I call BS that flex raids aren't possible

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

NPC at start of raid with a barrier blocking the way past.

Talk to NPC
I seek passage for me and my 9 fellow adventurers.
I seek passage for me and my 19 fellow adventurers.
I seek passage for me and my 39 fellow adventurers.

Barrier vanishes and appropriately-tuned trash and bosses spawn.

I’ve tinkered around with private server backend databases, you just create Ony1, Ony2 and Ony3, and spawn the appropriate one. This isn’t rocket science. Everyone gets the raid size they want.

5 Likes
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sounds like to much work for the devs that are not working on it.

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They aren’t going to recode and scale everything from Era.
Which makes perfect sense.

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id rather them work on new content - instead of wasting time on this

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Maybe the better question is… would you rather have more people playing SoD or fewer people? I can’t say for certain if 10 man raids are what kept the population during the start of SoD or that 20 man raids killed it, but raid size could be a big factor. It’s sure mentioned a whole lot as one of the reasons things are dire right now; but if everything were just re-tuned for 10 man, there would be a bunch of folks not happy too.

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It’s literally setting a condition prior to entering instance. Zero chance they can’t do this. Lock out is literally raid ID that is generated with a relation ship to the raid and a timestamp.

1 Like
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2/10. Spoken like an idiot with no idea how much work it would be to implement flex raiding. I swear the trolls are getting dumber.

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Flex raids suck.

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9

Just do what Diablo 2 does where monster life is directly proportional to # of players.

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Quite arrogant to assume things are so easy and would mechanically work well for every raid encounter. Even more so knowing it is a tiny dev team that is being pulled 7 different ways to have to put in the work with the spaghetti code that is wow.

Now with a larger team that has more time (future season maybe) there are possibilities. I would argue it could even be the future of wow classic if they want to invest in it… but they seem to mostly be testing how small of a team can they have and still milk money off us more than anything atm so this doesn’t look likely.

1 Like
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I have too, formerly a content dev for multiple Top10 servers back in the TBC and WOTLK era. Encounter design is difficult. And flexible group sizes make it significantly more difficult. So, here’s a lesson in encounter design.

Here’s everything you aren’t considering:

  • Fractions and Breakpoints: Spell Mechanics.
  • Raid damage Scaling for Healing
  • Room size.
  • Utility/CC.
  • Group Comp./Logistics
  • Player Improvising.
  • Snowballing/Limping.

Most 5th graders can figure out that “10 dps” and “20 dps” means you double the Health Pool. But that only works for Health scaling, and it’s not even ideal for that.

From my list above, let’s make it very clear: Blizzard has content tuning based on group size on Retail. And they don’t use the same solution for each problem.

Designing a boss for flexible raid sizes needs considerably more effort than a fixed raid size.

So, let’s use Sunken Temple. Shade of Eranikus is complex enough. Let’s try to scale it down to 10 players first.

  • The 20man group is typically 2/4/14. A 10man raid would like be 2/2/6.
  • Health Scaling: We actually lost 1 DPS worth of damage (14 dps, halved… 7. But we have 6 in this typical group.) So, Health scaling of “just double it” literally doesn’t fit cleanly.
  • Incoming Damage Scaling for Healers: Does twice as many healers mean twice as much damage? If the boss uses a Thrash attack (multiple attacks) and this deals ~50% of the tank’s health, wouldn’t doubling the damage put the tank into fatal territory? So, doubling the damage here doesn’t work. What about non-tank raid damage? It depends on the mechanic. How many dispels do we want or need? If it hits the entire raid, does the damage need change at all? If the “time to kill” of a DOT is 10sec, should it be 5sec? How does that interact with healing profiles of players?

We just talking generalities right now. And it’s already mired with conditionals.

So, let’s focus on just Eranikus, and scaling it down to 10man:

