I think the difficulty of mythic, especially the last 2-3 bosses, prevents all of this pugging you are talking about.
Heroic is pugged because it’s easy.
Mythic Tindral isn’t going to be pugged.
Basically I think the difficulty of the content can stand on its own for keeping people wanting to be on a set team. Raid ID lockouts I don’t think need to be part of it.
I don’t have the patience to try to convince anyone anymore.
I see the damage, I see the fallout, I know exactly what is happening, but I’m helpless to stop it.
I am now at the point that I believe the devs are unconsciously (or maybe consciously) designing to please themselves at the cost of the community. I am too sick to give a good rebuttal, so we’ll just have to see how it plays out.
It prevents pure pug groups, sure. But it wouldn’t prevent you pugging a 19th and 20th player if someone happened to not to turn up that day. That’s the real issue with lockouts, you can’t replace anyone with your raid ID, because nobody is willing to sacrifice their entire lockout to attempt a single boss.
This is the real issue with mythic lockouts to me. It forces guilds who want to raid mythic to keep a roster of bench players, in case of absences. And nobody really wants to be a bench player, whether it’s in sports or in gaming. You are there because you want to play the game, not watch others play.
I agree and am in favoring or removing the raid ID lockouts.
The other poster had a lot of thorough discussions, but to me it doesn’t really tie together why raid ID lockouts are needed or helping mythic guilds.
Well the thing about that. During Shadowlands, there was massive fallout from the community to pretty much every aspect of the game. People were not happy with WoW, and this caused a pretty huge course correction which has resulted in what we have in Dragonflight for like 90% of the game.
The part of the game that, for some reason seemingly got a pass on all the criticism was the mythic raiding scene. Despite the fact that Sepulcher had the most nerfs to a raid in the history of the game https://www.wowhead.com/news/all-nerfs-and-changes-to-sepulcher-of-the-first-ones-bosses-on-all-difficulties-327428, and the Game Director saying “Hey we won’t do this again.” https://www.wowhead.com/news/lessons-learned-sepulcher-was-an-arms-race-that-wont-be-repeated-in-dragonflight-327732 we still find ourselves at the end of this expo with a raid that has 2 seemingly overtuned bosses for the vast majority of their playerbase taking part in that content, and no communication or explanation as to why this is the way it is.
TLDR: There’s not enough negative and overwhelmingly loud feedback that Mythic raiding is in an awful state for the devs to stop patting themselves on the back that WF guilds struggle to clear the boss in the first week it’s good/fun content for the rest of us.
If people want to be in the action, mythic being locked isn’t stopping them.
(Open up discord, join a prog group, new guild, etc.)
It would be great to be able to do prog for say the first 5 hours, and reclear for the last hour or something.
If loot locks weren’t a thing, joining a guild would technically be unnecessary. The number of players applying to guilds would drop, making it harder for guilds to recruit. Guilds would be even more volatile than before and less raiding guilds is bad for everyone in the long run.
There are many, many more heroic only raiding guilds than there are mythic raiding guilds. The absence of a lockout doesn’t seem to have stopped them recruiting.
Another lie from a serial liar.
the best and brightest wow mythic raiders don’t cry for nerfs, they figure it out adn get it done.
I’d be delighted to have the bosses never get nerfed, if we could get reasonable season lengths again instead of cutting everything short to make a reruns season nobody even wants.
Nobody will care if you’re the best and brightest Mythic raider if the Mythic raiding scene dies off or shrinks into an unsustainable state.
Edit: Actually what am I saying, nobody cares if you’re “The best and brights wow mythic raider” now lol.
That seems like a fair argument. I don’t think it’s a 1 to 1 situation, with Mythic raiding being that much more selective. Heroic raiding teams can carry 15 players at a time, literally, as evidenced by heroic raid carry groups.
On the other hand, Mythic raiding needs very specific individuals and that’s the argument that I’m making.
Every time they increase the cost entry, or raise the requirements for mythic raiding they reduce the pool of potential recruits, which bit-by-bit tears away at the fabric of the game.
While technically true, it’s not a benchmark for anything relevant to the health of the game.
This isn’t the Bar Exam, or a doctorate degree. If the difficulty is set so high that it starts to kill guilds it’s not achieving anything positive in my opinion.
I want to be clear, and I’ve said this several times; I don’t think the difficulty is the crux of the problem. It’s the manner in which the challenge is presented. There is a clear and obvious distinction between “team” fights, where players can be assigned responsibilities and individual responsibility is limited to a few moments per player per pull versus fights that test each and every single individual for the entire duration of the encounter.
I see their goal, to test the full depth of the team at all times, but as I said before, that doesn’t test your teamwork, or your strategy, it’s tests your ability to recruit beyond your existing team. It rips at the fabric of teams, it alienates long time team members, it forces even the more casual guilds to focus on pure, unadulterated skill over personality to the point that the whole reason for community is undermined.
This game started and, and did extremely well when players could literally remain out of combat during a boss encounter in order to rez players. I’m convinced they added the combat pulse so that Paladins didn’t get shafted with rez duty.
It was part of encounters for my hunter to feign death and drink for mana.
