They haven't learned their lesson RE: Raiding

Community General Discussion
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The goal for initial Mythic raid tuning is to make it just difficult enough to allow the best guilds in the world to distinguish themselves

The design of Vault of the Incarnates and other raids going forward should still be a stern test for the best guilds

Ion.

ION.

This is a BILLION DOLLAR FRANCHISE. Stop designing a game enjoyed by millions to suit 40 people. It’s actually insane. Stop it. STOP.

The goal of Mythic tuning should be that the game is fun for many players who enjoy playing challenging video games. If you want to design something specific for Limit and Method to enjoy, you can justify to your boss and the shareholders why you should allocate hundreds of thousands of dollars to a separate side-project, but stop hijacking Mythic Raiding to fulfill your fantasy at the expense of the franchise, its crazy. The majority of Mythic Raiders don’t want you doing that. It’s why less and less of us are raiding over time, why you’re bleeding raiders to Classic or just losing them to M+ (and no, nerfing M+ rewards will NOT bring those people back).

The most inaccurate thing said at times, and the most hurtful, is that the developers don’t care. The entire team cares passionately and are deeply rewarded by the joy of their players, and want to make everyone happy. If they’re unable to act on feedback, it’s often because they’re balancing the concerns and requests of a very diverse player base that has different goals, different motivations, and often directly conflicting desires. Doing the thing that person A requests could make the game worse for person B and vice versa because they play the game in different ways and want to experience the game in different ways.

Stop weighing the concerns of Limit and Method literally ten thousand times more than the concerns of Mythic raiders as a whole and maybe people will stop accusing you of not caring. The optics from a player point of view is that you’re sacrificing a pillar of end-game because you enjoy watching the World First Race and in most rational players mind that sacrifice is not worthwhile and it comes across as simply not caring.

Yes, I understand that if World First Race clears content in a week people will say the raid is too easy, but stop listening to that nonsense. Those same people (WFR casters) were saying SFO was one of the easiest raids of all time until it became clear that they’re always going to say the current raid is too easy until it slams them in the face like a truck. Just stop listening. Close twitter, close out your email, and actually go talk to “rank 1000” raid guilds and see what they think about the content.

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Dude…they tune for RWF and then as soon as the top guilds beat a boss they generally nerf them down for everyone else. It says there in your first quote…initial goal…that doesnt mean final goal. Outside if some exceptions, once there is a winner, they nerf it down. RWF is too big of a marketing tool to make it too easy. Plus if the RWF guys say a raid is too easy there are plenty who will trash talk the raid without ever clearing it and hurt engagement.

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I replied to this idea already -

If Blizzard wants to design some ultra-hardcore “Ultimate” style content that it is in its own little separate world, that’s fine. However, they need to stop bending the knee to the likes of Tettles (LOL) and other casters who will always whine about difficulty as a form of clickbait and just make the most fun possible game.

Here’s the truth - people will just not play if they’re not having fun. Limit Maximus can hype up the raid up down left right and center but if people play the raid and don’t have fun with it, it doesn’t matter what he says they’re not going to have fun with it. People didn’t like SoD, people didn’t like SFO. You whiff two raids in a row chasing after the WFR competition, eventually that’s going to bite you in the :peach:. Just stop it. It doesn’t matter if Maximus says he thought Sylvanas was a great boss when many people hated the lengthy RP and progging a 12 minute long boss.

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This is nonsense lol. They absolutely offer content for every level of player… That includes the top 1%, and that’s a good thing.

Raids are always nerfed over a patch, gear makes it easier, and early bosses are almost always accessible to way more players.

This just sounds like another “I can’t complete this content so it’s bad!” post

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Mythic raiding should be nerfed the numbers don’t lie the player base don’t want to mythic raid.

