Not Raiding Mythic for Season 4: Why not make it flex?

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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My guild just made the decision not to raid mythic in Season 4. We’ve been one of the longest running mythic raid teams on our server, and I’ve seen the numbers dwindling every year. I’m really curious to see how bad the mythic numbers are for this season, because I doubt we are the only guild making the same decision.

There are many issues with the mythic raiding scene, but they mostly come down to fun. What is fun about the mythic raiding scene? To me, the fun is in challenging myself with my game friends. I like facing difficult bosses, and trying to come up with strategies to overcome them. Heroic is not enough of a challenge for us, and we actually would like to be playing wow together. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten a cutting edge, but we’ve had a few decent seasons and we’ve always been in there killing bosses. And that’s been enough for us to keep going.

There are some things about mythic that are not fun. But we’ve kept raiding through hundreds of wipes on bosses, through frustrating instakill mechanics, through different gear structures, through rng frustration with legendaries, or corruptions, or tier. We raided before cross-realm, before cross-faction, before merged realms. We’ve raided through “Bring the player, not the class”, and multiple iterations of requiring certain classes for different buffs. We’ve raided with 4 healing priests, and have players that literally only play one spec, even if it’s terrible. We had people that didn’t want to use addons or weakauras, and we still made it work (until mythic smolderon, really hate this tier for that). We still managed to have fun together despite all the difficulties, and none of that are why we are stopping mythic raiding now.

It is so overwhelmingly not fun to not be able to bring all your friends to raid. It is so overwhelmingly not fun to not be able to raid because people have lost power, or had family emergencies, or got sick, or even just don’t feel like playing. It is so overwhelmingly not fun to have to tell people they don’t get to play with everyone, no matter how you try and manage it, the situation is not salvageable. It is so overwhelmingly not fun to have to guilt people into raiding when they don’t feel up to it because if you don’t, everyone you are responsible for can’t play. And this lack of fun has built up for years, slowly killing the raiding community, leading directly into several toxic behaviours, and being the leading cause of burnout. A 20 person limit is overwhelmingly not fun.

It’s not worth it for this random repeat season four. This season is a joke anyways, why not make it actually fun and let it flex. Watch it be fun and revitalize the raiding scene. I know I would back. It would give people a reason to actually play during the season, for the chaos in the worst case, but I bet it would prove popular enough to incorporate into the next expansion. Do you want to do something to grow the mythic raiding scene Blizzard? Make mythic flex, be legends.

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While i think making mythic flex is a good idea i do want to point out that it wont change much in terms of participation.

Most people dont mythic raid because for most people wiping hundreds of times on a boss isnt exactly appealing.

Heck I lose my patience after 2 wipes lol.

I do support your idea though there isnt really a reason not to have mythic be flex.

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It doesn’t make mythic easier in the sense of not dying, or not getting frustrated with it, but it does mean that if someone isn’t enjoying it, the other 19 people who are still willing to die 60 times in 3 hours can keep on doing their thing haha. Tonight we were at 18 for raid tonight, because a few people had things preventing them from being on. This was going to be our last night of the season, and we all knew it would be a stretch to get a kill, but wecouldn’t even try. So flexing the size doesn’t make mythic more attractive (although I wouldn’t argue if blizzard stopped with the 200+ pull bosses also haha, cause I don’t like dying that much!) but it does allow those of us who find mythic fun to play in the time we set aside to play together.

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The thing is, it is a bit harder to balance with a flex format, with a set number you can kinda plan on the classes to bring for certain buffs (and Mythic is likely balance on having at least 1 lust, 1 b rez and all available buffs)

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Please spare us the notion that anything about Mythic raiding is balanced whatsoever.

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My personal take… I’ve been advocating for something like mini flex; make mythic 18-22

Thing is we shouldn’t want to make the amount of mechanics change if possible, only the number tuning, that way mythic remains mythic. But having some leeway would help fix some of the roster issues that every guild suffers greatly from.

I have zero hope of such a solution being taken seriously of course, nor that it is the only one. I just hope it help spark conversations

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The main reason to have flex is so that people can actually play.

You need 25ish people to do Mythic raiding, but only 20 people can actually play at a time. Everyone else just has to… not play.

It sucks.

The worst thing about raid leading is having to tell some of your friends every night, “sorry, you don’t get to play”.

Everyone understands it’s part of raiding.

But it shouldn’t be.

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Agreed. It creates an ever bleeding wound in the roster with no way to patch it.

If they evened out the difficulty curve so that reclears were a thing, that would take some pressure off. But yeh, the real fix is flex size.

