In Vanilla dungeons & raids had one difficulty each. In BC dungeons had two and raids one. In WOTLK both had two. These were by large consensus the best times the game has ever known.
Four difficulties seems superfluous. I feel like three is plenty, that the first should be faceroll to cater for idiots (most of the playerbase), the second should be challenging to the extent Heroic raids or Mythic 0 dungeons are now, and the last should cater for players who want to theorycraft and push the limits.
that makes no sense as it is end game for people who want to challenge themselves as a tight knit group and not deal with the logistics and roster issues that come with raiding.
Heroic and Mythic is what needs to be consolidated, Heroic loses all value once the first raid opens up.
people go from lvl 110 ->120 with normal dungeons, than straight to Mythic 0 with crafted pvp gear and than onto LFR-Normal-Heroic-mythic raiding or Arena/RBGs.
heroic loses all value after an expac initial release, becuse you only do it to gear for mythic 0 (before raid/pvp) the first tier. if they need to tune down Mythic 0 difficulty but leave the rewards for those who need it, people raiding wont do either unless it for mythic 0 mounts and heroic just acts like a catch up TO the catch up systems.
I played in TBC and it was pretty awful if you ask me. The raiding scene especially. Attunements ruined it for most people and a large majority of raid fights were laughably easy. Being able to zone in was the hardest part.
That was the time of highest subscriber numbers, sure, but only people with nostalgia goggles think that was the “best times the game has ever seen”.
I enjoyed Vanilla, TBC and Wrath. I’m enjoying BFA less and less now. It’s not an MMORPG anymore. It’s more like an arcade game. The only thing I enjoy now is M+. Just patiently waiting for classic, and if that sucks I’ll probably quit. 8.2 is more of what we don’t need.
I’m not saying that Mythic+ shouldn’t have the full range of difficulty, mind. It could easily have the levels be three times as far apart, though.
Wrath was vastly different than Vanilla or TBC. No attunements, multiple difficulties. All classes viable. Much more similar to raiding now than it was to TBC or Vanilla.
I thought BC 5 mans were great. I didn’t raid much, so I never totally outgeared heroics. And of course the existence of heroics meant there were multiple levels.
Arenas really messed up the direction of PVP, though. I did them because they were required for PVP gearing, but they turned me off the game. Lots of people defected to Warhammer after that.
I like multiple levels of raiding, and of 5 mans. I’m not sure we need quite as many as we have now. If raiding could be collapsed into LFR, Normal, and Mythic, that might help alleviate the issues with gear inflation, though there might be other ways of dealing with that.
How much of a gap in difficulty is there between Normal Jaina and Mythic Champions?
The thing is that the reason they are multiple difficulties is because those difficulties are aimed at totally different groups of players. LFR is not supposed to appeal to people raiding mythic or heroic - and it doesn’t. I am a very casual heroic raider, I mostly PUG and usually don’t get AOTC. But I have zero interest in LFR. The fact that it exists doesn’t really impact my gaming experience at all, and that’s how it should be. I also have very little interest in normal. I think I did it once when it was released and that was only to get some azerite gear (and only because the new season stuff had extra traits that my gear from season 1 didn’t).
Having 4 difficulty levels is not a problem. Nobody does all 4 unless they are really, really bored. There’s absolutely no point. And despite what people claim the 4 difficulty levels don’t really contribute to gear inflation at all. The loot from LFR and Normal is basically irrelevant to anyone doing M+ (as any serious heroic or mythic raiders are).
LFR itself is not really related to the actual raiding modes of Normal/Heroic/Mythic. Even guilds who only raid normal don’t bother with LFR. It’s not meant for people who actually want to be challenged by bosses. But it still serves a valuable purpose for people who actually want to see the storyline played out in a raid setting. It’s also handy as an interactive target dummy, testing addons and weakauras etc. I’ve frequently gone into LFR to test things like my healing frames setup or weakauras because I know it doesn’t matter if it isn’t working.
Yep… Still enjoyed them. The thing I didn’t like about Wrath was the dungeon finder and the entrance of “ez-mode gaming” that began to appear. Granted, they allowed hard modes for raids with bonus loot, but this seemed to be the turning point of wow difficulty and progression. It began to split here.
Personal opinion, but it turned me off WoW and I quit 3/4 of the way through the expac. Didn’t return til late Legion, which I laughed at (but enjoyed - somewhat). The game had gone into Oprah-mode. Everyone gets a car!
