Reasons people are quitting Mythic raiding

Being one of the most challenging form of content in the game, it’s bound to have lesser amount of participation than any other content. However, people have quit for a variety of reasons, and I would like to list all that I heard from friends and fellow players alike.

  1. Removal of 10man, enforced 20man

This makes forming groups and recruiting for guilds much tougher, and makes the raids themselves have a much different environment. 10mans make the content more challenging by making you shoulder 1/10th of the performance, rather than 1/20th, while creating an overall friendlier environment, since it is easier to surround yourself with 9 friends than 19.

People that have tried out / migrated over to FFXIV have also mentioned how great it would be if WoW had 8man Mythic raids, with similar arguments favoring the 10man variant. As a sidenote, FFXIV also does frequent tuning to make sure all Jobs are more or less equal when it comes to performance (elaborated on in the 3rd point).

  1. Cross-realm Mythic being locked behind Hall of Fame

All this produces is a negative feedback loop of lesser and lesser participation. Since not all servers have the most active Mythic raider scenes, players would try to look for other people on the group finder, and expand their communities there, however, since they are not allowed to do so, the Hall of Fame fills up slower, because these players can’t get to play any Mythic raids.

  1. Systems grinds

I’ll just link this here. Grinding isn’t content, content is content - Community / WoW Community Council - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com) The rampant borrowed power systems also hinder class design and frequent balancing quite a lot, which makes playing your favorite class / spec be unfun, either due to clunky gameplay or simply being too weak for the content. I believe there is another post I can link here. Class design, borrowed power, balancing and why patches shouldn’t feel like they’re expansions - Community / WoW Community Council - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)

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I agree that 20 can be annoying for a lot of guilds, as they end up either ceasing progression or disbanding due to the “roster boss”, but with the way raid buffs work right now, I dont think a 10-man raid is viable for mythic difficulty. There are 5 raid buffs, which we’ve already talked about here: External cooldowns/buffs on other players in group settings - #3 by Bababoey-draenor
Where we discuss that it would be nice to see these 5 buffs added to other classes so that having at least one Mage, Warrior, Priest, DH, and Monk is not 100% mandatory, but that love gets spread around.

This is a kicker for sure, especially for people who maybe want to reclear on alts. We spend a lot of time grinding out conduits, archivist rep, torghast, etc, etc to take an alt into mythic raid, all of which we’ve already done on our mains.

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Well, frequent tuning should make that one easier (refer to my 2nd link in point 3) - and FFXIV also brings in Job specific buffs. For example, Dragoons bring Battle Litany, which is a raid-wide 10% crit buff, and Dragon Sight, which grants 10% dmg to the Dragoon and 5% damage to a nearby friendly target (the melee more often than not), or Ninja has access to Trick Attack, which grants 10% increased damage dealt on the target. The main difference here being that FFXIV brings it’s party buffs as cooldowns that are more or less aligned with other burst windows, while WoW is passive, so it’s an area that could be experimented on with future class design.

And yet, you are completely fine raiding in FFXIV even if you dont bring the classes that have raid-wide buffs.

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10-man was viable before and it can be viable again. Will not having a perfect makeup make or break prog? Probably not. Will it make it harder? yes. It’s still 100% feasible. Lack of having 10-man option for mythic difficulty has been detrimental to raiding. So many guilds have bit the dust due to the roster boss. There’s no longer an option to just do 10-man mythic for the week when you can’t get 20 people to log on for 3-4 hours a night.

On an unrelated note: I’m tired of hearing the “it’s too hard to tune mechanics and damage for for 10 and 25” reasoning when flex exists for normal and heroic modes.

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Sure, but I don’t think mythic flex raiding is an option. Mythic bosses are tuned so closely to make them extremely difficult and they are able to do that because it is locked to a specific number. Maybe that number should be 15, maybe there should be 10 & 20 or 15 & 25, but it should not be flex.
In normal / heroic if you need more damage you add a dps, if you need more healing, you add a healer. Mythic doesn’t give you that option. You have to optimize your composition of an exact number of players to be able to complete the fight. If you want to bring an extra DPS because you can’t quite hit that damage check, but oops, now you’re dying because you had to drop a healer to do it.
Flex mythic won’t allow for this, nor should it.

To me its not about “its too hard to tune for 10 & 25” its that is simplest to spend more time tuning perfectly for 20.
One great example of this in recent raiding is Sludgefist. Widely considered by mythic and world first raiders to be almost, if not absolutely perfectly tuned. That doesn’t happen if there is mythic flex raiding.

Also, as a side note; I know that blizzard shouldn’t necessarily plan around and not everyone cares about the Race to World first, but I do so I’m going to say this: I think that mythic flex raiding would be absolutely horrible for the race.

Yes, but I dont think this is because there is no 10-man raid. I think this is because there isn’t enough in the rest of the game to keep 20 people per guild engaged in the game.

Also true, but that wasn’t really mythic, was it? Back when we had 10 & 25 man raids there was only Normal and Heroic (and eventually LFR)
10 & 40 man raids were introduced in classic.
In BC it became 10 & 25 man.
In WotLK it started as 10 & 25, then in ICC we got 10 & 25 man heroic as well
In Cata it started the same way again, and then we got 25man LFR for Dragon Soul
In MoP it started the same way again, and in SoO we got the system we have now: 10-25man flex normal and heroic and 20 man mythic raid was born. It has been this way since then. Through WoD, Legion, BFA, and now Shadowlands.

