Hey. I am not saying that the loot change wasn’t needed. I fully agree that the loot pinnata with M+ back in BFA which made every other end-game mode redundant (gearing wise) was a big problem. A different debate would be if Blizz didn’t try so hard to get out from 1 gutter…only to land in the opposite one and may have made an overkill a bit. 
i dont really think they are too complicated. if they stay on this level it would be fine with me, however, if they would get more “complicated” in the future, it would most definitely irk me.
however, what really bothers me is the effort =/= reward. i love the raid, i love my guild, but the lack of loot or rewards is just…ridiculous. kind of makes me not want to raid at all sometimes because it feels like wasted time.
For me yes there is just too much crap going on at the same time and i am not downloading some 3th party addon so i can keep up what is going on.
To me encounter design is a failure if you need dozen addons in order to play the game properly and keep up what is going on and if raid encounter is built in a way that even one person from 25 can F things up ill just ignore that nonsense.
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It is on mythic aswell
How do you know? Can you read OPs mind? Because nothing of the sort was said.
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Oh I agree on that completely. What they tried to do is tone it down a lot and bring it to old days. But they missed the other aspects of gearing was different back then - there were other methods to get gear, such as relatively powerful gears in Quartermasters that required grinding in the world or class quests here and there with rewards. The randomness of gear was a factor as well. Now all of this is stripped.
I had hopes for SL but actually unsubbed due to lack of content once I found the guild got my Nathria taste and 3-4 runs of Mythic +, aside from these there is nothing to do in game progression wise that matters.
Covenants could have been big selling point but again I feel they fell short with that.
come on… there’s nothing immersive about lfr. lfr is clown fiesta
Thats the price you pay when people want most specs to be braindead.
Like in most games people want challenges… and since they reduced the skill required to play most specs they needed to increase the difficulty elsewhere
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Personally, I dislike only those bosses where you HAVE to use addons/WA to make it much easier. Imagine mythic devourer without aura to tell the stacks or where people should go. Mechanics which require multiple players to do something in short time depending on what other would do are awful.
Bosses are more complicated, that’s right, but overall you do exact the same thing as you did in past xpacs - move here, kill this, dodge that. Only difficulty lies in RL chosing and explaining strategy.
You shouldn’t be so dismissive about a version that you personally don’t enjoy.
The raid can be immersive for many people and besides; it’s the ONLY available version for many more.
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I would certainly challenge that opinion.
I mean, a good raid progression starts from the point of simplicity and ends with the final raid having a high degree of complexity that players have learned to manage by mastering the previous raid tiers.
A bit like Mythic+ Dungeons.
You start at a low key and learn to manage a single affix.
Then you move onto a higher key and learn to manage two affixes – made easier because you’re already familiar with them individually.
And finally you have the high keys that present an extra challenge by introducing a new and unique affix.
That’s how you design difficulty progression! Step by step.
But that’s not how Blizzard approach raid design these days. It’s friggin’ bonkers.
They start out with way too high difficulty and way too complex mechanics. You’re not building up to it over the course of a raid or multiple raids. It’s just smack right in your face – Artificer Xy’Mox! Why the hell is a boss with so much complexity in mechanics presented to players half-way through the first raid of the first tier?! And then Sire Denathrius is less complex…Wait what?! Why?? How the hell is that progression?!
Battle for Azeroth was worse.
They start off with such an insane encounter as G’huun is.
That means the design can only become more complex from that point. Blizzard can’t make the second or third raid tier any less complex, because that would be totally anti-climatic to anyone who had managed to beat G’huun. You always want the sense of progressing onto something more challenging.
So hell Crucible of Storms! The biggest design failure in raid history, and the perfect example of why you don’t start your expansion raiding off with too complex encounters, because it creates a precedence where you have to follow it up with even more complex encounters, and then you get Restless Cabal and Uu’nat, which were so insane that even on Mythic difficulty a lot of hardcore guilds just tapped out and skipped them.
And then it just gets more complex from there! Again, once you’ve defined the difficulty and complexity of the first raid tier, it stands to reason that every subsequent raid tier has to be more difficult and more complex, because there has to be a sense of progression.
That’s why we end up with a crazy boss like Azshara that’s an encounter where Blizzard have just added every single mechanics they can think of in an effort to make it more complex. The more the merrier! It’s not a memorable or well-designed encounter, it’s just a mish-mash of mechanics.
And it all culminates in the grand finale: N’zoth. A boss where the mechanics have gotten so convoluted and obscure that they can’t even be retrofitted to accommodate players doing LFR.
