I appreciate the thoughtful counterpoints, especially the examples with Sould Hunters, Araz and Bandit. You’re right that Mythic mechanics are tuned to be punishing at fixed group sizes, and I don’t want to downplay the complexity of encounter design. That said, I don’t think these issues are insurmountable.
Blizzard already scales mechanics in Normal and Heroic to handle varying group sizes, and while those difficulties have more lenient tuning, the underlying tech proves it’s possible to scale abilities, debuffs, and ground effects dynamically. Flex-scaling wouldn’t need to be “perfect” balance across 10–20; it would just need to preserve difficulty proportional to the group size. If some mechanics require adjustments (e.g., tuning ratios, redistributing debuffs, adjusting cooldown expectations), that’s a design challenge, not a roadblock.
Other MMOs have shown that competitive raid environments don’t require rigid rosters to remain challenging. The “difficulty integrity” of Mythic doesn’t come only from having 20 people—it comes from how mechanics demand coordination, execution, and resource management. Those qualities can exist in 12, 15, or 18-player groups just as much as they do in 20.
At the end of the day, the question is whether preserving the current encounter design philosophy for the top 0.1% (the RWF scene) outweighs the accessibility and longevity of the broader raiding community. For many guilds, the 20-player barrier is the difference between participating in Mythic at all versus burning out after AOTC. If WoW wants to sustain long-term raiding health, accessibility matters more than perfect design purity.