I seem to remember them saying they wanted to put a focus back on 25 man as the traditional progression guild raid size. It's likely that they may do away with 10's completely in favor of flex and keep 25 as the "normal/heroic" raid.I look for Blizzard to do away with five man trinity based dungeons in favor of quicker scenarios in the future. I could also see them doing away with normal/heroic 10/25's in favor of 10-25 man flex raids with ulduar esque triggered hardmodes. The only argument i could see against it was the claim flex was introduced for the family guild crowd. What i proposed seems like a more eloquent solution to multiple difficulty settings and further boating of the ilvl system. I dunno it just seems more streamlined and neat. Also you could have the uber guilds competing to do it with less. I guess we need to see just how dynamic flex raiding could be.
^If you make a single size, people will do whatever it takes to run it. Just my opinion.
The point is that flex will take the place of the 10 man raid as a tier between LFR and 25man. By and large I'd say 70ish+ percent of the 10 man guilds complete Normal modes and maybe a handful of Hard modes per raid tier so realistically it basically is a tier between LFR and Hard Mode as it stands. The hardcore progression 10 mans would reorg a bit, but by and large I'd say the average casual raiding 10 man would be in a better place.It is significantly easier to find 10 people who can keep their heads out of their arses long enough to kill a boss than it is to find 25.
I would be shocked if Blizzard did away with 10 Man raiding entirely, as the last time I checked, there were many more 10 man guilds doing raiding than there were 25. Would a large portion of those players migrate to 25? Probably. But I know many people who would quit if they had to go back to carrying mouth breathers just to fill out a raiding roster.
Fixed.It's pretty stupid to have EIGHT flavors of the same content, if for no other reason than it'sBORING.
Well they'll probably wind up throwing a difficulty level to the flex raid - LFR - Normal - Hard or something silly like that. LFR would cause you to queue for players and the other 2 would require pre-made.I don't know about the removal of LFR, it's basically been the only thing that has kept me in the MMO mentality over the last year. And that seems like such an easy thing to balance, just make it retarded easy and poof you have LFR. With that said I never really played MMO's for the "socialization" aspect, sure I talk with people and listen to their problems but for me at it's core I played for my own enjoyment of executing my character during an encounter. I liked min/maxing and improving my own personal game play, because I always felt I couldn't make someone else in my raid a better player I just had to play better to help the raid if that makes sense to anyone. I still believe this last tier is going to be a large data collecting project by Blizzard to refine a dated product to compete with new releases.
If you listen to the interview itself (see spoiler), he talks about how they might consider applying flex to all normal mode raids instead of having it be a separate lockout (leaving LFR > Normal [flex 10-25] > Heroic 25), but they could not possibly make challenging heroic encounters scale to the number of players because players will always incline towards the easiest composition (this boss is easiest with 2 tanks, 5 healers, and 6 dps, etc).Ion Hazzikostas_sl said:
- Valor gear originally was added to complement normal difficulty raiding and filling in for bad luck. The Valor gear continued to work like that for normal difficulty raiders, but for players that just do LFR, it replaced the gear that dropped in LFR. Most of the gear that was best in slot for players that only do LFR was just purchased off a vendor, which isn't very exciting.
- The devs try to attract players to higher levels of difficulty by adding new things, rather than taking away old things. The new things that are being added aren't essential. People that don't manage to kill Garrosh on Flex, Normal, or Heroic and don't get their heirloom weapon will still be able to level just fine.
well T3 gear didn't come until Naxx and breaking your 6 or 8 piece T2 set for some AQ offspec gear wasn't all too commonTier 2 was in during vanilla and "transcended" past BWL...
afaik they keep this system because it gradually "nerfs" current content without them having to implement a buff/debuff that nerfs boss hp/damage like they did in the past with ICC/DS/t14 contentThe valor upgrade system seemed horrible because any points spent on less than the best gear felt wasted, but the valor cap sometimes required dumping upgrades onto an item you'll replace next week.
The whole system is pretty smart from one standpoint - it keeps high end, massively overgeared players running a few dungeons a week to cap their points. Which means undergeared casual terribles can usually get carried through dungeons. Wheras in most games, well geared players abandon dungeons completely a few weeks in. I'm pretty sure that's what the entire system is really about.
I doubt that they are going to piss off the majority of their raider base who prefers to do 10m over 25m for various reasons and obviously Flex mode won't come for heroic raiding because of raid groups cheesing certain aspects of fights by down-/upscaling the number of people involved to make certain aspects easierI seem to remember them saying they wanted to put a focus back on 25 man as the traditional progression guild raid size. It's likely that they may do away with 10's completely in favor of flex and keep 25 as the "normal/heroic" raid.