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

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
61

The question is, would that loss be bad for the game?

I enjoy your presence and greatly respect and admire your achievements, but if you’re asking me if I’d rather have 5000 more average players engaged in the game for every one RFW/HoF player who left, I’d probably say yes.

I’m not naive enough to believe that RFW does nothing for the game, or that having highly skilled players bringing legitimacy to the game is a bad thing, but I think the lengths Blizzard has gone to stroke their feelies has been damaging to this game.

I don’t need to know there is someone better than me to help me enjoy the game.

Ultimately, I don’t know what’s best. I can only say from my perspective that I think too many decisions that affect the overwhelming majority of the community are done with the best interests of a very small few in mind and I think the game is ultimately much worse off for it.

62

They can always gut stuff more as time goes on. But, would that lead to a more satisfactory experience?

Like, ICC had 5% scaling nerfs, Dragon Soul too, so it’s not without precedent.

Even though it’s still called mythic, it’s catering to different skill levels.

Tuning of content you aren’t doing, doesn’t affect you, I feel.

Difficulty can be balanced by expected time of arrival.

63

I don’t get the inference? Are you suggesting I won’t be touching Queen so it doesn’t matter how it’s tuned?

64

I’m saying however Queen is tuned for say the first month or two months is irrelevant for you because you aren’t there.

I suppose yes in a sense.

65

That’s the end point of the curve that everything hinges on. Everything is affected by that tuning.

66

Not exactly.

We can have more boss nerfs. Firesale on bosses (like bomb duration on Halondrus) so it doesn’t have to be a steady difficulty curve.

Bosses can lose entire mechanics (like Blasphemy targets can touch people without the debuff on Anduin.)

Most nerfed versions of the boss can be quite different from initial. And this allows them them to preserve the RWF difficulty, while making CE wider.

Does it lead to a satisfactory experience if people got to kill a boss that had abilities fundamentally changed?

And unless if it’s handed out for free, a new crop will be unable to do the newly-nerfed bosses.

I think it’s better to balance by completion metrics.

CE is prob 5%? (At least, it was for Fyrakk.) So maybe 7% now? By end of tier.

67

I think that’s literally building the game against the players. To my ears that sounds awful in ways that I can’t articulate without sounding stupider than I normally do.

I think I understand the reasoning, and I can’t say that it’s the worst idea, or the best idea. I just think it should be much higher. I think the kind of expectations for mythic raiding, across the board, have reached a stratosphere that is making it less and less fun.

I’m worried about the encroachment of things like the 21st player on mid tier guilds. All the things that this game is not about.

If WoW wants that kind of investment, that level of cost of entry, then perhaps they just need to go all in. Otherwise, I think they need to rein in their influence to some degree, by either providing them with a specialized format on dedicated servers, or dialing down the difficulty to make their preparation efforts superfluous.

If it sounds like I’m trying to take content away from players, perhaps you would be willing to understand that to me it feels like I’m asking to have content returned to players from whom it was has been insidiously taken over all these years.

1 Like
68

If it sounds like I’m trying to take content away from players, perhaps you would be willing to understand that to me it feels like I’m asking to have content returned to players from whom it was has been insidiously taken over all these years.

But like given your own achievements and the lack of CEs at every opportunity, has anything been taken away?

It’s not like you got every CE from x point onwards, then stopped.

69

Ultimately I feel like we’re already walking things back given how this tier played out compared to the last one.

70

Mythic raiding probably isn’t the content that’s going to keep the lights on even if it were nerfed significantly. I feel like I’m a decent example for the median player, and excluding 1 or 2 first bosses out of LFG a couple times over the years, I’ve never had a desire to do mythic raiding.

WoW’s biggest issue is an aging player base, IMO. I feel the ‘try to get more people involved’ contents should probably be focused around M+/Delves.

71

CE got added and then pushed further and further away each time. I choose to be where I am, and I accept that my prog is a result of that choice, but I think that’s part of my complaint.

I am putting in more effort than ever before but the goalpost are getting moved further each time.

I fear that everything is getting more complex about this game, not just the raids. The dungeons are harder from the bottom, gearing is harder across the board, in terms of expectations, costs and the time investment required to craft them.

All of the incremental gains are layered to increase the depth of the game, but the second edge of that sword is that each of those facets are elements that the best players can leverage more effectively than the average players, driving what they can achieve further afield, making it necessary to make the content harder.

