Idk I always thought LFR was the beer league. Drunk and standing in every mechanic? No biggie in LFR. I’m enjoying that normal isn’t basically LFR 2.0 this tier.
I also don’t really understand how the first boss isn’t getting downed, it’s easily one of the most boring/easy first bosses I’ve experienced in awhile. The hardest part is staying awake during it.
That said, sorry your friends are struggling. I think LFR should open faster, idk why it doesn’t. There you could at least ease into the raid better.
Normal seems to be the step up from LFR in the sense that the boss should be capable of killing you now.
I just find the argument that normal is too hard because some players are bad or just CBA to do mechanics unhelpful and unconvincing.
The issue with LFR is really that you have to deal with randos. Which means it’s not suitable for a “beer league” guild that wants to play with their guildies but not feel like they’re hitting their head against a wall.
And Normal is nothing like Flex in 5.3 despite them lying in WoD and saying it was the same. So that really casual/laid back mode is missing unless you want to play with people from other servers.
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I don’t know about that. It’s just SFO that’s overtuned.
Something like old Xymox vs new Xymox comes to mind. Old Xymox on Normal mode didn’t have that strong of a suck so you could beat it without the portals, and also you could survive it with a defensive on Normal. New Xymox, you can technically survive it on Normal mode but the entire raid getting hit by the ring is probably a wipe with those ilvls and you can’t really beat the rings without portals the way you could beat Old Xymox suck on Normal without portals. If someone scuffs portals you’re probably wiping.
You see this pattern throughout the raid from what I’ve seen.
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You were 3/10 M last tier, normal isn’t really supposed to be designed around what you find fun. You and I play the game on a completely different level than your average normal mode only raider. Frankly, normal should be boring for us because if it isn’t the people who actually progress normal probably won’t be capable of doing it.
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I think that Mythic should always be the difficulty level it is now, tuned to be a late game challenge and not just the new heroic, and normal should be a really chill experience where every group can clear it even if they want to run 7 tanks, 1 healer, and 4 dps or something. I’m fine with many difficulty modes but they should actually be difficulty modes and not boss hp modifiers with 10 mechanics instead of 9 on heroic to normal. I think normal should have like 3 mechanics per boss, one at a time, heroic like 6, mythic like 8-11 with the final bosses being significantly harder than the first ones.
IIRC your guild can queue for LFR up to 25, hopefully this could work in the meantime. I think the normal raid will probably get nerfed, the devs are usually pretty good about these things. They make it harder to begin with and decrease the difficulty so more people can do it as time goes on.
Btw I have tried the normal raid and I agree. The group I was with still wiped and we definitely shouldn’t have. Origin-Velen is the only hunter I raided with in 9.2 so far for any elitists who want to check me out. I’m not a raider (usually) because I pug only and got sick of the mythic lockout.
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Why even comment on Normal if you have nothing to contribute except “git gud”? Lol.
There’s clearly a target that Blizzard aims for when tuning Normal. Blizzard missed that mark. That’s the end of the conversation as far as I’m concerned. Just stop while you’re behind, lol.
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I started this by saying that normal is a mechanics check instead of a numbers check, and you seemed to take issue with that.
Yes. Because that’s a dumb take.
Normal isn’t supposed to be a hard mechanics check. You shouldn’t have an instant raid wipe if someone places portals down wrong on Xymox. In Normal Mode CN, the Old Xymox wouldn’t wipe you if you screwed that mechanic up because you could just run against the suck with basically nothing on Normal mode and be completely fine.
There’s a level of tolerance that is normally present in Normal Mode that is a bit absent in SFO. That’s it. The tuning is off. Saying “go play BC” in response to saying SFO tuning is off compared to the rest of the raids in this expansion or the last two is nonsense.
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IMHO they should bucket their players into “tiers” and decide what they expect from each. For example:
Normal raider - Should be able to clear normal by next tier, may kill a few bosses in Heroic. The vast majority of raiders should fall here.
Heroic Raider - Should clear normal within a month or so, should clear heroic (AOTC) before next tier. May or may not dabble in mythic bosses. Your normal heroic raider falls here.
Mythic raider - Should clear normal within the first week or two, heroic within a month or two, and should have the chance (not guaranteed!) of clearing mythic (CE) before next tier. Your typical Mythic raider would fall into this category.
Mythic+ Raider - Clear normal first week, clear heroic few weeks later, focus is on Mythic and should clear Mythic within several months to before end of tier depending on mythic skill. Basically your HoF guilds.
