Back in February there was an excellent post from Dobi about Mythic Raiding on the US forums, and why in their view it needed to change.
This was someone who had been there and done it, got the T-shirt AND wore it so much it had faded in the wash too.
The opinions were considered, detailed and reasonable. I thought about the article a lot after reading it.
So why do I write this? Well Dobi and their guild had climbed the mountain and still thought things needed changing.
But what about those that are at the bottom looking up at the summit. Is the perspective different? Worth considering?
How hard is it to take a fresh group from scratch to the pinnacle of modern raiding - Cutting Edge.
Blizzard make fantastic end-game content, and I think more people should be seeing & progressing it at the highest difficulty.
Well we started this process back in January 2024 (middle of Season 3 Dragonflight) running out of time on Fyrakk finishing 8/9. Barely any of us had proper Mythic Raiding experience.
Quickly a 3 Season Plan developed in my mind. S3 DF - Learn, S4 DF - Play, S1 TWW - CE.
Maybe weâll get it, maybe we wonât. But it wonât be for lack of effort or time commitment.
And thereâs the rub. We devote a crazy amount of our time to this game, so I write this post to just give my honest thoughts on what Iâve experienced since trying to run a guild that has aspirations.
The friction, barriers, and some downright annoying things that just make it more brutal than it needs to be.
I love the game, and I love the challenge of Mythic Raiding & Raid Leading - and Iâll probably stick it out if nothing else ever changed.
But I thought why not see if any of this strikes a chord with you:
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Whatâs in a comp?
You start planning a raid group with such ideals.
Iâm going to take one of each class, Iâm going to have a perfect balance between roles. Iâll have flex healers, Iâll have healers who can flip DPS, nothing is impossible.
Then you start the recruitment process, and reality smacks you in the face. Itâs chicken and egg.
You take what you can get, stuff the raid with warm bodies (ironically I found most want to play freezing cold Death Knights) and you promise yourself youâll come back to it later once youâve made some progress.
But then the WoW magic happens. You start to bond with your newly assembled team. So now youâre faced with that spreadsheet gamer dilemma. Do I ask my new friends to reroll? Is that even wise.
Itâs hard enough to learn one spec well enough to raid well at the Mythic level. How long will it take them to get up to speed, do they miss out on prog for now?
The alternative isnât much better, if you want to improve the raid because you miss a buff or youâre too heavily loaded with melee or range (itâs always range) do you bench for new trials?
These are all things that have created friction for me when running a group and planning for the future.
This isnât even factoring in balance changes, an evolving meta and just generally being read up on whatâs âhotâ in a Mythic raiding sense.
For TWW S1 Iâve talked to my team about having a secondary character at competitive Item Level ready to go. Iâm fortunate that after two seasons of progress the majority of my team are bought in, but I know itâs a big commitment to ask them to spend even more of their free time on the game.
Youâve got 6-9 hours a week of raiding depending on schedule, youâve got your M+ to do, and then if you want true flexibility you do it again with another character - and at the time of writing it doesnât seem it will be much quicker for alts.
The game has fantastic replayability in the sense of having 39 specifications to try. The barrier is the lack of economies of scale that pumping hours into your main has for the rest of your new Warband.
Could Blizzard add a crest or flight stone discount for alts once youâve achieved a certain item level in a season?
As the season progresses could we increase the amount of crests and flight stones that drop from content?
Imagine a world where a Mythic Guild has a roster of 20-25 people who once theyâve done the work, can easily assist their guild by flexing or changing characters.
Wouldnât more play for longer and be happier doing it?
At the moment the game punishes curiosity and a desire to improve a team with the barrier to rerolling.
It has gotten better, no doubt about that, but we could go so much further.
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What if Blizzard added a native 21st Raider mode?
Blizzard make their raid encounters complex. Chaotic, frenetic, intense to a such a level that Iâm sure Iâm not alone in sometimes having a headache after a night of raiding.
This is a good thing. The rush of the team clicking with the fight. Iterating on a problem you were having. Chipping a few % off a boss and seeing a new phase.
This level of aspirational challenge needs to remain - and TWW looks to continue this trend.
I love playing the game - I main a Mage and I find the gameplay so engaging. But it has to become secondary when raid leading. No matter how much I try, or I try to lie about it, I just cannot play optimally whilst calling the fight.
