Forged Alliance

Hopefully Eric will be able to clarify (he's our guy on the ground!).

So in WoD, Blizz is cleaning things up in terms of the raiding stratification. My understanding is that there will be four tiers of raiding with flex scaling built into all of them except for the top one.

1) LFR -- flex scaling as the group size changes (raid fires up, people get kicked, people drop group, raid refills). Nerfed boss mechanics.
2) Normal -- flex scaling (so there really isn't 10 or 25 anymore). Standard boss mechanics (?).
3) Heroic -- flex scaling (so there really isn't 10 or 25 anymore). Extra boss mechanics (?).
4) Mythic -- fixed at 20. Heroic boss mechanics + hard tuning (?). Maybe even more boss mechanics (?).

I think the direction is a good one. It removes the weirdness of the world first race and server first races being fragmented. For guilds like ours which barely scratch heroic raiding if at all (we didn't touch heroic in tier 14, only got two bosses in tier 15, and are still working on normals in tier 16), mythic raiding doesn't affect us. What does affect us is that normal and heroic modes will scale which means that our 12 man roster can fit into the raid without people being benched (unless they suck or are toxic, hey likeabowss).

I think the decision to set the mythic raid size at 20 instead of 15 is genius because it allows two 10 man guilds to joint raid mythic once they are done with heroic progression. You may say, "well, what if a heroic guild is raiding with somewhere between ten and twenty five people on their roster?". Well, if your roster has say 12 people, I'm pretty sure that two of those people aren't as good as the other ten -- they would be the bench if the raid were merged with another guild's 10 man roster. If your roster has say 18 people, you may just want to recruit 2 more and get twenty that way. If your roster has 25 people, I'm pretty sure you can find 5 people that are lower performance to bench to make 20.

Maybe I'll stop pet battling in the next expansion to raid again, lol.

-HP

I'm also intrigued by the word that hit and expertise are getting dropped and movement speed and cleave stats are getting added. Woohoo, time to be carrying multiple gear sets. That, or maybe gems and reforging will now be considered consumables like potions and flasks.

New raiding requirement, you must bring stacks of gems to slot your gear for certain boss fights. JCs will make bank!

-HP

I saw those changes as well and am interested to see how they will go. My question to the guild would be, I assume we will progress as we always have, doing the normal, now dubbed heroic, level of raiding. Or will we go to doing the flex, now dubbed normal, level raids? Obviously we now will never touch Mythic unless we recruit heavily or team up with another guild.

I like a lot of what is going to occur this new expansion. 10 levels again is nice. Player housing is also nice. Updates to BGs, sandbox pvp, and updated character models are all things they have needed for awhile and is finally here.

However, I must admit that I hate the theme and story of the next expansion. We have just spent an entire expansion chasing Garrosh, cleaning up his messes, fighting the new horde, and now finally are going to defeat him. All this work only to have him escape, time travel back to old Draenor and have us chase him again to fight the old horde. A total cheat to all we have worked for in Pandaria. Plus time traveling back to pre-Outland doesn't advance the story or narrative of our own world and the events there. It derails us from the brewing storm that is the return of the Legion. This is a fanboy expansion for everyone who had a hard-on for Outland and TBC.

Will I still play? Will I still have fun and enjoy the plot there? Yes of course to both. I was just hoping for something more than this and am a bit disappointed.

Valdun wrote:Plus time traveling back to pre-Outland doesn't advance the story or narrative of our own world and the events there. It derails us from the brewing storm that is the return of the Legion.

I think that since Cataclysm was so poorly received, they decided that doing anything in the old world (our world) would no longer be possible (what new continent could they cook up?). I don't think they mentioned anything about the end boss of the next expansion at all. I actually think that the reason for going to pre-Outland is that without the subversion of the populace via Mannoroth's blood, the Burning Legion will have to settle for a standard invasion of pre-Outland in patches 6.1 to 6.4.

-HP

Oh yeah, no more hit/expertise. No more reforging. No more multiple gem sockets, meta gems, or socket bonuses. Morphing stats on gear based on current spec (my ret plate transforms into holy plate and back again). What is this hardcore madness?!

-HP