Mythic raid time investment

Community General Discussion
1

Here’s a bit of back-of-the-envelope math. Consider the Race to World First. Guilds vying for first place in the RWF will typically raid for about 16 hours per day, with no breaks until the raid is cleared. The race usually takes about a week. There’s a lot of variation, of course (Sepulcher was a sh!tshow), but the typical RWF completes in 8 days, being cleared shortly after the first weekly reset. That’s 16*8=128 hours of raiding to get the kill.

Compare that to a typical twice-a-week, 3-hours-a-night raiding guild. They’re raiding 6 hours a week. If it takes them about 128 hours to clear the raid on M, that means it will take 22 weeks to clear the raid. That’s assuming you don’t have to cancel raid nights because of holidays or whatever. That’s a ton of time. So a simple observation: RWF teams complete the mythic raid 22x faster than a normal raid team in large part because they play 22x more hours per week.

People might object that the raid gets nerfed over time as you get better gear, so it should take less time for normal raiders to clear the raid on mythic. But I don’t think that people clearing at the end of a tier are taking substantially fewer attempts on the end boss than the RWFers are. The fact that normal raiders have better gear by the end is balanced by the fact that:

  • Most guilds spend a few weeks in heroic first to gear up. RWFers do that during heroic week running splits.
  • People in normal guilds aren’t the very best raiders in the entire world.
  • RWFers kill all the M bosses once or twice on the way to Cutting Edge. Regular raiders will do it a dozen times for the gear. (And if one guy who was running seeds on Xymox has a baby and has to take a couple months off, you’re back to teaching a new guy the hardest mechanics and you lose two weeks when you should be working harder bosses.)

When tuning the raid, Blizzard should have a goal in mind for how many hours, total, it should take for a team to complete the raid. The % of players who will complete the raid is the % of players who will have that many hours available to do it. “Weeks to clear” isn’t the relevant metric. It’s “hours working prog to clear.” What, exactly, that goal is is up to the devs and depends on the kind of game they want to make. But if your raid tier will last X weeks, and it will take more than 6X hours to clear the raid on M, clearing the raid on M will be simply out of reach for the huge majority of your players.

Many teams raid 3 nights a week in order to get the clear; 9 hours a week. If it takes more than 9X hours to clear on M, clearing on M will be simply out of reach for almost everyone (see, e.g., Sepulcher).

Bear in mind that 6 raid hours per week players aren’t playing for 6 hours a week. They’re doing dailies/WQs, M+ for their weekly chest, maybe some professions or achievements. 6 raid hours a week isn’t casual. That’s the dedicated player base who wants to do difficult content. They can’t, though. Because it takes too much time.

The problem with mythic raids - the problem with sepulcher - isn’t really difficulty. It’s hours.

3 Likes
2

A few things:

  1. you’re not wrong
  2. They need to have a cognitive complexity budget per boss per difficulty IMO. I’ve posted about how to think about that elsewhere.
  3. If you want to do bulleted lists the format is thus:
* first item
* second item
* third item

That will render as:

  • first item
  • second item
  • third item
1 Like
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seriously. this.

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The funny thing about it is that you can have cognitively complex mechanics on a given fight. But they need to manage how many and what else is going on at the same time. Having a mechanic that requires a player to make a split second decision while doing all the other things is what creates disaster. That and total number of mechanics to remember.

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The skill gap is way too large I think to come up with a generic X hours to clear.

They do seem to try and let about 1000ish guilds get CE each tier depending on tier length, participation, and difficulty. And went out of their way to cripple SotFO to push guilds through to reach that number.

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Isn’t that kind of the point of what makes the encounters hard?

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I think we’re looking at the same thing from different angles. The number of hours it takes to down a boss is a function of the cognitive complexity of that boss. Once doing all the other things becomes instinctual, you can make that split second decision correctly and reliably. But making all the other things instinctual is a matter of practice, i.e. time.

