Who is normal raiding for anymore?

Community General Discussion
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I think the problem isn’t addons per se. It’s the fact that Blizzard is no longer willing to produce a difficulty level appropriate for the specific demographic that used to be the largest in guild raiding.

The question is, why not? You can’t force people to git gud by making them fail at harder content than they want to do. You can’t make casual puggers who don’t want to join guilds join them, even if they could find one that hasn’t stopped raiding. Trying to teach the majority of your customers a harsh lesson is nothing but bad business.

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143

This is my guild too. We didn’t get aotc in CN or SoD, hell we didn’t even kill fatescribe last patch. But we made it to Anduin on our second raid night and have been starting to work on heroic. I don’t think this tier is much harder than what’s come before. Though we’ve been stuck on Andy for 3 weeks now.

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I wholeheartedly empathize with this comment.

We used to raid as as small guild, with a mix of people with all sorts of skillsets.
Many of us have been playing together since BC and apart from using DPS meters to sometimes flex, all of us used to enjoy raiding and sometimes be part of that carry group, for a couple of folks that weren’t always on top of their game.
The game was flexible, the game was more accommodating and most of all, the game was forgiving. We genuinely not only raided with great players, but great personalities as well.
This has all come to a end as the game has become competitive, to the point where even relaxing content, like dungeons, feels like a parse competition. This not only creates small niche groups of players that only want to do mythics etc. with a certain set of people, but also prevents people from doing stupid optional stuff like Torghast. Every raid is followed by a log posting for parsing, many a times, we even see players undermining the core objective of the group to get that percentile parse.
Competitive criteria around every aspect of the game has reduced every guild to a small group of niche players banding together to do their own content.
For the first time in 13 years, I bought a console and have been enjoying everything from old FF games to stuff like scarlet nexus and bloody flight simulator and if the current state of the game continues, I believe my wow indulgence might come to a slow and painful halt as well.
And I’ll have no regrets, as they have changed the very essence of the game to a hyper competitive environment, one that only accommodates people within certain parts of the wow gaming spectrum.

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We’re what, 3 weeks into normal raiding so far? How far were you expecting casuals to be getting by now?

Many people still haven’t gotten the cyphers so that world drops are 252. Most people probably don’t have Revered with Enlightened to get their conduits up. Getting good at this point requires a lot of mythics, or a lot of grinding, something most people who would identify as “casuals” probably aren’t doing.

We’re here for a while. Sure, people are at heroic now, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to be.

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Who is? Nobody is stuck. They always have the choice to leave a game where they’re stuck at a dead end - or with a boatload of boring chores and massive expenditures before they are permitted to have fun. I don’t understand why anyone would think those people would hang around indefinitely even though it’s obvious they aren’t making progress.

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147

You seem to think beer league means people that are sacks of potato. You can be casual and still make progress.

I’ve raided with beer/family group and wiping for 3 weeks on the first boss is what will lose you people.

Even the most casual guilds sometimes watch a video or talk strategy especially when they wiped for 3 weeks on the first boss.

There is a difference between casual raiding and insanity. Wiping for 3 weeks on the first boss while doing nothing to understand why is insanity.

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Define “now”. I mean, I liked Anduin, since he’s hard, but he’s not BS like Fatescribe or Sylv.

Like, I raided through Tomb, that had several “screw this and wipe” mechanics, specially KJ, so in general Sepulcher doesn’t feel that hard. Anduin is supposed to be end-boss hard, so that wall is expected.

Also, as mentioned multiple time, there’s two major power increases through the tier, so the worst case scenario is having to wait until they get unlocked. Next week is double leggo, that’s going to help a lot.

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My guild has been having trouble as well. We usually run at a mix of skill levels where a chunk of the raid can push decent level keys 12-15, and the other chunk is varying levels of new or casual. We usually push aotc midway into the tier but we start with normal and anduin has been a wall. On Anduin I’m seeing issues I’m used to seeing during that part of heroic prog when we face an actual challenge. The fight feels like a heroic end boss on normal its weird, and also super frustrating because its a huge power spike that we can’t reach due to the lack of tier.

It does feel like this raid was designed with all the borrowed power in mind, but it feels really really bad right now when the borrowed power isn’t really accessible. At present two of our players have a 2 piece, and most of the raid is sitting on one or even no tier pieces. I’ve considered pushing into heroic since it’d be easier then anduin, many guilds on my server seem to have done so since in my six server group only 2 guilds have even killed anduin to my knowledge.

Its just weird how many pass fail mechanics are floating around on that fight in normal. It was way worse then Sylvanas who just felt like a “don’t fall off the chains” check when we got to her last tier by this point.

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The important thing to remember is that your friends and family type guild don’t want to have to study videos or review logs or anything like that. Nor should they have to. They want to maybe watch a video of the fight a little bit before raid time, go in and have some attempts maybe learn a couple of things that they could be doing wrong and then as they learn they should be able to down the encounter.

Nobody is saying that they should go in and steamroll the place, but the surest way to make people say screw this it’s not fun and leave, whether that’s just raiding or the game entirely, is for that same friends and family guild to go in and bang their heads for 3 hours on The first or second boss of a new raid and walk away feeling like they haven’t accomplished anything. This is also a huge reason why raid difficulty needs to be progressive like it used to be where your early bosses were relatively simple and it got harder as you went in. Normal mode especially is supposed to be the entry level raiding environment except it’s not. I would hate to think what someone actually brand new to the game who has never raided before would think of their first exposure to a raid of this level difficulty. And no, the answer is not LFR. LFR feels a completely different niche to the friends and family guild.

