I am genuinely pleased with the recent changes made by the developers and game designers of World of Warcraft regarding the latest raid difficulty. It’s incredibly satisfying to see that the adjustments have made the final boss more accessible, as evidenced by the world’s top players managing to defeat it in around 100 attempts. This balance between challenge and attainability not only enhances the overall gaming experience but also fosters a more inclusive and enjoyable environment for all players. Kudos to the team for their thoughtful approach and dedication to improving the game!
In response to all the people that are going to say I am just bad and making the game easy for bad players is “not my world of warcraft”. I know I am bad at the game compared to Mythic Raiders. I will never kill current Mythic Gallywix. I still want to celebrate the change of design philosophy from the era of The Jailer and Raszageth, where the bosses are so highly tuned that even the world’s best players need nerfs to kill it, to Gallywix that at launch tuning required only 100 pulls by the best players in the world to kill it. I encourage the designers to continue in this direction making the bell curve difficulty lean more to middle of the player base, rather than all of these fights being designed with only hundreds of players in mind.
Since my first time playing in Vanilla I never thought about the game needing to be toned down to accomodate more people. The idea of something greater to strive for, even if realistically unreachable, was always a motivation for me and as I understood for more people I played vanilla with it was the same for them.
A lot of this mentality went out the window when whiners got what they asked for: content so easy people lose brain cells participate in it, LFR.
The problem is after getting what they begged for, today they are asking for more and more. They want content they don’t even wish to participate in, to be made easier anyway. Why?
Why can’t gamers just be movitated by challenges? Or inspired by greater things?
Literally what is the goal of wishing for the ceiling of the game to be lower?
For me, I will find a way to have fun with any game I play. Often, that fun requires a challenge. I believe that players creating challenges for themselves makes for a more enjoyable game. I am happy to try and beat easier content faster or with unoptimized gear, consumables, and talents. I imagine that with the current design direction in the future you can pick talents for the fun and challenge of making it harder, rather than being stuck in a meta talent build just for the extra ~2% damage needed to kill a challenging boss.
It’s a communication issue. I was there on the forums when people begged for things like LFR. They said they just wanted the opportunity to “see the content” without needing to commit to a raid group. It wasn’t about loot, they just wanted an alternative way to see the raid and complete the story.
While there may have been some small few that felt that way, or feel that way now when they make similar requests, the vast majority are asking for easier content because they want easier access to the loot it provides. Then they’re upset when they’re given the easier content they actually asked for, but without the loot levels they actually wanted, so they look for the next way they can angle for easier loot while claiming it’s just about content.
I’ve been seeing variations of this conversation consistently for over fifteen years now and it’s always the same.
But in group content people can’t all invent their own little challenge. People of the same group all share the same challenge and they want to experience the same thing together. It’s like a gathering point, something they can all relate to, when someone says “I beat this boss on mythic” it means something specific. When someone said “I solo’d this old dungeon while using this talent no one uses” it means close to nothing for basically everyone.
I don’t even know what you mean by “the current design direction”. Are you saying “the last boss being easy” while ignoring “the middle of the raid being way too hard”? Is that all part of the same design direction that you wish will continue or are you making the completely blind and ignorant assumption that only what you want is the “design direction” while the other one is “just a mistake in tuning”?
Maybe both are a mistake and Gallywix had the actual design direction of being the hardest boss ever made but missed the mark by a lot, we literally don’t know what their design direction is right now.
Yeah but it’s kind of implied, indirectly. Let’s say LFR is just to see the content without giving gear. Most people would do it once when it comes out, and then never again, making it very low ROI, and on top of that anyone who missed the wave of when it’s time to do it wtih everybody else would queue for it late and not get in any gruops because there would not be groups for it. Putting loot in LFR is necessary for player engagement, and it creates this bad perspective of expecting LFR to be part of some progression system.
I think LFR should be entirely replaced by the story mode where people just do it once to see it, not get loot, and that’s it.