I realize that sounds like an old man shouting at the clouds, and perhaps I am, but I don’t think that’s the all of it.

I think by adding more and more depth you create a much larger gap in outcome that doesn’t just result in a skill requirement. It comes in the form of increased organizational expectations and increased cost of entry for everyone.

The game used to be designed in such a way that most players could equip whatever dropped and get through content.

Blizzard had a whole epiphany about gearing being too confusing, regretting the need for players to consult third party sites because upgrades were hard to identify, then they doubled down by making 18 different embellishments, increasing the impact of trinkets and rare items and generally making more and more hoops to jump through.

Do we need so many different boot enchants? Do we need 3 different types of crit ring enchant with 3 different ranks each? All of these seemingly small changes have added up to something ugly and bloated for the sake of itself.

Classes are technically more complex than they’ve ever been. I’m sure some version of feral, or rogue will demand their specs used to be harder, for real men, but overall the new trees have made the variance between what the best and worst players can manage so far apart that it’s no wonder good content is so hard to create.

At the end of the day, I’m not demanding change because I don’t believe that I know what the actual problems are or how to solve them. Though well intentioned, I think many of the design choices have been harmful to the majority. But I can only rely on feelycraft based on my experience, so I could be way off the mark and have to accept that perhaps this is the best the game can be.

72

I think that’s a fair assessment. I do think that raiding is something more players would do if it was easier to access and succeed. But perhaps I’m wrong about that.

What do you think makes you so uninterested in mythic raiding?

73

Definitely not true.

You missed out on Pandaria ones aside from Garrosh. Missed out on Imperator (it was CE, but it was fake) given how long it lasted.

You got Black Gate, Xavius (seen as free.)

Then we don’t have a CE ever since.

CE isn’t only a matter of difficulty, but also time. And before season 4s became a thing in Shadowlands, the last tier usually lasted extremely long compared to the rest.

74

Just a little insight into my history. I was in a top 50 guild playing MM hunter during WoD. I went into Legion as a veteran player and got healing pants and feign death helm as my first two legos. I was suddenly competing for my spot against two hunters who both had boots and ring, the two bis throughput legos.

I was dead in the water. No amount of effort on my part could overcome that deficit in dps and when mechanical performance was identical I was sat in favor of more damage on Il’gynoth and in my bitterness I opted to stop raiding.

I was convinced to come back a short while later by friends and chose to join them in their effort to rebuild. We killed Elisande in Nighthold, ran out of time and tried to go into Tomb strong. The guild wobbled, fell apart part way through mythic and for the first time ever I skipped raid tier in Antorus. I focused on PvP for fun and it wasn’t until Uldir that one of my PvP buddies invited me to join them for an achievement run that I got the itch to raid again.

So I joined their aotc team and we’ve been building and rebuilding since normal Uldir to to closer to CE every tier.

And it’s watching those players make that transition from LFR to Mythic over the years that gives me what I think is the perspective to see just how radically this game has changed and how much more it takes now to be a raider.

I have landed in the 95th percentile for heroic and 90% percentile for mythic performance despite being in a c tier raid team. I have managed a rank 1 and 2 class parse worldwide for dps and numerous top 100 healing parses including a world 6th for shamans in DF.

I believe my progression is a matter of choice, not personal limitations and I’m at peace with that because I love my teammates and that’s worth more than any raid prog.

What alarms me though, and most triggers my belief that raiding is getting harder (complex might be a better description) is the number of players who skilled has increased over time but are still becoming liabilities.

It’s a vicious cycle where they struggle, work to improve themselves and are able to get by, then the new tier drives up the expectations and they are back to being on the cusp or falling short of expectations.

Raiding used to be more fun less work and as I pointed out in other places, it’s not just the difficulty of the raid, it’s the complexity of everything that I think is compromising the fun.

It’s just my opinion, so if I don’t get to have one because of my progression, so be it. I don’t care anymore. I’m not the one fostering the discontent, I’m just trying to sound the alarm because I’m scared by what I’m seeing.

Remember how we got two raids this expansion and they scuffed the tuning on one of them so bad that practically nobody goes there outside of LFR? I am not convinced that Blizzard is making the wisest decisions about what’s best for raiding.

