I mean, every guild deals with this though. You have a bench. People miss, comps need to be swapped, and sometimes people just have to sit for the sake of equal play time.
I think this is fine.
I will never defend this. Cross-realm mythic and the abolition of the current ID system are things I heavily favor.
And the player experience was better.
Yep, and I don’t think they should have to. It was the worst part of raiding back in vanilla, and it’s still a big problem that exists with raiding today that provides little to no value as far as I’m concerned.
I understand not everyone will agree, and I’m perfectly content to agree to disagree here. 
It’s arguably worse for the game than having a strict 20-player requirement because if a hard boss is easiest for 25-30 players it’ll all but require even more of them. Suddenly it’s not a 20-man raid; it’s a 30-man raid.
Even Heroic, as easy as it may be, tends to have some extremely severe scaling issues once you reach lower numbers. Harder Mythic bosses with those levels of scaling issues will become literally impossible with smaller groups.
Bosses have always been harder with fewer people (with a couple of exceptions) just because you have fewer people to do the same number of jobs.
Nefarian & Onyxia in Cataclysm - same number of interrupts to be done on the 3 pillar teams, but 60% fewer players to do it on 10-man.
Hagara, again in Cataclysm - same number of beam soaks to be done, but on 10-man you need 90% of your team rotating the mechanic instead of a third of your team.
My main interest in flexible Mythic is in the OVER 20 players area, so that existing teams can actually bring their whole roster in on every boss and people can play the game. But I’m sympathetic to the smaller team argument. Still, smaller teams need to understand going in that bosses will almost always be harder with fewer people.
I agree if all Blizzard does is made mythic raiding flex. That’s why I think raid placement and max rewards should still be locked to 20 to make sure there is still a heavy incentive for current mythic guilds to stick to 20. Any raid guild looking for HOF or any placement on raider.io will still maintain a roster capable of bringing 20 every raid.
But many guilds that reach the end of AOTC and just want the next challenge would be able to walk into mythic without needing to rearrange their entire roster to even have the chance to do so.
It does, and if there is a fight that becomes literally impossible, so be it. That’s better than telling any guild that isn’t sitting at exactly 20 they can’t even walk through the door.
I believe the biggest thing that makes mythic not inclusive is the difficulty. We saw in EN what happens when a raid is just that easy.
We saw with M+ how the raiding numbers went down expansion after expansion, the incentives to raid are just not there.
While flex could maybe help having a healthier bench, I don’t think you can expect any noticeable positive changes from it. The possible negatives seems way stronger from my perspective.
I think we will need to see how crossrealm guilds and mythic raiding will pan out first, but mythic raiding in itself even if there’s some changes won’t just grow back to what years of M+ and borrowed powers grinds will have done to it.
I’m pretty much guessing near half the active raider playerbase plays classic at this point because of how retail has abandoned them.
Oh, that’s easy. Crossrealm guilds will destroy what little community the game has left.
How so? Wouldn’t this expand the community? You get to play with anyone you want to!
Real talk? 6 of those 24 are going to parse grey/ green and will need to parse the minute this group tries for more than the free bosses.
It’s pretty simple. Back in the day, when a kid wanted to rage after school, they’d open their garage, get on their bike and get the neighborhood rowdy. Like the sandlot. the goonies. Etc.
That is a community.
Crossrealm is like the internet. No idea who you are playing with. Maybe you will see them tomorrow, maybe not.
But if they’re in my guild, which is cross-realm, how is it any different from them being on my realm?
It’s a guild-hopper’s dream, that’s for sure. Moving to a guild’s server showed at least some level of interest in actually being there. Now they can apply and join and use guilds like used buttwipes without a care in the world, and not even have to transfer anymore.
Also, different servers have different communities. It’s going to be really weird being on a mellow server and having people from different styles of servers, or vice-versa.
Oh, one more thing. Transferring servers used to reset your raid ID’s. Without that, people on the mega-servers can just take raid ID’s from anybody they want and sell or give them away freely.
