This might be controversial, but i think raids would be more popular if everyone got a garanteed pc of loot/upgrade everytime they ran one, regardless of length. Every boss should drop currencies usable to buy a upgrade item in a shop or upgrade materials like valorstones/crests. Running a raid and not getting anything is enough to ruin someone’s day imho. Prolly why Delves are more popular cuz at least you get everything, even if a pc that drops that isnt an upgrade the delve garantees a drop at the end.
Personally I love all the raid boss configurations, 1 boss, 3 boss, 12 boss. As someone who works a lot the smaller sets are more convenient, but on my weekends the 12+ boss runs are doable assuming most of the time isnt wasted trying to find a raid group willing to give me a chance, then again there is always LFR.
I think 9 bosses is a good amount for a raid. 12 bosses is too much studying that I don’t want to do.
Also on the topic of ToC. ToC had great boss fights. Most of the criticism came from the fact that you’re stuck in an arena, after we just got done with Ulduar which was huge and amazing.
Personally im fine with that. My concern is a player spending time and not get one at all for the run regardless of length. I consider Time a currency and spending it on a raid and not getting something in return, at least something significant is what kills at least my drive to raid. I’m not sure i can say thats the same for a lot of people though.
Hard to say, for me not much. I’m a cynical bastard, most of my true friends have died by now and i dont form connections with new people especially younger ones. I’m at the get off my lawn stage of life.
Addendum: My current good friends dont play WOW, we play DND. So I cant take advantage of that value.
No literally the opposite. The raids are already bare bones as it is what with minimal trash and stupid easy dummy bosses. The frick is moving some of the bosses into different instances going to do? It’d just be more annoying for those of us not doing queue content getting around and doing them.
What we need, if anything, is massive scrawling raids that actually feel like fortresses. NP takes an experienced group about an hour or so to plow through. We’re thematically talking a palace of an empire and we just waltz in and wipe it out in less time than a family spends going out to eat at a sit down restaurant.
There is a reason raids like Kara and Ulduar are as revered as they are
Ulduar is a masterpiece of environment easy, and the right amount of trash paces you through it. But just adding trash to a dull raid won’t make it Ulduar, it’ll just make what’s unfun worse.
I’m entirely going to gripe about how many packs are between Bloodbound Horror and Sikran, though. “This has gotta be the last pack before the next boss” x10.
some of the most boring raids in the game were single bosses. How many people still farm Magtheridon? Or Ruby Sanctum? Now how many Still farm Ulduar or Black Temple?
There are occasionally small raids that are good because they are set up to be (Onyxia’s Lair being a prime example because she was so intricately involved/intertwined with A LOT of the alliance questing from 1-60)
but generally, because they tend take place in one room/environment, they kind of lack that “oomph” that “grandiose sense of scale” that “raid feeling”. you gather people together to kill… 1 boss?
The other problem with multiple raids in a tier is then you waste a lot of time traveling from one to the next which goes hand in hand with kill order (in terms of difficulty)
You also then run into issues with loot. During cata, you had the choice of BWD, BoT or TotFW. As I recall, there wasnt really any drops in TotFW that were like must have drops as the drops were rings, cloaks, necks, non-tier legs so that REALLY put that raid on the back burner because it lacked the big-ticket item drops (weapons, trinkets, tier pieces)
Tier 4 Kara 12, Gruuls Lair 2, Mag 1 - 15 total
Tier 5 TK 4, SSC 6 and ZA 6 - 16 total
Tier 6 Hyjal 5, BT 9 and SWP 6 - 20 total
Tier 7 Naxx 15, EoE 1 and OS 1 - 17 total
VoA and BH did have the advantage of being really easy and gave away free tier pieces for certain slots. At the cost of being faction locked dependent on who won the world BG (Wintergrasp and Tol Barad respectively).
Onyxia in both her vanilla and wrath versions was basically a free encounter, provided you don’t have people getting knocked back into the whelps. And the wrath version dropped a mount, along with the fact that the other raid in that tier only had 5 bosses. FIVE.
ZA wasn’t part of tier 5. It was its own separate thing that gave gear between T4 and T5. in fact it dropped no tier pieces whatsoever. Unlike Sunwell which blizzard slapped onto T6, something they would regret doing.
iirc Blizzard even had to add in the helm and shoulder tier tokens to Al’Akir at some point. Providing an additional means of getting them outside of Cho’gall and Nefarian. yeah patch 4.1 made it so he dropped random necks, cloaks along with the T11 helm and shoulder tokens. It was listed as an undocumented change.
Al’Akir will now drop random necklaces and cloaks as well as helm or shoulder tokens in addition or in some cases instead of his current loot.
So unless you really cared about the mount from Al’Akir, Throne of the Four Winds was a dead raid. Even the changes with 4.1.0 probably did nothing to help that. No wonder Al’Akir did not get a voice actor.
But even then, people still didnt really do TotFW because that first boss encounter took quite a lot of coordination to kill, even on normal as the mechanics were rather punishing to the group if something got messed up as well as punishing on an individual level. Al’akir was no pushover either
I’m not sure a single person out there is looking at the current raids and saying that they’re too long, in fact I’m pretty sure the consensus is that they’re too short and could do with having some more bosses.
