Hi.
I’m a ‘semi hardcore’ player and I strongly feel the mythic raid should be a 10 man.
There is absolutely no advantage to having the mythic raid be a 20. The only pro I can think of is the ‘cool’ factor of having a larger group of people fight the boss.
There has to be a large group of people who just like me play with a tightly knit group of buddies (10-13 people) and just struggles to fill the rest of the roster. Due to artificial limitations blizzard put on mythic - pugging it is a nightmare. We were forced to join other guild just to be able to participate. Social dynamics become problematic when you want to put 10 new people in the roster. We killed 4-6 bosses and called it quits for the season for social reasons.
If the raid was a 10 man there would be none of these problems. Look at it that way:
20 man guilds are not getting screwed. Just split your mythic group in half, play together on HC.
Just let people play the content, we’d gladly play and progress the raid but we just can’t because we don’t have enough people. When the hardest part of the game is getting the people together there is something wrong with the game.
One of the reasons M+ is such a success because you can easily play it with your buddies. Same thing with SoD raids.
It’s time to stop catering to world first players and let normal people play the game. They might fail but at least they were able to try. 20 man is a huge artificial barrier for a great amount of small guilds.
I’d gladly hear your arguments against 10 man or in favor of a 20. I personally would greatly appreciate this change and I feel like it would be very healthy for the game going forward.
Completely agree with everything you’ve said. At the very least there ought to be one or two ten man raids just like the original Karazhan with normal, heroic and mythic mode.
Nothing spotting you from running the raid with 10 man
But I guess having such a feature could be useful, especially with a reduced amount of drops compared to larger raids. However a small raid size, could also benefit guilds, who don’t want to have large number of players and want to keep it among friends for example.
Me personally I don’t really care what size the raids are, as long as they are adjusted accordingly to difficulty & rewards.
It’s time for 5 man, 3 man or hell, even Solo.
People are the nr 1 reason others seek out to get boosted; Either to avoid playing with others all together (Due to time, skill, etc), or generally skip peoples toxicity and/or lack of responsibility of their own skill.
It doesn’t work for hard content. Part of their reasoning for making mythic 20 man only was due to tuning. While I disagree with the 20 man size they had a point, 10 man and 25 man were very different experiences, even though they tried to make them equal.
the only way to balance them would be to severely limit mechanics to those that could easily be scaled.
Given the fact there were 7 times more 10 man raiding guilds than 25 man raiding guilds back in MOP, the pragmatic approach would have in fact making mythic 10 man raiding.
Saying 20 man raiding size is the best to ensure competitive and good scaling is pure BS since other MMORPG out there do feature 10 man raids.
To hell with RWF guilds and up with actual average guilds !
Only a tiny part of the audience was bothered by the difference in difficulty between 10 and 25 man.
That being said a fix 10 man wouldn’t be much better as it has zero buffer and requires the same bench/commitment as a fix 20 man, just on a slightly smaller scale.
Like 300 nerds fighting over what difficulty was the hardest forced thousands of 10 man guilds to move to a difficulty they liked less.
It’s absolutely fine that they are different experiences, they should be. Aiming to balance them is fine, giving up because you can’t make it perfect isn’t.
It was done because its what Ion wanted and he lawyered up some reasons afterwards to justify it.
The reason that mythic raiding is 20 man and not 10 man or flex, it because of tuning, design, composition, and spec diversity.
Tuning refers to the fact that it cannot have multiple difficulties that reward the same loot. Mainly because one of them is tuned as the “easiest” and everyone is forced to pick that one in the competitive level (which we are talking about mythic, so it is made for the competitive audience).
By design we mean that the developers assume the players have in their disposal to tackle an encounter. Developers cannot really design the “hardest” bosses for a 10 man guild, because if there are encounters with specific classes in mid, most mythic guilds should have a roster of 15+ people to cover all the classes.
With composition I am referring to the ratio of tank/healers to dps. With a 10 man, you are looking at doubling the tanks needed to raid at mythic, and increase the numbers of healer by 25-50%. Dps are way more common into the game, and would be way harder for them to find a guild.
And lastly, with 10 man raids, there is 0 spec diversity for mythic. There is already more than 10 raid buffs, so each season the “best” comp would be calculated with raid buffs in mind, and most mythic guilds would not deviate at that (atleast in the top 200-500 ranks). That means that there is 0 chance for off meta specs to raid at higher level.
Generally, it kind of sucks that flex raiding stops with heroic, but I find that this is a problem with heroic being TOO easy. I cannot imagine many guilds progressing normal (even the worst ones), and most friends and family guilds are done with heroic with 1-2 months top.
That means that one difficulty is used just for the first 2 weeks (normal), and heroic is just used to get fast gear. I do not think this problem would exist if heroic was harder and provided an avenue for smaller group of friends to progress.
This is true for most of the game. But for mythic raiding that is aimed for the most competitive players it is not.
