Raid Practice Mode

Community General Discussion
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I’ve had an idea for a Raid Practice Mode. It would be a mode where you can queue solo or with a group and you would fight a version of a raid boss for practice.

The practice version of the boss would only do mechanics relevant to the specializations present for the fight. The bosses health would be scaled to give a challenge based on the number of players and specializations present. The players present would also have their item level scaled. A minimum number of NPCs would be in the fight based on the mechanics and the players present. For example if a player queues solo as a dps there would be a tank and healer NPC. If the fight however has a mechanic that chains 2 dps together then a few other dps NPCs would be present. This mode is purely for practicing fights and no loot would drop. This mode would be queueable a few weeks after a raid is released to give time for top guilds to race to first for mythic fights. You could also select difficulty levels based on the raid difficulties (normal, heroic and mythic) Doing the fights in practice mode will give a similar level of difficulty to the real raid equivalent. So a failed mechanic that would kill you in heroic or mythic would also kill you in that version of practice mode.

The goal of this would be to give players a chance to practice on their own leading to a more enjoyable experience in actual raid content. This would also give players a chance to learn fights and close the skill gap if they start raiding after a raid has been out for while.

While you can get a small amount of practice in LFR the difficulty and mechanics differences in LFR allow players to ignore mechanics that would be deadly in other levels of difficulty. In practice mode you would have to do the mechanics to complete the fight.

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Guild groups exist for this purpose. There’s also Wowhead and Youtube videos to help you learn the fights.

A solo practice mode for group content doesn’t sound intuitive. NPCs/bots aren’t your fellow players and will work differently.

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Watching a YT video and reading about the fight mechanics are a totally different thing than actually experiencing the fight.

The NPC bots would only do a minimum such as standing in a place to assist with mechanics or . The emphasis would be on the players in the encounter getting practice on mechanics that are relevant to their current spec. Only mechanics that are relevant to the specs that are queued would be active as well so you wouldn’t have to worry about something like the tank dying due to lack of heals or from failing a tank swap mechanic.

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LFR is raid practice mode.

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What you’ve described is basically LFR. A version of the raid you can queue into, with watered down mechanics.

Outside of LFR, you practice on the real thing. That’s what progression is all about.

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Okay, so here’s the problem.

Players who aren’t really all that good, have a tendency to try and jump right into the raids, when they don’t know anything about the fights, and more importantly about the classes in the game.

Now, learning about the fights, comes with experience, and the best way to handle this is to join a guild that progresses the easier raid difficulty.

However, something people forget, is knowing the fight doesn’t mean much if you are incompetent at your class and spec.

To overcome this, one should be putting the time into moving through lower difficulty content the way we used to, as in, you move through normal dungeons for some time, moving up into heroic dungeons, and then to mythic. This increases your skill level as a player dramatically in all regards, from your ability to understand general rules about mechanics, how your class works, and how to work with others.

What seems to occur though, is many incompetent players try to hop scotch pass this learning part of progressing, attempting to bypass all the lower difficulty content by simply focusing on getting just enough gear to get to the next difficulty.

This is why many players fail, they take the shortcuts, learn nothing, and then expect that to work on the hard content, then immediately get a wake up call.

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Doranos is correct about one thing: Actually playing the game as he describes, to learn, is far better than watching a video or reading about it.

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9

As long as the group you’re in agrees to that then sure.

But I hope you’re not suggesting that people should queue into randos and expect to waste everyone else’s time while they “learn”.

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Well, duh. I don’t think he was saying to Q for it. A player would go in Solo or with a “invited” group.

How would that waste everyone’s time?

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I thought of my idea just as a way to maybe make raiding a bit more approachable for some players and would give players a chance to practice on their own. For either a guild run or a pug I know I’d rather come to a raid fight with some practice under my belt.

I think it would also increase pug participation. After a raid has been out a while I think learning groups are few and far between. Most groups in the group finder are expecting players who know the fights. For players who pug you wind up with the issue of you have to know the fight to get in a group and you need to get in a group to know the fight. I think this would give them a chance to get that practice in.

1 Like