On the Mythic Raiding convo - mythic lockouts must change

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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So, recently we had a community council thread complaining that gearing may be too easy and that mythic raiding is not rewarding. Also, private auras and sort. Some influencers are also viralizing it with Youtube videos and sort.

I think the OP’s opinion is WAY too skewed to a “hardcore” player’s perspective.

  • Reaching gear stability in 1-2 months is great. I think it is great that the game is made more of your skill and knowledge than of your gear; It is also great that hardcore players can easily gear up alts and be satisfied; I’ve played the game for a long time and I love the current system;
  • You still have to do some decent grinding to reach gear stability, measured in grown-man hours;
  • If you compare Heroic raiding to a +18 M+, heroic raiding is lackluster on gear as it doesnt give you a max ilv item on weekly chest; And nowadays Heroic raiding is harder than completing 18s.
  • Doing mythic reclears surely boosts up the gearing a bit; You’d think is way too much effort for a low reward, but the first 4-5 bosses aren’t even that hard;
  • Later Mythic bosses have low rewards for the effort. Its the feat/achievement, and maybe an exclusive trinket or weapon;

If we made the Mythic lockout more flexible, we would straight up fix the reward equation from doing the earlier Mythic bosses. Most of the difficulty comes from the lockout, not from the bosses.

Rigid lockouts also introduce huge toxicity on the later bosses. As guilds lock in for a month or more in a hard boss, players cannot practice on the other bosses anymore (repeating a fight which you have mastered is fun for many). Some players may be benched for a month, effectively not playing the game (you pay for not to play).

If I had to choose between an easy tier in which you can do many reclears, and a hard tier in which you get 2 months locked in a boss, I’d surely pick the easy tier. More hardcore players can get away by doing it in many alts.

What if we are already almost fully geared when we reach Mythic? What reward will we get besides the achievement? Well, if we compare to M+ score grinding, both types of content already sit at the same spot. M+ players are already doing it for the score and the learning. Maybe adding a currency-based transmog set (or any other cosmetic reward) could help. PVP has something similar.

I don’t think that making the gear curve harder (like the guy from the other topic states) would solve any problem. It would probably make things worse. We should make the entry barrier lower (by changing the mythic lockout), not the opposite.

Also, if World First raiding is a concern, we can always time-gate the mythic lock (or anything).

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lower it to 15 players for a start on myt raiding you always win and lose people to many factors

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I think once you’ve killed a boss you should be able to skip to that boss at any time, without locking out the previous bosses.

One of the worst parts of prog is getting to the point that you feel the need to lock out later bosses, meaning you won’t fill mythic vault slots, nor be able to access any of the previous bosses for loot.

In my team’s case, for example, we should be able to devote the first portion of our 6-hour raid week to prog. We should then be able to backtrack to the beginning, or any boss we wish for a shot at specific loot or achievements. Locking out bosses is just sucks in the scheme of things, especially if you lock out and then get nailed by the roster boss. It’s such a punitive element in what is supposed to be a game. For fun.

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Getting gear is the same as nerfing the bosses.

Prog felt way better when you got upgrades all patch long, essentially nerfing all fights by 2% each week. Now its just pray Blizzard nerfs it. Youre already at full player power by the time you get to the hard bosses.

It also makes reclears a lot smoother since youll basically out gear the boss after spending 5 weeks on a hard one. Right now, after my guild finally gets Fryakk, Smolderon will be really no easier than our first kill and probably take 30 pulls since its been 2 months since we killed it. No one will even feel like doing it.

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nope. increase to 30.

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Mythic lock out will never change. I wrote a thread about it and the explanation I got was and I’m paraphrasing here: (Guild and player retention). The explanation was that if they change Mythic lockout guilds will break up and players will out right quit, and this analysis was 3 layers deep according to him.

So yeah don’t bother, just accept what your giving and keep going.

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You need a mythic lockout because you have bosses that take on average 15-25 hours to kill the first time. And you only have finite amount of time during the seasons. I’m in a 2-day CE guild so literally every minute counts.

It only takes about 8-10 weeks on average to reach Mythic iLvl with the whole gear upgrade, vault, and crafting system.

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How does the mythic lockout help/improve this when you can also have 1 person just extend a loot lockout?

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I’m a bit confused what you’re asking here. Do you mean that because a player can “save” a lockout you could re-clear one week then reactivate the lockout?

It reads as “why do you need a lockout when you have a lockout,” so I’m genuinely curious to what you mean.

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The reality of this issue is, the vocal minority that bothers to comment on this issue tend to be extremely elitist and aggressively gatekeepy about mythic raiding, and the majority of the rest have better things to do in life than to endlessly argue with them about the abysmal state of midcore mythic raiding.

Doesn’t matter how good or logical your suggestions are, because there is an infinite number of nonsensical, irrational and arbitrary reasons why xxt0x1chArDc0REr@id3rxx’s achievements would be slighted and their existence made irrelevant by people clearing mythic content well after them.