Contrary to popular opinion it has been proven countless times in this game that people will not suddenly improve to overcome something. Instead, if they feel it’s not worth their time they will just stop and do something they think is.

If the current team thinks that by making things harder they will entice people to improve they have completely ignored the last 10 years or so of evidence proving the contrary.

I agree with the person above that I think a lot of it is due to them making the nature of the game more competitive focused with more of a bent towards the people who want to make things more competitive. It is my opinion that going this route was the worst possible thing they could do because it alienates the majority of the game to get more exposure and appeal to your content creator types. Unfortunately this is the absolute wrong approach because those people are the minority and will not sustain the game.

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I don’t think you can ever force players to get good

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100% agree. Normal isn’t “friends and family” difficulty anymore. It’s much closer to Normal of old (which was turned into Heroic later on).

Anduin is not a “friends and family” fight in his current state on Normal Mode.

Blizzard, please keep the difficulty to Heroic and Mythic for those who want it.

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153

Actually sort of right. You can’t really buff a boss because everyone who went in first time killed it first try. But it hasn’t been overtuned, this raid has been tuned around having 2 leggos and a 4 piece set.

Your stock average player at 250 iLVL who has no tier sets and no leggo is going to struggle, hence why they have the catalyst creation so you can get your gear you currently have and make a tier set yourself, and come next week when we get 2 leggos it will be made easier.

If you look at the raid logs from week 1 to now you will see just how much more power tier sets are giving, no doubt 2 of the right leggos will help, so if you really want to progress your guild are going to need to help each other and ensure you can all get the right leggo, or at the very least one non covenant leggo and just use the free belt.

Your group could also run more M+ as tier pieces drop from there without needing to raid, or just sign up to LFR as a last resort, that drops tier sets. Don’t discount the lower iLVL tier sets, the bonus is still the same and will still offer something of an upgrade.

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According to Blizz and by extension a large percentage of the WoW population you can. People only have a skill ceiling because they think they do. If you shove them down the 4 diamond slope enough times they will eventually get better. If you can’t beat the boss it’s because you didn’t optimize, watch enough videos, practice your rotation while doing algebra and having an abridged floor map of the arena between your hands. But mostly it’s because you didn’t work hard enough quitter!

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You’ve got the guild leader of Elitist Jerks running the game. You think he cares about casual scrubs?

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This is false. Devs in the past told players that you can’t make casuals git gud by having them do hard content. You can’t turn casuals into hardcores. You can’t turn people who play the game for its entertainment value into hypercompetitive hardcores.

LOL, what a true believer you are. The fact is that if you shove somebody down the 4 diamond slope “enough times”, they’ll not only give up skiing, they’ll probably have you arrested for personal injury they have sustained. And they would be correct.

No casual cares about your self-serving notions of how forcing to make people do their entertainment like a job will make them do endless outside research and practice content they hate to make you happy. Oh, and you’re probably expecting them to buy tokens to pay you, too.

It’s no wonder casuals want nothing to do with control freaks like you and the content that apparently fosters such hatred.

This is their last chance to prove they can restore the game to its former glory by doubling down on all the features that have driven the majority of players from the game. If they do nothing different, surely this time they will get different results.

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----------- The Point --------->

Your head

Thanks for playing.

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No idea what your point is, that you’re really bad at communication? I mean, you already showed us that you don’t understand business principles that require paying customers to keep businesses profitable, and you want to literally enslave 80% of the playerbase to force them to work the game like 2 full-time jobs.

Literally enslave. If you pushed a beginner down a 4 diamond slope multiple times, they would have you arrested, and they’d sue you for the hospital bills your assault caused them.

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Last week my guild struggled with Anduin, could not even get to phase 2 regularly, this week we got down to like 5% on our first try and failed because we didn’t plan on even getting that far and never discussed the mechanics. The nerfs were a little too much, but certainly welcome by many.

I think you are missing something here, these forums, they account for like 5% of the WoW population and have many try hard Blizzard suck ups who don’t realise just how bad some players are. Like OK sure YOU can do an M20 in S3 with one eye closed in S2 gear, but that does not make it easy. I ran an M7 the other day with a 250 iLVL BM hunter, dude was doing less than 3K DPS overall.

There are many many many lost cases in this game and no matter how much gear you throw at them, no matter how much you try and help them, they are just not good.

I’ve played even with people in my guild who you spend a fair amount of time with to try and help get better, you spend weeks and months reminding them of this and that, give them links to websites to read, videos to watch, addons to use that will help.

Than all of a sudden they show up to raid missing enchants, using the wrong talents, have no tomes to change, no food, equipping the wrong gear and last second before a boss pull after we have planned our fight and what everyone’s roles are they go “Oh sorry I don’t have DBM” and than we go back to the drawing board.

I had a paladin in EP go “But I like these talents” and than proceed with stand in the wrong spot because “I like standing here” and end up pulling less than half as much DPS as the next paladin and dare to ask why they are not doing good damage.

I even went into an M+ yesterday doing streets and pugged a balance druid, dude sat in melee the ENTIRE time right up my bum while I was tanking, got hit by everything. halfway through asked “Where is my DPS”, the healer retorted that we were also wondering where their DPS was. As a balance druid they had the nerve to say they needed to stand in melee because they have spells that need melee…

I say it time and time again, some people here just have NO IDEA just how bad some players can be.

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I guess sarcasm and ghoulish overkill are completely lost on people today. I would think as obvious from my first sentence that my opinion was the exact opposite of what I wrote. How do you not get that?

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161

I long for the days of Pandaria and flex raids…

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