Mythic Raid - The Player Killer. The Guild Killer. and the Proposed Solution

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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Hey all, brief intro to who I am,

My name is Ginge. I run a 200-800 ranked Mythic guild on retail, a heroic raiding guild on Cata Classic, as well as a hardcore and Classic community of over 900 players.

Of course I dont do this alone with a roster of over a dozen officers, discord mods, and event organizers, we get to see first hand the state of the game.

This post is about Retail raiding and the Mythic progression burnout.

We raid weekly, locked to this 20 man roster, sometimes its in our favor and we have 23 players ready to raid, other weeks we run short at 19, reaching out for that final slot.

The biggest issue I’ve we have with maintaining raid, is not players moving around or raiding elsewhere, its them quitting gaming or quitting warcraft all-together. This is a surprising patch for that to happen, it being one of the best states of wow that we have seen in some time.

and they arent quitting for the reason that you think…

our main source of burnout comes from the constant stress of recruitment of new players, HAVING to be at that 20 person limit exactly means that we both need to keep a bench happy on long progression, without falling below 20 people, preventing raid from happening that week.

I plead for the re-consideration of a flexible mythic (post HoF), if we are able to take in 18-22 happy players, without having to cut or recruit, our players would be happier with progression and not feel the two steps forward 1 step back of constant required recruitment, relearning and re-setup of new players to a fight.

Leading to a second point which I dont want to stress too much but as we progress Broodkeeper Ovinax currently, when a new raider walks in to this fight, before a pull, they are required to have 4 addons, 6 weak auras, and custom settings on DBM/BigWigs.

Why is the wall to entry both so high, and only so big? we can ONLY have 20, but to lose a player means reprogging weak aura set ups, rather then a boss.

Please just add mechanics to make boss mechanics clear, hell even mark targets with clear ground animations, so that a weak aura doesnt have to be set up to do it for players. Its okay to make fights easier, if it means the artificial help of weak auras isnt needed for that boss.

(ie. would it be game breaking to a fight if instead of manually focusing an interupt on a worm with a special focus mark macro while dodging 30 other healthbars with a healbar deletion weak aura, so that 4 other players weak auras would tell them to interrupt that worm, you could just have those worms differently named, or appear on the side bar to be able to target manually or with a macro?(enemy1, enemy2))

Flexible raiding would both relieve the stress of having to recruit mid progression, as well as allow more guilds to achieve their goals in Mythic. I believe there would be no net negative to introducing this to the game once hall of fame is closed.

*now to be devils advocate.

Would this arbitrarily make raid easier?
yes, it likely would, but we are already doing that with gear and stacking damage buffs.

Would this set a new “recruitment limit” where 18 is the new 20?
it very well might, but it would also give players the choice to go above that limit, which would ease recruitment as well as benches.

I know this will probably go into the void of the forums. But as a leader and owner of such a big wow community for a game that I love so much, I have to at least say my part.

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Great post. I’m sure you very aware of the difficulties that come with all of this. What a load to bear!

I just stepped into mythic raiding myself (2/8) with a guild and it is very fun and rewarding. However, the 20-man requirement is sometimes a hindrance or an all out deal breaker. & the lock out feature makes it difficult to replace someone who may not be able to raid on day 2, and a PUG may not want to come in for progressing a boss they may or may not kill, but then be locked for the week.

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Does this hard limit on people (fixed raid size) also apply to your heroic Cata raid (fixed size) or classic raid (fixed size) or just retail?

Seems like it’d be a problem for you in all modes.

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Cata had 10 and 25 man heroics.

There are most likely many reasons besides the ones you posted. It sucks, but people do tend to grow out of things. This is why guilds come and go.

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I absolutely agree. A little flex would be a good thing.

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Yes…both 10 and 25 are fixed sizes, which are prone to the same rigid issues as a fixed 20 man….

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The challenge of mythic tuning is only preserved by their target 20 man. When they tried to homogenize things in WoD, they got crapped on for it.

Just got CE this Tuesday, and the reality is that you need a roster of 25-28, and always have for a stable shot at it.

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Yes, yes they are. I was only answering your question about numbers.

Grats, and yeah, 25 to 30 allow people to actually take nights off if needed or do other things. The only issue (with any sized raid team), is being able to make everyone happy.

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I mean…I feel like this is a post the is somewhat disingenuous because I’m going to guess that people are leaving your guild probably because you’ve been hard stuck at Ovinax since the 3rd week of October. And Flex isn’t going to help guilds in that position because after you get the Auras set up…the fight is pretty routine and its largely a “use your eyes fight” which I’m starting to see your average 2 night Mythic Guild can’t handle.

And the thing is this too: You can absolutely 18-19 man mythic right now if you wanted at these gear levels given there are Mythic guilds doing sales run where they just have 1 or 2 slots that might as well be empty due to carries. It is 100% possible to skill your way through bosses with 18-19 players.

