End of Legion: Mythic Raiding Feedback

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06/05/2018 04:25 PMPosted by Waterstrider
This sounds like Blizzard needs to try harder to balance then.

You cant balance some aspect of raiding, at 20 man the room and space is part of the difficulty on some fights, but that is not an issue with 10 man. On the other hand if you need x number of cd or cc it makes 10 man harder compare to 20 man.

These are problems that cant be solved with "balance", they would need to change some fights completely depending of the side of your raid and that would be a nightmare.
For a casual mythic raider:
Would appreciate 19-21 scaling. We lost a lot of weeks because someone couldn't log on. Then we couldn't hold onto spares because half the time they were expected to be on but doing nothing... Like I think that's actually our largest problem by far.
11 bosses was to much, 9 felt perfect.
Mythic gear felt pointless. I got to 960+ in every slot (minus tier) while only having two bosses on grind.
Using titanforging as time/scaling mechanic felt RNG and frustrating because, once again,mythic gear is pointless. Two, half our raid at one point was 975 while half was 955 because they kept getting horrible luck. Made raiding clunky and unreliable across weeks.
Our guild doesn't seem to care or mind that master looter is gone given that tier is gone.

You guys addressed a lot of issues otherwise over the expac.

For Bosses: Didn't get to far unfortunately, but I did absolutely love Hounds (Antorus) and Sisters (ToS). Tiny screw ups hurt but didn't wipe, lots of moments for epic plays. Honestly loved every mythic boss. Except Goroth. Hated that fight with a passion.
I think Mythic raiding is in a alright space right now, but my guild, and I know at least several guilds my friends are in are having the same base issue.

We can't recruit people if our server is a pool of 2 connected mostly dead servers and only 2 guilds have any meaningful late game progression on Antorous.

I don't really care if you are set on making mythic a set size, but not having the tools to recruit more people to your mythic raid or the ability for cross realm people to join your raid when the current is still good progression and people still want to raid hurts us a lot.

If the lootmaster loot changes are mostly decided upon, we need cross realm mythic opened up at the very start. Get rid of guild achievements for raiding and track everything by faction. I don't care about any of this split raiding nonsense, I just want to be able to raid instead of taking a break for 3 or 4 months before a expansion/content patch releases.

Give groups that are made up of the majority of the same characters some bonus each week, as some sort of fix for guilds who relied on EPGP or DKP to boost attendance. Nothing game breaking, just something to encourage people to stick together and raid.
Fight design wise it was pretty good, ToS excluded from that statement (more on this later). In terms of actual progression, it was all over the place in terms things feeling required to push progression.

EN was solid, outside of Xavius this was a strong tier. Every fight was good mechanically, and for a first tier it was extremely solid. The DPS checks weren't exactly there, but I'd take this version of mythic where mechanics matter as opposed to having every fight where maximization of DPS, dropping healers, and running tank comps for either their DPS or utility that would otherwise maximize DPS.

Nighthold - Post 7.2 this was fantastic. Pre-7.2 should have never been a thing. Auger should have gotten it's adjustments earlier, and when people were skipping Spellblade in mass to go to other bosses when it's clearly intended to be the 4th boss the changes to mark of frost should have been applied much much sooner.

The AP grind for people to feel as if they could hit those DPS checks needed to be addressed sooner. If AP changes would have went in a week or 2 after it's release it would have been much smoother.

Fights were fantastic, there was no fight outside of suicide strat P3 botanist that I didn't find interesting, enjoyable, and having multiple approaches to. Best raid teir for players to be given a puzzle, and finding that solution to that puzzle.

ToS, to just call a spade a spade this is the worst tier since Dragon Soul. Too many soaking mehcanic, to many fights with adjustments that were needed WELL before they were pushed, Sisters was approached with a massive HPS requirement, meanwhile the boss that could be faced next to it Mistress required an insane CONTROLLED DPS throttle and burst. Engine of Souls heavily favored to have as many people with immunities come to the raid regardless of their damage to bypass mechanics. Not going to comment on past Mistress, becuase I haven't done those when relevant.

Antorus was a fine enough return to the norm. Mechanically, nothing here is really interesting. We realized how bad portal keeper was as a mythic boss when we went to get our achievement mounts because the chaos rift is a SIGNIFICANTLY more intresting mechanic that was added than what we have. Half of the fights boil down to doing heroic but better, which is not exactly the most fun thing. Immonar is a good boss, but Kin'goroth was the largest mixed bag I've ever seen. I'm not a fan of some mechanic being so completely raid wide punishing that it's an instant wipe if it's not handled correctly.

