Suggestion: Flex Mythic Raids

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

TL;DR:

  • After Race for World First is over, Blizzard typically introduces major nerfs to some/all Mythic raid bosses.

  • Nerfs don’t matter if you don’t have 20 Mythic raiders for your group

  • Blizz should introduce Flex for mythic raids after Race for World First is over so that your group isn’t screwed if one person quits or is unable to play any more.

Mythic raid participation is extremely low (as always) and remains a piece of content in the game that is restricted to groups of 20.

Blizzard introduced Flex raids for Normal and Heroic which was groundbreaking, and as a result, you saw a lot of Normal and Heroic raid guilds start to pop up due to the ease of entry. It is a lot easier to get 10 people together rather than 20, and it is nice to be able to bring an 11th+ person along to either trial them or just play with them due to inconsistent schedule, and not make the raid any more difficult.

I would like to see Mythic Raids become flex AFTER Race for World First is over.

I understand the whole raid is balanced and designed around 20 people in Mythic, so it would make sense for it to be restricted to only 20 people for competitiveness. But 4 months in to a patch, there are a lot of players taking breaks, but also some wanting to continue progressing in mythic.

The biggest struggle I’ve found in my Mythic raiding journey is just getting people. Typically you’ll lose 1-2 people due to many reasons because people have real lives and playing consistently for 3-4 months straight is impossible for any adult.

Most Mythic raiding guilds that don’t clear the first half the raid before Race for World First is over, begin to dissolve 3-4 months in to a patch because further-progressed mythic raiding guilds have a few players have to quit, and pull in players from the less progressed guilds.

I understand this is inevitable, but this occurrence could be reduced by making Mythic flex, so that having 19 people wouldn’t hurt.

A lot of feedback I get as a Guild Master posting here on the forums is that I should just “replace and get more people” but I recruit 24/7 across most every platform I can think of, and rarely get anyone. If I do get someone, they’re brand new to mythic raiding (which is fine by me) but they’re severely under-geared, so then we have to invest in trying to gear this person JUST to bring them in to Mythic to try to continue to progress.

I just think it would be cool if we could begin to see Mythic turn in to a flex raid after Race for World First rather than Blizz just nerf-bombing the raid. Nerfing the raid might help guilds with 20 people, but it does nothing for guilds that lose 1-2 people.

2 Likes
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Every guild I’ve raided in fell apart due to the 20 man requirement raiding at two days a week. If we have 18 people on, we can’t raid. If we have 20 the first night, then 19 the second night, we can’t raid due for to people already being locked to a mythic raid. Flex 18-22

2 Likes
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I can agree with that, I’d think it wouldn’t be too difficult to tune around.

4

why only 18-22? what if my group has only 17 players? that’s not fair to us

1 Like
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They better not stop the flex at 17. It would be a slap in the face to all of us that have 16 man groups.

2 Likes
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Flex will never happen because mythic is balanced around 20man. But they should open lockouts. No reason to be locked anymore.

7

how would you balance it?

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They don’t need to make mythic raids flex size. Just remove the mythic raid lockout so you can pug the missing spots.

9

I disagree nothing about the game should change after the RWF. Mythic should just always flex. Guilds die struggling to get 20 so at least still being able to kill farm content would be a game changer.

10

Flex mythic raiding would make it too easy. Groups will just flex to whatever size the fight is easiest on as well, so you’ll have to change your raid size per boss and some people will get benched anyways.

11

I’ve been saying this for a long time too, not much reason to require 20 people and have a lock out for all 20, that’s a ridiculously large time investment. Either flex down to 10 or just remove the lockout per group.

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There are good reasons for both, whether you’re willing to acknowledge them or not.

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Yes good reasons, like the whole hall of fame and catering to top tier yada yada yada. It should be difficult absolutely, it should be a real achievement for sure, but it doesn’t need to require 20 people. It being more difficult to tune a dungeon that flexes is a fair point, but not doing something because it’s hard is just called being lazy.

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It does though. Twenty was the smallest number they felt they could design encounters around expecting each class’s toolkit to be represented in the group.

No, it’s called valuing a uniform experience rather than investing in an exercise in futility that would ultimately just be gamed to maximize progression, ie ‘bring 14 for this boss, 16 for that boss, 10 for that one, and 18 for this one, etc.’

It’s not more difficult, it’s essentially impossible, and the attempt would be a worse mythic raiding experience.

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There are 13 classes, most having 3 specs available. If you did only bring 10 you’d still only be missing 3 classes, so what? Are you going to tell me that top tier groups aren’t already bringing only the best class for each boss when pushing? Average guilds bring whatever they got, it’s just the way it is. My guild raids with 15 or 16 people most nights and we’re not breaking any records but we have fun. It would be nice if we didn’t have to pug extra people in and worry that our progress is locked cause people are going to leave.

A uniform experience how? You already can gamify almost every encounter with a particular class. Most of the bosses in VoI are easy for me because magic shell avoids a ton of mechanics and death’s advance makes all the pushbacks not a thing. Variety is a good thing. They already know how to flex the other raids and even rares now, and honestly they work pretty well. Raz is a good example, less people = less sparks for example. It’s not that complicated and as always I really couldn’t care less about hall of fame or RWF. That’s not something the average player deals with. If you want to force Hall of Fame and RWF to 20 people, great go ahead. But let’s not lock the vast majority of people out of the content because they can’t find the same 20 people to do the raid with.

16

So if you bring 20 then you could have all 13, be missing none, and even have some doubled up. So if they plan a fight with a Mind Control in mind, they can assume there will be at least one priest. If they plan a fight for a warlock portal for the group, they can assume there will be at least one warlock. Etc., etc…

No, I don’t think top tier groups are bringing 2 tanks, 4 healers, and 14 of the top ranking dps class. I think they generally have a balanced raid to account for all of the raid buff synergies and utilities that they can bring to a fight.

Sounds like if you recruited 4-5 more people you could fix that problem without overhauling the mythic raid system.

A uniform experience in that every group can expect the same amount of debuffs/circles/adds/beams/soaks/etc. and not have an opportunity to find optimization of player to mechanic ratio by sitting or adding people.

This is a terrible example. You chose a mechanic that is 1:1 player to spark. Of course there are fewer if you bring fewer people. But should 3 static fields go out in P1 if there are only 10 people? That’s around half of your dps coming off the boss to run those out but in a group of 20 it’s more like a third. Wouldn’t it be punishing for smaller groups to have all 3 of them to manage and only half the players in the raid? So what if only 2 go out? Great, when does that switch happen from 3 to 2? Now you have a break point that can be gamed in a way that isn’t possible with a fixed raid size. Repeat this for every single mechanic on every single boss that isn’t in a 1:1 ratio with the size of the raid.

There are thousands of people on each server. No one is getting locked out because they “can’t find 20 people to raid with”. They’re getting locked out because they are choosing not to find 20 people to raid with. Yes, it’s harder to maintain a solid group of 20+. Mythic is the hardest difficulty. What did you say about not doing something hard because it’s hard is lazy?

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I’ve tried but you’ll never get people to understand this. It already happens in heroic, why do people think it won’t in mythic?