Warlords of Draenor

culhag wrote:

fuzzygeek wrote:As far as I've heard so far, there is no difficulty toggling, which means if you're working on Mythic progression, "that's what you're doing." So if you want to clear the farm content in heroic, you have to start over from the beginning?

In the Raids panel, they said they're thinking about implementing something to allow you to skip the wings you've already cleared once, to replicate the wings split we have with current LFR and Flex. That way we wouldn't have to clear everything from the start just to kill the last few bosses.

Yeah, Ion made a comment about "if you've cleared a wing X times you get a key so you can bypass to the end boss" or something along those lines. It wasn't clear if it was for that difficulty only, or if the "keys" would work cross-difficulty. I also wonder how many times it will require, such that some guilds will have to go back and clear wings to hit the magic number when they've progressed past that on farm.

In theory a simple switch "start from boss X" after the leader has Y kills of that boss could work.

The problem is that they're also trying to go non-linear, so there are no clearly defined progression points.

Worldie wrote:I think some people on this forum (and on the interwebs) automatically assume that every guild desires to do Heroic/Mythic difficulty.

I give you a hint, not everyone cares about the "very hard" mode, some people are fine with just clearing the game.

true, but not that much

i was in top guild since vanilla. then CATA, we moved to a more casual/no stress raid and it was fine for all of us.

if we can't do some HM by the end of a tier, no one will start it! and i don't see how it will be possible to recrut good player who accept to not do some mythic!

from my point of view, the new raid paradigm is pure garbage
i still will buy the new ext. i'm very pessimist about future raid activity (hoppefully, i don't care )

If your aim is to get to do Mythic, even just few bosses, you belong to that less than 10% of the playerbase. Not exactly the majority.

You'd be surprised of how many people around have the only aim to clear normal, or even to just clear flex.

Well, I think you need to view the lowering of time spent on heroic/mythic raiding development in context of the success of flex.

Flex has energised a huge part of the otherwise non-raiding or LFR using community to participate in raids. This is gold for Blizzard - it has the potential to keep a large number of the playerbase hooked into content.

The overall proportion of heroic/mythic raiders is still quite small. We are the most vocal and active, but we still pay the same subscription fee as everyone else. From this point of view, it makes sense to balance out the time developers spend on this content with other parts of the game.

Garrisons will also draw people in to the solo player aspect of WoW (although I'm personally hoping there are some great features to help draw people in to share your space too).

On the plus side, one raid difficulty and the changes announced at Blizzcon should also allow faster content to be released. This will be a direct benefit to mythic players that I think a lot of people are missing right now.

Paxen wrote:Jeesh. I'm not going to say what I think about 10vs25, only to restate the important facts:

20 fixed will make for a better game going forward. It will put severe pressure on 10 man guilds and suck for those that like to raid with a small group.

One thing that's worth flagging up:

The difficulty with fixed-size raids is that guild membership ramps up gradually. I'm quite sure, as a guild, we could grow to 20-man size - if it wasn't for the awkward fact that when we're in the interim portion of having 13-15 people or so, we're having to bench a *lot* of people. We can't take them because we're not at the size breakpoint to be able to take on the content, but if we consistently leave them out, they would - quite rightly - start looking to other guilds who *can* accomodate them on a regular basis.

I'd hoped Flex would be the solution to that, but Flex content is consumed too rapidly to hold peoples' attention for long. We're too good for Flex, right now, but too poor for Heroic.

That's what's interesting me about the changes for WoD; the fact that since current-level Normal (Heroic in WoD) *is* our level, but the fact that it's Flex means we can be a lot more open to including other people, holding their interest until we reach the key breakpoint to be able to enter HC content - which may even happen *before* we down the final boss, given our usual rate of progress (got our first Thok-Normal this week).

I think much of the guild, deep down, have always wanted to do the larger raids, but the difficulty in accomodating and holding onto guildmates in the gap between 10 and 25 has stood in the way of doing that. I'm hoping Flex Heroics will fill that gap nicely - not least because we have a number of Friends Of The Guild who could well be enticed over fulltime.

(That said, the emphasis on Flex is worrying me in one regard: We have some *terrible* players in the guild, too. Now, in the past we'd occasionally need to live with them to make up the numbers on a bad day, but in Flex with a larger workforce? As RL, I'm going to have to get a *lot* stricter along the lines of "This is progression content, and your presence is actively detrimental to us", which I'm not looking forward to... but it's necessary.)


Small aside that I may have missed in the mix: Have they said that the option for personal loot only exists in Flex raids, or will it be extended to Mythic as well? Temporary mergers of two 10-mans are somewhat viable if that's an option to avoid bickering over loot rules.

A mine in your garrison: Will this be a place where you put NPC miners, giving you a steady supply of ore? At first thought it changes how mining has worked in WoW, but then I realized that it brings it back to how mining works in the RTS. Instead of going around chasing vein spawns (which is, when you think about it, slightly ridiculous) you instead have all those minerals sitting exactly where they are, just waiting for somebody to put intensive labour into bringing them out. I think it could be a better way to handle mining, but how will it interact with the mining profession?

It sounded like you could do something of both. You could hire a mining follower and set them to mining ore, or you could hop into the mine yourself. (I seem to recall a specific quote from Blizzcon about being able to go into your mine and mine ore, but can't look for it right now.)

if you are currently a 10man guild, in the next xpack you can simply raid norma...sorry heroics until you get enough for mythic while you are recruiting and in the mean time learn the fights more and more and getting better and better geared for when you do step into mythic

not a perfect solution by any means but you can bring your whole raid team in (its flex technology, not difficulty)

The reason my team is a 10-man is because my wife and I don't want the headaches of having to organize a 25-man (or 20-man in the future), yet our raid team enjoys current "heroic" content. We led 40-mans and 25-mans in previous expansions and the headaches are not something we want to deal with again. To me, it feels like Blizzard is trying to trade their difficulty in balancing 10/25's for our difficulty in managing a larger roster . . . and of course expecting us to pay for this trade.