Mostly what I want to see in BfA is faster response to adjustments for what are obviously problematic mythic fights. More communication so fights are stale like in ToS where mostly what I'm doing on a given fight boils down to different variations of the same 2-3 major mechanics, and mythic fights to have a bit more flavor to them over heroic. One of the bigger issues right now facing mythic is there are several fights that don't exactly change a lot in mythic, so they ultimately become annoying or stale while doing progress. I'd much rather have heroic to mythic fights that work similar to Tichondrius as opposed to High Command.
I'd love to see the quest for acquiring a skip to be reduced on Mythic. It would be a nice quality of life improvement to be able to kill say, M Aggramar, one time and then be able to work on Argus progression the next week early instead of having to choose between extending or rekilling the back half of the raid.
The AP Grind and Legendaries held back an otherwise good raiding expansion, unless you didn't play a class with immunities in ToS, then you held your guild back!
Never make another tomb of sargeras again, the legendary concept was terrible, and the AP grind was extremely grueling. Also, 19-21 flex for mythic would be a big help for those raid weeks where things don't work out.

Other than that, the expansion's raiding was excellent. Emerald Nightmare was a solid beginning raid, Trial of Valor was a little challenging but fun (except mythic Helya), Nighthold was wonderful, Tomb of Sargeras was extremely imbalanced and impractical, and Antorus was fantastic. Keep the raiding design in BoA. But please, please, do not add another RNG system with legendaries.

Thank you for Legion!
I got sat for the first time in 10years cos I didn't have a mass grip. Not being able to put up a active mitigation spell cos the boss is in the air or at the other end of the room sucked. Other than that, I liked this Xpac over all, just wish I was younger again and had more time to play lol.
I would love to see mythic raiding become cross realm, boss by boss lockout, and flex. If Blizzard wants to keep it at a hard cap until the world's best guilds clear it, then that's fine too. As it sits now, it feels like Blizzard's mythic raiding rules are in place to cater to the top guilds in mythic and not the "average" mythic player.

With wow being 14 years old, many people, myself included, have been playing so long that we can clear heroic in a week or two, tops. However, many of my friends cannot commit to a regular 20m scheduled raid 3-4 nights a week. I have heard and understand the tuning argument for keeping it a single size in mythic, but outside of the top guilds in the world, nobody would really cares if you killed a mythic boss with 13 or 15 people.

Adding more flexibility to more challenging content would be a welcome change that would keep more people engaged longer.
Mythic flex raiding would be a huge help for mythic guilds on small servers. Once new tier releases if you could make the previous tier flex that would be so helpful. Mythic fights were great, on a personal preference note, please don't give melees heavy mechanical responsibilities. We all know how that turns out.
Mythic raiding in Legion was better and worse in some respects comparative to past hardest difficulty raids.

What's better
  • Environmental and room effects.
    • Specifically fights like Krosus, Elisande, Sisters, Imonar, and Coven. These types of fights promote awareness and improvement on personal play in order to succeed, and don't allow you to buck the responsibility on to other raid members.
  • Varied Fight Design
    • Fights throughout the expansion have been varied and fun so-as to have many different specs and classes shine in their niche. In addition it helps keep the content fresh longer if not every fight is the same as the last.
  • Pacing
    • Raid patch pacing on the whole was great, the only blemish being ToV though, it was a sort of "unplanned" raid that was shoehorned in. Content didn't feel stretched thin or like it dragged on, plenty of time to get the bosses down and on farm before the next raid.

What's worse
  • Tuning
    • Unequivocally, tuning was the single worst part of mythic raiding this expac, on the mode which is limited to a specific character limit to allow for tighter tuning. The first 80% of nearly every raid aside from ToS were loot piñatas, then suddenly the last 2 bosses are these huge, go f*ck yourself walls that lead to frustration and drama. ToS had the problem of middle bosses being drastically more difficult unless you brought like 5 blood DKs or some other insane comp. I personally believe these issues are mostly due to Titanforging screwing up the player power curve from top to bottom, and it will continue to be a problem moving forward unless it is so rare it almost never happens, and at that point, why does it exist?
  • Boss Stability
    • Bugs bugs bugs bugs bugs, far as the eye can see, every boss had ridiculous bugs. Things like invisible stun orbs on Odyn, sharks on mistress eating you even after dropping pufferfish like 20 yds away, Maiden orbs disappearing randomly then still exploding, Sisters walking out and 1 shotting DPS and healers on spawn even after being taunted, Coven or Vari pulling through the ceiling / floor depending on whichever you had pulled, and loads of mythic Argus bugs (probably due to lack of testing to maintain secrecy).

