An Idea: I think an easy way to increase entry level raiding at the normal level is not to scale Normal Raid until the group size hits 15 players. This would allow groups of 10 to take a couple of newbies and help them learn the raid.
EDIT: some confusion on the post. IOW, Normal is the same as now, with 10 players to star, but nothing in the raid scales until you reach 15 players.
Pros? Cons?
You can already do normal with a group comprised primarily of people who aren’t familiar with the encounters.
Normal is a gimme. We have low parsers in my group and we cleared normal on the 2nd week, and even 1st week only fyrakk was left to defeat.
Isnt 10 the base size for the easiest level of normal?
Debatable. If you’re carrying grey parsers in your 10 man, their weight is higher.
You are correct, but the problem with 10 that the OP doesn’t address is that many boss mechanics don’t scale in quantity which puts more emphasis on individual players doing mechanics correctly and repeatedly…while still trying to DPS.
But that has nothing to do with scaling
So being expecred to do raid things? Lol
I’ve definitly been in Normal raids where the raid leader asked someone to leave who wasn’t doing enough DPS. So, it does happen. Thinking it might not happen if boss heath didn’t scale right way, or at least would happen less.
It does for OP request. He wants scaling to start going up only when you go past 15, and anything below be the same health and damage as it would with 10.
Which is a bad request by the way.
I guess you could look at it that way. But there is a huge difference between getting 5 spears in a 15-man raid (33% of raid) vs. 5 spears in a 10 man raid (50% of players).
I can’t say that this is the case in the current raid, but it is a constant problem with running smaller groups and Blizz has consistently failed to address the problem in the past.
Whats the next scaling point? 14 or 15 people in the force? I havent raided as part of a core raid group to where this mattered in a few expansions.
I recall there being sweet spots just before the scaling adjusted on the next person added
I thought they had (in the past) scaled mechanics accordingly?
I’m just spitballing for ideas to increase participation. We have some people who are afraid to raid because they are below average. Would be nice to have them tag along without causing frustration. If anyone has better ideas, l’m all ears.
From my experience, that’s not the case. For example, the first boss from last tier would give you the same amount of puddles/beams regardless of how big your group was…starting at 3 of increasing every phase.
So if you had 10 players it was 33%(ish) of your group. If had 15 it was only 20% of your group at the start. And then increasing from there.
It does for many of them. Like you get 2 players targeted with bombs in a 10, you might get 3 with 15. That kind of thing.
Right. But im thinking the difference in boss HP pools made up for that? As the HP scaled higher than the average dps did by having more people?
I don’t think we have specific data on how much bosses scale per player…or even if each boss’s scaling is unique.
I just know that fight specifically was far more difficult with fewer players because the players that were selected for puddles/beams were unable to DPS for the duration of the mechanic. Especially as you reached the 3rd “phase” or higher when 5 (50%) of the raid or more were constantly doing a mechanic and were unable to DPS.
Also, at 10 players if 2 people died the tanks started getting the mechanics as well…which is pretty much a wipe unless your tanks were pros and the boss was almost dead.
There are other examples, but I am just very familiar because we struggled with that boss a few weeks last tier do to poor attendance.
When i mentioned earlier about sweet spots (mind you this is referring to expansions past), i recall boss health pools increasing at only certain benchmarks. Like at 15 the bosses health jumped up to the next “tier”. So the sweet spot was bring 14 (for example) to push as much DPS as possible inside that lower health bracket.
Im all for increasing participation…so long as people are willing to treat the content accordingly. Meaning: yeah you may not be the greatest player, but still try. Mechanics are a thing. I dont want to introduce players who are going to treat raids as a test dummy for their DPS rotation. The player with below average DPS who does mechanics > the above average dps player causing stress from not doing mechanics
raids would then be balanced around 15 player minimums defeating the purpose.
All that would change is that 15 players would be required to even start raiding.
Just normal and just health scaling. Not that many people even play normal anymore. No need to change any other raids.