To be fair they never really got the balance right between 10 and 25 man difficulty I think. It took them 3 expansions to realize that hey...making good solid encounters and then balancing them properly between 10 and 25 man is nigh on impossible.

One of the things I am hoping for is that we can skip every single difficulty before starting Mystic. If Blizzard continues to insist on having raid difficulties then I at least want the option to skip all of them except the last.

Io.Draco wrote:One of the things I am hoping for is that we can skip every single difficulty before starting Mystic. If Blizzard continues to insist on having raid difficulties then I at least want the option to skip all of them except the last.

I think that would be a great idea. Mythic would probably still open a week later so that patch day bugs don't interfere too much in world first raiding.

Paxen wrote:

Io.Draco wrote:One of the things I am hoping for is that we can skip every single difficulty before starting Mystic. If Blizzard continues to insist on having raid difficulties then I at least want the option to skip all of them except the last.

I think that would be a great idea. Mythic would probably still open a week later so that patch day bugs don't interfere too much in world first raiding.

Which means you'd be doing the normal mode first anyway, just to get some gear/practice out of the first week.

Paxen wrote:A mine in your garrison: Will this be a place where you put NPC miners, giving you a steady supply of ore?

There will be node spawns in your mine, but your NPC will also be generating ore on its own (one of the slides has a mouseover showing "2 ore per hour" on one follower).

mclem wrote:Small aside that I may have missed in the mix: Have they said that the option for personal loot only exists in Flex raids, or will it be extended to Mythic as well? Temporary mergers of two 10-mans are somewhat viable if that's an option to avoid bickering over loot rules.

The latest word is Normal and Heroic raiding use non-personal loot, so you can trade loot around.

fuzzygeek wrote:

Paxen wrote:A mine in your garrison: Will this be a place where you put NPC miners, giving you a steady supply of ore?

There will be node spawns in your mine, but your NPC will also be generating ore on its own (one of the slides has a mouseover showing "2 ore per hour" on one follower).

Yep, and it sounds like the quality of ore, or type, will increase as your mine levels.

So many details yet to see...

I wonder if the garrison will effectively replace gathering professions on mains.

Unlike the farm, which you could do on a dozen alts if you wanted, seems that to maximize your garrison you will really need to be out in the world, beyond max level.

So now the big question is:

Can my gnome capture orcs and put them to work in my mine?

fuzzygeek wrote:

mclem wrote:Small aside that I may have missed in the mix: Have they said that the option for personal loot only exists in Flex raids, or will it be extended to Mythic as well? Temporary mergers of two 10-mans are somewhat viable if that's an option to avoid bickering over loot rules.

The latest word is Normal and Heroic raiding use non-personal loot, so you can trade loot around.

It is raid leader decision.

Say you're starting a pug you lock it into personal loot but doing a guild run you do standard loot.

The question is: Can the minions smelt that ore?

KysenMurrin wrote:The question is: Can the minions smelt that ore?

If you build a smithy, that minion can probably smelt it.

Paxen wrote:

Io.Draco wrote:One of the things I am hoping for is that we can skip every single difficulty before starting Mystic. If Blizzard continues to insist on having raid difficulties then I at least want the option to skip all of them except the last.

I think that would be a great idea. Mythic would probably still open a week later so that patch day bugs don't interfere too much in world first raiding.

Bugs are part of the deal when going for world first progression, and THAT has never changed. ( A serving of saronite bombs anyone? )

I would prefer not to have the delay, and I am sure world first guilds would prefer to deal with bugs then some delay like this.

Flex wrote:Say you're starting a pug you lock it into personal loot but doing a guild run you do standard loot.

Oh really? That's really good news.

I'm most curious about how deep they're going with cross-profession perks. Am I going to be able to have an engineering follower that I can use to make me tinkers? They mentioned access would be "limited." I wonder what that means.

One person in my guild has been fantasizing about having his own zeppelin forever. Shame they don't let us build airships ...

Edit: something else I want: avatar scaling (within reason). Add some visual variance, so we're not all the same goddamn height and build.

Paxen wrote:

Io.Draco wrote:One of the things I am hoping for is that we can skip every single difficulty before starting Mystic. If Blizzard continues to insist on having raid difficulties then I at least want the option to skip all of them except the last.

I think that would be a great idea. Mythic would probably still open a week later so that patch day bugs don't interfere too much in world first raiding.

I think they should make the [Ahead of the Curve: previous heroic endboss] achievements should allow you to unlock heroic mode in the next tier in week 1.

It'd still be "clear non-mystic" for Tier 1, but after that the guilds capable of trying mystic in week 1 will be able to.

Io.Draco wrote:To be fair they never really got the balance right between 10 and 25 man difficulty I think. It took them 3 expansions to realize that hey...making good solid encounters and then balancing them properly between 10 and 25 man is nigh on impossible.

finally something we agree on!

i agree also that it is stupid if they make the mythic raiders clear normal and heroic before mythic..at least after the first tier

for T18+, if you got the cutting edge achevement for a difficulty, you should be able to start on that difficulty
as an example, i got cutting edge on Lei Shen normal, which would be heroic in WoD, so i should be able to start on heroic in the next tier