Rubbish.
If there are 4 difficulties, you can’t tell me that a basic requirement for succeeding at the lowest two is that everyone uses voice communication on Discord and the raid leader goes through lengthy explanation of tactics prior to every boss attempt and that wiping and failure is a necessity to success and satisfaction.
You can argue that such is the design pre-requisite for the 2 higher raid difficulties, because surely that’s why you have a total of 4 raid difficulties, right?!
Why on earth set the overall difficulty so high that there really is no differentiation in approach between Normal and Heroic? Why set it so high that the mechanics get so obscure and complex that they are impossible to retrofit to the lowest difficulty? And why set it so high that most players feel compelled to purchase boosts as opposed to trying to get through the content themselves?! Like who are Blizzard designing these difficulties for?! it surely can’t be the entirety of the playerbase, because everyone who isn’t a hardcore raider has tapped out and called quits!
It’s too difficult. Too complex. Too convoluted. Too demanding.
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Well if you can get your head out of your competitive teenage butthole, then you’d perhaps realize that you’re playing a roleplaying game, and part of the charm is simply to adventure through mysterious caverns and embark on assaults into unknown territories alongside your fellow adventurers and experience the story and music and visuals that go with that.
And LFR has always been the intended venue for that.
And it’s definitely a better venue when it’s just smooth sailing from start to finish, because if it was more than that, then you’d be doing the higher difficulties. But that’s something Blizzard are struggling to understand, evidently. Maybe they listen too much to the folks who proclaim everything to be a clown fiesta if it’s deemed inferior to their own ego?
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I think 4 difficulties are too much. LFR, Normal and Heroic as it was in late Cata would be perfect. LFR - cakewalk, Normal - mistakes of one don’t cause instant wipe, Heroic - mistakes of one CAN result in instant wipe.
From my experience, mythic encounter changes often are easy to learn and adapt while increased numbers of heroic/normal mechanics are the hardest to learn. This tier isn’t like that though, which I kinda like. It was annoying to “re-learn” fight cause Big Obvious Fireball was hitting for 10% hp on heroic and on mythic it now oneshots.
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Comparing Sire, the first raid end boss to N’zoth, the end boss of the entire expac???
lol
what an adventure lfr must be. You can try and paint lfr as this mighty adventure but in reality its 30 people who didnt bother to look up boss mechanics which btw are almost non existent on that difficulty.
Side note please spare my feelings. My competetive teenage butthole cannot take your insults.
Good example over complicated boss is Hunstman who have new mechanics for every pet.
Most of players don’t do heroic raids because they are too complicated.
When I enter Mythic raid now I feel like playing Darksouls but on multiplayer where one my mistake can kill 19 other players.
When I was playing in Pandaria, WoD, and previous expansion I have no seen no this issue.
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Right.
But they’re there because the raiding population is too diverse. There’s way too big a gap between the newcomer who started playing a month ago, the blue-collar dad who’s been casually raiding for a year, the teenager who’s gotten into hardcore raid progression during COVID, and the veteran raid leader in a World First guild.
My point would be that the difficulties are too centered around the latter two types of players, and not the former two.
LFR and Normal should be gamer-friendly and casual and EASY!
Heroic and Mythic should be challenging and complex and DIFFICULT.
But Blizzard have gotten into a habit of making all the difficulties HARDER.
That’s acceptable for Mythic.
It’s debatable for Heroic.
But it’s unacceptable for Normal.
And it’s friggin’ ridiculous for LFR.
In my opinion. 
Right. And that’s exactly what it should be. Friggin’ entry-level content and lowest difficulty just like other games have easy mode where all the challenge is scrubbed away. That’s why you have different difficulties! So there’s easy for the guy who wants easy and hard for the guy who wants hard – and not hard, harder, very hard, hardest.
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one can say that about mythic where your whole focus is on mechanics instead of location, aesthetics, lore and story let people enjoy things
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Mechanics ARE playing imo. It also comes very natural, so I am glad they are there.
As for WotLK mechanics, stuff like firefighter and hardmode Yogg Saron still required a lot of coordination. When you run Timewalking, you get watered down versions.
One major issue WoW got, the coreography is all over the place.
We learn not to stand in the fire, but then there is fire we have to stand in, some have to stand in, everyone have to stand in, two have to stand in one after another… Only way to really know is to read the log or trail and error.
Compared to FFXIV where there are clearly defined markers that tells if a mechanic is avoid or stand in.
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