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Having mythic be a static 20 might cause some problems, but it solves others. As we’ve seen from flex heroic, some fights are always going to be harder or easier with less/more people. A flexible mythic would end up inevitably being ‘you bring 15 people to boss X, and 25 people to boss Y for the best chances’.

This tiers problem, overall, has been the front four bosses being too easy, the back four being slightly too difficult and the devs being iceberg slow to deal with that situation, particularly the jump from rash to ovinax.

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It’s why they need to make grabbing that extra 2-4 players guilds usually end up needing by pugging and getting rid of the unique Mythic Raiding ID.

A lot more skilled players would be willing to dive into mythic raiding if they weren’t locked out so easily just by attempting the boss.

It’s not even worth trying to jump into any group that’s killed even one boss unless you’re absolutely sure you’re going to get something out of it.

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this has been a problem in cata as well with the 25 man fixed size, we even flex doing two 10 man groups for similar gear, so at least we have another option

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I actually think its not the worst thing in the world that the first 4 weren’t tuned so hard but I would have rather there been a boss between Rash and Ovinax that is has it’s difficulty nestled between the the two, because it’s my opinion that the first 4 bosses being so easy led to alot of guilds that were not ready for Ovinax to get there. I think a 5th boss being the bridge between Rash and Ovinax/Nexus Princess would have been much better. This current issue is that there isn’t a “Smoulderon” before you go to do Tindral. You’re just going from Nymue/Larry to Tindral.

But the thing that I will call to the mountains about that at this point in the tier Ovinax isn’t a gear check in the slightest and is largely down to skill play after weakauras are sorted since the beginning of november. With what gear levels you can reach now and the fact we have a 9% throughput buff at this point I think it’s difficulty is pretty fair given and that was the case even going back the past month. Most of what you’re doing in Ovinax you’re doing on the 3 following fights so if Ovinax is posing difficulties skill wise then the next 3 fights aren’t going to be any easier. If you can’t bait out discharges before Egg breaks properly then you’re gonna struggle with Queen P1 and Court. If you have terrible player awareness you’re going to murder your fellow raiders on Nexus Princess and rack up Betrayal deaths on Court. If you can’t improvise Worm interrupts then you’re going to get farmed while progging Queen P2 for a long while.

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it sounds like you are comparing top 1% guilds (i see your guild is the top guild on the realm!, good job!) who are able to carry people for fun through mythic, to a mid level guilds that yes, do spend more time progressing bosses (we killed ovinax last night btw). Ive been running a guild at this level for a long time, both on the raid team and not. Sounds like this conversation doesnt affect your level of play, which is a good thing!

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At this point we’re outright skipping the entire 3rd section with our gear. He doesn’t even go over to the canister.

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I think the last time we killed it a month ago before we locked out on Court we were still in lust from popping it right at 7th break. It’s very much just do the fight style of fight and I just think a lot of guild can’t handle mechanics that guilds have no impact on.

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It doesn’t but I think alot of issues guilds that are having with the this current raid is more rooted in the guildes (structure, officer core, how they work through mechanics) themselves rather than the raid itself. And the lockout being gone or an option for flex raiding wouldn’t have help.

But congratulations are in order! Nexus Princess is probably the most fun I’ve had this whole tier so far and it’s a blast to do. It’s has the biggest “one with the matrix” type vibes once you get it down and your team will love it. Best part: NO WEAKAURAS NEEDED :slight_smile:

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I agree absolutely, The amount of recruitment I get from guild imploding with leadership drama is insane. Thankfully things have been good for us, we vote on leadership each tier to make sure everyone level headed, and even the GM (currently me and one other player) wont always be the GM, I actually joined this guild as an initiate in BFA! and just overtime ended up here.

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I think honestly blizzard should have stuck with their guns on private auras, and then had the mechanics that are private aurad be more lenient in terms of time they give players to organise. Ovinax is a boss that blizzard wants players to communicate on the fly to handle, but 6 seconds wasn’t enough time to do that.

What if it was a private aurad but you had 10 seconds, or 12? Before the egg debuffs went off. Enough time to communicate where players are going and enact a plan.

Blizz clearly wants there to be a boss every tier or so where the main difficulty isn’t the dance or the tuning, but instead having to handle and organise something on the fly. I think that’s fine, but they need to make it something feasible and then stop players using computers to do the legwork for them.

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This is part of why I love Princess as a fight. Everything is private but still feels comfy while still needed good reflexes to react to mechanics while still testing your guilds ability to communicate say for externals and to pump damage.

I feel like 10 or 12 would have worked great for this and then shave off a bit off the boss’s health to account for the increased fight length maybe. The 8 second change was good but then it had the weirdness of making it line up with a discharge set. The thing is that I think there would still need to be some assignments made in order to account for knocks for parasites for grips and CCs before they start running. Other main thing is just making increasing the cast time for the Worm to allow guilds to forgo interrupt anchors if they were comfy.