Maybe I can sum this up with a terrible analogy that won’t work:
A few tiers ago you could clear a mythic raid with about 5 players who could repeatedly speed run flawless mario maps. You could have 10-15 players who could post good times every run with a few deaths and you could bring a few players who could finish the map, but needed more attempts than the rest of the team.
Now you need 20 players capable of consistently speed-running flawlessly or else everyone fails.
I don’t think that’s necessary, nor healthy for the game and the raiding community. It’s not an accident, so I can only attribute it to self-indulgent development, or a poorly identified goal that needs to be reconsidered.
Given Blizzard’s inability to actually tune ANYTHING with any accuracy I’m choosing to attribute it to negligent incompetence.
but you don’t need 20 people. World first guilds are carrying 2 at a time now I believe.
Emerald nightmare was the only “recent” fluke.
I wish you could admit to yourself just how pointless that argument is.
I managed to get my hunter through DPS proving grounds to wave 217 or something like that. Over 2 hours of flawless play with each successive wave getting more health and damage.
Just because I could do it doesn’t mean anyone else should be held to that standard. Nobody thought “let’s increase the “Proving yourself:” achievements from 30 to 200 just because players can do that.”
It would be like changing max M+ rewards to be +32 since some players can succeed at that difficulty. Fine for a few people would suck for pretty much everyone else.
The theoretical or even practical limit is NOT a good defining benchmark for practically anything. I can drive my car safely at 90 miles an hour through a suburban neighborhood so let’s just make that the limit.
Clearly we don’t want to cater to the lowest common denominator, and the difficulty threshold is not some easily determined marker that Blizzard is willfully ignoring, but I think they’ve lost sight of what is most important to this game. Community and player satisfaction over some sort of pseudo-important hierarchy that only serves to feed the egos of few fragments of the population who rate their self-worth by their WoW accomplishments.
the fact that everyone knows nerfs will come lets plyers wait for nerfs, which in turn lets devs tune super-tightly at start.
Guilds like Echo crying they lost RWF because the tier RWF was too short don’t help the situation.
Nor does every Joe’s expectation to clear mythic raiding.
They are essentially launching the raid with mythic-plus difficulty and bringing it to mythic difficulty two months later.
So how many people should the game include? And what if you aren’t part of the people included? (For CE.)
Only recent CE I have is aberrus and that’s cause I joined a guild on Sark.
It’s been pointed out in this thread, the amount of ‘tuning’ required to fix Tindral of Fyrakk would essentially alter the fight to be unrecognizable.
As I’ve mentioned several times in this thread, I don’t think it’s the “difficulty” of the fights, it’s how they’re designed to assert that challenge on players.
They’re not, “here’s a few critical moments, play your best by maxing dps or healing, find a strategy that gets you over the hump and get your team to victory.” They’re “Every individual is tasked with performing a make or break maneuver for every mechanic or else every one wipes.”
The expectation is that through repetition everyone will eliminate mistakes from their play until nobody makes a mistake. In my opinion that’s too extreme and it’s an expectation that goes so far beyond what the overwhelming number of mythic guilds can realistically ascend to.
Not for a minute do I want mythic raiding to be easy and completed by anyone who walks into the instance. What I do want is for raiding to focus more on team dynamics with mechanics that are far less dependent on comp and more on execution checks. Things like did you assign and execute enough CDs to bypass a healing or dps check.
I’ll cite Painsmith as an example of what I thought was a good, but challenging design. Everyone had to learn the ball and spike patterns. Everyone had to learn where to drop bombs and how to avoid baiting fire during transition phases. But the challenge was spread across the team. You needed good dps to beat the checks to break balls and adds, but you didn’t live or die to those mechanics because of one person. One person could wipe a pull with bombs, but it wasn’t making every player nail bombs every cast on every pull. If someone died to fire, or spikes, or balls you could keep pushing for prog and ultimately kill the boss. If it was tuned like Tindral or Fyrakk any of those failure would have meant an immediate ‘go again.’
You could literally tune painsmith numbers and the fight would be same, just easier or harder. When you make everything a one shot mechanic the only tuning you can do changes the entire mechanic. If it’s no longer a one-shot it’s a different fight and that’s not really better. Just different.
Mechanics need to matter, they need to be difficult but making practically every one of them pass fail (times 20) is too much for one boss.
I can’t give you a number. Ideally it would be a consistent percentage across the tiers, and no something that has to be consistently nerfed in order to achieve.
Something that a recent dev said was very telling. They don’t even know what the world first players are capable of. They tune things to work in order and then just crank up the volume to 11 and hope that it’s possible. Then they work backwards.
To me that’s like tuning a motorsport race track after finding out how fast cars can go. It results in a constant back and forth where cars will be adjusted and then the track needs to be readjusted.
If Blizzard has made their game so thoroughly untestable because the number of possible solutions has grown overwhelmingly indiscernible then I think they’ve lost control of their game. It’s one thing to be unable to anticipate what thousands of players in thousands of compositions can conceive, but when you are tossing out content not even sure if it’s possible, I think they need to rein in their game. Adding hero talents is going to make it worse and I doubt there’s much coming back from that.
They’re tossing darts in the dark and calling it game design.
They don’t know how good people are. So it’ll be a lot more disappointing if people get CE say week 2 (the regular average guild.)