With the Anniversary event over, as amazing as it was, BRD stands as a failure.
Why did it fail? Two primary reasons:
Not a 10-30 player flex raid, cap was 15 players. (This is why my guild never did a guild run because we have more than 15 players)
No Mastery Gear. (Many specs have Mastery as a top 2 stat)
Ignoring the fact that it was very overtuned the first two weeks had BRD had a tradition flex raid of up to 30 players and Mastery gear it would have been a success and more people would have done it.
Tried BRD when it came out on normal and it was a total clown show. Normal felt like it was harder than heroic raid and trying heroic felt like it was harder than mythic first 4 bosses in palace.
No reason to tryhard in BRD when you could get gear with less stress in palace.
BRD was a failure because they tried to make it into a pseudo progression raid halfway through the existing season with a raid people were already working on.
They did that, while also ensuring all of the gear was either outright meme garbage or mediocre filler at best, so no one actually HAD to do it for any reason.
And then the whole thing ended up massively overtuned, even post-nerf, and said nerfs barely even touched Heroic to begin with IIRC.
All in all it was a mess but can be boiled down to failing because they made it a prog raid.
It should have been an LFR-style affair like the 10th anniversary’s Molten Core raid was from the start. Trying to turn it into anything else was a poor decision. At most - use it as the Timewalking Raid for Classic Timewalking (thought maybe that misses the point a bit since it’s technically new). When just taken at face value as an LFR romp through Raid-ified BRD, it was honestly solid.
Throw in a few cosmetics to get from the place and that would’ve been perfectly acceptable and remembered better.
It’s all the EXTRA beyond that that had no reason to be there and will make people remember it worse.
It should have been LFR-only like the anniversary Molten Core, yeah.
Instead of desperately trying to gatekeep gear and crests, (even though floodgates always bust open late in the patch anyway) then just don’t offer them. But no, had to dangle heroic gear and MOST importantly a gear vendor only to make it such a huge PITA barely anyone bothered.
I just replaced the last champion piece on my 636 main tonight, and never once considered pugging BRD to get it sooner.
It is still overtuned. Or at least too hard for your average player. I tried to join a pug recently, and after 1 hour of finally getting enough people, we got stuck on like the second boss.
What’s crazy is not being able to refill inside if someone leaves. Just terrible all around.
Pretty sure there were like 10 or more threads about this on Week 2. But good to see that 9 weeks later, people are still upset about it. I only ran the LFR version for the achievements.
I don’t think you can consider it a failure just because it wasn’t the best option for you and your guild. Plenty of people got plenty of use out of it, a lot of them even enjoyed it.
I have no theory about itemization and flexing, but it was indeed a failure in most ways, just because it lacked fun and was a pug nightmare, in what was a light-hearted loot fest aimed at casuals. Having a raid which theme is smashing Moira and making her a widow - and her baby son an orphan - besides mog competition and a gob selling balloons was another layer of stupid.
I’m not sure the size was the #1 problem but the rewards were simply not worth. For me it seemed set to fail. No point learning a new raid for heroic loot when hero track loot is simply not that hard to get this patch and it wasn’t more easy to do vs nerubar palace.
Maybe they thought the event tokens would motivate people but I don’t think that worked.
I only did it once, on Heroic, with a guild group. And I kept asking myself… “who is this FOR?”
If it’s a nostalgia kick, just leave the fights like they were. Why are you designing new boss fights for a temporary anniversary raid that will be removed afterwards?
Shouldn’t you spend that time making sure the next raid isn’t a buggy mess, for once?