75

It’s not tuning. It’s the gear. Place BIS stuff (but it caps out at heroic so it kinda limits it) and people will be over there.

I don’t think people are becoming liabilities unless if people want to shoot for higher than they’ve been before.

Wouldn’t this contradict your claim that CE is harder and harder? (Because you would be regressing or staying in place.)

76

I think it’s the tuning. Players have tons of alts that would go there, but nobody wants that pain.

What you think and what I’ve witnessed don’t coincide, so I have to believe my experience over your supposition.

That would be accurate if we were only putting forth the same amount of extra effort each tier, but as I’ve mentioned, that isn’t even enough to stay relevant anymore. Each tier ups the ante and requires more effort.

That’s the inflation that I think is becoming untenable. Again, perhaps I’m totally wrong.

77

Mostly the time involved in being on a 2-4 night a week schedule. But then there’s the gold cost, the beyond logged in time investment of doing raid homework (potentially PTR raiding required, depending on the group), and the pressure to parse (I’ve been playing Spriest for 3 months, I still have no idea why my ST DPS is terrible, hopefully I’ll figure it out eventually but if I were M raiding I’d have been 404’d by now lol).

M+ just made the game too convenient for me. I do like the one night group I joined, I think that’s a good fit for me. I just feel like ‘play when you feel like it’ content has taken over since BFA because we’re all old and sleepy now. Lol

78

How would you measure effort?

79

Things like stricter pre-raid ilvl requirements. Participation is pre-raid planning and strategy development. Use of resources like wowaudit and raidplan. But it’s so much more than that. Performance audits and literal coaching sessions with players from top guilds to find and implement improvements.

But here’s the thing. While those things are not unusual for guilds pushing into harder content, it’s not as simple as that.

It’s things like the great vault. We’ve gone from just playing when you can and getting what gear you can to having to fill the chest in BFA, then they cranked that up and now we’re filling 6 to 9 vaults slots. More and more and more each expansion and yet people keep insisting things aren’t getting harder. Perhaps if I say things are more demanding people might at least understand, if not agree.

It’s things like Sharpening Stones. We establish a new expectation for players to have weapon runes or stones and then Blizzard ups the ante for us next tier by making them require some of the most ludicrously rare crafting mats and costing our raiders arms and legs before any swirlies have hit the ground.

It’s things like Augment Runes. Just having food, flasks and pots used to be fine, but let’s add augments runes. Are they consolation prizes, miniature crutches for ants? 0.000005% content nerfs generously tossed at us by Blizzard. Just one more complication that adds so little and yet they even managed to gouge us for 100k in Amirdrassil.

If you want to argue that they’re not that important then you don’t understand the ramifications and probably don’t understand my argument at large either. If you give RFW players an advantage like an augment rune, or a vantus rune, it increases their potential. When their potential is increased it becomes the yardstick by which tuning is measured. It is therefore no longer optional at the level and that requirement is now passed on to all venture there. For the record, we don’t expect augment runes this tier because they’re just a step too far now.

Ironically, RFW raiders are the least in need of those additional boosts, so adding them didn’t help those players, it just added more baggage and standards for lesser teams to adopt, in spite of the added onus, in lieu of simply easier content.

It’s thing like Vantus runes. Instead of just nerfing content, they sell the nerfs to us on the AH. Conceptually they’re fine, but they’re just more fluff and unnecessary expense.

It’s all the things on top of things. Ranks on ranks on ranks of consumables, the costs are so stupid. Raid team expenses are ludicrous and the costs just increase each tier while gold income is nerfed.

There is an elegance in simplicity that has long since abandoned this game.

80

Wouldn’t just doing 1x of any activity be equivalent to BFA Chest? (Kinda.) Just because BLP exists, people are kinda incentivized to do so.

Hpellipsis’s guild only requires 2 m+ slots filled. 4x a week.

And I don’t think many people filled nine.

The thing with vantus is to give first kills an edge. (Cause usually, people don’t use them for rekills.) And you can’t vantus every single boss of the tier for the first kill.

It’s functionally different to Blizzard nerfing content.

I will say that the gold I have became astronomically more thanks to the professions revamp. But just like before, people who don’t care about the economy, tend to find things expensive.

Sure, some people despise the economic side of the game but compared to the past, I don’t think costs have climbed that much?

The complaint for consumables was BFA, or at least, I remember that much.