I’m not seeing the need for such a consolidation. Normal-level bosses would be too easy for heroic-level guilds, leaving them hanging when they reach the “need 20” wall. And heroic-level bosses would be too hard for normal-level guilds, frustrating them by stalling them part-way through the raid.
It wasn’t really the dungeon finder that made Wrath dungeons easy though. They were already easy before that came in. It did make it much easier to find groups for dungeons though, which was great.
Agreed. I came back for BFA after 11 years off. TBC raiding was my last experience, so mythic anything is new to me.
I don’t get LFR. When i played last, if you couldn’t raid because of your schedule, ability, gear, etc., you just didn’t get to raid. I was fine with this. It made raiding, the hardest content, feel like a priviege you earned by playing a lot, doing dungeons to gear up for it, getting attunded, farming consumables, and finding a guild. Now, apparently, raiding is an entitlement you get if you pay a subscription fee. LFR anyway.
Normal feels mostly useless to me, and after two seasons of doing extensive mythic plus, i pretty much outgear normal and heroic raids long before my guild finishes them. I started raiding in Heroic Uldir, already at 385 ilvl from Mythic plus. I started normal BoD at 400 ilvl.
Just have two raid tiers, IMO. Normal and hard. And as much as i love that Mythic plus is a thing, and a viable source of end game gearing, it sucks that if you do both you basically invalidate the gear from LFR, normal and heroic raids.
Blizzard wasn’t. They couldn’t afford to devote so many dev resources to a part of the game that very few had time for. Mythic raiders are less than 5% of the total subscriber base. LFR encompasses over 70%. So yes, people actually are entitled to enjoy the content that they paid for in their subscription fees. At least according to the people who actually make the game.
This has been tried and it failed. Why? Because 2 raid tiers is not enough. When there were only 2 difficulty levels, the content was trivial for people at the highest end (e.g. Cutting Edge guilds now). But it was way too hard for the majority of raiders (e.g. current Heroic-only raiding guilds, which make up the vast majority of actual raiding guilds). The differences in skill level between the top and bottom end are gigantic. Only 2 difficulties would never be able to have content that targeted a majority of players.
Here’s thing: it actually doesn’t matter at all how many difficulties you think there “should” be. Just choose the one that suits you and stop complaining about how other people enjoy the game. Trying to take away options because they are meaningless to you is just petty. Very few people actually play all aspects of the game. But it’s seemingly only the “I raided in TBC when it was hard bro” types of people who constantly come on the forums crying that the things they don’t do should be removed from the game.
It makes no more sense for you to complain about LFR than it makes to complain about battle pets or PvP or transmog farming. If you don’t like, just don’t do it. Stop trying to ruin it for other people for no reason.
If you had only 3 difficulty levels, then you’d only need to inflate gear by 15 ilvl per patch instead of 30, cutting gear inflation in half. And if the gear from M+, and for that matter, emissaries, makes gear from Normal raiding irrelevant, why not cut Normal entirely?
I agree with you on LFR. And we need Mythic for the hard core no lifers. And we need something in between. Do we really need two levels in between?
I don’t think the line between Normal and Heroic is so clean. There’s a lot of overlap between the two. Typically guilds down Heroic Grong before Normal Jaina, or even Normal Stormwall. Do we really need half a raid of overlap? And then another half a raid between Heroic and Mythic? If it’s just for the 10 man raiders, can we scratch that itch with interim raids like Crucible of Storms? 20 man raiding guilds obviously have no problem doing 5 man content, so they can’t claim that 10 man content destroys them any more.
It’s either 2 levels in between or we go back to what they used to do in TBC - which is fill the beginning of the raid with normal-style pushover bosses, and the latter part of the raid with more difficult heroic-style bosses. Which just gives everyone less choice.
Look back at TBC raids like Hyjal where 4 of the 5 bosses were about equal in difficulty to Champions of the Light and then the end boss was Heroic Jaina level difficulty. This is the sort of rose coloured nostalgia goggles that I’m talking about when people who claimed to raid in TBC talk about how it was the best ever. It wasn’t.
Blizzard would prefer for people not to take 11 years off at a time. LFR is what they came up with to keep some of those people subscribed. I know people who stayed subscribed all the way through Legion, just doing LFR for titanforges.
10 man content really did destroy guilds though, that’s the thing. People generally prefer smaller groups when possible, and thousands of guilds broke into smaller 10 man guilds when that was a legitimate mode of content.
There was also the issue of balancing 10 man vs 20 man content which is why Mythic is a fixed size now. They still can’t get balance right in flex mode (they’ve basically given up now, pretty much all raid encounters are easier with more people in the last 2 expacs).