I completely understand the desire to create game modes for the various types of groups that exist. The problem, perhaps counter intuitively, is that more choice actually leads to groups experiencing fracturing or frustration.
Most groups of friends are comprised of people with various levels of commitment to wow. Having multiple difficulties will cause these people, who otherwise would enjoy the content together, to be at odds with one another.
Multiple difficulties usually mean that the “harder” version of the raid will be difficult to get through. So much so, that the weekly farming of these raid MIGHT get incredibly tedious once you’ve finished your first prog. MC was run a ton throughout classic 2019, even though it was the same boring raid over and over.
1 difficulty promotes a culture of improvement rather than a culture of pre-optimization. If you know that you need good specs/players to clear a raid efficiently, you will gatekeep who you bring. If it is easy to clear, you can bring people and they can get better and better if they so desire.
The classic community, with parses and speedruns, has found ways to artificially introduce difficulty into easy content. This is a more organic and community based way to challenge yourself if you’re bored of doing normal runs.
Mhm if players have to implement fake challenges to appease themselves that means the content is far too easy
Difficulties appeal to everyone the people who enjoy doing raid content can do *optional higher-difficulty content while people who enjoy dungeon level content can do the *optional lower-level difficulty
Just clear on normal difficulty
It’s not like they are rewarding players for completing harder difficulties or anything
Being dismissive of speed runs/parsing and advocating for +fire res heat system is interesting.
Difficulties appeal to a group of players that don’t want to speedrun/parse, but find normal modes boring. If you want difficulty, you can introduce it. Wasting dev time on it is a waste.
*Adding: Vanilla WoW has been popular for 20 years with no changes to raid content. People insisting it needs different difficulty levels seem to just forget that there is a large population of players that enjoy improving week to week at the same stuff.
Don’t begrudge them for trying. Not a fan of the system they decided on, but also just not a fan of hard modes in general. It means normal is too easy and hard mode is an annoying grind. Both become less fun than the original difficulty was.
Algalon was the best fight in Ulduar for this reason. You had 1 difficulty and you killed it or you didn’t. No weird progression ladder of “I killed boss x at difficulty y”.
Yup fire res to fight a primordial flame being chimes into true classic not era an actual MMO aspect no way!
also again its optional you can clear on lower difficulty if you choose to do so who cares what other people think abt you just do it on lower difficulty if that’s what you wanna do
Lol parsing speedrunning is just about cheesing to get as much as you can.
PS: Nobody cares about parsing/speedrunning on lower difficulties on any other implementation of wow btw
There’s a really amazing solution to this: play era
The “its optional” portion of your retort relates to my first point. No reason to artificially separate people that would otherwise play together.
Idk what you mean about lower difficulties parsing/speed running. There should be 1 difficulty, and then its always interesting to see how you perform against the greater population.
Classic had a very active speed running and parsing community until ulduar, then everything shifted to being more focused on progression. I (and many others) prefer pre-ulduar classic.
*Adding: You guys realize this is vanilla wow that you’re playing? Difficulty levels are an entirely new concept in this game and its first expansion. Saying “I don’t want difficulties” in a game that has traditionally not had them…is the steady-state desire.
It’s ok to say “I want you to introduce difficulties”. I laid out why I don’t like that though. Playing a 5 year old era realm is not a sufficient response.
People with common interest will play together you could say speedruns seperate people as not everyone wnats to speedrun? But it is Optional how is an option to do what you want bad?
“Everyone should have to play on my level” 1 difficulty is harder to balance and it always becomes too easy to where players have to create artifical barriers and challenges to somewhat entertain themselves.
This is Season Of Discovery a classic foundation made to fill in the flaws of modern classic: One major flaw being raids being on dungeon difficulty.
No in serious. Clearly you dont enjoy SoD and just want another Era server so just play Era dont see whats stopping you
You make so many illogical or bad faith conclusions.
“Everyone has to play on my level” - No, you can introduce additional difficulty if you’d like to. If you’re not willing to do that, then you do not actually want more difficulties. Chess has been the same game for centuries, and continues to be exciting because people have mastered it and continually improve. All games are like this actually.
“You’re not enjoying SoD” - I’ve played SoD full time each phase. This is the first time they’ve added difficulty levels. I’ve enjoyed this phase EVEN with the difficulty meta. I am offering up that I do not like having some guildies that want to do one thing, while others want to do another.
“Optional” - You are acting like my arguments revolve around my personal preference for difficulty. I do not like the effect it has on the larger community. Those effects are 1. Casual groups with people that value different things now need to move to a different group if their current group doesn’t clear at a difficulty they want. 2. Given the higher difficulties require levels of preparation that is irregular to vanilla, there is gatekeeping. 3. If you try to make “progression” the main attraction of classic, you will quickly find that its uninteresting. We’ve completed these raids hundreds of time, wiping to a boss you’ve killed 100 times because of artificial FR gear requirements doesn’t feel rewarding.
Lastly, different difficulties are the easiest solution to the question of “how do I balance this raid?”. Again, I understand WHY they do it…its easy. It is much harder to create a raid that is fulfilling for a long period of time.
The truth is, hard raids are fine, but only after you’ve allowed people to coalesce into consistent raid groups. Thus why a raid like Sunwell was better received than SSC/TK during TBC.
The only thing they could add is just optinal bosses, Heat levels are just for those who think they’re being competitive because its apparently harder when it’s not really any different. All the bosses get zerged down still.
“Wall” bosses are incredibly satisfying to progress/kill. Definitely a fan of Algalon style bosses that are challenging to progress but become easier with the loot. A much more interested progression ladder.
My guild progressed into h2. There was no elitism about it; we took a couple weeks to assemble tier/FR. We wiped on new mechanics and had to learn and progress through h2. Have you ever considered that your just horribly cynical?