And you might say “well they need to change how raid ID’s work” but the point is, THEY AREN’T. There are a lot of things they COULD do that would make cross-realm guilds a good thing, but they’re putting the cart in front of the horse AGAIN and not doing any of them.
It really isn’t.
I’ve been progging Mythic Tindral for three weeks with a guild that had a 0% chance of killing the pre-nerf version of that fight. There is absolutely nothing more demoralizing than pulling a boss that you have 20 people for but know you are completely incapable of killing.
If only Blizzard would finish developing the fights before releasing them.
Welcome to the reality of the roster boss.
Roster of 28 — people sit too often and leave
Roaster of 24 — razors edge. Hope your 4 seats are flexible and can play tank and/or healer and also don’t mind sitting 80% of the time.
Roster of 20 — you don’t raid. You’ll count on one hand the number of times all 20 people are online at the same time.
It’s stupid. Unless you have some team dedication and rotate and reclear constantly (better be a 3-4 night guild for that) you just feed more progressed guilds. You ever try to learn a group dance with someone new in the group every week?
For established guilds that get CE every tier and reclear it enough to give their bench CE, the system works. Guilds like mine find the gems, polish them, and then send them on up while we reprog mid bosses with brand new people every 2 weeks.
Mythic raiding is not designed for the people who play this game, and that’s a problem. If you’re not willing to be a mercenary, you’ll never get CE. If your guild isn’t top 1000 right now, it’s out of reach for your guild. You can chase it. Improve your parse, and hop to a better guild. It’s the only way.
And even as GM of an established guild that gets CE every tier (this is our 10th anniversary!), I think we need Mythic to scale above 20. Because I want to play with my friends, not tell them they can’t play tonight.
Are you suggesting it would be better for Blizzard to put up a wall that prevents you from killing Tindral because it seems like your group can’t kill it? You’ve never had a raid boss that seemed impossible the first time you pulled it but then it falls over 50 pulls in?
Nobody is forcing you or your raid group to keep going. At any point you guys can call it quits. I would be just as opposed to Blizzard artificially stopping your raid group from continuing to pull Tindral after an arbitrary number of pulls without you making progress. If a guild that’s unprepared for mythic wants to smash their face for a 100 pulls before deciding to call it quits, they should absolutely be allowed to do so.
Tindral prior to yesterday was a 450+ pull boss and the vast majority of guilds that got to him within the previous three weeks (to put things into perspective, that amounted to about two-thirds of upwards of 900 guilds) had absolutely zero chance of killing that boss in its current state.
Most bosses really can’t compare to that sort of brutality. We weren’t expecting a Smolderon kill within the first 50 pulls or so and we actually did waste a huge amount of time trying to learn the fight by 18-manning it one holiday weekend, but we were going into that boss knowing damn well that if people dodged waves, baited fires properly, and used their cooldowns properly/didn’t let the boss eat their orbs the boss would die. It’s not an inherently complex boss, and you can see the entirety of the fight even if you do literally zero damage from start to finish because that’s how the boss works.
Tindral, on the other hand? Yeah, no. From the literal first time we pulled that boss half our raid team knew we’d just be banging our heads against a wall until Blizzard nerfed the living daylights out of the boss (something they took far, far, far too long to do). Just the sheer concept of pulling a boss that you will not make any sort of meaningful progress on is insanely demoralizing and I’d have unironically preferred if the game just flat-out prevented us from pulling the boss and told us “nope, sorry, this boss is not for you. Wait for nerfs.” And the icing on the cake? You can’t even get that much meaningful practice on the fight if you’re doing so; the fight is infamous for incredibly brutal mechanic overlaps throughout multiple phases and even getting to Phase 3 (the hardest part of the fight) cleanly was a 300+ pull endeavor.
So no, pulling bosses you literally cannot kill with the group/guild you’re running with isn’t exactly better than not being able to pull them at all. That time you’re spending banging your heads against a wall could be spent doing… well, literally anything else.
This has already been discussed ad nauseam. It creates issues with encounter design and would create scenarios where you’d STILL have to field either the minimum, maximum, or some ideal in-between to handle mechanics.
It wouldn’t solve the problem you’re describing, it would make it worse.