I agree that shared group content challenges are a significant part of the WoW community. Historically, and more recently to an absurd extent, the statement “I killed the boss on Mythic” has evolved to mean different things due to the heavy and numerous nerfs applied at various stages. For example, Race For World First raiders experience the boss in its most challenging form, while Hall of Fame raiders face a slightly nerfed version, and late season Cutting Edge raiders encounter an even more accessible version. This progression of nerfs creates varying levels of difficulty and accomplishment, making the shared challenge less uniform across different groups.
Additionally, solo player challenges can exist within group content. Having a shared goal of killing a boss or clearing a raid should not prevent individual players from selecting aspects of their game to make it as easy or as hard as they want. This flexibility allows players to tailor their experience to their personal preferences while still contributing to the group’s overall objective.
I don’t have any real objection to loot from LFR. The issue I see is that the people who advocated for LFR expected raid loot and instead received lower item level raid finder versions of the loot.
Of course, this was appropriate based on how much easier they had to tune everything to make it doable by randomly queued groups, and if the intention of the players had actually been LFR, the people advocating would have been happy. But their intention was never LFR, it was a way to get raid loot that they thought would be easier than the avenues that were available at the time. They got what they asked for but not what they wanted, and so on over the years. The players keep asking for “accessibility”, and Blizzard keeps giving it to them, but it’s never enough because they’re not asking for what they actually want, which is the highest level loot without needing to do the content that is required to get it.
I understand where you’re coming from. It can feel like making it easier will diminish your enjoyment of the game, but I don’t feel entitled to diminish your enjoyment. I just believe that the change would simply allow me to enjoy the game more. And I wanted to celebrate that. It’s not about greed; it’s about enhancing the gaming experience for myself and potentially others who feel the same way.
Can only speak of Vexie and Carnage so far but they feel fine. Hearing though how hard Stix and OAB is then going on to Mug and Gallywix is definitely strange though on mythic.
Gallywix being 100 or less pulls feels definitely on the weak side though. Just from my raiding history I expect a final boss to be at least 150 pulls but maybe im wrong.
Gallywix was 100 blind where the majority of it was working out a strategy and not necessarily optimising it. The current mood with guilds who are reaching and progressing it now is “Once you kill mugzee gallywix takes maybe a night, if that.”
Sure, but that’s a never ending cycle.
Make change X, improve the game for Y and diminish it for Z.
Remove change X, diminish game for Y and improve it for Z.
Where are we going with this? Who has the more reasonable claim to their enjoyment and therefore the right to enforce it on the rest of the playerbase?
I don’t think anyone should have the right to lessen someone else’s enjoyment of the game.
Where we differ in opinion is that I believe people that enjoy a difficult challenge can enjoy a game that is easier, where as people that enjoy the game on a more difficult setting can not exist in a game that is tuned to be harder.
I put forth Classic Hardcore (addon) as an example. People that enjoy a challenge took a relatively easy game of Classic and made it more challenging while leaving the base easy mode available for people like me. On the other hand people like me can not enjoy the official Classic Hardcore servers because there is only the hard mode.
My dream is a game we can both find enjoyment in, like Hardcore before Blizz made them official.
The retail version has 4 raid difficulties and 14 dungeon difficulties with varying loot. There is no reason to reduce the top challenges to make them easier for people that already have large sections of the game dedicated to them at the expense of the people that can only play one difficulty to find the challenge they’re looking for.
Not to mention the way bliz designed pretty much every raid boss this tier makes the difficulty ramp up over time. Which means when you get more gear and more damage the hard parts kinda just stop happening.
I’m not following. If you played with the hardcore addon, you had to follow these rules, there was no “easy hardcore”. The people playing regular classic on the same server don’t count. The official hardcore server is like people playing with the addon, and if you play regular you have no busines there, blizzard made regular classic servers for you, you can still enjoy easymode classic, you said “there is only the hard mode” but that’s not true. Not only is it not true, the official hardcore server HAS the easy mode of hardcore which is to let people use the AH or trade, something that was not available in the addon.
And I also don’t follow this as well:
People who enjoy a difficulty challenge can enjoy a game that is easier, how? They want a challenge, they don’t get what they want because the game is easier, why are they playing this?
People that enjoy the game on a more difficult setting can not exist in a game that is tuned to be harder, why? They want difficulty, the game is harder so they get what they want, they should be happy to be there.