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That’s why it’s a budget, not a hard ban. You can do those things. Let’s say for a opening boss in mythic it would be 60 points of cognitive complexity and 100 for an end boss. Normal would be say 35 and 60 for the same, heroic some value in the middle.

That means that you have a way to gauge if the complexity of the fight is likely to overwhelm players of a specific difficulty. It’s also not a hard budget, you can exceed if you make sure the timings are just right. It’s just a way to guide encounter designers into making something that isn’t stupidly hard when it didn’t need to be.

Edit: It would also prevent encounters from being too easy. If they calculated the cognitive complexity of a fight and found it way low it would also indicate maybe they should revamp it to have more challenge.

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They can make mechanics unforgiving without overlapping a half dozen mechanics making the entire encounter a huge mess.

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I think they are different actually. Cognitive complexity is a measure of how hard it is to perform perfectly on a boss. Hours to clear is a measure of how hard it is to learn. I think both should have budgets/targets personally.

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I don’t think something like “cognitive complexity” is reasonable to be quantified in a game like this with such a massive skill gap in the playerbase.

Nor would it be useful in designing raid encounters, or at least more useful than just iterative build and testing while making mechanics thematic to the boss.

This sounds like an extremely soulless way to develop a game though so Blizzard is probably going to adopt it.

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Not to mention, none of it seems worth it IMO.

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Skill gaps are always going to be a thing in any player base, and not everyone should be able to clear all difficulties of content That’s why we have 3 raid difficulties + LFR in the game. Mythic is designed for those in the highest skill bracket. The only problem with it is that Blizzard started designing the raids with the Race to World First in mind, which alienated many players that previously were able to compete in mythic content.

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I think based on this response you fundamentally don’t understand it. Which in all fairness I haven’t really explained how it’s calculated anyway.

The overall goal is to quantify total number of mechanics, how many mechanics can overlap (e.g. worst case) and how hard those mechanics are. So an example of where it would help is if blizz detects that a slower DPS raid team is likely to run into a really really nasty overlap between a timer and a HP% mechanic they could change the mechanics so that it’s not so punishing and they don’t happen at the same time. That sort of thing.

Like any metric it can be abused, I don’t think the current way is working though. It’s way to subjective and the testers don’t test worst case scenarios. Xymox is a really good example of this where a raid team with good DPS has a massively easier fight than one with mediocre DPS.

I don’t expect you to agree or like the idea, I just think it would be a better way to gauge if bosses are likely to be completely stupid or not.

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I think after the stunt that Blizzard pulled in Sepulcher, this is going to go away. We’ve learned our lesson that Blizzard could pull the plug on the current raid at any time, and we simply cannot take our time and enjoy the experience like we used to.

Extend, extend, extend. Almost from the very start.

Gear through Mythic+. It’s faster and easier, anyways.

Also, there’s this urban legend that periodically surfaces where people think the RWF guilds are undergeared when doing these fights. They’re not.

The first kill of Mythic Jailer had an average raid-wide ilvl of 274.
The 1000th kill of Mythic Jailer had an average raid-wide ilvl of 277.

3 Likes
16

“Not everyone should be able to clear”

🫠

While so difficult, it’s a computer meant to be beat. There are many people that could beat mythic mode but they’re doing this thing called life.

16 hours a day. What a joke.

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16 hours a day is done by like 6 guilds in the world. And it’s done because they are racing each other, not the content.

There is a PvP component to the race which is what drives all of the extreme loot funneling, class stacking, and such.

Not the content itself. It’s not about just beating the raid. It’s about beating the raid faster than someone else.

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People got to “enjoy the raid” for massively longer than normal in CN and SoD when those each lasted 7+ months.

The rest of the playebase calls that a long content drought on patch 1.

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Many of the people putting in 16 hours a day are playing wow and/or streaming as a job. If you choose to “have a life” over playing wow than that’s your choice, but there are other difficulties made for you.

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Which is why they should have released Korthia earlier. Followed by Tazzavesh. THEN Sanctum.

If anything, there’s too much content in the game - the problem is that Blizzard dumps it on people all at once, so much of it goes untouched.