World of Warcraft: Current Year

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Grayson Carlyle

Grayson Carlyle

Golden Squire
225
9
Scaling old raids up can't work because shit like Magmadar is a fucking joke mechanics-wise, or on the other end you get Lucifron which would be impossible to do because of the cooldown on dispels. Making players scale down to the content's original level would be far easier, and it would put the onus on the player to figure out what abilities and rotations actually work at that level with only minor tweaking of the bosses. And hey, then you don't get relevant loot from it, because you fucking shouldn't get relevant loot from non-progression content. You could have your glory day rose-tinted glasses, make the bosses shower lots of transmog gear at you and add in the races/competitions to that for pretty things.

Turn all Legacy raids into scaled content that drop randomized loot like D3.
Random Loot is an ilevel equivalent to Normal Raids (or maybe LFR equiv I don't care)
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I can't believe you don't realize how fucking retarded that is.
 
bixxby

bixxby

Molten Core Raider
2,750
47
Would rather have every dungeon in the game scale up to level 90 and be available on the LFG finder while also making dungeons relevant again than having to find jerks to clear content I can already solo for fun and profit.
 
Dandai

Dandai

<WoW Guild Officer>
<Gold Donor>
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The problem with scaling old content, as Grayson pointed out, is that they have done countless balance passes in the past 9 years. Encounters designed around short cooldown cc, dispels, cleanses, etc, would be nigh impossible as they have been universally nerfed (and frankly, I'd wager a guess that the vast majority of players don't even have them on their hotbars and/or haven't used them in current content in months). It would take just as much time to go back and QA those old dungeons as it would to create new, expansion-themed content. I'd much rather have legit new content than "developer new" content.

Now if you start talking about scaling a character down,thatcould be interesting. However, in my experience with EQ2's leveling down system (mentoring), the power level of a even just a dungeon geared max-level character is at minimum twice the power of an X level character (your combat abilities hit much, much harder than your mentored player's abilities, you have more utility spells and combat spells, etc). So I'm not convinced that even scaling the character down would be the panacea to everyone's itch to do old content at the content's appropriate max-level.
 
D

Draegan_sl

2 Minutes Hate
10,034
3
Grayson Carlyle_sl said:
Scaling old raids up can't work because shit like Magmadar is a fucking joke mechanics-wise, or on the other end you get Lucifron which would be impossible to do because of the cooldown on dispels. Making players scale down to the content's original level would be far easier, and it would put the onus on the player to figure out what abilities and rotations actually work at that level with only minor tweaking of the bosses. And hey, then you don't get relevant loot from it, because you fucking shouldn't get relevant loot from non-progression content. You could have your glory day rose-tinted glasses, make the bosses shower lots of transmog gear at you and add in the races/competitions to that for pretty things.



I can't believe you don't realize how fucking retarded that is.
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So make the gear shitty compared to Heroic and decent for the pleebs. Main point is just using old content that you can fuck around with on a daily basis and get some gear out of it. As far as old mechanics not working, yeah thats a problem but who cares. I'd rather have people messing around with it and hitting a brick wall (against meaningless content) then it sitting there.

Of course you can always make the option to do the original for the people who like to farm for mounts and shit too.

If I were in charge, I would get rid of LFR, Heroic, Normal levels of dungeons and just make Flex and Normal. Flex shits out low ilevel stuff. Normal shits out awesome level stuff. Then old flex raids shit out Flex Level stuff with a very low chance at lower end Normal level stuff. To people who still care about WOW progression raiding, you should be able to get you and your buddies to clear an old Flex raid in the same time it takes you to clear a heroic dungeon.

Just gives everyone something extra to do using old raids. I mean I can't believe you didn't realize that there are ways to adjust rewards from a raid. Don't be that guy.
 
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LadyVex_sl

shitlord
868
0
I don't think there is more of a need for a flex raid before normal then there is for people from 10 to 25. When you don't have 25 you aren't going to take a hit on ilvl to get everyone in, you'll just split the raid. And if you have slightly more than 10, you rotate in. That sucks.

You can already queue with friends for lfr; I'm not saying its a bad idea but there should be a flex normal mode too, for the current raiders who find themselves with unexpected overages/underages.
 
Dandai

Dandai

<WoW Guild Officer>
<Gold Donor>
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I think they made their intent with this new flex raid pretty clear. It's not for people (like you) who want item progression and have a raid force capable of clearing normal mode raids. It's for people who want to raid but don't want the shitty LFR experience and have terrible players and can't handle normal mode encounters. I would have killed for a flex raid when I was raiding with my first raiding guild in 2 expansions last October. We wiped on those stupid dogs in MV for 3 hours, at least 20 attempts. Obviously that encounter is not hard, and I almost washed my hands of raiding that night, but I was fortunate enough to find another guild the next day and we ended up going 3/whatever hard mode that tier before splitting up.

Anyway, let's examine the likely ilevel breakdowns:
LFR: 502
*NEW* Flex: 510-513?
Normal: 522
Hard: 535

There's definitely a large enough gap there that ilevel would feel some level of meaningful progression without threatening to overtake normal and making LFR rewards not feel mandatory between tiers.
 
