This has always bugged me a bit. My guild always stops at Heroic because we’re just a chill guild that takes whoever shows up and away we go. We get to the end of heroic and that’s it, we go on raid break. I think maybe once in the last 8 tiers we’ve been able to go into Mythic because we just happened to have 20 people sticking around. Any other time we have anywhere between 15 and 25 people.
To me, it doesn’t really make sense to have Mythic raiding capped at 20 people. Why can’t it go to flex? It’s the additional mechanics that are supposed to add the difficulty, right?
That’s just my view though, so I wanted to ask others. Do you think Mythic raids need to remain fixed at 20 players? If so, why?
Because tuning varies when flex is introduced and teams would figure out the perfect breakpoints and only bring that precise amount of players per boss.
Things would just get messy on the strategy and personnel side.
You might be right, but I’m not sure that would be a bad thing. I mean, I suspect this would be a thing that would only happen at the bleeding edge of gameplay (ie, world first) and they are already doing crazy things to gain an advantage.
I hope that, one day, WoW will change this. Flex raiding was one of the best things to happen to the game, imo, since it meant we didn’t have to sit friends out and we also didn’t have to cancel raids when a few people couldn’t make it that night. Since then we always get AotC, but then the game is over for us. It would be nice to have access to the other 33% of raid difficulty.
Even if flex Mythic raiding came at an ilvl penalty… the same gap that exists between M+ and Mythic raids today. I don’t care about the status, just the content.
Tuning, mechanics are basic answers but as Ion said himself its a barrier of entry/friction they want to keep with nythic raiding and I agree with it. If you as a guild can’t get the 20 people to raid with by having a 25 person roster then you have some fundamental problems with the guild.
Because designing an encounter for a fixed number of people allows you to be certain of some things (i.e. every raid buff, gateway, etc.) - whereas as soon as you allow for a fexible number of people you have to throw that guarantee out.
Not only that, but it makes room geometry significantly more problematic. Consider Mythic Rygelon - how do you make that Flex upwards? There is no space for extra Massive Bang circles.
Or how do you make Anduin flex downwards? If you can’t guarantee 2 healers every downstairs, how are the healing adds meant to be done without becoming completely trivial?
Having a 25-man roster for a 20-man raid means that on any given night, 5 people have to sit out. For a hardcore progression guild, people will be willing to do this. For a casual guild, people will not. Once we’ve cleared Heroic, it’s a shame to not be able to tackle the next difficulty up simply because we don’t have the roster for it.
It seems to work for Heroic raids, but having not done Mythic raids I don’t know about the specific encounter details and what might make them not work for differing sizes.
I think we’d have to talk more about those specific mechanics and you’d have to elaborate a bit to go further.
Like, Anduin on Heroic seems to work just fine. Sometimes we had two healers downstairs and sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes we needed two but figured out a way to make do with one and a shadow priest for mass dispel.
It’s also fair to say that by considering flex Mythic raids, it doesn’t mean it has to be the same 10 to 30 people that Normal and Heroic is. Perhaps 15 to 25 people is more appropriate, or even 18-22.
The main problem is that for casual guilds who just want harder content, it’s very tough to maintain that fixed roster on any given raid night.
25 man roster, 20 man raid. So please explain your math on how 20 people are sitting? Casual 2 night a week guilds prog mythic raiding all the time. “Looks at own guild as example”. You can get the roster for it though. You have the means to do so.
Back when Mythic was first started in Warlords of Draenor pre-patch, they wanted Mythic encounter design to start with the premise that one of every class was available (therefore all unique utility is available), and made the call that 20 was the lowest number that would be possible for that.
Someone actually asked them on-stage why not 15 if I remember correctly, and they replied something to the effect of thinking it would be too inflexible for raid comps if they did that, and then designed around every class being present.
Since then, we’ve also had Demon Hunters, and now Evokers, added to the available classes in the game.
Any change to that would probably require them to shift their approach to utility among classes so that no class had unique utility - e.g. Warlocks bring Gateway, Mages bring a version called Mass Portal, etc., and ensure that every thing has 2-3 options. I’m not saying that to imply it’d be a bad thing ( at all), I’m just stating that it’s a fairly significant fundamental change that’s going to impact across the entire game, not just raiding.
It was a typo, I’ve edited my OP above. I meant to say 5 people have to sit. I’m glad you’re able to work around it, but the last 8 tiers it’s only come together once for us (Nya’lotha).
What I’m asking here though is, does it need to be this inflexible.
