Who is normal raiding for anymore?

Community General Discussion
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Greetings! I’m just some scrubby outlaw rogue who does normal raiding with 15~20 folks of various backgrounds; grandmas, asthmatics, various forms of physical disabilities & mental illness, etc. You know, regular people you might run into at the grocery store or work.

We’ve been raiding with each other a long time, with myself joining them back in Throne of Thunder. But our true heritage starting with Flex mode in SoO.

While I, myself, can pump out respectable DPS when my dice let me, and perform mechanics well… this isn’t true for the whole group.

In past raids we’ve done pretty well, including the last raid where we progressed to farm the whole thing, and even dabbled into the first few bosses of heroic for S&G.

Something is… off this raid tier. We are struggling to get the first boss down three weeks in a row now. We have, but usually with just me, the tanks and maybe another person alive at the end.

My team is just normal folks, not bleeding edge or even try~hards. Just regular folks. While my 9k~ish dps on the first boss would probably make it trivial had the rest of my buddies pushed it, they don’t. They sit around 4-5k. This has never really been an impediment before when doing Normal raids. It’s actually been par for the course.

So why don’t I just join a heroic guild? Because I want to play with my friends. Chill, relax, have fun.

9.2 raiding has not been fun.

Flex-mode was made in MoP for “friends and family”. It was later renamed normal. This is the content we do, what Blizzard designed for us.

What changed this tier? Everyone is saying it’s tuned for 2 legendaries and tier bonuses? Really? Even the first few fights when nobody has those yet? I can understand later fights being harder and needing better gear. But not the very beginning.

I don’t know. The 2 1/2 hours we meet twice a week has usually been more… productive? Maybe Blizzard doesn’t think organized raiding is for our types anymore? It’s been disheartening.

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Blizzard went overboard with tuning, because it is easier for them to nerf a boss than it is to buff or change a boss to make it harder. They just kind of over-overtuned in this case.

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Yep. You described my experiences with guilds that I’ve been in. I think normal difficulty should be a lot easier and then they can put the challenge on heroic and mythic raiding.

I don’t know why every tier of raiding has to be difficult

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If your people are pushing 4-5k DPS, the first couple bosses should be falling over. This group me and a few others are helping out (in hopes we can at least get normal tier faster than having to wait for mythic+ crafting to open up) is made up of much the same…a few pretty decents and a bunch of medicore to borderline bad (though not horribly awful) ones.

Normal was always designed around the “beer league” or “friends and family” group but is very much overtuned for that classification of players and is not something double legendary and tier is going to fix innately because the problem is too much emphasis on pass/fail mechanic checks to where having the objectively bad players is far too much of a detriment before even considering the level of their output.

We’ve already seen a round of nerfs and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more in the future. Blizzard rarely ever buffs an encounter after the fact so it is “safer” from their end to have it be too hard and then bring it down gradually if the clear numbers aren’t where they want it to be.

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Honestly Im not sure who Normal Raiding is actually for anymore. It used to be aimed for Guilds just like your describing, but this expansion its continued to ramp up to the point those grps are being punished the most.

My Guild used to have a A team and a B team. The B-Team were the Normal raiders and were never going to become bleeding edge along with Alts and a couple mains. But what I witnessed was that not only did those guys lose interest in raiding and vanished, but so did those guys who liked playin Alts…

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This tier normal is less about numbers, and more about doing the mechanics correctly. Even on LFR, if you don’t make it into the circle on vigilant guardian, you’re dead. Bad placement of the Xymox portal will probably lead to a wipe. A mote hits halondrus, and you’re not going to have a good time.

It seems that this tier they wanted to emphasize mechanics > numbers in normal mode

Mythic seems to be, normal is not.

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Yeah, I’m not entirely sure what role they are looking at it filling right now myself. Maybe they are not thinking they ought to be designing a raid difficulty to be cleared by groups doing low damage and that are terrible with mechnics? Perhaps they think normal should be relevant to people who do mythic bosses and get CE now and so they have made the mechanics a little bit harder than normal usually gets? I thought normal served a respectable purpose letting people hang out and play with their friends, even if their friends are not skilled. Normal probably shouldn’t have raid killing if someone fails mechanics in it.