Biggest Improvements that could be done in BFA
  • Tuning
    • There should be a linear difficulty increase on the first several bosses, followed by an exponential increase over the latter part of each raid, not 8 pushovers followed by 2 T-Rex's dual wielding machine guns and breathing plasma arcs while wearing Fallout power armor.
  • Fight Design
    • While fight design was good this expac, it can always be better moving forward. I'd like to see a varied and interesting spread of bosses that allow for various different specs to succeed instead of seeing some classes play the same thing for every boss fight (looking at you Aff locks) or never changing talents, though the latter there may be a class design problem and not mythic raiding specifically.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I hope my feedback helps improve this already excellent part of the game!
I don't think there is room for flex mode, there is something about the 20 hard cap that kills most casual mythic guilds. However, Blizzard has stated that they are happy with 20 man raiding mythic, but I can't help but think how short sighted they are. How are you happy? In the long-term this will hurt your players, WoW is not getting any new mythic raiders, past raiders are leaving due to real life stuff or just moving on. I think it is in Blizzard's best interest to accommodate the player rather than their design.
I like the pace of raid release (longest current raid will only be Antorus at 9 months), but I think Trial of Valor coming out shortly before the holiday season and then being discarded by Nighthold's release soon after was a misstep. I think there was room to make Trial of Valor its own mini-tier raising the ilvl cap to 900 or 905 so that Mythic progression could play out the way it's supposed to rather than hitting a gear wall on Helya.

I'm enjoying the compromise of Mythic-only phases replacing normal phases to preserve encounter length (Gul'dan and Argus come to mind). Mythic phases are really cool and the only way to really get a feeling that you've never actually done something before in progress and it's nice to get those without needing to have 15+ minute fights.

I feel like very careful attention needs to be paid to immunities going forwards. Fallen Avatar, Kil'jaeden, and early Argus progression were grossly warped by abilities that were supposed to cause vast amounts of raid damage simply being immuned, and while Argus got a fix a month later, it feels like warping fights to the point of being 3 healed simply because of immunities is very bad for the game and should be caught sooner.

Finally, I think there was far too much free gear thrown out that was equivalent to Mythic item level. Between an item from M+ every week and an item from the follower missions every 3 weeks, drops in every raid were simply irrelevant unless they rolled warforged beyond the first month or two of each tier. I would like to see the follower mission capped at Heroic item level so that it's not throwing even more free gear on the pile, since nerfing M+ boxes would be detrimental to that game mode.
In the end, I really enjoyed the Legion raiding experience. It was a breath of fresh air and had some unique and interesting mechanics. I feel 4/5 of the raids were decent to really well done. I think everyone knows how over the top Tomb of Sargeras was compared to the rest of the raid content in difficulty and mechanical issues so I won't mention them.

The hard cap on 20 people is the only real significant issue on mythic raiding in my mind. We have had nights where we were at 17-19 people and progressing on a boss was just out of reach. It's likely my guild will down Argus before the prepatch- but the nights we had to miss were due to attendance entirely. It's frustrating there isn't some mild scaling in mythic mode. I'd love to see mythic bosses scale up and down for like 17-23 people at best. Even just a sliding 18/21 would be a significant boon and breath of fresh air. The system as it is doesn't take real life into account and is there primarily for world first players. An easy compromise if you're really dead-set on hard limits is don't allow world firsts and maybe even other achievements if you're not specifically 20.

It's reasonable that there isn't flex raid scaling like normal/heroic because it's a completely different level of difficulty. But the system is just too punishing at the moment for guilds not at the highest level of bracket play. As it is, the real difficulty of mythic mode is getting people to show up for it.

Mythic raiding is required for Mythic+ progression and this is frustrating. This is an easy one to unpack. It's rough as an adult to run a mythic progression and then if my class sucks this round of balancing / altogether for mythic+, have to create an alt and find another mythic progression guild to level them up- or as an alt in mythic farm nights. I don't think this is very reasonable system. I fully expect to mythic raid in BFA, but really would like mythic raiding to merely be about min-maxing my potential in mythic+ rather than required gearing for keys above 21.

It would behoove Blizzard to place most of the best 5-man azurite traits and acceptable 5-man trinkets within 5 mans themselves, and leave raid-focused azurite within the raids themselves.