I’m not saying it can never change, but I don’t think the system is the flaw. In my opinion, generally speaking raiding is one of the best remaining parts of the game. Mythic raiding isn’t the reason people are quitting mythic raiding, Prosident nailed it in his third point:

They suck to do over and over again on other characters. That is why people aren’t mythic raiding anymore in my opinion. Not because there is no 10 man mythic raid, but because the game surrounding raiding is lackluster at best.

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A lot of what you’re replying to me is about “flex mythic” as you seem to have misread what I said in my post.

I’m not asking for Flex Mythic.
At all.

I’m asking for 10 again in addition to 25(20?) like we had before for the highest tier of difficulty in a raid environment. I’m saying the “excuse” of tuning for 10 and 20/25 is invalid because flex already exists in lower difficulties.

Not exactly. They decided for some ridiculous reason to rename all of it in Siege. LFR, Normal and Heroic existed. Heroic was today’s Mythic.

As you mentioned (but I’m going to elaborate) LFR was introduced in Dragon Soul, giving us 3 levels of difficulty. “Flex” (then renamed to Normal) was introduced in Siege in addition to Normal and Heroic to give players a difficulty to attempt the raid that fell between LFR and Normal.

For the WoD pre-patch they revamped the raiding nomenclature yet again.
Heroic was turned into Mythic and set at 20 man,
Normal became Heroic,
Flex became Normal,
Heroic and Normal had 10-30 flexibility,
LFR remained the same.

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Points Raised by Others

Enforced 20 man didn’t kill/make people quit Mythic raiding, if anything it made raiding more competitive. Encounters could be explicitly designed around a set raid size rather than designing for multiple.

I’d argue that by having a singularly defined challenging mode of content it actually became more challenging for the everyman and that is what pushed people away as you would put it.

Whilst yes, 9 is a smaller number than 19. Being able to surround yourself with likeminded individuals is the goal of the guild that should be established and pushed for. The reasons a good chunk of guilds I’ve been keeping my eye on (for recruitment purposes) have been disbanding are due to misaligned goals, they start to chase for some arbitrary world rank and add extra days or requirements and start to bleed people away due to burn out.

However, this burn out is also caused by system design. By forcing people to sit on a treadmill 24/7 for player power is straight up not respecting peoples time with the game.

I’d argue that Hall of Fame itself was a noble idea but it pretty much ends up as Alliance Hall of Fame being a bit of a meme as the end of Alliance Hall of Fame can often equate to World Rank 400-500, it is no longer a representation of player skill and achievement but just the fact you’re on a dead faction where your end boss was not Sylvanas this tier but convincing people to spend money to transfer to Alliance.

Would much rather an approach where its a fixed period of time or when 200 guilds total have completed (assuming factions will no longer be a thing next expansion).

New Points

The large steps between each difficulty mode

I would argue that the jumps from LFR to Normal, and Normal to Heroic is too big and are the biggest facilitator of players not filtering upwards. The gap between Heroic and Mythic is somewhat more in line as there’s an expectation of having more gear and understanding of mechanics as it is the highest point of difficulty.

LFR is pretty much an exploration of what the content looks like and an introduction to the mechanics. It also comes with some pretty neat mechanic diagrams on twitter sometimes:

Would be pretty cool if stuff like this could pop up in the LFR queue window to help players familiarise themselves with mechanics rather than twitter being the only avenue?

Normal is quite a significant step up from LFR (but can be outgeared)

Heroic is once again a significant step up from Normal, however this avenue is not outgeared as quickly as it’s on par with other loot sources available in game.

If we look at the difficulties individually and what they represent I can see an opportunity for improvement.

During LFR when you are facing a challenge that is greater than what your group can overcome, you are given a determination buff, this will stack to the point where you are able to overcome the obstacle.

In Normal (the introduction to structured raiding) there is no such way of overcoming this obstacle. You simply wait until you outgear it.

Personally, I think that Normal should be made more difficult than it currently is, but it should allow you to gain a couple of stacks of determination. This way you are able to overcome the obstacles which are more in line with what Heroic would present and allow the step from Normal to Heroic to be smaller.

I know it’s not really something that is a simple, it’s a philosophy shift, but I think it’s something quite interesting to think about.

The Economic cost of Raiding

This expansion has been the most extreme in this regard.

You have the increased herb costs for Potions/Flasks (but Procs were removed).
Scarcity of Materials (where materials required are only found in redundant content Zones)
Increased cost to crafting Tomes/Codexes

Combine this with the already high cost to produce for Cauldrons, Feasts, Vantus Runes the average raid night for a guild costs 3-4x more than it did a few expansions ago.

Loot Scarcity

People love to get gear. It’s a huge motivator, however rates of loot went down this expansion. With fewer items in the pool you want to have some element of control, Master Looter used to provide this for organized groups so now addons are used to replicate this.

The most sought after items however are caught on loot tables which are shared with a lot of superfluous loot, and this tier these are Weapons.

In Nathria Weapon Tokens were introduced which was a huge improvement from BfA, but then they were removed going into Sanctum? The weapons didn’t need to have 4 tints as they did for Nathria and could have easily been provided by Bonesmith in Korthia.

Imagine playing a rogue this tier, the only person who can trade daggers to you are other rogues and they kinda want it too. Instead, you watch the raid loot 3 rings and a chest piece for the 8th week in a row. It’s pretty demoralising.

Deterministic tokens dropping from bosses were good and should be used more.

There was also the removal of bonus rolls but the addition of the great vault. This gave people an element of control with the amount of choices they have for loot, but the deterministic element that bonus rolls provided is not there. Would be absolutely fantastic if you could toggle what your first slot was going to provide. A simple drop-down menu to say “I want loot from X boss/dungeon”?

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