I doubt it’s a technical limitation, but an awkward one as scaling boss damage and health up or down is more straightforward while scaling amount of mechanics occurring is not. As Pyri pointed out, if they have decided 3 puddles makes sense for 20 people, but then you go in with 17 that kind of mechanic is not designed to be partial so either it’s still 3 and feels way too punishing or it’s 2 and it feels like a joke.
If you create breakpoints for certain mechanics then you might as well be locking the flex raid into specific sizes because if going down to 15 makes 2 puddles and 16 makes 3 then no one will bring 16 players unless they can bring 20 because you’re just asking for a much harder time than you otherwise would have.
If they really wanted to get to a world where they would let mythic scale up and down and the challenge would remain relatively the same they’d have to be able to design every single boss fight with mechanics were logically scalable, and I doubt that’s realistic.
I say that because lfr, normal, and heroic all work that way so its not a technical issue.
Is it way more balance work, yes. But we do indeed have the technology
If it was a hard 10, then yes probably. If it flexed down to 10, I think more. I’ve done mythic b4 and my main reason for stopping was the need for a dedicated 20-25 person roster (plus the lockout making subs hard).
Yes they could, yes they can, but I think some higher ups don’t want us to be able to flex / 10man Mythic raiding anymore.
There is no tech reason for this to not happen
Ion is making it so that it is a job, not a game, IMO
I would probably do it if they made it either 8 or 10 raid size. As it stands right now, getting 20 skilled players together at the same time for many hours each week all playing different classes and roles is just too difficult.
Turning flex on is easy. Balancing it so flex works for every combination, not so much. There’s a reason there’s only one raid-size for Mythic… it’s less costly to them to only balance a fixed 20-man group.
If you could make “flex” for any size from 10-30 work “for free” then sure, there should be no obstacles, but they 10m raiding was awful (G’huun in particular didn’t scale well to small groups which assumed lots of people could do the basketball game and get a perma-debuff from repeat dunking-duty… small groups were severely punished to the point that you had to bring specific classes that could cheat the debuff).
If they ever learn to scale the difficulty fairly with flex-sizes, I’d love to see that but I realize it’s non-trivial and that a “for-profit” mindset likely means we’re never getting flex back for anything mythic raid.
I never said it was easy, but they could do it… just like they could balance all the classes but they choose not to, and it has been this choice since the 1st patch in Vanilla that nerfed the heck out of Warlocks
First, some context: Mythic raiding is locked to a set group size for a very specific reason. The reason is Blizzard couldn’t (still can’t) balance mechanics and damage for flex groups at the highest difficulty level while still keeping a fair progression pace.
Those who’ve been around long enough will remember when Heroic 10-man and 25-man raiding were a thing (Heroic then was the equivalent of Mythic now). Long story short, it was a constant poopshow of Heroic mechanics being too difficult or too easy depending on the raid size.
Anyway, dropping from 20 to 10 might seem straightforward enough, but logistically it’ll suck for a lot of semi-hardcore and hardcore guilds. Imagine having to split your existing 20-man raid (assuming you even have 20 consistent raiders and not, like, 15 regs and nine bench warmers) and deciding who gets to be on the “A team” and “Those other guys”.
How does making it 10 man make it not a job?
10man, 20man, 25man.
All have something in common. Two tanks.
You may as well cram as many DPS in as you can per run.
That’s a choice. Not everything needs to be designed for Ion’s top 1% club
It’s a choice and it’s theirs and they’ve made it.
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They also made a choice about housing, and now we are getting it. 
After many years and with lots of behind the scenes work that was likely part of the original WoW blueprint.
This though? I don’t see Blizzard stepping back. Like you said, this was specifically for high-end guilds and Blizzard’s always been keen on creating a competitive platform for those types of players.
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…which screwed up a lot of other guilds and has cost us players over time
Don’t think so, that have to keep the shenanigans of RWF for like the 2 group of raid team and the 100+ viewers. Why would they care about 99.9% of other wow player?
There’s no debating that. Dropping it down to 10-man again or making it flex will cause the same degree of upheaval at the Mythic level, which is why I don’t think Blizzard altering the raiding formula will happen again - or not any time soon.
If we see another shift, it’ll likely be on the heels of a major player count drop that necessitates smaller groups. I.E. They’ll only go through the trouble if they have to.
IDK, seems like alienating the 99% has caused a loss of sales over time, at least that’s what I see, I don’t have all the metrics other than how low our population is currently from mmo population sites
Mythic would be completely ruined by making it flex and anyone who has done mythic raids knows that.
Mechanics need a certain number of bodies to handle. Coordinating those bodies is the challenge.
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It was Ion at Gamescon and that is exactly what he said. They have no intention of changing Mythic raid size anytime soon.
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