Remove mythic keep heroic but design super boss fights for the elite to test their skills that reward mounts titles etc (no gear)

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Remember when people complained heroics were to hard so they nerfed them and added mythic as a final challenge for guilds. Now people want mythic nerfed and another difficulty added for the top 1%? SMH

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We’re not talking about the top 1% or even the top 0.1%. We’re talking about the top <0.01%. In a game that launched with 8 million players at the start of the expansion, we’re talking about a billion dollar franchise being catered to literally 40 people. That’s insane. No, that is not a good thing. That is objectively NOT a good thing and we already saw it in the devastation of Shadowlands, how much the Mythic raid community has fallen off. Ion has tried to force people back into Mythic Raiding with raid-or-die style itemization and it simply failed. People left, people went to FFXIV to raid for a while, etc.

The numbers don’t lie. SoD and SFO both bombed. Shadowlands “failed” in a respect because it alienated more casual players and also alienated many Mythic Raiders. It also alienated PvPers. Really the only group that kept Shadowlands alive were M+ players.

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I’m not saying there isnt a gulf between heroic and Mythic. Part of that has alot more to do with the static raid size and static lock outs preventing the puggable, more casual nature of heroic and normal from reaching mythic, but part of it is difficulty and investment. However, given that many guilds kill bosses on mythic BEFORE killing the last boss on heroic. I would say its a fight to fight thing more than anything. Having the bosses tuned harder for the first few weeks to encourage competition and then nerfing them isnt a bad thing.

Also, its not just 40 people. Its like 40+ per guild competing in the top 5-10, plus the casters, members of the org that support the race, and the, at minimum, cpl hundred thousand that tune in to watch each race that take enjoyment from it.

And Shadowlands did feel raid or die, but that had nothing to do with mythic tuning. It was about having no other options, which are being improved in DF with crafting gear, M+ loot changes, etc. Mythic failed because of all the outside the raid stuff you had to do to be relevant for mythic this expac. Torghast for leggos, all the dailies, the conduits, soulbind and renown grind, reps for drops, etc. Lots of people stop mythic because of the stuff outside the raid, not in it.

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And yet SFO still failed even though there wasn’t much outside it you needed to do, so that theory is kind of shot.

The truth is as Asmongold put it - people want to get the best loot. Simply put, people who play WoW, who have played WoW for a while, simply want to get the best loot.

M+ has a structure where the top players play for prestige. PvP also has a structure where the top players play for prestige. It seems like Mythic Raiding is lagging behind in that regard, and they constantly feel obligated to dangle a bigger and bigger carrot to try to get people to raid and justify slogging through content they’ve tuned for the 20 people in Limit and the 20 people in Method instead of focusing on ensuring the Mythic Raid experience is fun and that the loot naturally comes along the way.

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The issue is that amount of viewership that the WF race brings in. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people binge-watching for hours on Twitch.

Guilds like Limit and Method and Echo have a financial incentive to make the races as hard as possible, and last as long as possible, because of the sponsorships, donations, ad revenue from everyone just viewing their channel for weeks at a time. Of course they are gonna beg Blizzard to make the raids as hard as possible.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, the issue is Blizzard tuning these raids for literally 100 players, and then not applying appropriate nerfs until MONTHS later.

The minute the final boss falls, they should slam the whole raid with massive adjustments. Sepulcher was terrible. An awful grind, and they nerfed it too little, too late.

The opinions of WF players and casters on how appropriate the difficulty of the raid is, is USELESS. Half the casters for the WF streams parse grey or barely raid at all anymore (Preach lmao), and the players sit there for 16 hours a day wiping to the same boss over and over. They have meals catered, they sleep, they wake, rinse and repeat. Anybody wiping a thousand times to a boss will eventually learn the split second timing required in order to meet the mechanics, or the dps optimization required to down the thing.

Sepulcher also suffered from being cut off way too short to shoehorn in a season 4 for Shadowlands.

These people play on an entirely different level than every other guild in the world. Even in the top 10 worldwide you see massive performance discrepancies between the top 3, and the other 7.

Sure, if they want an exciting race, make the damned raid hard as hell, but if that’s the path Blizzard wants, the nerfs to the fights better come quick after the final boss falls.