Thanks for providing some background and history to this
WoD was a long time ago, I’m wondering if that could be re-evaluated. Do folks who run Mythic raids bring one of every class as it is. I suspect this isn’t the case. Heck, even if they kept it as a 20 person minimum but allowed you to bring as many as 5 more (or something like that), it would just provide a bit more flexibility.
All the Mythic raids I know can have 1-2 people of any class at any point they choose to. They don’t necessarily actually use 1 of every class for every fight unless they need to swap around, every player has their preferred classes and what not.
Anecdotally, back when I raided, I kept 3-4 characters available and geared to be able to switch and step in as required, and being a tank or at least a backup tank, had 3 classes I was comfortable doing it on (2 were raid-ready at any point). Most of my friends/guildies had some sort of setup where they could use at least one preferred and raid-ready alt if it came down to it.
Your guild sounds like they were a fair bit more dedicated than we are. For us, people just play what they play, though we do try to cover a few of the more important buffs. This extended to that one season we were able to do Mythic raids… we just went with what we had and we did fine. I’m actually not sure how far we got, but it actually didn’t matter to us. Just having some more content to do was nice
I think that’s all I’m really after here… making the content even a little more accessible. Flex mythic raiding (at some level) just so people have access to those encounters, even if it comes at an ilvl penalty.
Blizzard can design fights assuming you have at least 1 of every class. Which they have done. For example Mythic blast furnace required you to have a priest to mind control the guards in phase 2. So you could get rid of the immunity shield on the elementals that need to die on top of the ‘mini bosses’. Mythic Aggramar was made easier if you had a blood DK because of their mass grip as another example.
Blizzard has shown that it is hard to design top end difficulty fights with multiple player caps. Cata and MoP showed this with fight difficulty inconsistencies between 10 and 25 mans. Thok 25 man (even on heroic) was a cake walk compared to its 10 man equivalents. Due to having a wider range of diverse healers and cd’s. Now imagine doing that for 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 etc players? Even on normal and heroic, Blizzard has designed fights that are painful with fewer players or more. Vectis is a fight that is painful with the fewer players you have. As it will always give out the 3 debuffs that can not be removed regardless of your player size. Meaning that you get the increased nature damage taken stacks a lot more frequently with a party of 10 than one with 30. Why they didn’t make that ability dynamic? Who knows.
The second point wasn’t an issue back in Wrath because Blizzard intentionally designed fights to be easier on 10 man versions than their 25 man versions. For example, Kel’thuzad does not do any mind controls on 10 man but he does on 25 man. This was why 10 man dropped lower ilvl and in general, quality loot than 25 man. To the point that 10 man heroic = 25 man normal in terms of ilvl for ToC and ICC. In Cata and MoP, they tried to make 10 man and 25 man be the same difficulty as they now rewarded the same loot and ilvl.
Of course, if they spread utility around so that things were functionally available to 2-3 classes, they wouldn’t need to “assume 1 of every class”. It’s always worth discussing since something like this is a fairly arbitrary stance, and the equation has changed at least in theory since they first made the decision back when Demon Hunters and Evokers didn’t exist.
I don’t think what they did in Cata or MoP are great examples of this.
Going into Cataclysm, they clearly had major issues with even conceiving of how to make the concept work. Plenty of mechanics in T11 were straight up exactly the same, with the exact same damage on both 10-man and 25-man, and Blizzard stood around with a shocked Pikachu face when it didn’t work out.
Beyond that, they’ve apparently never tried to accommodate their design to consider both modes; rather, they seem to have always designed for 25-man and then tried to tweak the fight for 10-man. You wouldn’t build a fight based on area denial and then put a 10-man raid in the same area as a 25-man raid after all, you’d want to put the 10-man raid in a smaller area so that space is just as important, but they never even attempted this.
Similarly, they had absolutely no real chance of achieving similar difficulties when their entire approach was to copy-paste mechanics and hope numbers tweaks would solve it - it obviously would never work out that way. And some of the more obvious numbers tuning failures were mistakes of their own making; Spine 25H was simply a mess up regardless of 10-man or other difficulty modes, just as much as say, their initial version of Theralion and Valiona for 10-man.
I mean, I feel like that’s obvious though right?
It’s because Mythic exists. Since it acts as their core design point, they’re at least outwardly not putting much, if any, effort into thinking about Normal/Heroic and different raid sizes. Consequently, even super obvious things are going to go live and never get changed; they don’t even have a reason to try or care.