Raids this expansion seemed to reward singletarget or spread cleave to a significant margin. I'm a big fan of shadow priests and warlocks, and it's always great to see them shine. It's also great to do well on ST bosses too as a Warrior. But Emerald Nightmare, Tomb of Sargeras, and Antorus all tended to have a big single target focus. There were AoE and add fights of course, but they tended to be dominated by either burst or spread cleave AoE and few and far inbetween the mostly single target focus of many of these encounters.

Class balance can be fickle. We all know Bear druids were completely out of bounds in Nighthold era. Rogues are always pretty much the best and only melee you actually want in raids outside of niche circumstances and this has been a problem for nearly two expansions now. It's frustrating that some specs were left completely impotent for most of the expansion such as Enhancement Shaman, Demo Warlocks, and Survival Hunters. Class balance was overall good in my opinion in that almost all classes and specs were represented well enough but there was still this significant sliding scale of which class is good or bad. I feel most of this was centered around tier pieces and later 7.2 weapon additions.

I feel Blizzard's approach to balance ultimately isn't as fast or goes far enough for the health of the game.

You really should nerf old trinkets faster. Arms and Fury warriors were defined by un-fun trinkets from Nighthold. Arms eventually got to branch out but Fury has been stuck with Convergence of Fates for quite some time. Please never again make a "Draught of Souls"-level trinket that is required for competitive play.
Mythic Raiding in Legion Pros -
- Boss design, for the most part, was pretty solid. Memorable fights that stand out are Gul'dan, Helya, and even Dragons of Nightmare. These fights included multiple ways to go about your business, and needed teamwork in order to complete.
- Pace of content was excellent. The down-time between raids was perfect, and I hope this continues in the future. A month or two of progression, and a couple of months farming was solid.
- Utilization of class utility was very refreshing. Mass dispels, grips, rez totem, and even immunities (only so far) were handled beautifully. It's nice when you need certain classes to step up and perform, y'all did a great job with this.

Mythic Raiding in Legion Cons -
- There was a bit of an overkill on one-shot mechanics and immunity stacking. I believe y'all have addressed this already in the past, and realize it's a problem. Still worth noting here, but fights like Star Auger, Fallen Avatar, and Coven should never happen. The idea is nice, but having the one-shots on Auger, 4 mages on Avatar, and 2 melee on Coven are a bit drastic.
- The over-reliance on pre-planning fights is a big issue, specifically Kil'jaeden. I see where you were going with this fight, and I enjoyed it overall, but going into a fight knowing exactly where we are going to be, how much dps is required, and exact positioning is a bit extreme. That fight was 100% scripted, and it seems lazy compared to a fight like Gul'dan where there is so much personalization based on guild and comp.
- Class balance was a major issue. Though this is maybe not the correct place for this complaint, but having mistweavers completely unusable most of the xpac, warlocks the most valuable raid class for 3 straight tiers, the spriest STM at the beginning and then becoming a niche spec for most of the xpac, and many other examples is just not a good look. Making classes more unique going into BfA might fix this, but the class balance was bloody awful this xpac.
- Titanforging. It sucks, it's not enjoyable. I know y'all like it, just place a cap on it. Normal can't go higher than heroic, heroic can't go higher than mythic, etc. It's simply game-breaking when it shouldn't be.

Overall, I'd rate the Mythic Content as being a B to a B-. Solid work overall, enjoyed raiding this xpac, but I know and have faith that y'all can do better.
One thing I would like to see gone is titanforged gear that goes beyond a + 15 IL boost to the base line level. It's heartbreakingly frustrating to have all of this compounding RNG for one specific item you need. 20% chance to get loot from personal, which you need 1 out of 7 pieces that can drop for you, which you also need to titanforge 40 item levels for it to be useful. It feels like you're forced to play the lottery every week to get a piece you want.

You can say to players 'don't feel obligated, it's just a fun way to keep things exciting', but you know darn well that every mythic player is going to feel obligated. It doesn't incentivize old raids in a good way, it just turns it into a chore.

Normal RNG is fair enough, but keep it to +15 IL boost for titanforging so you're not feeling forced or even incentivized to run old raids or world bosses for BiS trinkets like arcanocrystal for current progression.

Otherwise I found the difficulty of the final bosses of ToS and Antorus tend to be VERY overtuned for insta-wipe mechanics. Kiljaeden and Argus feel at least twice as difficult as Archimonde or garrosh ever was in terms of punishment for personal accountability mechanics like soaking (ie 1 person would instantly wipe the raid if they lagged). Compound that with buggy mechanics like Cone of death where you could be 5-10 yards out of it and still be hit due to lag.

