I would even go as far as saying raids should scale from 5 players and dungeons should allow scaling between 5-10 players.
But why is 20 player mythic raiding still the only thing? Mythic raiding was introduced in SOO more than 10 years ago now and nothing has changed aside from master loot.
I haven’t done a mythic raid since mid SL and not for lack of trying, but many players don’t need it, very few can even do it, and most players I see these days are just AOTC and bail. If they scaled mythic the same as other raids, and allowed for no ID lock, you would certainly find more players doing the raids and isn’t that what Blizzard wants?
I want to mythic raid, but I don’t want to keep moving guilds when we end up in a situation where we can only muster up 18 players because that’s just crap. Join a guild, make some friends, have 6 people get AOTC and leave, or just leave in general and now I have to move guilds, find new players, try find a spot in their roster.
And that’s half the issue, find a guild, try and gel with them so you can play well together and hope to get a spot on their roster. If they scaled mythic raids you would be able to just go “OK, we have 12 on tonight, but we have enough tanks and healers” and keep going.
Problem is smaller the group, generally means fewer people able to stuff up the run.
Mythic raid on 5 man would probably be the only raid run cause it’s far easier to get 5 people to harmonise than 20.
Essentially it’d be a hard nerf to raids.
That may be better than trying to recruit out of the limited pool of people that have the ability and drive to raid mythic.
If they brought down the overall difficulty, that would also expand the pool of people.
I’m tired of fighting the roster boss.
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Well if I had to think of it from a personal PoV I only have roughly 5-6 friends IRL who join at the start of a season, usually get KSM then quit. Rinse repeat they’re doing HD2 nowadays.
This would mean I’d be able to do this with them each week too. I’d get nothing but a benefit from it, though a part of me feels wrong about it because it doesn’t seem like a ‘raid’ anymore at that point.
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There’s a crazy amount of overhead to keep a guild running. It would cheapen the feeling of doing a huge boss with 5 people, probably, but being able to do meaningful pulls with 18-19 is better than skipping days because too many people can’t show (holidays for example). Especially with bosses tuned to take 30+ hours of prog to kill, and that gets essentially reset if you replace too many people.
Something has to give.
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I agree with you. I’m just going through my guilds (super casual) logs and we get 10-13 on average. We don’t get outsiders but 20 is out of the question.
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That’s not a problem, the real problem is that you do not have 19 other people to cover one person, so trying to do a 5 man mythic raid would be like trying to do an M28 or something.
At this point raiding has lost what made raiding good. Now it’s just a numbers game and a
roster issue.
I know if you want to raid for the story and some decent loot, go heroic. But some people want to still challenge themselves and pushing another M25+ key, again, can be very boring for some.
Many players who raid actually enjoy the raid itself, but doing normal/heroic every week when you clearly don’t need it, is just not fun, there is no challenge since you can push M+ and just out gear the raid.
I thought you meant M+ scaling. My disappointment.
Would it? You’d have to drop a good chunk of the boss mechanics at 5. Not having to deal with the timer & affixes on the trash would probably make it a teens key.
While I don’t raid, I fully support Blizzard fixing mythic, and bringing all levels of the raid up to support those that like the content. I’d suggest removing lockouts from lfr to heroic so they can be repeated like keys. Vault rewards should be upgraded to be more inline with keys, so if you get a slot from lfr you’ll get a piece from normal in the weekly. Remove the silly crest system and go back to a single currency that can be used to upgrade gear and can be obtained from all content.
I’m trying to think of any non-gift mythic boss that would work anywhere near the original design with player scaling, and so far am coming up blank.
Depends on the mechanics. Take Tindral and the dispel, you can run a priest and monk and get one mass dispel each time and if you miss one, you can still fumble through. With a 5 man you would have 1 dispel, super easy? Sure. But you would need to put something in place to make it worse if you miss the dispel or take too long, like a scaling damage debuff from it.
Like if you don’t do your one whole dispel in say 3 seconds that person starts taking a massive chunk of damage.
Nymue and the flower soaking, make it so if no one starts soaking like 1-2 seconds after the flower drops the outgoing damage starts scaling.
Gnarlroot and the adds, let them scale up in damage the more adds you have alive. Like if you only summon 2 adds, the next summon will have 12 adds, so for 2 adds they will do 10K per hit, but on the second wave with 12 adds they are now doing 100K per hit. This will force you to ensure you are summoning not too many adds, but also needing a DPS check to kill them before more adds show up and start multiplying the damage of each of them.
There are ways, you just need to think outside the box. And that Gnarlroot example is a good one in general for all raids, not just 5 or low player counts, because if you want an easy 5 man raid to avoid rostering issues it will mean you HAVE to take the right 5 players who are not only doing mechanics perfectly, but also hit hard enough, heal well enough and use tank defenses exactly correct to avoid being overwhelmed.
See Blizzard make these crazy mechanics for mythic and are now hiding auras, and punish you super hard for missing something by half a second, but why not just make it so things are not just scaled a harder, but keep scaling the more mistakes you make?
The way mythic works sort of requires a specific aim point for players for balancing. Its even a thing for normal and heroic too where the last few bosses always get a few changes because they become unreasonably different when done in 10 man vs 30 man. That said 20 is a lot and that aim point could be lower. One other issue is that lowering mythic would also necessitate another look at class buffs, which would be a good thing, in that we’re already getting close to the point where a ideal mythic group is mostly locked in from class buffs alone with like 5 spots as flex if that after you get all of your raid buffs.
The difficulty gap between aotc and the start of mythic is negligable but the group requirements to have an appropriate raid group for it is heaven and earth. It would be good for the game to have more people able to jump into early mythic even if it doesn’t change much for cutting edge numbers since keeping cutting edge and late bosses as great challenges is part of the point of mythic, though supposedly this tier went a bit off the deep end in that regard too.
It would be a huge ask though since to effectively follow through on having a lower mythic entry point class balance on class buffs and raid fights would have to be designed toward the new number. If this is done though I can see it being a net positive for the game. Also small example since the last time I really mythic raided was bfa, a lot of the the fights in bfa and this thread made me think of mythic soccer boss(dark inquisitor xanesh) from nyloatha. The main difference in mythic is soccer was more difficult in a number of ways(won’t go into detail look it up) and each player could only do it once meaning that you were limited to 6 phases and then auto wipe on the last one because its 3 people doing the mechanic per phase. The fight didn’t fundamentally change aside from the changes to the soccer mechanic. If the raid size was lowered that would mean this boss would have to be scaled to be shorter to account for less phases, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing since it was a pain to do on farm because it was one of those every person in the raid has to do it right type fights that tend to be a pain to reclear and honestly would have been a welcome change at the time.
For a lot of fights it would probably mean things like one less mcguffin when they make them like one less halondrus bomb or fyrack red seed.
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This is my biggest qualm with this game, you cannot just take 5+ skill appropriate players into content and beat it, aside from cheese with 20 tanks or something stupid like in Ny’alotha where they ran 20 mages.
And that’s honestly crap these days. I cannot remember the last time I ever had all the group buffs at the same time, well that happens when you cannot even muster 20 players, but at the same time in one group you are missing a DH or monk, another has no warlock, mage and warrior, next run we have no enhancement shaman and so on and raids being designed around all this means if you are missing something you are just nerfing yourself.
I’ve had many bosses where we got down below 5% and failed and didn’t have some of the buffs, makes you wonder if removing the raid consumable buffs was the right idea since it did not have the intended outcome they thought it would.
Yes buying a scroll to not need to have a warrior is bad, but not being able to raid because you need that additional buff from the warrior that you don’t have, that’s worse.