I am now at the item level where I can raid with my guild. We’ve tried Dragon Soul twice now - killed one boss the first week and didn’t go the second week because of last minute cancellations.
To me, the biggest challenge with raiding has always been finding the exactly 9 or exactly 24 other people to do it with at a time that works for everyone.
I am the 10th person in my guild’s raid group. If someone else in the guild gets geared and wants to start raiding, there’s no room for them unless someone else drops.
The game is not set up for “most people in normal/heroic raiding and only the people who want to do LFR do LFR.” Right now, it’s a small fixed number normal/heroic raiding, nothing for everyone else. If they just bring back LFR it will still be a small, fixed number normal/heroic raiding, LFR for everyone else.
To get your vision, they need to implement flex. Flex will allow the 11th - 24th member of the guild do be part of the normal/heroic raid group. Only then will “most” people even be able to be part of the raid group.
Oh and bring back cross-realm group finding functionality.
That I agree, I just don’t see them implement or even balance it. MoP was not designed for Flex, and the Flex Raid difficulty in SoO is nothing more than LFR in a premade group.
I actually don’t mind the way the 5 mans work for gear gaining. I probably would limit it to tier and trinkets though. Have LFR there for the rest through random chance. This way people can square away set bonus situations, avoid the community crash out when guilds manipulate the system to get it for themselves in LFR, and in general just give 5 mans purpose for the whole expansion. LFR being there is nice though. It is an activity a lot of people would like to do, and as long as set bonus and trinkets are quickly gainable outside of it the need for most people that don’t want to be there to plow it weekly for a month or two diminishes. Seems over all win win.
Flex difficulty fell between LFR and normal mode, so where normal mode is now in retail, not completely faceroll like LFR but still extremely forgiving.
Somewhere around where 10 man normals were in wrath.
The roster issue like you said can happen in 10m or 25m but that doesn’t mean you can’t fill those spots by pugging. I look at my realm discord and people actively look for runs or advertise runs. Flex is interesting but if you’re not filling a 10m you will still have a hard time filling a flex as most fights if I remember even on flex are better to do with a minimum of 10m and often get easier with more people.
I would personally recommend that when Isle of Thunder comes out that the rewards from the current protocol are added to base heroics.
Lets say we start with Protocol Fear, then Protocol Thunder, then Protocol Pride.
So when Protocol Thunder comes out, all the extra rewards from Fear are now available from regular heroics.
You already tried to explain this to me twice. I know where Flex is supposed to be. I did it back in the days.
Flex was a meme difficulty and barely any harder than LFR, especially since you could pick the players you want to raid with. Heck, I remember how my guild (during content draught and full clear) did a fun challenge by having us all create new alts and we went into Flex with iLvl 450 and had no issue at all. (Heroic) Raiders, including me, had a harder time doing LFR with all the actual bots or players that played like a bot in 2014. I saw warriors with cloth gear during mop (!)
And yes indeed Flex is what Normal is nowadays - it’s a joke. People do that week 1 for gearing and never forget that even exists. Normal has lower participation than Heroic lol
This has been an historical problem in wow and at least for classic they have gave many free transfers to help (and I would expect some more coming with mop). You have some control on that problem as you can always create another character on another realm while I understand not the perfect solution.
As far as group finder goes it is generally not used even on my realm people use discord to setup runs so I’d still recommend looking at your realm discord.
Not sure if this discussions about group finder was based in retail, but at least for classic Cata since Firelands the group finder was broken and would not let you list raid groups, so that is why you didn’t see any when browsing.
But in classic cata you can finally list raids again in the premade finder.
I’ve seen some groups in it for baradin hold and older raids as far as I know what was broken (but found that it was done willingly) was crossrealm lfg.