need to learn how to play their class, learn about boss abilities and learn/practice to deal with these abilities. Instead of teaching players about raiding, what does LFR do? It teaches players that you do not have to care about boss abilities, it teaches players that it does not matter how much dps you do, it teaches players that healing is as simple as randomly pressing some healing spells.

I'm not sure how you could teach people to become better and get them more ready for normal mode raiding. Making more things deadly in LFR seems to only add frustration (Elegon's floor, Durumu's beam etcetc), both to the people that die and those that cannot do anything but see people around them die. Making things hurt more will not change much either. People either just get healed up again or they just die. Ever had those LFR encounters where half of the raid is dead and the remaining half plays perfectly, but it just takes 2 times longer to kill the boss? That cannot be a fun experience right?
What LFR does do is give hints with texts, while they are useful, often times damaging abilities can just be ignored any way. They just don't hurt and no one cares if you stand in stuff 100 times if you can't die to it anyway.

One idea I could come up with right now (while seeing many negative sides of it at the same time) is to have performance based rewards.
Those rewards could be anything, but it must be substantial in a way that people really want it, and that mistakes will actually hurt the amount/chances of getting the rewards.
An example for a bad reward is for instance a 30g reward for a flawless boss kill vs a 10g reward for a kill where a player screwed up many times. The difference is insignificant, people would still not care about not screwing up.
Something better might be a free bonus roll for people who make less than 2 mistakes during an encounter.
I'm sure someone can figure out what rewards would be worth it and how to tie that up with performance.

By having rewards based on performance individuals in a LFR can still screw up while not pulling down the whole raid.
It will be important though to make sure people understand what they did wrong and what they should have done instead so they can learn from it.

However it isn't that simple and there are a lot of things wrong with this idea. It adds a lot of complexity to something as simple as LFR. People will find a way to cheat the system or to grief others.


Pugs are also more rare thesedays because a lot of realms seem to be losing players. Those who can raid, are already raiding. There simply aren't enough capable players around who could pug a ToT. At least not on my realm, and since my realm is pretty in the top half of population, I can imagine it to be much worse on the lower pop realms. Pugs can still happen in highly populated realms. Cross realm raids have really helped, but Blizzard does not allow it for current content.
Realms are a problem, whether Blizzard admits it or not. Blizzard is doing opposite things are the same time. On one hand they try and strengthen the concept of a realm by not allowing cross realm raids for current content, by not having cross realm zones on Pandaria and in major cities, by having realm leader boards for challenge modes, other realm stats and leader boards etcetc. And at the same time they do the opposite of confining people to a realm by having cross realm dungeons, raids, cross realm zones.
Again, there is no simple solution. They can't just suddenly merge realms, people will still be separated from some of their friends. They could have "a handful" of big realms, and people would still want to keep cross realm dungeons and raids.


Anyway, long post in short. No we don't need an easy mode at the same time as a normal mode is current content. Previous tiers at nerfed difficulty serves that purpose. Pugs happen less often because people have LFR thesedays and most realms aren't as populated anymore. Imo LFR needs to become a training ground for normal raids instead of mindless dummy hitting. Teach people proper play and get more people to move towards normal raiding instead of nerfing things to the point where everything is boring and meaningless. Allow people to raid current content together by either allowing cross realm, or merging realms. More raiders means more guilds, more people to recruit from, more alt raids (who will often have room for socials that can't follow a raid schedule)

[anaxie]

LFR is aimed at players with other time commitments.
The fact that it is easier is questionable, somewhat splitting the community on what its actual purpose was.
Its intent was not to be an easy mode, but that being a consequence instead.
A lower difficulty is not required.

And it most certainly shouldn't have its own loot lockout.

LFR is a huge time commitment. That shit takes longer to clear then the same bosses on Heroic farm.

[spaace]

Isn't normal mode, easy mode?
and LFR is "free loot for bad people"

[Deleted]

They do indeed.

However, "they" aren't going to and "they" won't ever bother and "they" will just leave instead.

Blizzard can either make content for the players they actually have, introduce some FUN way of teaching them to play, or say goodbye to a shitload more subs. Sitting there with a corn cob up their asses demanding that the players magically improve isn't an option that will ever work.

---------- Post added 2013-05-09 at 02:37 PM ----------



Sorry, I thought you were being sarcastic.

I see from your other posts you are serious. Oh well.

Fucking ridiculous that players demand extra content to be made specifically for them. Do you also complain to other game devs when their easiest mode is too hard for you? No. People just suck it up and try to get better. That's the whole point about a fucking videogame, it provides you a challenge to overcome.

I don't remember people complaining and bitching when they couldn't beat a level of pacman, demanding it to be made easier.

Raise your level to that of the game, not demand it to be lowered to yours.