RWF - The Best Yet?

Community General Discussion
1

I’d Just like to take a moment to congratulate the raid design team and the raid teams, especially Echo, Limit, Pieces, and the others on what I think has been their best RWF to date.

Shadowlands hasn’t been a strong expansion. Unfortunately, this includes the raids. CN wasn’t a bad raid, but Sanctum of Domination was. I don’t speak here as a first world raider, or even a hardcore mythic raider. I raid one day a week, clear heroic, and just chill as life allows. However, raiding and M+ are my main activities in WoW and when one of them isn’t great, such as Sanctum, you feel it. Especially if the rest of the Xpac isn’t going great. I don’t need to go into those things. It’s just background to why I enjoyed the RWF and this new raid.

I watch a bit of RWF, but not obsessively, and never with as much as interest as this. It’s not terribly exciting to watch guilds blow through bosses in a couple of pulls. However, in Sepulcher, it was different. Once the guilds hit Holondrus it got interesting. 400 plus wipes on a mechanically difficult boss, followed by Anduin, Lords of Dread, Rygelon, and The Jailer, all made for great viewing and engagement and, best year, a fine endorsement for the new raid and the game. Watching guilds work and rework and fix pulls on live is good stuff, far better than watching things executed after months of work on the PTR.

I don’t know how this race, or raid will be viewed internally at Bliz. I know there are some complaints regarding the difficulty and the time spent raiding and it’s toll on players. Given that the RWF is an entirely manufactured event and not the thing to design a game for, I do hope the difficulty is maintained as well as the pace. For players and those in RWF, I suspect some kind of rules, or governing is best put in place to save them from themselves, though I am not sure how you’d work this (I also think within that you could and should work out global release dates, ways to cap split raids, etc). But there’s nothing wrong with the pace of the raid and its bosses. That’s great. And like I said, a great advertisement for WoW. I’ve been excited to raid during this time. It’s been good to log on for it.

Anyhow, thanks for reading, and I hope the dev teams look at this race and think that it has hit that sweet spot and should be a model going forward.

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2

SoD was certainly not a bad raid. it didn’t shine as bright as CN but it wasn’t bad.

one can argue even with CN, the oversized architecture is getting out of hand…

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3

The RWF race was the most boring thing I’ve ever watched. 2 straight weeks of watching split farms, and raiders taking breaks cause the race was so long. I started to re-tune in on the jailer prog and that was the only exciting thing out of the month it was going on. Not entertaining at all to over tune to make this an esport knowing that these bosses are tuned differently for the top 100 players in the world and needed after it’s done.

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4

Watching it may be fun, but I think it comes at the expense of your average player concerning design and tuning.

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5

It was a great close race, but the ending proved an important point - this is NOT a healthy way to play wow. Some of the best, most conditioned players in the game hit a physical wall & had to step away for fear of harming their health and happiness… and we are all susceptible to these same issues if we’re not careful.

Hey you - yeah you - go take a break. It will still be here when you get back.

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interesting how low level toons didn’t like it but max level toons did.

7

Got to disagree. Fatescribe was an awful gimmick and bugged. Sylvanas was a long, long mess, and KT and Guardian were super disappointing. But I think the biggest problem was the shard system. That really came to define it and it was this grind to get them, get the piece, then grind up the shards…

The look of the raid was fine. CN’s look wasn’t bad, either. I liked the way you could do one wing, then another, which was handy for guilds who have small raid windows.

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8

i think raid design suffers from a “I wanna be the guy” design.

i remember when In Cata they said they’ll make player Hps big so it’s not one-shot deaths anymore but a gradual falling down.

well the modern raids are very one-shotty. fatescribe takes that a step further, to raid-wipey, and so do many bosses in the entire expansion.

one-shots everywhere. not great design imo. that’s my biggest complaint with modern raiding. overly mechanized with bloatware abilities and overly reliant on “Avoidable one-shots” for difficulty.

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Ehh, This race was a race to see who could get their tier 1st and smash it. You know things are in bad shape when your being payed 5mil for a 252 chest piece…

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No RWF is a healthy, or ideal way to play WoW. No-one would argue otherwise. It’s an event, and as the event has gotten more money involved, it’s generated more and more behaviour that isn’t ideal. However, the responsibility of that is, for the most part, on the guilds and the organisations involved, not Bliz since they don’t run the event. Now, they could - they could create a tournament realm where you ported the toons over and they limited the hours you could spend on it. Or they could do something else to manage it.

But I really wasn’t talking about those things. I was talking about the raid itself, it’s pace, and difficulty, and how I enjoyed that from an outside perspective.

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Literally every race is about that. Drops, shards, corruptions, tier… it’s why splits, multiple toons of the same class have become a thing. I’m not saying it’s great, but to think that this was different just because of tier is to miss what’s gone on before.

12

I think the race went too long. I was excited to watch it but lost interest around the 2nd mythic reset. I did enjoy the jailer fight but I think the system required for the raiders doing high end is abit on the crazy side. Personally I think the sweet side is around 10-12 day long prog.

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13

the Ragnaros-heal special phase mechanic is something players probably hate… and makes progress reporting ugly. I wish they didn’t heal the boss for special phases. increasing its base HP at 10% to make it 4 times bigger than the previous % might be a nicer solution imo…

14

An every tier its the most complained about feature, No tier a month in, no shard gear 2 months in, 3 months still no 75% corruption or useful corruption.

Meanwhile its increasing clear how heavily Blizzard designs these Raids around a system lately thats pretty brutal …

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15

What’s wrong with sanctum? I loved SoD. Better than CN imo

16

they just keep failing to make Kel’thuzad epic. every time. he’s either an addfight or an addfight.

surely there’s a way to design a lich better than that.

fought the dude in 3 raids, he sucked in all 3.

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I don’t know that it has become more or less one shotey to be fair. I think there are more mechanics that if you didn’t do this right, you wipe, straight away, but that’s not truly an different than previous raids - even those in Cata (or Wrath, or BC, when I first started to raid). The difference is mostly the time it takes to wipe from that mistake, and that fact that, when you overgear it, you can’t recover from the error cause it just kills you. But there are worse things.

If I had to complain about raids, I’d mostly complain about healing, which has become very dispel orientated at times, as if dispelling was somehow interesting gameplay. Or tanking, which often feels quite stagnant in a raid. But these aren’t new complaints.

18

Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. Tier I think is just the old system back again, so I have less probs with it.

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Cleanse has always been hotkey 1 for me. Since i first keybound back in Tier 6. (dont hate).

this expansion i used cleanse in one place only: the worm tunnel after Huntsman boss in CN to drop the slow poison debuff.

at times i take it off keybind 1 to replace it with the warlock gate toy.

why are we not allowed to do anything useful with our cleanses as dps?

20

He’s alright in Naxx, though the add phase was incredibly boring. This new version was just that, sadly. Just boring.