Remember guardian on mythic? The literal first boss of sepulcher. He was practically unkillable until the nerfs. THE FIRST BOSS.

It’s unsustainable at this rate. Guilds are collapsing because there’s a dozen insta-wipe mechanics paired with the most confusing DDR movement requirements on every mythic boss. And then the nerfs come six months after most people stopped caring.

TL;DR: Nerf faster. Mythic can be tuned for the pinnacle of WF guilds on release, but adjustments need to be quick after the first clear.

I kinda hate how the WF players hold the rest of the game hostage. Classes in PVE and Arena aren’t tuned quickly either because Blizzard “never tunes during the MDI and PVP tourneys”.

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The game is designed to have multiple difficulties and the highest difficulty is designed to be hard. There is nothing wrong with that.

No, that is the goal of heroic tuning, and mythic tuning at the end of the patch. This allows for guilds to slowly overcome mythic over the course of the patch. The tuning of Mythic at the very start of the patch is to be doable only by the very best.

Did you made a survey or something? Why are you speaking on behalf of other people? I certainly don’t hold this position.

Why should they? If they listen to Method and Limit they will end up with the perfect tuning for everyone. The hardest part to get right is to make a raid that is extremely hard but doable. The fact that it gets easier over time naturally just ensures that the players that are not the best will be able to conquer it over time, which is the ideal.

A raid that is too hard for the best players is a raid that will not be conquered over time by the other players, and a raid that is too easy is a raid that will be conquered too fast leaving players with nothing to do.

You seem to think that it is either one or the other, when in fact one ensure the health of the other.

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Casters dont need gold parses to do their jobs…why does that matter? Also I agree that one mistake raid wipe mechanics arent much fun. I think lots of raiders, even the best raiders, would agree with that. That’s Blizz design being lazy when trying to make things hard rather than doing other methods.

To Sylina’s point. Yes it should be nerfed faster and guilds shouldnt be left out in the cold, but the RWF opinions do matter to lots of people. Its a measuring yard stick for many. So a challenging, and engaging race is important.

As for SFO not doing well. By then SL was in the toilet, of course those numbers were going to be bad.

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I don’t blame them for wanting that. It makes economic sense as you’ve said.

I blame Ion for listening. He is the decider, and instead of deciding on what’s best for the game and actually having an understanding of the player-base as a whole, he is listening to the direct emails from the leaders of two guilds of with 20 competing raiders a pop in a game that launched with 8 million players at the start of the expansion.

Ion seems to be a robot that only responds to direct inputs, who doesn’t seem to think for himself. He reacts to data streams and doesn’t reach out to determine what players are doing. Changes only ever seem to happen when enough people quit over his choices that it creates large waves that batter Blizzard. He’s very bad at his job in this regard because he’s not proactive at solving the problems. That needs to change.

:+1:

The faster WFR is over the faster actual tuning can begin. A shorter race benefits us all.

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Do shut up plz

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Ya, you come off as annoying as F. I think shutting up would be for the best. The content for every level of player rub me the wrong way.

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A quick search of OP shows they’re not a dummy.

“I cAnT cOmPlETE tHiS cOnTeNT sO iTs bAD!” Wut a joke.

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RWF should be on the Tournament realm. Let anyone sign up that wants to compete. Give them vendors to buy whatever gear they want. Tune the raid to a special competition mode. Give them the global raid launch they’ve always wanted.

Leave the rest of us to our regular game.

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I love this idea. Not everyone has the time or desire to beat their head into oblivion for the sake of RWF

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Brewa has brought this up many times and I don’t really see any downsides TBH. It just seems like “the play”. Many games already do promotional events on promotional servers, so doing RWF on a promotional server to hype the raid could work pretty well. Limit the ilvl of tournament realm characters to increase the challenge if you want, but keep it out of live Retail.

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A lot of people not getting this dudes post.

We’re not talking about heroic vs mythic.

We’re talking about mythic only. Even within the mythic community, the difference between top 10 and top 500 is massive. The OP is saying they should cater more towards top 500-1000 compared to top 1-10

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