Legendary Raider - WF level guilds (say top 50 or better), they are so far off the curve they shouldn’t factor in at all
Something like that and they should balance around that. For example if normal is overturned, your casuals are going to be stuck there when they should reasonably be able to clear it given time. But heroic might be too tough outside the first boss or two. that sort of thing.
They also should structure raids so bosses get more difficult as you go. The first boss or two should basically be a dungeon boss with more HP/damage, 1-2 straightforward mechanics. Then you can add some, but they go way too far as every boss has like a dozen abilities.
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I think that would be a good start. I’d like to see them allow for mobility between tiers as well and I think normal raiders should be able to clear the normal raid in the first month and have fun reclears every week after. In general, I think it’s a good idea to consider and reward as many playstyles as possible, so nobody is stuck feeling left out of the game they love. I absolutely agree that the first bosses of the raid should be easier than the later bosses, because the later bosses will be approached with the gear that players earned from the earlier bosses.
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Well it’s hard to gauge skill so I think a good compromise is to sort of go for the middle, and design the difficulty such that an “average” player of that level would be able to clear within a couple months so they have time for farm/fun reclear, but it could take them up to the end.
The issue is I don’t think they know, or can agree on, what constitutes “average”. If you ask people here as well, the gauge differs. Is someone like the OP average? Is someone already done of normal average? It depends! However I 100% agree that it seems “average” is gone up, wrongly, and that has led to raid design that’s not meant for “normal” players anymore.
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Right, they should save that for the gimmick bosses of fatescribe, or xanesh. Or the psychus kite phases of n’zoth.
There are fewer mechanics on normal than on heroic, but the difference between normal and LFR should be that the boss is capable of killing you if you mess up on normal.
That’s exactly right. And WoW is a game that’s not just about skill, but also largely about set-up. I’d like normal to be easy to clear without any need for DBM/weakauras (or any addons like them), no simulations, no tight group compositions. I think you should be able to clear normal with 5 tanks, 15 healers, and 10 SV hunters if you want. It shouldn’t be a dps check because most people are not running sims and optimizing their rotation. It shouldn’t ever one shot the group when one or a few people mess up a single mechanic. Another thing is that I don’t think normal should be tuned for players who already have tier sets, imo normal should be one of the best places to get those tier pieces.
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This raid tier feels really off to me.
The guild I’m in clears AOTC normally, and it’s still our goal.
The problem is, we steamrolled pretty much to Anduin on normal and hit a wall, decided, let’s go get some heroic gear. We can’t clear Skolex with our gear, which most of us should be geared for.
The tuning of this raid is very off, they shouldn’t plan around tier or double legendary, cause it’s meant this raid is highly overturned and we are at the mercy of RNG
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“Kathleen get me my beer and meatloaf while the kids cry in the background” demographic
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Yeah the design is all off. I’m not sure you should be able to clear normal with whatever, but I think you should have a lot of leeway as normal guilds would not be expected to have/require certain raid comps. It should really be designed for any combination of 2 tanks/2-3 healers/DPS or whatever, but like I’d be fine with it being slightly harder if you go all melee or something, just because of fight tuning. That’s acceptable I think as long as it’s DOABLE, even if it’s a bit harder with a “bad” comp.
the key point is that a normal guild shouldn’t BE concerned with “comp” it should be more like “Okay who do we have on that’s ready to raid?” and that expectation should be to go in and down some bosses/start progress on other bosses to where yes, the 4th or 5th boss in might take a couple weeks to get down but when you do, it should be a celebration like heck yeah we got that guy finally. it should FEEL almost like clearing the raid to a casual guild.
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This would be really nice.
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well, I LOVED the “Flex” raid style in 5.3 (EDIT: I meant 5.4!) I did it all the time even when I didn’t have to just because it was FUN, and I had a “regular” group that I would sign up for every week to do Siege of Org. It was probably one of the best periods because Flex wasn’t THAT hard, but it wasn’t stupid easy for “average” players either. So while progressing on normal we would do flex, flex provided a great way to test out trials or people wanting to explore a different role, etc.
THen for Warlords they claimed Flex was now Normal, and that IMHO was bollocks because Normal became harder than Flex was. And ever since then normal raids have become more and more complicated, thus basically pushing out the people “Normal” was meant for in the first place!
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I’m not really sure who normal is for anymore, especially since they keep ramping its difficulty.
Along with world content gear being mostly equal or better, or getting better gear from low keys (an untimed +2 gives the same as killing a normal raid boss in the vault).
It’s like…why bother?
I guess with tier sets there is that, but in a few weeks with the creation catalyst even that won’t be much of an incentive.
6 Likes