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100% this.

The amount of pass/fail mechanics this raid (and moreover every new raid) is high, with nearly every boss having one to some extent. Now this is usually fine but failure of the mechanics (especially in normal) should punish you to stop repeated solutes but so punishing you either die or cause a raid wipe.

This is also a big thing. Credit where it’s due, Blizzard did provide alternative (or at least will be) ways to get tier, but those aren’t going to solve too much. Pass/fail mechanics are going to still exist, the only thing that might improve is the soft enrages through DPS checks.

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Normal Mode should feel like Karazhan or Naxx 10. If its harder than that, they’ve missed the mark. Considering how many nerfs they’ve done so far, it’s pretty obvious Blizzard themselves are cognizant of that fact.

Unfortunately for Blizzard, beer league players are the most likely to quit the game if they’re not having fun, because they play almost strictly for fun rather than with a goal of earning AOTC or CE. And I doubt the overtuned fights are that fun for them, especially since the “fun” part of the game, the tier pieces, come from later fights like Halondrus and Anduin.

Blizzard is fooling themselves if they think that just because this patch will last 52 weeks, that people won’t care about the first 5 weeks - when in fact those are by far the most important for many players.

Time will tell.

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I think you’re right. It does seem like failing a mechanic is significantly more punishing than before. I don’t think it’d be as big of a deal if there weren’t so many at once, though.

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Agreed.

On the other threads about this people keep telling me that I’m wrong or that it will get better when we have tier/double legendaries…but it’s hard to get tier when you can’t kill the bosses that drop it.

I can see the current design killing a lot of casual raiding groups.

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Isn’t wrath naxx the most notoriously undertuned raid they ever made? with pugs clearing it week 1 of the expansion in leveling gear? Also, if you want karazhan BC classic is right there.

They have also gone on record as saying that it’s better to overtune content and nerf it later, than to undertune content and have it be too easy to the point where they want to buff it. This may be an overcorrection because sanctum had 2 bosses that were substantially harder than the rest (painsmith and sylvanas), and they want to smooth out the difficulty curve of the instance.

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This is the best raid tier of the expansion by a mile. These kinds of posts have already resulted in the most fun fights in years being nerfed through the floor.

Please stop ruining this game. I can only imagine you didnt play when this game was actually hard before.

Not to mention, this raid tier needs to last a REALLY long time before there’s new content.

“Oh no its week 2 and we cant kill everything! Oh no anduin is getting pushed sub 10% before p3 and hitting max will power BY PUGS WITH ZERO TIER GEAR! ITS TOO HARD!”

please stop.

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Wrong. 10char

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Lol.

“If Blizzard fails to hit the mark in terms of tuning, go play an older version of WoW instead”. Actual kekw

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Just waiting for that 6 month sub to expire. doubtful if I’ll ever purchase another one. not sure if I’ll just go m2m or if I’ll just go super duper casual and/or quit.

Blizzard has made it perfectly clear this expansion that the beer casual league is no longer in their vocab.

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I’d rather have fewer players complaining about non-issues in retail, tyvm.

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It’s not a non-issue. Normal is for the players normal is for. I don’t really know what else to tell you. Normal is targeted at Naxx 10 or Kara, that’s the way it is.

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It’s not for “regular” people anymore that’s for sure. Someone, somewhere, listen to the wrong people and over tuned everything.

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That’s exactly what it should be but they haven’t done that in years because people wind about it being easy and there’s this current generation of gamers that think everything should be hard so they can feel better about themselves.

The concept of the entry level raid tier been lost on this team for years now. LFR isn’t it.

If they are going to continue with this approach then what they should do is make LFR able to be done with a static group and not automatically bring in extra people. That way at least your options wouldn’t be bang your head against over tuned content which is not made for you or join a group with random people who want to ignore everything.

Needs to be some compromise Because raiding is not going to Carry this game when The difficulty is pushing away the average players

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