Yeah, it would cons strict the design space a bit, but (imho) that’s the lesser evil compared to having a bloody hole in the roster.

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You and others might not like it, but Mythic raiding is likely balanced, in Blizzard;s books, with the limited amount that can play. As with the set number, they don’t have to worry about trying to balance it so a group with 10 has the same difficulty as a group with 15 who has the same difficulty as a group with 20, etc.

With the flex mode, you can have fights that are easier with fewer players and those that are easier with more players. So what happens if the mythic fight is easier with less? do you bench players for just the fight instead of the night? Or if it is easier with more players, do you just invite till you have the numbers to zerg/overpower it?

I feel for those that want to mythic raid with their friends, but I also see that there will be guilds/groups that will kick/invite based on the number that makes each fight manageable.

Maybe the best way to handle it would be flex but with less range then normal/heroic, like what is the lowest number of classes the group can have all buffs available? The range for the max might be the ability to have the full raster for at least a few fights/“farm”

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Even with current fights, it’s a tight squeeze to fit everything in that you need, keeping in mind you generally need multiple Paladins, multiple immunities, etc. They’ve added Demon Hunters, Evokers, AND reinstated lots of older raid buffs - but WITHOUT the buff overlaps the game used to have - and haven’t raised the raid size at all.

I don’t, no.

Let them. I don’t care what they do.

Society as a whole would be a lot better off if people would stop clutching their pearls worrying about what other people were doing to have fun.

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Agreed, but the dark side is what one group does, and has success doing, becomes the “norm”. My concern in more from the angle of you and I might not care, until someone makes the blunder of you are only having fun if/when you win which means you have to do it x way. In my book, those that kick/invite might be doing it for progress but who is to say some won’t do it not for fun but because they are focused on progressing or winning a competition of some kind?

Well, messing with the raid comp tool on WoWhead, I did have the basics (all buffs, debuffs, at least 1 of each CC, CD, etc.) with 8 classes, so the multiple immunities, paladins, various misc utility, have 12 slots to fill to hit the 20.

Again though, I think the answer is in flex but say like from 15-25 instead of 10 to 30 (or whatever the max for normal/heroic is, my guid can usually barely field 10 currently)

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The norm for whom? Pugs? Bad guilds?

The “norm” for Heroic, per my understanding, is that you have to do it with 15 players. That’s hogwash; we always bring everybody when we clear Heroic the first week of a new patch. I just wish we could continue to bring everyone on every fight after Heroic, but we can’t, because a lot of delusional people who don’t even raid CE think that Mythic is something Perfect that has to be protected.

When the truth is that Mythic is rubbish, and if those same people looked in detail at trash like what happend with Mythic Zskarn, or how Blizzard dropped the ball in Sepulcher and promised they’d never do it again, and then did exactly the same thing all over again because they’re a bunch of lying sacks of crap, or how they left hundreds of guilds to fall apart on Tindral and don’t even care. Oh, but wait, Ion says when we say “they don’t care” that his developers feel sad. Oh noes. :crying_cat_face:

I don’t know what the minimum number would be. But I definitely think it needs to go to 30.

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Let me put it this way, swap norm for meta.

Agreed, my guild can get 15 if we are lucky, but more often are going with 10 and we tend to be mid–late season AOTC, we might have interest in low mythic (say Gnarl, Ingra, etc) but are blocked from even trying that due to numbers. We also often feel like we could use some of the gear from low mythic to beat the last boss or 2 of heroic.

Even I admit that it is nor perfect, I just see it as Blizzard wanting to limit how much work they want to do to balance the hardest mode.

Truthfully I pulled the 25 from you:

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You do, just as a practical matter. People have to work late, people get sick, people have families, people travel, people use power/internet. And that’s not even getting into the class-stacking you need for some fights (because of how badly designed the game is).

25 is the bare minimum

More is more fun.

(If you’re a social player. Which most raiders are.)

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Eh, most of my guild prefers the more tight nit feel of smaller groups, but to each their own, that might be why I set 15 as the low end, as that we might hit at like raid open or if there was enough interest in mythic.

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There is probably an optimal number of players now for any raid encounter on lower difficulties, and in spite of that I don’t see guild raid teams all that often looking to bench friends there in favor of progress. There is no reason that it would necessarily be much different were mythic to go flex. The same morale calculus would be in play for raid leaders in mythic as any other difficulty.

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honestly i think we can all agree that the ideal number of players for raid is however many friends i have online at a given time

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balance is the reason.

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Explain pls

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“balance” here doesn’t mean “every fight is tuned to the difficulty you think it should be”, it means “every group facing the encounter is facing the same version of the encounter”.

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