  • The boss has a Thrash, and this is paired with the Sunder Armor effect from Corrosive Breath. Tanks have to swap at 2 stacks, and a Thrash with 2 stacks can take them down to 30% or so from 100%, varying by gear progression. If the damage is too low, this means you can avoid swapping. If the damage is too high, you risk making a basic mechanic too deadly (which is bad for casuals). You need to reconsider your timers for this, where is the Corrosive Breath cooldown, the Sunder Armor duration, or the Thrash cooldown and well as the damaging components.
  • 2 adds spawn, and they can be CC’d, kicked, etc. Can I expect a 10man group to handle the adds normally? Do I change the cast times of the interruptible spells? What if I change the spell cooldowns for their casts? And what should their health tuning be like? Can I expect a Poison dispel in the group in a way that feels fair, or are some groups going to need to dig deep to overcome that 50% Miss Chance poison debuff ?
  • Deep Slumber targets 3 players outside of melee range, with a fallthru of targeting players within melee range. The number 3 does not scale down to 10man cleanly (its not a whole number), so do I cast 1 or 2 spells at the ranged players? If I pick 2, I’m mandating this boss have at least 2 ranged players. This decision also impacts the Whelping and Scalebane adds in Phase 2 and Phase 3. Whelpings in particular typically run to the healer with the highest threat. If a healer is forced to run in ranged, does this make the fight more difficult in a way I do not intend? Likewise, is killing Scalebanes necessary if I only have 1 spawn at a time? It would be very easy to lock them down, or simply kill them. And that would make Phase 3 pretty simple. There’d be no need for a zerg strat, which means I lose my design of “an overwhelming force” at the end.
  • Waking Nightmare lasting 15sec is already punishing. If my ranged player accidentally dies to this mechanic, does it create a snowball effect from other mechanics? For example, if I send a healer into range to cover the spot, are my whelp groups going to be that much harder?
  • Bellowing Roar is simple effect, just kick it. But how many interrupts can I expect in the group with 10 players? Do I make the cast time longer? Is the poison debuff, with a 50% miss chance, going to sometimes cause a player to coin flip this critical mechanic? If the rogue wasn’t dispelled, and pressed Kick, and it failed, did this feel fair to the rogue?

This doesn’t even include the mentality of “which raid size is best/easiest” nor does it factor in loot. Logistically, a 40man raid would be harder to organize, and thus should be compensated. Does 1 tier token and 1 non-tier token drop per boss with 10 players? Are epic items a bonus drop? How does that scale up to 40 players? Are there up to 4 bonus epics then?

Flexible raids are complicated. The systems need to support it. The spell mechanics need to take into account player ability and cooldowns. The health and damage tuning isn’t as simple as a 1:1 ratio. It takes significantly more effort to make a boss both fair and enjoyable.

9 Likes
12

From sod you can tell, devs are good at coding once they are provided a task.
But ask them to plan a project or create something from scratch, they will fail 100%

1 Like
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As if blizz will spend time investing in tuning 3 different versions of a raid.
3 different versions of mechanics (no, you can’t just change numbers, you also need to consider impact on the raid at different sizes, some mechanics may even need to be disabled entirely)
3 different health/damage pools tuned based on possible raid size and comp
3 different sets of drops/rewards

you now also need to consider the raid design itself to be appropriate for both 10 man and 40 man sizes. You can’t cram 40 people into a small room.
You can’t stick 10 people into a huge room.

you are limited on what mechanics you can implement to account for every raid size. For example:

  • you can’t implement punishing AOE/chain in a 40 man as it will be too disruptive compared to 10 man
  • you can’t implement too many cooperative mechanics (go to someone, click this, 5 people must stand here etc) as a man 10 group will be too sparse compared to a 40 man
  • you can’t implement magic/poison/disease/curse dispel mechanics as a 10man raid will very likely be lacking the ability to remove some of these due to raid comp.

flex SUCKS for a classic version of wow, it works in retail because every class is extremely homogenized and the mechanics are mostly all the same, keep moving out of the bad stuff on the ground very very fast over and over, it’s more like a bullet time/arcade shooter at this point compared to an MMO.

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if its not having to have my friends sit out due to raid size im perfectly fine with there being less strangers in the world. others inability to attract players to their raid group isnt my problem.

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how do they get tuned?

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The devs have said that it is possible to code flex into SoD, however they do not have the resources or time on their team to undertake the process of moving Flex from retail code and put it into the old Classic code. Can they do it? Technically yes, but they don’t have the people on the classic dev team to do it while creating new content and balancing what they have.

Now, if Cata was moved to the retail dev team, which it should. (Considering that Cata client isn’t even in the classic client anymore, the entire cata client should fall under the retail client. After all, Cata isn’t classic. It’s closer to retail then it is to classic now.)

Classic dev team should be for Era/HC/Seasonal. Cata REALLY should fall under the retail team now.

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Retail has this mechanic. Why not go poison that game and leave ours alone?

18

Very informative. Well done

1 Like
19

100% they did. 10s were easier/quicker to pug allowing players with not much time to play. 20 mans now take twice as long to pug and actually require more of certain classes, would you rather have a shaman drop a poison cleanse totem on the second boss or take someone that doesn’t have a cleanse. oh and you need one for each group too thats 4 reserved slots taken right there by one class.

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They’re simply a bad idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s possible.