by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

One of the most important factors of raiding has always been progression. Killing bosses after practicing the mechanics and feeling accomplished as you improve. With the introduction of Mythic difficulty and raids scaling to the amount of players in all other difficulties, raiding has never been as accessible. LFR serves the purpose of showing people the overall story and gives decent gear to start doing normal raids. The addition of the group finder helps anyone find a party for basically any form of content. From my personal experience this is a really good tool to get into groups and help fill out your own raids.

Blizzard designed two very good raid zones to form this tier. People have been asking for difficult fights and complaining that the top end content was too easy.  Just from looking at the world race we can see that this tier is a lot harder than recent tiers. The change to a unified Mythic difficulty helped the design team tune the fights to what they believe the hardest content should be. Even in Heroic I see an increased difficulty and many guilds that used to be able to easily clear the same level content in past expansions are struggling.

(Lets kill Beastlord, but first, a selfie)

Here is where the problems begin. Many Mythic level guilds have been falling apart because they can’t put in the hours that are needed to clear the content in the first few weeks. There are also the mid tier guilds that where able to step into what is now Mythic but now they can’t because they don’t have the rosters or it is simply too difficult. What I notice is that guilds almost feel entitled to what they had before which is creating internal conflict that eventually hurts them. The group finder also makes a lot of mid level players feel like they don’t need a guild to raid which just builds up on the problems most guilds are facing.

No one should feel bad about the content they are able to clear, this is why Blizzard created multiple difficulties. If the group you have is only able to clear Normal and Heroic that is still valuable progression. If you can’t put up the hours and work to get to the highest ranks of raiding, don’t feel bad for progressing slower. Guilds are an important aspect of the game. They create a feeling of community and cooperativeness, that is the base of an MMO. Killing a boss with a group of friends for the first time should always feel good, regardless of difficulty.