It wasn’t, I could just as easily get 20 ppl on discord. What was your point? irrelevant to my scenario.
OK… WOW… and not the game.
Reading this thread it’s become abundantly clear to me that the core foundation of how the game is designed is completely rotten. Hard to express the exact whys yet but working on that.
A few notes:
- The core “unit” of the game should be the 5 player party, every type of content should build on that. So content should be 5,10,15,20.
- The 11th (or 21st) player problem is real and still a problem after all the years. There is still no good solution even ff14 has issues with the 9th player problem.
- Buffs and utility are way too scattershot in the class design. There needs to be a lot of thought put into how how buffs are distributed and how that should affect the game. Right now it’s almost completely disconnected from any semblance of sanity. (I love my DH and my Monks but why do they give a buff to magic/physical damage that never falls off)
- Multiple difficulties having the same content may be a serious mistake
- Harder content should probably not be as common (e.g. have the same boss count) as easier content. It’s wasted effort for a small RoI. (Perhaps mythic should just become WoW’s version of ultimates?)
- Flex raiding isn’t perfect, breakpoints really suck if you’re on just the wrong side of one.
- Maybe it’s OK to tell a different story in larger group content?
- Gear acquisition is and has been FUBAR in the last few expacs and was arguably not well thought out prior to that either.
- WoW as a game has some seriously ugly culture issues (cue shocked pikachu face)
- The decisions the Devs have been making have made all the different groups of players ultra defensive of their playstyle because investment in the game as a whole seems down.
- Not all of the trolls on the forum hail from the darkspear or the zandalari.
- FF14’s savage raiding is generally speaking just harder than heroic but not as hard as mythic… it’s a very different design philosophy. Direct comparisons are… hard.
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We were talking about Ghuun. Warlock portals are nice and they differ like many classes do in their unique abilities. But they should not be mandatory in a sense that a boss is not possible to do without it. Thats just bad design. It gives you a bonus where an innervate or PI gives you a different one. A boss is designed well if you can manage mechanics with different approaches made possible by different class mechanics and not just 1. And this is in fact the case for almost all bosses except for RWF who nobody should care about in the grand scheme. Therefore the design of bosses wouldn’t change much if at all.
Arbitrary standards as your recruiting/logistics wall should infact NOT be relevant. It should be player skill and strategy. I can handle mythic quite well, but I do not enjoy the 20m style which is why I quit as a CE raider. I know the ins and outs of CE raiding from a entire work perspective. Recruiting, Strategy, Logs, Logistics, etc.
Difficulty would remain the same since bosses can be more difficult with lesser people or easier. It all depends on the boss design itself. Fact is that in a 10m group mistakes can be more detrimental than in a 20m environment. You also have less tools at your disposal as we have discussed plenty now.
The individual difficulty from a skill perspective goes up and the arbitrary gating as in recruiting and logistics goes down. If that sounds terrifying to you maybe you are one of the people that got carried by his mythic guild and was lucky enough they couldn’t replace him. I know those people, I had them in my raiding group. And they know they had no chance to survive in a 10m group of the same raid progress due to their skill issues.
Because thats what it currently is. If you are not one of the top guilds you always carry dead weight just to fill your group to 20.
There is opportunity to do this in WotLK. I believe if it is utilized enough maybe that may give blizzard another look at this whole subject. With that said I loved 10 man when it was a thing with hard modes in Ulduar, looking forward to another go at them as current content.
I’m suggesting that there is a mandatory set of utility that has to be brought to a mythic encounter, and once that is there, output is the most important factor in who gets brought by far.
For M+, you need a certain amount of stops, this expansion you (almost) need some form of MD, Wo means shroud isn’t as mandatory as it has been in seasons past, but if you remember the almost mandatory rogue for basically all of BFA.
There are also about half as many specs in FF than there will be in DF (38 vs 20), if we limit it to just DPS specs, it will be 25 vs 12. I don’t know enough about 14, but in the other MMOs I play with 8 player, the classes are a lot more homogenized than they are in wow.
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I’m not sure how you’re not connecting the dots.
We can agree that AI is mandatory in a 20-man raid. We can agree that it is absolutely NOT mandatory in a 5-man group. Now there’s some line somewhere that you cross over where the DPS gained by AI becomes worthwhile enough to always want to run a Mage no matter what. if that line is sitting somewhere in the range of variance you would see in comps in a 10-man groups in terms of output per class, physical vs magical DPS etc, then Mage is not “mandatory”, it just becomes part of the kit worth considering, like whether you get a Soothe from someone in an M+ key.
