The future of raiding?

Community WoW Community Council
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Hello again!

Been comparing today’s raids and raid encounters with oldest ones and I wanted to share my thoughts on it.

  • For me it feels that the more time passes and we have new patches, the more we are moving away from raiding. In the previous expansions we had times with 2 or 3 raids in a single patch. Different levels of difficulties and rewards from raiding within the same patch. We also had miniraids on most if not all of the expansions, something we completely skipped this expansion.
  • Dragonflight for me and for most of the people I discuss with feels like the worse raiding experience we had so far. The encounters lack innovation. Most of the raid mechanics nowdays are just “avoid”, “move out of puddle”, “move out of breath”. Even stacking and spreading became a rare thing this expansion. I am really trying to think of a fight this expansion that I said,“wow what a nice fight”.
  • The same I would state for the feeling, the atmosphere and the entire raid design. I cannot name any boss that feels epic for this expansion. I know that it would be unfair to compare, but whenever I discuss with my friends we all think the same. Where are fights so epic like Garrosh, Lich King, Most of Nyalotha raid, Nighthold, Tomb and Antorus, special mechanics like Mekkatorque, or Opulence, so other amazing encounters. Now for some reason and I don’t know if it’s me, but most of fights are just dodge, move, dodge.
  • Rewards from any difficulty were really bad this expansion. 90% of gearing happens now in Mythic+ and the only thing you expect to get from raiding is a weapon (possibly if you are a caster) and a trinket or two if your spec allows it. More and more guilds are struggling to keep up because people are not as motivated to raid as they were before.
  • Lore. Well. You know it already so I will not extend this further, but Houston, we have a problem.
  • Graphics. For what it’s worth, WoW still has very nice graphics despite it’s age but “they are old”. The result in most cases is that usually half the raid has mid level CPUs and when we get into heroic with any size above 20-22 things get nasty. With mid range CPUs and such raid sizes we are looking at 5-10fps 1% lows and at best 25-35fps. Eventually changes need to happen. Also some projected textures that are being overlapped by abilities like Darkness and such or they go under carpets etc. Not the best visual experience. I am wondering also why do devs insist to design blue colored mechanics in a room with blue floor and blue lights and blue AoE effects (look Nymue for example).

I would love to see raiding becoming the end game content again, maybe even in parallel with Mythic+. At the moment is being left as a filler for people who push Mythic+. A friend of mine told me about a month ago “yea I need to raid too to get a couple of trinkets for my Mythic+ runs”.

Thanks for reading!

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I think the steps taken into TWW with Delves will create another track that PvE players can explore the game through – which is a very good idea if evergreen.

Alternatives are good because, I feel, that traditional raiding is a sort of “old model” of MMORPG gaming. Nowadays the MMO audience is undeniably older - bringing with it obligations and making 6-hours-a-week time commitments sometimes a large ask.

Rewards being aligned to what players want to do is a good thing, if someone wants to hop on, explore a Delve or tackle some M+ keys - comparable & competitive gear awaits them. That said, the best gear, often trinkets, is still coming from a mythic raid… if people are not motivated to raid to get those I think the motivation is mostly coming from the massive time commitment that some adults don’t want to give up.

Also, achievements, mounts, and titles are their own reward - even more permanent than the gear itself! And certainly, nothing is taking that away. But if the raid is fun then that is its own reward too.

It’s hard for me to separate what is Blizzard’s fault versus just my own falling out with caring about raiding. I thought that Ernog & Council mythic fights were fun, Razagath was fun but too long, uhmm… Rashok on mythic was alright. Yeah idk, nothing really jumps to the top for me. I think Ernog as a first boss was probably the most fun first boss I’ve ever faced though. A separate problem is that these fights get infinitely more fun when you do them on mythic difficulty, which is just not strategically feasible for some people.

Agree with a lot of the points you’re saying though Athlios, especially on graphic difficulties, lore, and the “epic”-ness of some fights. I invite Blizzard to take risks and try crazy new ideas in raids, I’ve seen the Alpha for M+ dungeons and those are a good sign that the team is willing to do it!.

But I would push back on the desire to have raiding be a forced endgame more than it already is. This is because of the changing audience, and realizing the awards that are already there. (This isn’t saying “I’m right and you’re wrong” btw, I just weight raiding at like a 2/10 on what I want to do, whereas it sounds for you those weights are higher!).

To get an changing audience to pair well with raiding changes need to happen to allow less down-time and allow for more ease of play. These could include:

  • in-instance summoning stones at different checkpoint bosses. Or every boss, who cares?
  • Allow for easier rebuffing, including static in instance food buffs or party buffs.
  • It’s weird that we have to reset the boss all the time, maybe the game could just make it to where player abilities reset on pull, or when you click on something outside of a boss idk.
  • Allow for variant roster sizes, and not incentivize running multiple of the same raid across different difficulties.
  • Give more movement speed abilities to people to navigate large environments faster.

These would make it to where groups could form slightly easier, and when players with limited time join could be assured that most of their time spent would be playing the content of bosses rather than the micromanagement of raiding.

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The audience is still there. Devs are just trying to push us away from raiding. There are still thousands of guilds raiding.

Aligned to what half the players want. The fact is that raiding gives just those trinkets and nothing else cause we are forced to hit M+ hard the first two resets since the option is there and all the gear acquired through that makes the equivalent slots from Mythic raiding obsolete.

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I think the biggest deterrent is requiring more people to be on the same page with mechanics and the required time investment for raiding vs mythic+ it is more free flow.