Iâm constantly panning the camera, pinging things, calling timers, adapting to things as they happen live. I just cannot output at 100% whilst doing all the other things that raid leading needs - I just donât have the bandwidth.
I could be selfish and go for the âpumpâ but that would just waste everyones time.
If I had to pick - Iâd choose Raid Leading over playing the encounter as it would be better for the raid. But I canât pick, well not in a frictionless manner.
To be a 21st raider right now requires a bunch of work - I think many used to use Parsec or other bits of tech.
Presuming I do that setup, I then have to work with someone in my guild to configure their UI differently so it suited what I needed. And at our level? Just trying to kill a Tindral, or a Sarkareth, etc post-nerf it feels a clunky solution.
Not to mention Iâd give up any personal achievement, loot, raiderIO credit. Not a huge consideration, but does that feel great?
If youâve ever watched a TGP stream, or played a Wargame Battleground in any version of WoW, Blizzard does have the ability for free mode real time viewing in an instanced environment.
Could this evolve into an officially supported 21st Raider mode? I could swap PoVâs, and have a basic level of UI customisation to see what I needed too and call the raid in real time.
On top of this it would count as a proper member of the raid for progression & kill credit. To circumvent people selling boosts, just make the 21st player HAVE to be the raid leader. People wonât want their loot potentially messed with.
Blizzard wants more raiders to see this brilliant content they make. I genuinely believe adding this mode would increase the success rate of guilds, lower stress, and ultimately result in a more rewarding experience for Guilds trying to climb the mountain of Mythic.
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âOh youâre a Mythic Guild, what kind?â
Talking about the mountain of Mythic, you learn very quickly when trying to get a group going that actually you could split Mythic Raiding into a further 4 different tiers.
- Race to World First Guilds
- Hall of Fame Guilds
- Cutting Edge Guilds
- Race to World Last Guilds â (we are hoping to be here this coming Season, if not higher)
Realistically if weâre going to kill the final boss in Nerubâar Palace, weâre looking at the post-nerf versions. Probably multiple waves of nerfs at that. And thatâs okay I can live with that as it will still be tagged as Cutting Edge.
However when you sit and think about that for too long, you have thoughts creep in. Is it the same? Does it feel as good? You also start to think about priorities as a Guild Leader.
The feeling that youâre making tangible progress is so important to the health of a raiding group. You want to see the improvement in how you handle a mechanic, if you can skip certain elements of the fight as your output improves. But this has to be balanced against it feeling too difficult pre-nerf and too easy post.
Knowing that nerfs may materially alter our progress. I have to keep the group turning up long enough to earn the chance at killing these bosses when the nerfs are in place. Thatâs an achievement in itself - just ensuring your group lasts a whole tier.
I suppose this part of the post is more of a question that I donât have a solution too - are we happy with the way the contentâs difficulty is reduced throughout a season at the moment?
From what I can tell there is talk of a scaling aura buff for the new raid - similar to ICC/Uldir used to have. Perhaps this is a smart way around the issue.
Is there an argument that encounters should be made easier once on farm - a stacking individual buff based on how many times your guild has bested them?
All of this plays into recruitment also, how do you equitably pitch your guild with where you are at right now and where you hope to be?
How do you match that against what people are looking for?, and how do you keep your current raiders bought in so they donât feel the need to jump âup a tierâ if they see a hard block on progress?
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Practice makes perfect
Why doesnât WoW have a Raiding Mechanic practice mode?
Mike Tyson once said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
I can picture it, talk to an NPC in the capital, pick your encounter, pick the phase and then practise that mechanic. You can tie it into the Dungeon Journal as that lists out the phases and the abilities.
So many other games offer this type of feature now. You could even add in the idea of training dummy mode too. How much more useful would it be to have a place to practise your rotation whilst dodging or soaking.
All the videos, all the guides, all the theory - all the preparation. By god does it help, but does any of it come close to actual real time experience of these encounters.
How many times have you been progressing a boss? Letâs take Smolderon this expansion for instance, and just been held up on something as simple as baiting the Geysers correctly? Or grabbing your orbs?
Or Perhaps itâs Tindral, you just need a bit of consistency of how to move out for seeds and back to stack for roots in P2.
You finish the raid frustrated, and itching to go again in a few days. You write up log reviews, you ask the various discords for tips and tricks. But you canât action any of it - well not practically - until you come back.
