I’m playing in a guild of boomers. We like to play heroic raid because it would be annoying to recruit like 10 additional people whose attitudes and schedules and low ambitions are aligned with ours and because some of us are kinda bad, and we want to play with them anyway. Most of us have done mythic and gotten CE, but we know that if we try doing that again then we’ll get to like the 3rd boss on mythic and then have to uninvite some of our pals after a few pulls when they keep failing the zek’voz chain lightning
Many raid tiers like all of shadowlands (?) and season 1 of dragonflight provided good experiences to this type of guild because some bosses like sludgefist, denathrius, or raszageth were tuned to be reasonably difficult for moderately good players who spend moderate effort gearing outside of raid. This was great for us.
Currently, moderately good players who spend moderate effort gearing outside of raid gain like 10 ilvls/week for 3 weeks at the start of the season. So to make heroic bosses that are somewhat challenging, they would have to be tuned around the gear at the end of that process, like 480 ilvl in the current patch. And they are not tuned that way, so we just kind of knock them over by hilariously outgearing them, which is sad. It also makes me wonder why normal raid exists, if heroic raid is going to be like this.
You should consider the last 2 raids (VotI and Aberrus), which had incredibly low player participation. I would be quite anxious if I worked for months designing them, and thus might just nerf ADH to the level that the average, not-very-smart people can play and have fun.
That said, I think real cause of low raid participation might be low reward, instead of high difficulty.
The loot reward is both a function of how many pieces that a boss drops for each player, and a function of how well-geared players must be to stand a chance. If a boss that drops 300 ilevel gear requires players to have 340 ilevel beforehand, then even if the boss drops 50 pieces of gear for each player (instead of 0.5), it’s still 0 rewards.
Back in WLK, players typically earn a upgrade piece after every 2~3 bosses defeated (0.3~0.5 pieces of gear per boss). In VotI and Aberrus, that number is close to 20 (0.05 pieces per boss).
When all is said and done, challenging bosses can be fun, but what’s more fun is generous rewards for all the hard work that raiders must put into it to defeat challenging bosses.
It might be a combination of both. The guild I raided with the last few expansions… I never really needed gear out of the raid because I’d get it through Mythic+ and the vault first. Like I’d walk in there on normal, and would already outgear practically the entire instance. By the time we clear normal and go in on heroic, once again, I already outgear it.
In Legion, I used to full clear Antorus on heroic via pugs on three different characters weekly. Now, I don’t even pug raid at all. It has nothing to do with the quality of the raids and even whether or not I enjoy doing raids. I do, but the reward has been completely removed from it. Like, not even transmogging is a thing anymore. I walk in there outgearing normal before we’ve killed our first boss, and I can’t roll on anything because I don’t need the gear. At least if you’re going in there with a pug group under personal loot, what you get is what you get and you’re not obligated to trade it to somebody else… but personal loot isn’t a thing anymore like it used to be. Now, the system is asking you to actively and consciously roll against people and I can’t. Morally I can’t. Tack onto that the difficulty of them, and I’m sitting there like “what’s the point?”. “What’s the point?” period, even if I walk in there and one-shot every boss… let alone “what’s the point?” when you’re wiping over and over and over again because group members are trying to learn the mechanics. For what? For gear that you don’t need and can’t roll on for transmog?
The bar for entry into pug M+ groups gets higher and higher for the same content as the weeks go by and you are setting yourself up for a crappier time trying to get invites if you’re not spamming M+ in the first few weeks of a new season when the bar is still low… but then when you do that, your gear naturally skyrockets. I’ve yet to step foot into Amirdrassil in normal and my main completely outgears it already. In a few weeks I’ll outgear heroic too… so when am I supposed to walk into normal and learn the fights proper? After things have calmed down for groups and I outgear heroic? Or do I just not bother to go in there to start with because I don’t need the gear and I’ve screwed myself out of getting transmogs so what’s the point of even going in there at all?
I’d like to see them stagger raid patches and season patches and see if that changes anything at all about participation for raids. Like suppose the first season of M+ starts, and then the first raid of the expansion doesn’t even open until 2 or 3 months into the season, but the first raid’s gear is at a higher ilvl than it was, in such a way that even people that were clearing +20s for their vault rewards before it opened would find upgrades in the heroic version of the raid. Now you have more of a reason to raid if you’re willing to do both of those types of content. 2 or 3 months after the first raid goes live, season two starts, and the high-level rewards from that become very desirable and may even be the difference-maker for groups trying to clear the first raid in heroic or even mythic. I think if they stagger things like that, it might be better for raid participation.
My gut says if they try to “fix” this gearing disparity they’ll just nerf M+ drops into the ground. Like maybe gear doesn’t even drop from every run. So they can arbitrarily make content last longer. I don’t see them buffing raid drops again, it’s not their style.
It’s not really about the loot to me, it’s just that a boss like Heroic Sludgefist has to be tuned to a part of the gearing curve where people aren’t doing like 20% more damage week over week or people won’t get the experience of wiping on him in two separate resets. To me it feels more satisfying if we can say “wow we got marginally better in a lot of ways and then we won” instead of “wow this pull would have sucked last week but we have fat loot so we won”
More complex bosses like Raszageth can maybe work because baddies like us will die to mechanics for 3 resets or more.
If memory serves, there was a Shadowlands beta(?) test build that had exactly what you said ---- the M+ dungeons did not even drop epic-quality loots. The players found the experience absolutely miserable. Instead of spending their game time on raids, people just stopped playing World of Warcraft.
So the designers reverted the M+ loot system to that of the BFA.