Just because we want to tackle the highest difficulty doesn’t mean we care about ladders. And with TWW mythic raids will be cross realm from day 1 server rank will disappear, and nobody aside from the top 100 guilds will care about their global rank.
The goal is CE.
Back in the day the endgame raiding community (including myself) was convinced by the top guilds that the 10vs25 man thing is incredibly unfair and thus we caused the biggest self inflicted damage in the history of raiding.
Sure, but many people can clear heroic in 1-3 weeks.
So the only “challenge” left in game is mythic. And there the barrier to entry isn’t skill (although its clearly a factor), the biggest thing is keeping / recruiting a team of 20 plus the bench. It’s far more nuanced for 20 people than it is for 10. It’s not just about bodies, you all need roughly the same skill, temprament and expectations. Misalign any of these three and you’re in a death spiral.
I led a guild for about 7 years and got a decent amount of CE’s and even realm firsts (bad ream!). I can say without a doubt that 10 man is far less than half the work. 20 man was far more “admin” hours than raiding hours.
Why do I think this matters?
It’s the guild leaders and raid leaders that form the glue that keeps people coming back (subbed). If and when these people quit then others follow. I had people in my raid team that never missed a raid for years. The day I’d had enough of herding sheep and quit leading some of those people never ever logged into the game again. Thats really sad.
So sure, technically 20 man is a more pure raid experience that probably offers the opportunity to create better raid encounters.
But:
Thats not all that raiding is about
Blizz utterly squandered that line of logic with fights like Blast furnace (look priest is mandatory because of MC) It was one of the most garbage fights ever made and it was meant to showcase unique class utility.
10man should absolutely be available on mythic. I’ve no doubt if that ever happened we would see many more 10mans over 20, but hey, an extra option and more inclusivity. I would like to play with my smaller group of friends in mythic raids.
Mythic raiding should have initially been released as 15man though imo, The fact it’s not been lowered from 20 yet is surprising, given a number of guilds recruiting very slowly due to server populations.
Exactly, and this is why I said that the answer should be to make heroic matter and make it a long term goal for most guilds.
Many guilds care about their rank, and because blizzard cannot have everyone happy, so they decided to keep the most competitive people happy (since the more casual had other content in the game).
It was not a “plot” since with 2 difficulties, guilds had to do some pretty stupid stuff. Just imagine of having to “switch” and bench people between 10 man and 25, in order to have the easiest fight available. Then have each class available (or even double) in case a fight needed it, or made the fight way easier.
If you ask me, hc should have had the difficulty of a mid tier mythic boss, and all entry level mythic bosses should have been way harder.
Now HC does not mater, and mythic progress matters at the later half of the raid (because blizzard made the first mythic bosses be easier, so that hc guilds could go and clear them). Just make hc matter and leave mythic for the absolute highest end.
No they didn’t. And most chose not to. I don’t ever recall hearing that any guilds mix and matched their way through 10/25/10/25 etc based on fights and their perceived difficulty.
The bigger size was always the more “prestigious” one. People in 10 man guilds were fine with that.
If you make “HC matter” you’ll kill pugging it because people want a kill and gear and to dip in and out. Mythic is for people that accept that you’ll need problem solving and practice to overcome a challenge.
But you are making my point. If people at the 10 man level are accepting that their content will not be the same level as the 25 man content, then they are accepting that it is a different difficulty. Blizzard also had this in mind with giving different gear in the different sizes.
And that is a problem of gear acquisition. Normal can easily fill this gap, where people want to easily pug and kill it fast.
Apart from lfr that is the story mode, we already have 3 other difficulties. Atm we do not use 1 of them (normal), gear with hc, and progress through mythic (those that are progressing).
Why not change it to gear through normal, progress through hc, and have mythic be for the best of the best (think of the prenerf mythic fights)?
My guess is there would be plenty of complaints if the best gear was still in there, and the majority had no chance of obtaining it. Expectations have changed over the years in this sense I think, there is a much stronger feeling everything should be obtainable and accessible.
I’m not sure the general playerbase would happily revert to a more oldschool way of thinking there.
Oh, I would be more than happy of seeing the gear gone. Just keep the BiS gear be from hc, and have just cosmetic rewards like the tmog of the tier set and mythic mount.
Even now what happens anyway is that people gear from hc and early mythic, and hardly get any use of the 6ilvl upgrade from the last bosses (except if you are world 200-500). From my experience what matters to the people that are going for CE, is the achievement, mount, and THEN gear, followed by tmog (in that order), unless they want to push for title for m+.
I understand, it’s been suggested before and I think it is a good suggestion in some ways. It would mean anyone in there is purely there for the challenge, because they enjoy that. It would make it a more clean concept in a way.
I could imagine not everyone agreeing tho! And my guess is it could potentially make it even harder, because there is no way to further push your ilvl. It might make it very niche content, and then you get the question whether it’s worth the cost to have it in the first place.
I have no idea. I think wanting it to be more accessible through potentially different compositions is at odds with this take tho. Because it would not help those people, it would simply create more obstacles.