We want to get better, we want to improve - give us a place to do that.
Oh and whilst weâre at it - put an NPC at the existing training dummies that resets cooldowns and lust. No brainer.
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What a waste of time
Iâm amazed sometimes that this game can convince 20 adults to spend two or three nights of their week smashing their head into a wall. But itâs a bit like spicy food, the pain is the fun?
My friends who donât play WoW often say with shock âoh you fight the same guy for 3 hours and you still didnât kill him?â
And then I have to bust out the âwell actuallyâ - when you wipe you have to make sure you have wipe recovery, and then you wait for the healer to mass ress people. Not everyone has auto accept ress on, some go to the toilet when they die, or make a sandwich, or play WordleâŠ
Then some have to eat, some have to repair, some have to let the dog in.
You put things in place as a Raid Leader to try and minimise this, but it just makes you feel and sound like a drill instructor. No one likes to be that guy. But the alternative is burning literal hours across a raid tier on dead time.
I find myself watching the clock, anxiety rising like our pull count as minutes slip away.
And of course this is before we rebuff, talk about what went wrong, and any changes we want to make
When you wipe, you should hit release spirit back at the boss, and in an ideal world buffed. We have the embellishment for food persisting. Why canât Raid Buffs? Why do I have to enable my permanent augment rune every single time? Is there a scenario where I donât want my +86 stat?
The frustrating thing is we had two bosses this expansion that almost nailed it. Two of the hardest too, Tindral and Fyrakk. How many quick P1 wipes did we all get on Tindral and then bounce back up and get under way in a minute or two.
But then you have wipes that make you run back from sometimes near the start or the instance. Maybe your healer used the soul stone as a combat res mid pull to try and salvage. They even put gimmick speed increases in, why? Itâs like theyâre admitting this is rubbish but donât want to fully back down.
Maybe even a âpick your spawn pointâ prompt?
Believe me, anyone whoâs prepped a raid only to hit a wall for 3 hours and not make the progress you aimed for has had punishment enough
Donât waste more of my groupâs time with downtime. I guarantee you in those run backs or waits between pulls some let the curtain fall and start pondering âis this fun?â
The only friction should come from the encounterâs complexity, not the distance between spawn points.
I get 6 hours a week with my raid group. Not killing the boss for 200 attempts is punishment enough surely?
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Itâs my 3rd Party and Iâll cry if I want too
Has a Cutting Edge guild cleared a modern raid without a single weakaura? Without an MRT Timer Note? Is it even possible? I genuinely donât know. If it is then fair play, I think you rock.
If itâs never been done - is that a problem?
I dread to think how much slower my guilds progress would be if I didnât have access to the fantastic tools that people like Kaze, Viserio, Liquid, Reloe et al. create & curate for us.
Blizzard has talked about this before but Iâm not sure theyâve experienced the learning curve first hand of what you need to do before you can try and progress some of the later boss encounters.
The amount of time spent outside the game to prep for the game is ludicrous. But you have to do it, otherwise youâre collectively wasting hours and hours of peopleâs time.
We have this arms race between how much stuff a boss can have going on, and what our add-ons and weakauras can handle. Now again, Iâm not necessarily advocating the removal of them, as by definition the fights would have to become simpler and less interesting.
What about working with these people that create these tools, and having them built into the core game? Imagine a world where you open the raid panel, select Sarkareth and you can start assigning cooldowns of your raid group to the ability timeline of the boss.
The game can then feed that back natively to the members as and when they need to do it. And because itâs tied into the game itself if you push early or slow it would adapt.
If these tools are already used unilaterally, then donât these people work on the game already in a way?
I dabbled with the joy of Private Auras and Macros for the first time ever in Season 3 with Smolderon & Fyrakk - does pressing a macro when an orb spawns make us better players? Itâs not what we want from our raiding experience surely.
All it did was waste my raiders time, as I went around and made sure 20 people all had the same macro and had bound it on their action bars. Time that could have been spent talking about more interesting things like when we need to use a combat potion, or when we lust.
Creating excellent accessible Mythic content should be the aim for Blizzard - the encounters are largely brilliant, and itâs those that keep us coming back DESPITE all of the baggage we need in order to properly tackle them.
If you removed that baggage or better yet, made it part of the base game experience, is that not an ever-green system that allows you to go further with encounters in future?
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Thank you for reading if you got this far, interested in any & all feedback!
