This has been an interesting thread to watch. The top raid guilds have always been mostly beneficial to the game as they have the ears of the devs in terms of game maintenance. Likewise, they do things that don't help the game, as too few voices saying the same thing generally have had undue influence and end up turning off as many people as the ones they are helping (or trying to at least). Make no mistake though, the game has changed. Populations have thinned somewhat, so accessibility is of utmost importance to sustainability. Between those guilds that have posted and those that haven't/don't, I'd estimate at least 50 raid forces have beaten all or the majority of NoS. This actually creates a direct threat to guilds like RoI, MS, and others, as people have much more palatable ways to play and raid in the modern game, rather than leaving their current guild to find success. Additionally, the time trial associated with raid win continues to lose importance to everyone as the game ages, the players age, and fewer and fewer people actually care. The guilds in spots 10-30 are losing less players than they ever have to the top 5. Additionally, asking for class development and stating that is a reason players are leaving is questionable at best at this point. That ship sailed long ago. Moving forward, raids in general will most likely not get harder. The aforementioned accessibility is not something that be walked back from at this point. So what can they do? A few things: 1) Get beta-testing back to beta testing. Reduce accessibility while ensuring sufficient testing. Pre-expansion content doesn't need to be full time accessible for weeks prior to launch. Guilds should at most see 2 raids before release. Reduce the "cliff notes" on how the raid works. While these should be functional, they will probably fall on the harder side with more limited testing; which will indirectly achieve the goal of harder raids the top guilds want for a period of time. Tune over the next 1-2 months from there. 2) I've always been a big proponent that Vanquisher does not get the attention it's deserved. It, by design, is truly beating the expansion. The rewards as of late back this up. DPG should more openly promote this via its website "i.e. first guild to beat Vanquisher = <GUILD NAME HERE>. Promote this over the time trial (which will still get tracked regardless), as that can differentiate guild capability far more than seeing who has the least zone lag or finds novel ways to work around script timers during a win. Of course, it's paramount that raid /ACHs work at launch for this to hold full meaning. Make one or two of the /ACHs a real challenge to further separate guild capability, while still allowing they be achievable to all raid forces at some point. People need to think more outside the box and account for current reality, then just posting the same tired lines of "make it harder".
I agree with Rylak. Do the top guilds track and brag about vanquisher ? Maybe that *IS* the thing to track about rather than how fast they can slam though the raids to just get a win.
Vanquisher was bugged for like 4 months. So, it would have been in the same boat as we were for raids, who could log in first on patch day to get the final achievement. Achievements were probably the dumbest thing they added to the game. None of them are hard by any means, they are tedious and make the events take longer for no reason. A good majority of them are wait around until the final percent so an add doesn't spawn as the boss is dying, while having to adjust for lag not messing up with spawns. Beating the raids first has always and will always be the end goal. Asking for 1 event out of 9 to be remotely challenging is really not a lot.
I can agree with most of what you said except for this and the vanquisher idea unless they find a way to actually make those add difficulty. We generally speaking do not have issues recruiting people outside of maybe the quality of player we would like so that is not a threat to us. I do not take issue with making raids more accessible overall. That is where they currently are at which is fine for the most part. I don't see how asking for one raid (the last event specifically) be made difficult for a couple months is asking for too much to appease a few guilds worth of people though. More importantly saying that the lack of class development is causing players to leave is questionable is pretty funny. Out of the friends of mine that have quit playing the game over the last few years that has been the reason. That is the main reason I dislike playing anymore myself. I solely stick around due to the people I play with. The only current solution if you are unlucky enough to play a class that has been garbage for years is to main change. Not very many people want to do so, so your left with just riding it out until you get frustrated enough to quit hoping one year they will finally address it or to just quit. I don't think its unreasonable to say that should change and is probably the most important thing to address outside of the lag issue.
The preponderance of competent & willing testers are in the guilds that you want to exclude or constrain or whatever. Further, those guilds have lots of crossover re: players that are willing to talk to one another or are simply *in* multiple raid forces. Your…plan would not have the consequences you imagine. More open access has led directly to more functional events. The Cliffs Notes have, besides democratizing "access" to the developers or at least to their perspective and intention, sped up testing dramatically. The docs allow infinitely more cogent feedback through mechanics passes consequently enabling time to be spent on balance (which may or may not be well taken advantage of. I understand that being subject to opinion).
In my opinion, this expansion's raid events are, by and large, too easy. Some events such as Myconid Mutiny are the exception. The key problem is that many mechanics can simply be ignored. Complex events don't necessarily have more hitpoints, or annoying mechanics (such as the "let's make sure the healers aren't bored" flavour of ToL), but instead have mechanics that force players to play in non-obvious ways.
What is exactly challenging about Myconid Mutiny besides a few of the achievements? That one is a pretty simple event.
I think zleski is alluding to the event being one that you cannot just ignore mechanics (unless going for the achievement). People in this post have brought up vanquisher as the way to track or rank guilds. For nos, we would have been waiting for pit fight to be properly patched to determine a winner... With that said, I helped lead a raid to the ach on myconid for blowing them all up when the adds did not attack/aggro. I am fairly confident that achievement will be hard to get for those who were not present that night now that the adds are working as intended. I think the achievements add some flavor and in some cases increased difficulty but mostly are just artificial tasks that lengthen events. Perhaps DBG can offer titles to the first guild server wide and another title for each guild who completes it first on their respective servers. Because currently as constituted the reward given is more than enough for every guild to reasonably attempt to finish before the next expac launches and in some cases go back and get them for new members/returning members. An example of this being the reward from vanquisher from tov still being relevant. Lastly, I guess the mindset is that every guild will/should win every event in the expansion while it is current. When I look back on egl I see guilds that did not win expansions in era and in some cases they went back for the win in the following expansion (after upgrades, new aa, levels in some cases). I only started raiding in cov (and the guild I was first in could not beat be aary) and the ability to unlock ore from the vendor was a big reason i saw quite a few of the better performing players move on to other guilds. Put me on board for the idea of not having all items unlocked by beating all 9 events; if that means the 9th and final event is a real challenge (as to not lock out certain items or ore as it was in cov/tol). If all 9 events remain easy mode then who cares if the ability to unlock everything is behind winning them all ; as just about every raid force will do so well before the next expansion launches.