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11

It’s a matter of time management. If you raid 6-8 hours a week: every minute counts on boss prog. The two end bosses take on average 15-25 hours of prog. That’s basically 5-8 weeks on just two bosses.

The world first guilds just crunch all those hours in by playing 16 hours a day for weeks.

Doing weekly reclears can take away 1.5-3 hours of progs, especially if some of the bosses are difficult to reclear. Smolderon and Tindral are very difficult on reclears even for experienced guilds.

There’s no real way to “fix” the problem on Mythic reclears without making the last two bosses not take up 90% of your raiding progression time.

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12

I get that.

Can’t guilds just extend like they do now though? Using loot lockouts instead of raid ID lockouts?

I guess I don’t see why raid ID lockouts are needed for guilds to extend like they currently are doing.

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Do you mean skips? If so, this tier you have to clear Smolderon to skip, which can result in a lot of wasted time. My team also raids 6 hours and we just can’t afford to spend time on anything but prog.

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the scr00bz0rz should know their place, I agree.

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No, just standard extending lockouts.

You can extend raid ID lockouts (mythic) and you can extend loot ID lockouts (like heroic).

I’m not seeing the value/necessity to have raid ID lockouts.

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Because there’s always one or two self-centered narcissists that will jump the gun and get themselves saved to bosses, which will not only reduce your raid team’s loot chances, but will eventually lead to them skipping out altogether. They’ll get saved again and since they won’t want to clear mythic twice they’ll just no-show.

It’s a slow, insidious death. Even if you cut their cancer out early they can disrupt the team enough to create problems down the line.

It happens every day for Heroic teams but fortunately the content is easy enough or scales well enough that teams can work around it.

The bottom line is that there are too many unreliable, selfish players out there to be trusted with that sort of freedom.

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You are saying guilds will be having some members go out and pug their mythic Tindral or mythic Fryakk kills outside of raid time and then not want to come back and help?

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They will do it for all sorts of dumb reasons. The same way they will miss raids for dumb reasons, or make excuses to avoid prog.

People are selfish creatures and if they aren’t 100% locked into a commitment some of them will fail, leaving others around them to pick up the pieces.

Sometimes I don’t even blame them, the system sucks in so many other ways.

It’s critical to keep something like 25 players active in a Mythic roster because players are so unreliable. Everyone seems to hate different bosses, so you’ll have some guy making excuses to avoid one, then others trying to avoid a different boss.

Most of the time you’ve got 15 players who will give you two weeks notice of an absence and then 10 players who range from flaky to outright untrustworthy. Our recruiting officer is amazing and we have worked extremely hard as a team to avoid roster bosses, but when one or two players are missing on a prog night it’s volatile.

How do you keep someone on the bench during prog when the only raiding is one boss that they won’t be able to join you for? Answer is, you get lucky with great human beings willing to sacrifice their chance to play the game or you get player after player giving up to actually go play the game elsewhere.

It works when bosses take two to four week of prog, but when bosses are so unforgiving like Tindral it thrashes raid teams like mine, and many many better ones. We have 3 Mythic raid teams in our guild One has CE and is straining to get players back to reclear. One just lost too many players on Tindral and called it for the tier and we’re desperately trying to field a consistent 20 to work through the final 25% of Tindral’s health before the tier ends.

Bosses like Tindral and Fyrakk are great for the few hundred guilds that can get over the hump and murderous to the remaining guilds that get there but don’t have the same depth of skill or access to the same comps that make it so much easier.

We’ve probably been through 20 new players while progging Tindral because they aren’t world first raiders, they’re not getting paid, they’re not dedicating their life to wow, they just want to play the game and when the prospect is wiping another 80 times in P1 because everyone is taking their turn to screw up, they just don’t see the fun in it and I can’t blame them.

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19

This is a really good response and I appreciate that, but I’m missing how raid ID lockouts are helping your guild and it’s 3 teams.

If anything it seems to be hurting your team since you can’t have any cross over to help.

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I don’t have the skill to articulate it properly, and I don’t have a full list on hand of the impact it has, so I have to concede that I can’t properly sum it up.

Ultimately a team is a sum of its parts. If parts of the team are getting gear or achievements on their own it erodes the sense of team. As I said, there’s just no way to maintain that sense of commitment if some players are coming and going on their own.

It’s why heroic raiding is so unimportant. You can pug it on Monday night and nobody cares if you do or don’t.

If Mythic raiding becomes unlocked like heroic less and less players will commit to guilds and I think the net result would be a huge loss of community that will have far reaching negative consequences to the game.

It’s all speculation, but based on 18years of raiding and guild leadership.

The reality is that there is a new generation of players who have no desire to commit to practically anything. They want the game to be their version of log in and log out at will with no strings attached. It’s why we have solo queue and players asking for LFG for M+.

They want all the things but aren’t willing to work with others, or within a schedule. I understand it, but I think caving into their desires undermines the core of this game and is harmful in the long run. Ultimately I’m not in charge so it will be what it will be, whether I like it or not.

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