Normal is intended for Friends and Family guilds. Per Blizzard:
One Size Does Not Fit All
While it’s impossible to fit every player into a neat, tidy archetype, we recognize that we could be providing a better experience to one broad category of raider: social groups comprised predominantly of friends and family, and smaller guilds that do their best to include as many members in their Raid outings possible.
During the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, the 10-player Normal difficulty served these groups of players pretty well, but the unification of 10-player and 25-player into a single difficulty effectively eliminated that niche. While Raid Finder > mode is extremely accessible, it doesn’t provide smaller groups with a tight-knit social experience while progressing through the content. In Patch 5.4, we’re planning to introduce a new mode of raiding that allows us to deliver the sort of experience that we think these players are looking for.
Blizzard stated this right before the release of flex in Siege of Orggrimmar. While Normal is, by default, the best organized PUG solution, Normal is not, nor was ever intended to be, the pug solution, or a replacement for LFR.
Over the years, we have seen a slide on WoW’s “Overton Window of raid difficulty - a drift, and a bias, towards normalizing Heroic as baseline raiding and everything under it “random pug-land.” This, I believe was never Blizzard’s intent. LFR was always intended for players who cannot or will not commit to a scheduled raid. Normal was always intended for, what we knew back in the day as, the “Casual 10s” of Wrath-era raiding: the friends and family difficulty. Heroic was always intended for progression raiding and mythic was always intended for hardcore competition.
There is room in WoW for all four lanes of raiding. Players need to embrace the lane that makes them happy, and utilize the benefits of the lanes that typically wouldn’t be their first choice.
If you got a warlock and are willing to kick bad players and add good players to your friend’s list you can have a mean pick up group slapping out raids in no time.
Oh you sweet naive young thing if you think someone who’s been playing since vanilla has only had one or two bad experiences pugging.
More like half of the time I run normal leveling dungeons it’s an absolute nightmare on my tanks. When I run raids as a pug there’s people who were screaming, people who were quitting at the slightest inconvenience, people who were sexually harassing others, people who were spewing slurs such as ethnic slurs and LGBT+ slurs like every single time without fail.
There’s only been one time actually had a good pug we’ve invited back when we were bringing pugs into our raid back in the original Castle Nathria. There was also the time someone was talking about lewd things involving minors and we kicked that person to the curb on the spot.
I have never done mythics with any sincerity before season 3. I had one bad experience per week sometimes 2 or 3 but the overwhelming majority was fine.
That’s just me. But I don’t think it’s worth throwing the entire thing away or dismissing because it’s not perfect
I have run over 20 toons from one to Max as tank alone. It’s not that bad. Again, the overwhelming majority are uneventful
I mean I don’t think it’s fair or “appropriate” to pretend like everything is bad either.
If someone has severe social anxiety I would question the genre of choice. Whether you’re in a pug group or lfr you’re still interacting with people which would be socially taxing. No more or less normal to lfr.
You can call it trolling I can call it disagreeing with you. I’m perfectly fine with agreeing to disagree. I don’t really care how you feel about any of it. No offense
what are they doing in a multiplayer game that’s been group based from the beginning? And even if they play solo in that kind of a game, why should the social, group game change its core nature to cater to people with social anxiety?
what are they doing in a multiplayer game that’s been group based from the beginning? And even if they play solo in that kind of a game, why should the social, group game change its core nature to cater to people with social anxiety? If you have severe social anxiety then don’t play social multiplayer games unless, yknow, you’re trying to get desensitised to the anxiety and ffs don’t ask for the multiplayer game to change to suit you.
Nobody is telling anyone what they can or cannot play.
What’s happening is that people are complaining about something they don’t do, giving something they want.
Which is silly.
Arena gives unique mounts EVERY SEASON that are GONE FOREVER because they vanish when the season does. But we don’t get dozens of threads every arena season about the mounts that people won’t get.
I don’t do arena, myself.
I don’t like arena.
I also don’t complain about the mounts I don’t get. There are plenty of mounts in the game.
I am SHOCKED that Blizzard did not honor the already published achievement, and instead changed the achievement text to Normal. I was quite certain that they would change the requirements to match the achievement text.
That said… we get these kinds of threads all the time. We had them about Mage Tower, we had them about Jailer mounts, we get them for everything EXCEPT the PvP mounts. Which is really bizarre.
