Agree with most of this, except vantus runes. However I think difficulty pitching of Nerub Ar Palace and the plan of “Bosses all get much easier with gear and don’t use % phasing so the hard overlaps eventually fall out of the back end of the fight” is a winning formula for balance tuning.
I want hard fights we can stick our teeth into, and I don’t mind that they get easier for everyone who comes after us. The first 4 bosses melting and giving guilds 2 vault slots consistently since week 2~, plus revitalising the PuG scene has been a huge win.
Ovinax is the fly in the ointment, maybe not a boss where the pull count expectation is that high, but in reality it was too much organisation for most guilds to commit to and down in a timely manner. It was mechanically simple enough in theory for it’s position but not in practice. Which is a shame because Kyveza and Queen are fantastic mythic bosses, even pre nerf, and silken whilst a little finicky felt completely acceptable as a middle ground between them.
Ovinax was even a problem for us. Making the first 4 bosses that easy meant we hit it on our first mythic raid night, before it had even been killed in the RWF. We had 2 raid nights of staring at an RWF tuned unkillable wall with our low ilvl and lack of gear from splits or m+ farming. It sucked but it felt like we just shouldn’t have been there that early, mainly because the first 4 lacked any sort of DPS or gear check.
A guild is to have fun, get to know other players, instead of feeling like you are on a 8 - 3pm job stuck in a cubicle questioning every decision that has brough you to that point.
I wouldn’t accept an invitation into your guild even if you paid me one million in gold.
Been there and done that. I solo instead and find groups on the premade option to accomplish certain tasks. Like Mythic +, delves and so on…
There is absolutely NO GOOD REASON for not making the Mythic raid tier a FLEX raid for 10-30 players… ONCE HALL OF FAME CLOSES! And hall of fame should close after the 4 week of the raid’s release date, imo — not the first 200 guilds (it should be a TIMED event!)
I can understand the need for 20 people for the RWF and other competitive challenges so that the effort is worth the title. I don’t want that to change. BUT… at some point in time (around the 4th week) it becomes untenable to continue to raid that instance as people grab their titles and go “on a break”.
The solution there is turning the Mythic raid tier into a FLEX raid after the 4th week and closing HoF after that 4th week! It also makes HoF worth a whole lot more than just some arbitrary count of guilds.
Mythic flex with a big range will never, ever work. It will 100% result in the following: either small group sizes will basically find the encounters impossible because they cant field the powers of many different classes, or it will be significantly easier than big groups and guilds will say byebye to half their raid team.
Even 15-25 might be too big. 18-22 could be the sweet spot.
Elaboration here helps it sound less offensive. It’s CE but the reason why some don’t like it is because you could actually go back to it after doing BRF which made it significantly easier.
Still a mythic fight though just not an end game one at that point.
Heroic style lockouts after HoF is much more appropriate imo. Has the benefit of bolstering recruiting by potentially subbing in a pug on roster strained days, flexing alt/bench players on fights without getting them stuck with a lockout, and you don’t have to screw around with how the raids are tuned.
Flex raids are tuned from normal tier, enhanced up for heroic tier. As it is, they literally create a brand new tuning structure for just Mythic alone, adding the lockout complexity. Programming wise, it would be far easier to just tune up from the flex heroic into a flex mythic.
I still vote for a Flex Mythic after the HoF lockout, not heroic tier. The reason being is the MAJORITY of active guilds out here past the first ~4 weeks of a season are mostly CASUAL to SEMI-CASUAL raiders. Opening up the flex for them would greatly help them access the Mythic content to play around in. The folks that chase HoF would still have the same locked out Mythic raid they always do, while allowing for more of the NORMAL population to access the Mythic content and play with it.
Programmatically tuning anything other than the flex rules they already have in place would be more difficult. They literally take normal (from a code standpoint) and add in mechanics & a ranged HP table to call it heroic. The same could be done for a flex mythic. But any changes to that structure would require more programming, which makes it more difficult to implement.
Downsizing for a kill is mostly a SKILL ISSUE or ATTITUDE ISSUE. If you think that folks get benched in heroic for the s**** & giggles, that’s not a thing. We bench people that are failing mechanics and pull them back into the previous tier to get more practice. I don’t know of any guild that purposely would bench anyone that doesn’t fail mechanics, pumps out the dps/hps, and is generally great to get along with.
The issue is that someone is always going to be last on the team, and cutting them out = faster kill (up to a point.)
It is a skill issue thing, but also something that happens inevitably.
By taking less people, you reduce the points of failure.
And by taking more people (at start) it allows for a easy vetting process of who’s capable.
Sure maybe some people are bad enough to drop (for the foreseeable future) but in most cases (at least with benched for the kill, in heroic) didn’t happen to be the case.
Typically it’s because fights are tuned to be difficult and playing a harder version of the fight by bringing more or less people than what happens to be optimal adds to the difficulty.
If the fight is easier with 18 people than it is 20, odds are most guilds would bring 18 instead at least for a first kill.
I don’t necessarily mind flex as a concept, as long as they can consistently maintain one number as the optimal choice. If you wanna bring the whole gang to rekills and take the hit to consistency (Or overcome it outright with gear) I think that’s conceptually fine. But yoyoing group size based on what specifically happens to be optimal for prog on each boss doesn’t feel like a good design choice.