• World of Warcraft Flexible Raids - Even More Noob Friendly?

    by
    HI5
    Published on 06-07-2013 11:00 AM
    8 Comments Comments
    As we all now, raids in World of Warcraft have been slowly nerfed for many years now. First the number of players required for a raid has been reduced to 25, which obviously made things easier for less experienced players who didn't know how to operate in large groups. Next we got Raid Finder allowing players with very little experience to beat all raid bosses even if a few of them are completely afk, but apparently, that's still not enough.


    With the upcoming WoW patch 5.4 Blizzard is planning to implement new feature called Flexible Raids. The idea behind flexible raids is to allow a group of players (either guild mates, random people or Real I.D. friends) to party up in a group of 10-25 players and enter a raid placed somewhere between Raid Finder and Normal difficulty. Unlike in Raid Finder, players will have to invite others to the raid group by themselves.


    Another significant change is the number of players needed for raid, in Flexible Raids your group won't have to be exactly 10 or exactly 25 players large - you can do it in 11, 14, 18, 22 number of players, or anywhere in between 10 and 25. Raid difficulty will be scaled automatically every time someone joins or leaves your party.


    As Nethaera (author of the post) has announced, they want to give more social experience to the players, which basically means more chats in the middle of fights, more time to eat a sandwich, or even watch some TV during the raid.


    So the question is, does this actually makes any sense? Players that are already slacking in raid finder, will slack even more, so wipes will most likely happen even in Flexible Raids. Players who are actually trying to contribute to the fight will only get more annoyed, which is also already happening in Random Raider. However, allowing people to continue a raid without having a full group might force people to try their best or they'll get kicked.


    What do you think, are Flexible Raids completely useless idea, or does it actually makes some sense and might they be usable for casuals? Make sure to voice your opinion in comments below!


    Original post can be found here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/10175200/
    Comments 8 Comments
    1. Laykith's Avatar
      Laykith - 06-07-2013
      I think its a good idea and will mostly be used for guild recruitment cross-realm and the major thing is that its a good place to start becuase all the mechanics will be as normal and not like raid finder.
    1. Sklug's Avatar
      Sklug - 06-07-2013
      While I think the move from 40 to 25 was actually a good move, I agree that raids have been dumbed down a bit...

      LFR is almost too easy, but it's not about the challenge it's just about letting everyone see the end-game content. Which honestly, imo, completely destroys the uniqueness and a lot of the motivation to become an end-game raider. However, blizz is trying to appeal to all...

      I don;'t know really... I think WOTLK had the healthiest balance of all in regards to raids, with normal/heroic separate lockouts as back then I was mainly a pvp'r but could break into Naxx fairly easily, and it was fun. Uld was challenging, but fun... and who can forget ICC? Everyone wanted to do that. It was a much more rewarding experience that even for a non-raider type like me I was willing to slowly progress over the weeks and months as Naxx slowly got easier with the 5% buff every couple of weeks.

      LFR has removed any incentive I ever had to get into "normal/heroic" raids. As such, I clear an entire new raid in a week whilst sleeping through it since they are so easy.

      Now we have this new "flexible raid" thing. I am not going to say it's bad, but I am just going to add that it is not doing anything that helps or fixes the entrenched problems of WOW since Cata days. LFR only came out in Cata, imo, because in Cata there was litereally NOTHING to do in the game. It was the most boring end-game of not just WOW, but even some of these newer MMOs that suffered from terrible end-game or lack of end-game content, and as blizz has admitted, due to the fact they re-did the old world and maybe should've focused more resources on lvl 85 content. So, what did they do? They attempted to introduce more content by allowing Everyone to experience raids in LFR.

      This continued the random encounter, lack of consequences from dbaggery behavior, and perpetuated that to get the best "bonuses" in-game you had to be anti-social. But blizz constantly says "LFR is so popular!" Well ya, because it's the easiest route to get gear... People will always take the quickest route to getting gear. LFR has only ruined the game further. I only relate this to the new system because while you form your own groups, it is still going to be a dumbed down system... How easy will it be, only slightly harder than LFR, where half the team can AFK and you can still easily kill every boss?

      Sure, we might start seeing the spams for "LFM Flexible Raid (FR) forToT" in trade, but it could just turn into the new LFR where everyone joins, doesn't say a word, and snoozes as much as they can through the fights... the only difference is some random person out there had to take the initiative to bother filling up a raid.
    1. hackerlol's Avatar
      hackerlol - 06-07-2013
      Good to have options.
      So far this Expansion has been a million and a bit percent better than the previous expansion overall.
      +1.
    1. reptyl's Avatar
      reptyl - 06-07-2013
      What's wrong with raids being dumbed down? Looking for retards is simply painful, but so is getting 10 players for a raid in my guild.. now we can recruit and never risk having too many online since we only raid for the social part of it anyway.
    1. Gentoo's Avatar
      Gentoo - 06-07-2013
      It's invite only, and you say people will slack even more.. Did you miss the part where it said you have to invite the people to go? I mean, you're the one that typed it above. I also see no problem with difficulty scaling with the number of people in the raid, it's about time really.
    1. Cromon's Avatar
      Cromon - 06-07-2013
      I love it. And i dont see how this is related to "noob". Raids were not harder in previous expansions, they just took a hell of a lot more time for annoying things. Its not easier doing a raid with 25 people instead of 40, it just was a pain in the ass having 40 people in a raid. Half the time you were wating and doing nothing even in raids where you knew the plan and all.
    1. shawn619's Avatar
      shawn619 - 06-11-2013
      "Barbarian has joined our world. Diablo's minions grow stronger."
    1. Pandaslol's Avatar
      Pandaslol - 06-12-2013
      I don't play this game to make friends; I play to slay dragons and collect the phat lewts. And like Cromon said, raids were definitely not harder in previous expansions, lul.