This is also something within Blizzard’s control to tune if 10-man raiding did exist. If Arcane Intellect only provide 3% bonus magic damage, it becomes much more difficult to say AI is mandatory for a 10-man party compared to the utility you might get from some other class/spec.
This is so true, it’s the same people who comment about how LFG tool destroyed the moral fabric of WoW Community and how after that the game was never the same and thats why they quit!
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Even if we ignore AI, chaos brand, mystic touch, and battle shout, fort will still be big value in 10 player, and there may be bosses with strats that only work during prog if you can bring both fort and devo. There’s going to be at least 2 fights per tier where warlock gate is basically mandatory. The specifics aren’t as important here, but as the group size goes down, any form of mandatory utility or class reduces group comp flexibility more and more.
They said in a dev interview pre-warlords (so, before DH and Evoker) that they can reasonably expect a 20 player raid to be able to field at least 1 of every class. In 10 player: THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE WITHOUT A BENCH OR MULTI-CLASSING.
No one is progging on bosses in keys.
People figure out the bosses week 1 in M0 then when M+ comes they’re good to go.
There are some pretty involved mechanics showing up in Megadungeons, to be sure, but the nature of dungeon content means no boss lives more than like a minute and a half in most difficulties / keystone levels, so you don’t REALLY have to perfect them or maintain a heightened level of performance. you just nuke.
Like, the last boss of Tazavesh Streets? Awesome encounter. Mechanically, one of my favorite in the game. The instances where you have to either wait for the right time or make 3 portal hops to get to where you want to be are fantastic! But the boss dies so fast half the time you don’t even have to use portals more than 3 times in the fight, and 2 if not all 3 of those are in the first half where it’s much less hectic. Those are the kind of mechanics that can be more problematic in a prolonged raid encounter, but turn out trivial in a minute long dungeon encounter.
Lockgate was added to the game in Mists. They made 10-man encounters in BC, WOTLK, and Cata that didn’t rely on the expectation of a lockgate. It isn’t as if they can’t design encounters that don’t need a lockgate - they have before.
A number of these lockgate uses are artificial anyways. Like the gate usage on Painsmith pre-nerf. That didn’t need to be there at all, it was just Blizzard being silly and saying “well, lockgate exists, so why don’t we put some in that uses it”.
As far as Devo and Fort, no I don’t believe there’s any mechanic that becomes trivial if you take 3% less damage, or else Avoidance stacking would be completely overpowered.
You try Mythic Xy’mox in sepulcher without a warlock. That’s not an artificial use. You either use gate, or force almost the entire raid to play venthyr.
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I meant it is artificial how Blizzard draws out your lockgate so you can’t use it elsewhere as well as forcing you to have a lock in the first place. Like, the Painsmith unavoidable wall of spikes is artificial - it doesn’t add anything to the depth or complexity of the fight, it just exists so ensure you can’t actually use your lockgate for anything else but that.
In a fight designed for 10-people, Blizzard could just not design mechanics like this.
glad 10mans are dead. you got 5mans so why do you complain?
Complain is a strong word.
I like M+ a lot. I would also like to enjoy raiding as well. I choose not to raid because I do not enjoy 20-man raiding in WoW as it exists currently. If 10-man raiding existed, I could enjoy raiding. Seems very straightforward to me.
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And that’s part of my point. Without that assumption about raid teams being able to field every class, you limit your design space, and potentially hurt your ability to create cool bosses.
10man is not raiding. that’s just a large dungeon group.
Do those mechanics actually enrich the encounter though?
The only mechanic I’ve seen this expansion where the lock-gate really added an interesting depth to a fight would be Sire D. You couldn’t design a fight like Mythic Sire in a 10-man. But there are plenty of other bosses that would play out particularly fine without a lock-gate if you removed the artificial mechanic meant to force you to use lock-gate so that they knew you didn’t have it.
Got some really great news for you Sentenza 10 man raiding exists in heroic and normal.
Go fourth and enjoy!
I beat the final boss of 10-man raiding in two pulls (only parsed blue because I wasn’t too familiar with the fight though). And that was before this most recent wave of nerfs.
Ideally, y’know, there would be some form of actual progression of difficulty.
If you killed heroic jailer in 2 pulls, it probably wasn’t a 1st kill for most of the raid, you heavily out geared it, or both.