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LadyVex_sl

shitlord
868
0
Yea but honestly we're already completely awash in ilvls. It's not that I think it's a bad idea, I just don't understand why it didn't extend to 10-25 mans. Weren't they saying those raids were suffering quite a bit from a loss of players?
 
Dandai

Dandai

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<Gold Donor>
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LadyVex_sl said:
Yea but honestly we're already completely awash in ilvls. It's not that I think it's a bad idea, I just don't understand why it didn't extend to 10-25 mans. Weren't they saying those raids were suffering quite a bit from a loss of players?
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They definitely said the 25m raiding scene has fallen off a cliff and went on to say that the 10m family guild that could raid with some success in WotLK no longer has a raid because they are striving to make 10m as challenging at 25m.

I'm just an armchair designer, unfamiliar in raid design balance, but it seems to me that they could not bring the same level of challenge with a flex style raid without a heavy investment in dynamically scripting each encounter to accommodate the precise setup of the individual raid (1-2 tanks could [probably] be static, but adjusting damage output/hp for number of present healers/DPS respectively). There should of course be minimum thresholds to prevent exploiting (like bringing 1 healer or 1 dps and having the boss do no damage or have no hp), but I know in 25m normal some fights are just plain easier because you can carry a couple slack dps/heals as long as you have a couple people that are good enough to compensate (let me preempt the, "But 10m is easier!" by saying that there are obviously benefits to having a smaller, 2 group raid force, but on a difficult encounter, everyone has to show up in 10m - encounters are rarely as tightly tuned in 25m normal).

I don't know how their NPC stuff is coded, but it may be a technical engine limitation that has prevented them from trying this, or they could have tested it already and decided it wasn't worth the effort to balance 4 raid tiers (because make no mistake, the QA dept would still have to test the 50 different combinations for a "normal" flex raid to ensure nothing was broken). Making it LFR difficulty, but exclusive to the people you invite, is a pretty elegant solution to meeting their target audience halfway.
 
T

The Ancient_sl

shitlord
7,386
16
Flex raiding is a pretty cool feature, I'm surprised GC backed off his position to begin with. It's not enough to get me back into the game, it's just so old at this point, but the way you guys talk about WoW you wouldn't think it was still the #1 MMO in the world by a really large margin.
 
Caeden

Caeden

Golden Baronet of the Realm
7,581
12,535
^ I'm fully aware it is. I still play nearly daily to kill some time. Heck, I even had a few weeks where I really missed that thrill of raiding semi-hardcore and a boss keels over.

As a content guy, I really don't care about ilvls. I tanked so it was just a tool to do my job. I was always more interested in bosses dying and seeing the fights as intended to at least some degree. LFR takes that away. I'm hoping that they can stop cutting so much out of fights for this and be closer to Wrath 10 mans which were already pared down but not LFR pared down. I just wanted them to apply the flex/scaling to old content. Maybe that's a 6.0 feature.
 
Ukerric

Ukerric

Bearded Ape
<Silver Donator>
8,312
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LadyVex_sl said:
You can already queue with friends for lfr;...
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And get yelled at when you stop for taking pictures, have "awesome raiders" try to tell you that they don't need to tank swap, etc, etc.

(at least they didn't yell at you for rolling need on everything to feed off your guildies anymore)
 
BoozeCube

BoozeCube

The Wokest
<Prior Amod>
51,561
302,669
It sounds like a cool idea in theory. I mean being able to bring whoever is on the night is a nice idea but most 25 man guilds are gone already and this doesn't really serve any purpose for the 10 man normal guilds. I don't know how many casual guilds with 15-20 people on every night are left, and even more so I don't know how many of them are looking for some LFR+ to do.
 
spronk

spronk

FPS noob
23,360
27,218
flex is cross-realmable and you can complete all the metas for glory with it (in new raids), so it will probably lead to an explosion of trade chat/openraid pug raids. I would assume if it is successful, 6.0 removes 10 and 25 man completely and instead moves to LFR, flex normal, and flex heroic mode and possibly even changes all new 5 man dungeons to flex 2-10 man dungeons.

It'll be interesting to see if Wildstar has any reactions to it too.
 
Ukerric

Ukerric

Bearded Ape
<Silver Donator>
8,312
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spronk_sl said:
and possibly even changes all new 5 man dungeons to flex 2-10 man dungeons.
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Won't work. The idea of flex-dungeons require a pre-made group, which is not going to work with pick-up (the large majority of dungeon groups).

Otherwise, I can see LFR, flex, heroic 25 (since, again, the large majority of heroic-raiding guilds are in 25M format). I don't think you can have a flex heroic, since the entire goal of heroics is to have them very tightly tuned.

I just think the flex should have two loot mode: if the raid lead selects NBG, then you get the LFR auto-roll system, without additional rolls; if he selects master loot then you get one random loot per full group in the raid (you gain priority allocation and disenchant opportunities at the cost of getting potential item rot).
 
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