Normal has it’s place.
1 Like
The same can be said about tourist raiding!
The boss’s literally have zero mechanics apart from dont stand in fire and dps.
This is so true. After the 1st week of a raid tier being out, if you didn’t clear heroic, it’s a struggle just to get into a raid even on normal, let alone a competent group unless you’re with a guild.
3 Likes
Right, but I understand tourist difficulty is there for people to see the story/be anti-social. I get it. I just don’t see the point of two different flex difficulties.
Right, but I think the solution to this is to get into a guild? I’m not sure that we need to have a pug-finder difficulty and then another difficulty for slightly more organized pugs if that is what people think normal is for.
I’m also grateful for Normal when it comes time to do the Glory achievements. xD
This is primarily what we use Normal for as well. We also use it for alt-night for a couple of weeks at the start of each tier before the alts all get geared up enough for heroic. Heroic this tier is so undertuned that our alts are now carrying other alts at 430 ilvl through heroic n’zoth because everyone wants a geared rogue/destro lock for the arenas.
Here is the thing though, not every guild does raiding, and there are people in those guilds that want to.
I took a break from WoW for the majority of BFA and only came back well after 8.3 launched. Most of even the basic mechanics are missing from LFR. The normal raid has 90+ % of the heroic mechanics, but are usually just watered down a bit. So Normal is a good stepping stone for people like me, to step back into raiding who are in a non-raid guild to get used to the way the boss fights in a raid work.
3 Likes
One is easier than the other and award mythic level gear of the previous tier, it’s a nice way to see the raid and get a few upgrades before hitting heroic for most heroic guild. Most mythic guild also clear it once to get a taste of the raid.
I just don’t see the point in removing normal.
I don’t know that I am advocating for removing Normal as much as I am advocating for a tuning that makes more sense? I don’t think “tourist mode for guilds that are only ever going to run it once” is a very good justification for keeping it around, at least as currently designed.
Also, I get that normal drops the same ilvl as the previous tier’s mythic (at least in a world without warforging/titanforging), but it also drops gear that is 20 ilvls behind what spammable M+ content drops and 30 ilvls behind the weekly M+ cache. So I’m not really sure it makes sense as a gearing mechanism when everything it drops is irrelevant the same day it comes out.
Edit: to be clear, we use it for the same purpose, and I kind of resent that, and maybe that is part of the problem. We always clear normal the night before we do heroic. And this tier I got talked into doing it more than once to try to get multiple bites at the infinite stars swords for the casters in the guild.
As someone mentioned in the thread, normal does kind of lose its edge later on in the tier, but in the beginning it does serve a valuable purpose. And it’s still good to have for other reasons even later in the tier.
If I were going to learn how to lead a raid, it would be in Normal. I don’t think I could do it in heroic.
I do understand having lower stakes fights for learning, but does it need to be an entirely separate difficulty where everything, even the big bad of the expansion, is toothless? Would it not make more sense to combine normal and heroic, tune the first few bosses in heroic down slightly to allow people to learn there, and then maybe tune the final boss(es) up slightly closer to mythic so there is a clear difficulty curve within the raids? Maybe condense some of the ilvl inflation from having four different raid difficulties at the same time?
1 Like
No, because it would leave folks in a situation where all they have to raid all tier long is the first four bosses. Remember Wrath and ICC? It wasn’t uncommon for folks to never see past Saurfang, and that’d be boring as hell.
Let people see the raid and kill the bad guy on a difficulty level appropriate for them.
Because there are players like me who do Heroic raiding, but does NOT do mythic+
Because we didn’t always have difficulty levels. In vanilla and BC, you just showed up with the number of people allowed for a raid and did it. Wrath opened it up to have normal and heroic versions of 10 and 25 player raids.
MoP turned that on it’s head by removing raid sizes and then adding flex difficulty. Flex raids were even easier than normal, but they allowed the bosses to scale to support groups of 10 to 30 players. With the WoD pre-patch, they renamed flex to normal, normal to heroic and heroic to mythic.
As far as I can tell, the difficulty of bosses hasn’t really changed since then. “Heroic” raids are just as easy as “normal” was before.
So, yes, the “normal” raids are actually rather new. And yeah, they’re designed for families and friends that aren’t interested in min/maxing everything and spending hours on youtube. They’re designed for people to go in and have a low stress good time, but still get to experience raiding as a group.
Per wowprogress 1279 guilds killed heroic Nzoth week 1.
Right now 1295 guilds have killed mythic Nzoth.
So about that week 1 clearing everyone does…
1 Like
It is also a nice stepping stone into raiding. I started raiding with a guild actively again at the start of legion and I remember wanting to make things a simple as possible and joining a pretty casual guild that was running mostly normal raids. We eventually moved into heroic and I remember having fun doing beer and pretzel normal run with them.
Anyway I think it’s fine as is.
Yeah but bro, I can’t kill mythic N’zoth. We’re 5/12 M and are not going to clear mythic with our current raid schedule (3 hours a week). There is a difficulty that literally everyone can clear: LFR. Most players are going to get stuck on a boss at some point in the raid tier, most players are not clearing Mythic. Why is it a problem if that point is in “normal” vs. “heroic” or “mythic.”
Edit: to clarify, I’m stuck raiding the first five bosses of mythic for as long as people keep playing this expac (probably not much longer). I will be fairly surprised if we kill soccer without extending a lockout for a week or two, and we certainly aren’t getting much further than that. I’m sure there are guilds that hit a wall somewhere in heroic and are stuck only raiding the first 5 or 6 bosses on that difficulty. LFR solves the problem of not being able to get past Saurfang.
Amusing that you think guilds are the only people who kill heroic n’zoth.
They honestly should just merge LFR and normal to find a “sweet spot” in terms of difficulty that does a better Job of introducing people into raiding.
In the first week? Yeah pretty much.
Or “pugs” made up of mostly CE raiders.