It might have mechanics you can't ignore but that doesn't make it a challenging event. It isn't as much that every guild should be able to beat every event rather what is a challenge for the top guilds is impossible for the guilds that struggle with events as they are currently tuned.
I think this would satisfy a huge portion of people's wants. This idea has been pushed quite a bit over the years. The last few expansion cycles I've recommended something like the below for the last few raids in an expansion: Create a reasonable guess at mob HP / damage that lets most raiding forces in the game beat the content On expansion / raid release, increase that by a 100% multiplier Every week, reduce that multiplier by 10% When a guild beats it, lock that multiplier After ~2 months, begin reducing that multiplier again Stop reducing the multiplier until it reaches 0, or the number of guilds that can reliably defeat it is high enough This makes it so that a casual raiding force can defeat all the content while providing challenging content for those who want it and give every challenge-hungry raiding force a chance to defeat the same content for a bit before it gets nerfed in a reliable way. This also reduces the tuning difficulty of the raids by autotuning them.
They need to AUTO unlock last expansion RAID GEAR NPC on a new expansion. unlock the able to see all the items - it still means they have to raid to for the coin to buy items. This will allow guilds who are struggling to gear up peeps who are coming back to the game. This means that any none won raid can now buy the loot they might need to win that new expansion raid.
I mean idk how i feel about all that. People still go back to get the ach in rof for bifold/rod of dark rites, cotf for shield, tds for poison cure clickie (too lazy to look up spelling). Granted the most recent expansions don't really have any cool items locked behind achievements. Perhaps that is a solution. Make the achievements on t3 events super challenging with a reward of a few items being unlocked on the raid vendor. Would certainly add some flavor and change to itemization and gearing choices in terms of what to buy first with currency.
I'm not particularly interested in arguing over the precise definition of what constitutes "begging", but there was a serious push by some influential members to get the raid nerfed asap to the point a hotfix was going in the following Monday. The raid was finally beaten the day before the hotfix, and those same influential members immediately changed from clamoring for a hotfix to arguing against it so the hotfix was pulled and the raid wasn't nerfed until later. I'm sure many of the members of the guild didn't know what was being said behind the scenes because I'm talking about what was actually being said between players and the devs at the time, not what was posted on the forums. I agree with having the final raid be the hardest. The problem is that it is actually not as easy as it sounds. What makes one raid harder than another is not always uniform for every guild.
I thought mearatas should have been made easier but I also wanted other guilds to have a chance to beat it once we were able to. Delaying the hotfix for a a few weeks to a month made sense to me. The main problem I had with the raid was that imo you had basically zero chance at winning unless you got lucky with which sentinels happened to spawn.
Eh, I don't think that's true though? Once we beat it, we were beating it regularly with no problem. The biggest thing, IMO anyway, was getting everyone on board to not bork 25%. If more than a person or two dies, you're wiping from cascading deaths and add spawns. Everyone had to be positioned right, and tanks had to be ready to get those adds, people had to hit glyphs, and you just couldn't make mistakes. The main thing for the sentinels is people couldn't slack, had to do your job. Many wipes were a mezzer or rooter not paying attention (or bad paladin splash!), or it was people dying too fast due to tanks not being on it or bad luck on positioning. I don't remember wiping due to too many of one kind spawning. Would be nice to have a fun hard raid. Just one. Nerf it a month after a guild beats it, or nerf it X months after t3 released. But give us something!
No. Sentinels had very little to do with people slacking. We just couldn't keep them locked down in addition to making our ways to the halls unless a few of them were rootable/snarable that we could hit once and ignore. Plus mez stopped them from moving too at the time I believe. A bunch of slow/stun made it too difficult. We also didn't even attempt the hard version for a few weeks after our first win so it's weird to say we were beating it regularly before the nerf.
So basically overtune the content on purpose, then nerf weekly until *someone* beats then let them be the only guild(s) able to complete the content for the next 2 months before reducing it further? Sounds pretty awful TBH. Raid design is hard. I want raids at that are reasonably mechanically complex without insanely high DPS checks personally. Hard DPS checks / hard enrages aren't terrible engaging IMO. Nor are encounters that are entirely trivialized by being able to burn hard enough to skip mechanics. (ie, sontalak before lag eased up a bit) At the same time, you can have a very interesting and engaging raid that is just hopelessly broken by "average" launch day lag, or typical pathing issues that *somehow* get overlooked both during the design phase and ignored during beta testing. (hey look, both of those problems were exemplified pretty well by AHR last xpac) I don't know what the solution is. Turning up the numbers alone won't make raids more interesting. Harder maybe, require more specific class stacking definitely if they tune it up enough but not necessarily more fun. That's not what I understand, from what I understand top guilds have actively complained that the "get X ore(s) per win" system of loot was boring and made t1 meaningless. They might not have wanted this specific version of loot where some guilds will go months without getting key slots to drop while others get multiples weekly, but I still lay the part of the blame on them since they lobbied for switching away from a straightforward fixed loot system I liked.
I think 2 expansion old raid gear should be the new group gear. I do have a problem with auto unlock right away, there is still interest on casual raids to finish that content. Especially early on before we are inundated with new content. Maybe 6 months then unlock?