I’d like to see more changes in terms of the extremely formulaic raid releases where we have three tiers of raids and the mythic+ pool is always dungeons with 4 bosses with the rare outlier of 3 or 5.

The last time we had a min-raid was Crucible which had poor timing in release (5 years ago now!). I think they should change things up like bringing back those mini raids or even lair raids and just having them release at the same time instead of what happened with Dazar’alor and Crucible with the intention one is tuned harder.

Mythic only phases feel meh for awhile now too. The Jailer and N’zoth felt lackluster for their Mythic only phases compared to other phases like Gul’dan and Argus.

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I would agree with many points. I think the storytelling in-game doesn’t reach far enough in what people expect out of wow, it doesn’t feel epic enough.

The theme of this expansion were more soft I would say than what a lot of people like. Going back in Remix MoP and going through those stories with the Horde and the Alliance, with Garrosh and the Dalaran purge with the Isle of Thunder it felt way more Warcraft than the 2 last expansions. I’m not gonna hide my bias also that any expansion with a troll raid for me is a better expansion.

I also feel one of the solution might not be more mini-raids but more new scenarios, dungeons, etc. each patch to progress the story better. I also like any questlines that makes you go back in older zones as I think those also add a lot to the world building element of world of warcraft.

I’ve made a whole thread on gearing so I don’t feel I gotta repeat all of it but definitely gearing for me needs to be changed.

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Not by any relevant margin, and it’s a lot of extra effort required compared to just doing heroic and upgrading to nearly the same ilevel or god forbid doing M+ that gives myth track loot for doing heroic-raid-equivalent difficulty keys.

No. Mythic has to be fixed raid size, and if anything that raid size should be 25 rather than 20 (or delete raid buffs so we can actually bring specs we want instead of having nearly all raid spots hard locked)

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I am a firm believer in the idea of templated raids and to some extent pvp.

While the latter isnt the topic here. The sheer volume of benefits a template would provide always makes me criticize the way the game has been run for years.

How can you genuinely have any fair consideration of raid progress, or world rankings when every single expansion the top guilds employ structured purchasing of every advantage possible.
The amount of people that are paid in hard cash to provide the vast majority of BoEs, gold, split runs, all the other stuff that destroys any competitive spirit.

Many of these people arent the best, they are amongst the first.
Lets talk about a few of the benefits of templates.

  • Everyone starts and ends with the same gradual power curve
  • Redistributing any given difficulty of any encounter could allow every guild. All of them. To truly have an opportunity to progress with as limited as time as you conceive.
    -Wih a strong foundation the removal of LFR and normal / heroic could be realized
  • Raid difficulty growth could have a Mythic+ mentality with Amirdrissil+2-5.
    Allowing all spells, abilities, health, damage, and any other modifiers be placed on either player or Boss.
    -With that in mind, giving players the option to fine tune bosses and themselves to give each boss new mechanics from a pool. 1,000 possibilities across range of stats and difficulty. Allowing for near infinite progression over any and all seasons.

Do I have the end system worked out completely. No.
Is it a step away from the generic rotation of mechanics that have been prevelant for years, I think so.

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I think devs are just creating content players want. The fact that thousands of guild raid is a pretty low metric given the approx. 7 million players subbed to the game. If it were fun and/or rewarding people would do it. But it’s too much of a hassle, and and older populous doesn’t want to engage with it.

Trinkets are a significant portion of player power and sometimes utility, I wouldn’t downsell that portion. Also with Delves coming out some of this “being forced to do M+”-ness will decline.

If you want to weigh the pros/cons of raiding and come to the conclusion that the rewards that are there are not worth it that’s totally within your right as a player. Many others have probably come to that conclusion as well. Yet, many more competitive players want the trinket upgrades because it makes the content their pushing easier.

Yeah raiding is a slog, I think modern players don’t want to do it sometimes. Delves will help with that a bit given the vault updates.

In the vault, sure. Delves will be there too.

roster boss intensifies

The game isn’t so hard that you have to align your roster to specific “hard locked” classes & specs. The bosses are designed to be beaten. Mayyybee if you’re a world first raider or something, but like for lay players you can take the player > the class. I think people get too hung up on meta’s - does it make things easier? Yes. But like idk, just be gamers, accept a slightly longer boss fight, and win.

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Keep in mind, I say “forced” to do M+ as I do not like it but still have to do it to be able to be competitive in a mythic raiding environment and the same way some M+ players who are not into raiding they get in mythic raids just to grab those trinkets and then disappear. That was not the case of course with this patch and the bullions (thank god and I am sorry at the same time to be able to get free gear for various reasons which I will not go into now).

Just to emphasize, apart from the actual difficulty, organizing a raid team even at a heroic level takes way more time and effort than running 8s.

I was goin through the first 500-700 keys in ranking and half the teams are VDH - RDruid - SP - Rogue - Aug. The other half was the same but instead of RDruid was Balance with rest affi?

I’m putting this thought as well here to say that the way the specs and classes are balanced at the moment just simply doesn’t work at any mode or level.

All game modes need a lot of work to be able to work as intended. My raid team has 2 demotivated tanks, one Monk and one Paladin and both do not want to get into keys above 10 and the reason is obvious.
Imagine having 20 people in a raiding team trying to do keys and noone in a guild of 400 people to want to tank them
Even now I have a friend DK I’m doing keys with and a Disc Priest and we stand in queue in LFG forever to get into 13s. They just won’t invite a DK tank no matter what.

How much do we need to struggle to get a raiding team sorted??? And how much rewarding it is in comparison to what we have to go through?

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