The other bosses before then those two were very well tuned though. I thoroughly enjoyed fights like tichondrius, elisande, aggramar, cenarius, and gul'dan. In fact, I would be very happy if you used Gul'dan as a perfect example of final boss tuning. It was 200-ish wipe challenging for most groups, had fantastic phases and intermissions, was perfectly tuned for damage required and damage done, and it had challenging but not frustrating mechanics.

Finally, this may be a moot point but I feel like legendaries were too overpowered on some fights and severely handicapped groups that did not have all of them for their spec. I know there wont be any next xpac but please keep that in mind in case another legendary system gets introduced.

Thanks for the great xpac of raiding :)
Personally I enjoyed Nighthold, the difficulty ramped up at an acceptable pace.
The mechanics were interesting and I felt like everyone could do something interesting during the raid tier.

Tomb was when our roster started to fall apart, I don't know the individual reasons for all the players leaving the game (not just the raid team) but what feedback I did get from leaving players is that they felt Tomb was punishing them for not having certain types of utility to defend against boss mechanics as well as too many wipes because of 1 persons single mistake.

While Antorus was not as brutal as Tomb it certainly hasnt been all that popular within the guild.

Our player churn rate in Legion has never been higher, and I dont have an answer to this problem but it is worth noting the something didnt set well with many players and it stopped them from playing.
06/05/2018 05:38 PMPosted by Kervv

To be fair, secondary stats purposefully don't scale well with ilvl anymore. Arcanocrystal was BiS in many cases without any titanforging.
Mostly Mythic Raiding was more of the good things thst we had from Warlords. Difficult encounters , some really cool use of utility, and interesting strategies. Legion Mythic raiding did a lot right.

That's not to say it wasn't perfect. It had its fair share of issues as well. Soaking in Tomb of sargeras was a huge problem for a lot of classes and unless you bought an insane amount of damage you are often considered a liability. Several bosses also wipe the raid after a single mistake from a single player. I think it's safe to say everyone would like to see less of this in battle for Azeroth.

And short fight should look more like Operator Thogar and less like maiden of virtue. Fights where mistakes can be made but not necessarily wipe the raid immediately. Things like DPS checks or a lack of bodies for mechanic all work well for punishing deaths.

Lastly, a lot of players are talking about Flex for mythic raiding. A trend I've noticed is the vast majority of players stating this were on Alliance characters. Which brings me to this point. The vast majority of Mythic Raiders are now on the Horde making it difficult to recruit for Allaince guilds.

A video recently bought to my attention on Reddit made a very good point that of the top 100 guilds, very few are Alliance. This is due to Horde having superior racial abilities for many years. For the most part that balance has been fixed in PVE, however a very large majority of the mythic raiding population has shifted to Horde due the ability to recruit more easily.

Something needs to be done, or Mythic Raiding for the Allaince may not survive another expansion.
06/05/2018 04:32 PMPosted by Dartakan
06/05/2018 04:25 PMPosted by Waterstrider
This sounds like Blizzard needs to try harder to balance then.



Yea, the size of void zones relative to free space, nor the frequency/damage of abilities totally couldn't be scaled based on the number of people in the raid. Impossible!

It does create more opportunity for issues with the scaling for sure, but I don't think the dev deserve a pass here, especially when they say they don't spend that much time on tuning mythic. But you need to be careful with the cost vs audience size arguments lest you paint yourself into the logical conclusion of the elimination of mythic entirely (it would help with gross illv inflation, but I admit there is a segment of the population that still finds it fun and keeps them subbed so probably best to keep it at this point IMHO).

Personally I don't need the logistics hassle at this point in my life any more (even if the capability to execute on an individual level is there), and the server-only + fixed # of people required barriers are just not worth fighting anymore, especially on my dead server.

I'd rather M+ in the future, because the small number of actual friends I have that still play can do something as much or little as we want, have the difficulty scale up as high as we feel like going, get rewarded appropriately, and is easily broken up into small chunks of available time. M+ is basically everything that Mythic raid are not from the standpoint of accessibility.

With tier gone, I'm hopeful a no raiding future is actually viable- really high end M+ 'required' Mythic raiding in Legion, because of tier and trinkets that weren't available any other way and outclassed anything you could get out of a dungeon.

Edit- PS good first 2 two topics Blues, keep them coming!! Thanks for actually actively soliciting feedback, I hope to see some design course corrections from the common themes expressed in these types of threads.

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