I agree that the heroic raid is too easy for sure. Even after they buffed Fyrakk, I think we spent more pulls on Smolderong and Tindral week 1. We’re only 2-day, but we absolutely could’ve killed Fyrakk in as many pulls if progged it.
Going into week 2, I had 5-set, even, and it didn’t take too long to full clear heroic and do Mythic Gnarlroot from scratch.
However, balancing raid difficulty around longevity in relation to gearing is tricky to do with the modern playerbase. Raszageth took me until week 3 to PUG (as I was not guild raiding at the time), despite having achieved 7/8H in PUGs on the first week (with Broodkeeper and Dathea being brutal). Aberrus I full cleared in PUGs and got week 1 AotC.
I, personally, think the raids should begin their difficulty curve sooner. Castle Nathria was certainly much better, as early Xy’mox wasn’t free, and Council of Blood was a lot of fun and challenge. Sanctum of Domination was pretty good, too, where you kind of saw the difficulty ramp with Remnant into Painsmith, though Guardian was largely considered undertuned, especially on Mythic. My guild got 9/10H first week pushing out of our raiding schedule, and even pugged people for the last couple bosses. Fatescribe only took 6 pulls, but we were stacked with geared CE raiders and comms. Pre-nerf, pre-rework KTZ was no joke, even with all of that on our side. (We didn’t get AotC Sylvanas until week 3, opting not to even pull her week 1 due to bugs.)
Nowadays, you can casually stroll into the raids and clear over half of the raid with virtually no organization, and maybe one decently competent tank to take the lead. Mechanically, the fights are cool and fun, but the numbers don’t feel tuned appropriately. They might be doing this for accessibility reasons, but the jump from Heroic to Mythic is massive compared to Normal to Heroic.
They’ve been tuning down the amount of work required to get AOTC. In SL it took usually 100 pulls minimum just to get your first AOTC.
Now? It’s getting easier and easier. Heroic Sark was 30 pulls and Heroic Fyrakk was 15.
Gear makes a major difference between doing Heroic at iLvl 455 and no 4-piece was rough, but with the entire raid 470+ and 4-piece… the bosses that gave us trouble become push overs.
The first 3 bosses on Mythic are complete push overs as well.
I mean the real answer to this is just do mythic if you’re looking for the challenge.
We can’t have our cake and eat it too in this scenario. M+ can’t give good rewards while raid’s not being in a position where they’re difficult. If raids are hard, people are just going to leave to have more gear than required for the kill like we saw with Anduin last expansion. I know not a lot of people know this that did heroic, but he actually had a phase 3 and you had to clear the debuffs more than once.
The raid has to be do able for the average player at -5 or -6 the itemlevel that it drops. Of course you’re going to bypass a ton of mechanics and the fights are easier when you’re 15-20 itemlevels over what you need for the fight.
I will agree on one point though, I don’t know what the point of normal mode is anymore. If anything, it’s serving to inflate itemlevel long term over an expansion and create scaling issues for certain specs more than anything else.
The hard 20 makes mythic untenable for many mid level guilds that stop at heroic. Being able to flex classes and have exactly 20 people(and people willing to sit) is a logistical challenge that isn’t really worth it for the guilds that cleared heroic and could maybe go 3-5 out of however many bosses the raid has and stop there. You basically have to fundamentally change the social dynamic of such a guild to make it work and that juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Flex raid is kind of cancer though once you start going over 20 players. When you do heroic with 27-30 people you have way more mechanics to deal with and less space to play with. There’s far more chances for things to get messed up.
People would also sit there and crunch the perfect mathematical amount of players to bring to each fight on Mythic if it was flex. You’d see stuff like bring 15 players to this fight and 19 for this.
Mythic being balanced around 20 players works simply because you know what you have to deal with. It’s also easier for the developers to balance.
I think we carried like 4-5 people in our heroic Amirdrassil clears just to pad loot. We only cut them on the first Smolderon and Tindral, and we added more second week. It really didn’t dent the difficulty much.
Yeah but the casual guilds that hover around mythic typically don’t have 20 heroic ready players or more so that isn’t my issue. I get why mythic is locked to a number, but early mythic fights and overall mythic participation suffer for it. A pro and con if you will.
'Member when Flex first came out and people capped the groups at 14 as going to 15 caused way more mechanics to happen compared to the player size.
Then Blizzard made it so that getting extra things per mechanic was a % chance based on sets of 5? players. Then you had fights like Vectis where having more people made the fight easier. Since you could keep the debuff stacks (5% increase to nature damage taken) low as you only had 3 debuffs for the whole fight, regardless of player size. So the fewer people you had, the harder it got. Due to having fewer people to ‘share the love’ around.
I think this is realistically not as big a deal of an issue as people imagine it to be.
In the first place, Mythic being a static 20-man has not in any way made difficulty consistent. Fights still yo-yo from being trivial, to being insane, to being cheesed, to being nerfed. Whether there’s inconsistent difficulty and poor tuning through Flex mode might not even practically change the outcomes.
Secondly, for most guilds these sorts of considerations don’t really matter. For guilds in the WF race, they’d probably optimise the comps because who kills the last boss first is the only thing that matters, and they have the luxury to do whatever. For ye average Mythic guild, they’re rolling with the players they have on. That’ll make some bosses easier, some bosses harder, but that’s not a big deal unless it becomes ridiculously disparate.
The biggest issue is situations like we’ve had in the past where a certain comp (e.g. 2/3/9) is just universally the best. But that doesn’t happen in a vaccuum, and is also super easy to identify.
Not to mention, any of this is easy to find on a PTR, and can be rectified or tuned before going Live. But y’know … that would be doing development.
