I don’t think level 60 raids should continue to be 40, so let me just suggest an alternate route: Add additional difficulties to Classic SOD.
Do I think that Classic Era should have extra difficulties? No, please lord no, but SOD? There’s potential.
Three difficulties. Normal: Flex difficulty 10-30 players, Heroic: 25. There’s a world where I could see a mythic-difficulty 20-man Naxx at 60, but I don’t want to get too silly here.
I legitimately think having a ““casual”” difficulty that makes it easier for people to not have to bench their friends is a great idea, and if you can only fill a 10-man, then don’t worry about it. You can run the content.
Have a harder difficulty with a player cap of either 20 or 25. Blizzard has (apparently) commented that the 20-player cap of mythic is “easier” for them to balance, but I’m not sure. Regardless, I think breaking up future content drops into normal and heroic difficulties are fine, I think that’s one of the best things Wrath added to the raiding scene.
Edit 1: I also want to make clear that I don’t think every raid needs to flex 10-30 players, having smaller raids like BFD and Gnomer (and the later ones) are fine. Could make those like, flex 10-20 players, with a harder 20 player locked difficulty, I’m not sure. I’m not a game dev, I just think it could be a slightly better/more interesting scenario to try out on seasonal servers.
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Flexing to 40 would be cool but i doubt they have the tech to do that.
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I mean, the tech already exists on retail (which the Classic/SOD servers are based on) to scale to 30. I’m not sure we need to scale to 40 players, given that classic era players already try to not take all 40, or the meme that “we take 10 people just to fill spots”. Also, 40-player raid loot is drastically dire. 2 pieces of loot for 40 people? So gross.
The tech exists sure, but they’d have to completely retune the bosses
Which they’re already doing and will have to do. People are running the numbers, at the rate we’re scaling we will be doing significantly more than level 60 damage when we hit level 60.
If they released MC, BWL, AQ, and Naxx as they are on Era servers, everyone will stomp at least up until AQ. The skill gap is significantly lower than it used to be, Naxx will still be challenging because mechanics still have to be danced and such, but MC and BWL will be cleared so fast.
No flex raids thanks. Multiples of the same raid per lockout is annoying, and different gear from different sizes is necessary and also annoying. It makes one the real raid and one the baby raid.
This is actual “no retail changes” territory. Just make the 60 raids 40 man and call it a day.
People will probably just run the 40 mans as 20-25 mans instead of something.
Confirmed today that 40 mans will remain 40 mans.
I hope so. I hope they keep these raids laughably easy and I hope the best rewards come from 10 mans.
Honestly I agree on the raid sizes, I think it’s a bit worrying for Blizzard to have come out and say “40 man raids will continue to be 40 man raids” (there was apparently a twitter response about this)
Unless of course that is simply leaving the old raids as is and making new content around them instead of reinvigorating them. But that would also leave them irrelevant.
But I’m not so sure I’m quite on board for multiple raid difficulties.
I definitely like the thought of flex raiding, I know it has its issues with things like loot thresholds etc. However on the whole I think flex raiding has more positive effects than negative ones.
The simple fact that you don’t have to just sit people because you are one or two over is great, and it allows a lot more people the potential to raid, especially those who may not have the same time/access as others in the group and would usually miss out due to the inability to provide consistency.
But no multuple lockouts with multiple levels of gear for the love of all things holy.
No one needs that.
I’d like it to be flex or 10-mans… 40 man raids are a thing of the past, yes it’s classic… but SoD isn’t the past. SoD is about changes and trying something NEW. I get people want their good ol’ 40-mans but we got era for that.
Difficulty and flex raid sizes are not what I want to see.
For one thing they split the community and encourage the best players not to socialize with new / poor performing players even more. I understand people who want a game where it’s about showing off your skill but the old vanilla feel to me is also about just chilling with people who are maybe kind of bad at the game but cool players nonetheless.
Also much like how LFG and LFR don’t seem like a big deal making raids flex size really breaks immersion. Classic is the best at making you feel like the game is a “real” place and hitting a menu before raid to set the size removes that. Players should be in the world not have too much agency over it to change raid sizes. If a raid just requires 40 people then that’s the identity of that place you can’t change it.
That’s not actually how flex raids work.
Flex raiding simply dynamically adjusts the raids based on the group size, there are no buttons to press or immersion to break.
You simply rock up with 15 people and the raid is tuned slightly harder to compensate and drops more loot relative to the size.
It’s all handled dynamically with no player interaction at all, it is essentially seemless.
It seems you are misconstruing flex raids with raids that have multiple sizes, such as WotLK raids.
In flex raiding there is no difference in loot quality between raid sizes and no UI interactions that have to be made to engage it.
It quite simply just allows you to take a variable number of people.
So if you had a 20 man team and someone wasn’t able to make it, you could run it at 19 with no issue, or if you had extra people who wanted to raid you could simply add them and it wouldn’t make any noticeable difference.
The biggest difference you would have is due to vanilla’s party wide design for buffs and whether you still wanted to min-max having specific raid buffs in every group.
Outside of that you wouldn’t notice it.
Plus of course, if you still wanted to stick to a specific size there would be nothing stopping you either. In the majority there would be no benefit/hinderance for doing so.
Glad they confirmed raids will remain at 40 at level 60. I hope they increase the difficulty of the raids as well. It should be easy to add a few mechanics to each boss in MC/BWL/AQ and increase health, armor and resistances. After '19 its apparent these raids are untuned. In addition, I would like to see the phase 3 leveling raid at level 40 man and the difficultly increased dramatically over Gnomer. This will help guilds solidify their rosters heading into level 60. Cheers!
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Sounds more reasonable. I think there is a lot of core game design philosophy here about “friction” versus “accessibility”.
Is it a good thing to force players to do something they don’t want to do because they might find they really like it?
Obviously there is a lot of people who have made their mind up about 40 player raids due to past experience and that’s fine but the devs have to think about the wider impact.
Too much customizing your experience I feel goes towards retail make your own burger type game instead of the emergent interactions of vanilla.
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Tbh, doing 10m Raid and I got nothing so if doing the pug with over 20+ absolutely nothing, I mean the rate drop is worse such as neck on the 5/6th boss BFD *forget