Please, Blizzard, add a mythic + gate to raids

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

I know that the speedrunning community in WoW classic is a fairly niche one, but we exist, and many of us are playing the game for that reason, just having a blast trying to clear the raids as fast as possible. The community has however struggled with one element of classic speedrunning, ever since Molten Core in 2019 : the possibility to pre-clear the raid or “fish” for an optimal raid ID.

To define it a bit better, pre-clearing is the act of going out of your way to clear trash mobs before you actually start the run, which is extremely counter intuitive to the idea of speedrunning the raid. But, of course, it saves time. It’s a competitive scene ; people are gonna pre-clear to improve their time if the design of the raid allow them to, but the community hate being compelled to do it, and it’s often really annoying to practice (the SSC pre clear meta for example).

“Fishing” is resetting the raid over and over before the start of the run to get more favourable RNG. It is mostly utilised as a way to get the least possible amount of a trash mob that is a random spawn. The most egregious example were the Qiraji Mindslayers back in AQ40. It was extremely common for guilds at that time to reset the raid 1000+ times trying to get a raid ID with 0 out of 32 Qiraji Mindslayers. It has also been use to get favourable RNG on certain mob abilities, like the Bog Lords in SSC. Again, the community is mostly against this practice, which is extremely time consuming and require you to do things inside of the raid before speedrunning it, which feels very counterintuitive.

As a community, we have tried to fight against fishing and especially pre-clearing on our own for years, but our ressources in that regard are faulty at best. It can be not too bad for one raid and horrible for the next one. The conclusion on those discussions is always the same : “our ressources are limited. The only fix would be Blizzard adding and M+ gate”

This is my suggestion to blizzard to make speedrunning feel way better in WoW classic : add a gate at the start of the raid (that can’t be passed through in any way ; most doors in SoD have been blinkable by mages amongst other things), that you can remove by talking to an NPC at the entrance. Make the removal of the door trigger an advanced combat log event so we can register the start of the raid on warcraft logs, or, even better but probably more work for the devs, give us a timer starting from the removal of the door and ending at the last boss death.

This simple thing would fix the vast majority of the issues speedrunners have with their favourite in game activity, and make a lot of people very happy, without affecting anybody else’s experience. You simply wouldn’t be able to fish or pre clear before the start of the run anymore. Please, Blizzard, add a mythic + gate to raids.

4 Likes
2

You said it yourself…niche,

blizzard shouldn’t cater to niche, resources are already stretch with the mammoth job they have undertaken.

3

Its up to the logs website to decide what counts as starting the run, not blizzard, fishing for good rng is a basic thing in all forms of speed running unless you can manipulate it in the game in question.

4

Yes please. Just a wall and static spawns is too much?

3 Likes
5

People aren’t (just) fishing, though. They’re using slowfall/soulstone/rezz to get through the instakill zones which are obviously intended to act as a gate and to preclear mobs so that (for instance) they have exactly 20 Dark Iron Agents, who have less HP than the other two mobs they’re grouped with in the Guardian/Nullifier/Agent trash requirement group, while also reducing the total number of mobs in the run, not just cherrypicking the type.

Upgrading from instakill zones intended to act as a gate to an actual gate/enforced starting area prevents this and makes a lot of sense.

It would also enable support for ingame timers, preventing log cheese etc on those.

6

In speedrunning all of those types of things are normal, im not talking about wow raid speedrunning though but other games, people do really extreme things in those, and its not on blizzard to put in extra support for a player created thing such as speed runs in reality, if you want to make sure that people dont cheese it make sure to put in requerments such as the run must be fully recorded to be on a leaderboard, have the timer start the second someone steps inside, people will still try to do stuff but most of them wont, you could even enforce a addon that says if its the first time every raid member enters the raid this lockout and have that be needed to be seen in the video for a speed run to be officaly counted on leaderboards, but blizzard have nothing to do with warcraftlogs so complain there about whats needed not to blizzard

7

Even if they add a wall, people will try to use wallhack or flyhack or modify the client to pass through like bots do.

Cheater always gonna cheat. The only source of truth is a video that give us more insight.

Warcraftlogs top world speedrun and parsing, is the most toxic minigame I ever played in my life.

8

I can’t think of many games where doing things before the start of the run that wil affect the run the way pre-clearing does. Do you have an example of this being “normal” in other games ?

9

If you reread what I said you can clearly understand that im referring to the “They’re using slowfall/soulstone/rezz to get through the instakill zones which are obviously intended to act as a gate” not to the preclear part when I say that its normal in speedrunning.
I even give a solution to the pre clearing problem. But its not on blizzard to fix your problems

10

Well, the slowfall/soulstone/brezz part is mentionned because those are things that are used for pre-clearing, they aren’t used in the actual run.

11

My thought that those were mostly used for scouting out the RNG and then maybe reseting, and thats really used in every other type of speedrunning, no one just starts a runs it all the way through, most speedruns are aborted before they get anywhere close to the end of them, but still I would suggest taking up how speedruns should be handled not with blizzard but with the community instead, just like no one is bothering Rare about how golden eye is being ran but handle it them selves, get people to accept strict requierments of video proof and a specific addon that tells you how many times someone in the raid have entered the raid that reset, have moderators who look through the videos before they go up on a leaderboard and who have the final say if a run is considered legit so people will be willing to comply if they want a copy of the addon used to see if it was modified. You could even then have categorys where things like preclearing is allowed and once where they are not, you could have a category even where people need to clear x amount of trash packs for it to be counted so that people cant skip packs.

12

It feels like you aren’t very familiar with the current WCL/speedrun ruleset, which is fine,

There are already trash requirements, but a part of the problem at present is that there are packs with RNG where individual mobs within the pack can be different types.

Part of what people are preclearing for is to remove the harder/higher HP mobs from those packs.

An M+ style gate at the raid entrance (and ideally fixed spawns) wouldn’t negatively impact anyone not speedrunning and would make speedrunning fairer and more accessible.

13

It is true that im not overly familiar with the current WCL ruleset, im though fairly familiar with other speedrunning rules and as far as I know every other community in speedrunning have to set their rules around what is already a in the game.

For me atleast a M+ syle gate would be a break in immersion, and while that have no bearing on speedrunning it have a bearing on others enjoyment of the game even if its just a little.

Having fixed spawns would not break any immersion and would make things like pre clearing easy to detect even while just using a ai to go through the log files.