Hey all, this is Thainos, aka Platetits. I’ve run a raiding guild, The Horde Initiative, since mid TBC. We raided 25/40-man back in TBC, then heroic in Wrath (6x a week on 2 paladin tanks). Mythic raiding was a natural progression for us although not as hardcore as back in the day. Nowadays we clear AOTC fairly early in a raid tier and we might dabble in Mythic if we have the numbers. Loads of my teammates tend to leave WoW right after AotC, but most still stay in contact and we play other games in the post-clear season. The post-clear raid team consists of 12-18 raiders, not enough for more than a mythic boss or two. However, we’d love to get our hands dirty, but alas, there’s no flex mythic raiding.
In the ever-evolving world of World of Warcraft, the Mythic raiding scene has become a pinnacle of endgame content. However, with its current rigid scheduling and demanding time commitment, many players find it difficult to participate. This proposal aims to address this issue by advocating for a more flexible approach to Mythic raiding.
Benefits of Flexible Mythic Raiding:
Increased accessibility: By allowing players to raid on their own schedules, flexible Mythic raiding would make this challenging content more accessible to a broader range of players.
Improved player retention: Many players who enjoy raiding are forced to choose between their personal lives and Mythic raiding due to the current inflexible schedule. Flexible raiding would help retain these players by accommodating their real-world commitments.
More diverse raiding groups: A flexible approach would encourage players from different time zones and with varying availability to come together and form raiding groups. This would foster a more diverse and inclusive raiding community.
Proposal:
Separate the World First Race from Regular Mythic Raiding
Rationale:
The current system for the World First race in Mythic raiding creates an unhealthy environment for both the competing guilds and the regular Mythic raiding community.
For competing guilds: The current system incentivizes guilds to use extreme measures, such as sleep deprivation and unhealthy eating habits, in order to stay ahead in the race. This can lead to burnout and health problems for the raiders involved.
For the regular Mythic raiding community: The World First race often results in the release of strategies and guides that are only accessible to the top guilds. This can make it difficult for regular guilds to progress in Mythic raiding, as they may not have the same level of resources or expertise.
Proposed Solution:
Create a separate World First race that is distinct from regular Mythic raiding. This could be done by:
Setting separate servers for the World First race. This would allow guilds to compete for the World First without affecting the progress of regular Mythic raiders.
Requiring guilds to register for the World First race in advance. This would help to ensure that only guilds who are serious about competing participate in the race.
Providing special rewards for guilds who place in the top three (or 5, or 10) in the World First race. This would incentivize guilds to compete in the race.
Allow for participants to create any character combination and acquire baseline gear. Allowing participants access to the base item level gear and items and preselecting their character would streamline participation and allow for teams to decide their own comps.
Benefits:
Separating the World First race from regular Mythic raiding would have a number of benefits:
It would create a healthier environment for competing guilds. Guilds would no longer be incentivized to use extreme measures in order to stay ahead in the race, and raiders would be able to compete without sacrificing their health.
It would make Mythic raiding more accessible to the regular raiding community. Regular guilds would no longer be at a disadvantage compared to the top guilds, and they would be able to progress at their own pace without having to worry about competing with the World First race.
It would create a more exciting and dynamic World First race. The race would be more competitive, as there would be no clear favorites, and it would be more difficult for guilds to predict who will win.
Conclusion:
The implementation of flexible Mythic raiding would be a significant step forward for World of Warcraft’s endgame content. By making Mythic raiding more accessible, inclusive, and accommodating of players’ real-world commitments, Blizzard can ensure that this challenging and rewarding content remains a vibrant part of the game for years to come.
We’ve been talking about this for a long time, RWF should be its separate tournament server where Blizzard can massively overtune the bosses as much as they want and enforce a strict 20-man rule.
But leave everybody else out of it and let them do the actual versions of the fights that they’ll be doing anyway. Just from the beginning this time. Also uncap the raids so that we can actually play with our friends.
Blizzard needs to stop catering to Echo, and worry about the other 1,600 CE guilds, instead.
No need to check io, armory works fine as long as you post on the actual account. See, that wasn’t so hard.
Anyway, back to your nonsense speculation, why on earth would anyone want to play the eyeball-gouging versions of these boss, when nobody’s even having fun with the current versions?
So you progged Tindral, for example, on the nerfed version that only did 3 firebeams in P1, right?
And you’re saying everyone would prefer to do the older version where he did 4 firebeams (which overlapped) in P1 instead? To the extent that “nobody” would play retail.
As somebody who was progging the 4-firebeam version, I think you’re absolutely dead wrong on that.
I wish I got to see it, but eh, smolderon at 1% hp, lived for 2 more weeks. (Or was it even earlier that that was changed.) The 10% hp nerf absolutely gutted the boss though.
I did not enjoy when they nerfed the blasphemy mechanic on Anduin.
The time adjustments from May or the big whammy in June? We killed it before the June nerfs so I can’t speak to that.
But I’m glad they finally got around to fixing Jailer at the end. The entire notion of “let’s make a boss on a network of narrow catwalks and add 4 different knockback mechanics” was stupid from the beginning, and I hope whomever came up with it is never allowed anywhere near WoW again.
Whenever the boss’s greatest weapon is the architecture of his room, that’s a problem.
I don’t think we should be fracturing raiding any more than we already have. Having a separate competition in the same vein of the Mythic Keystone Invitational I could see working, but it would make the world first race even more inaccessible by virtue of making the race have a start time beyond the initial implementation into the game.
There may be some more rigid requirements, but in terms of accessing Mythic raid content? I don’t think there’s as many barriers of entry as their used to be. While I’m not the biggest fan of every person needing to be on the same server and faction, the only thing that really bars people from entry with Mythic raids is really up to the raid guilds themselves.
Mythic being the highest echelon of raiding serves to provide us with a solid baseline that all guilds operate by. It’s a lot easier to design and create a raid encounters around a solid number of participants, rather than a potentially fluctuating one. It also has the added benefit of ensuring there’s no meta to emerge for what the best tank/healer/dps ratio is. The very instant people find out a good composition with scaling, it becomes the meta for group forming. We had a similar issue with people arguing over the prestige of 10 vs 25 raiding back in Cataclysm.
It’s probably not the answer you’re looking for, but it sounds like your issues are less of a result from Mythic raiding being accessible and more that your guild is struggling to have a consistent roster for your dedicated raid night. I don’t think having a separate world first race is going to resolve that issue for you.
Maybe not a joke, but I think it would compromise the otherwise fairly solid integrity of the difficulty. If the encounters scaled based on the number of participants, there absolutely would be different variations you could bring to manipulate an encounter to be easier.
As if Mythic isn’t already a clown show of class-stacking and exploits.
People need to drop this phony notion that we’re in some glorious renaissance of game design. They need to stop putting Mythic up on a pedestal as some beautiful work of art, because it’s not.
Who cares about “it would compromise the solid integrity”? People who don’t even do the content, but just watch other people do it on TV, instead? Who gives a crap what they think.
You know who actually wants flex scaling? People who run Mythic raid teams, that’s who. Because we’re the ones who have to tell people every night, “you don’t get to play”.
