Today, Blizzard announced yet another raiding format and difficulty, labeling it Flexible Raiding. The idea for Flexible Raiding is to allow for a variable number of people to join in between 10-25 and introduce a new difficulty tier that will sit in between LFR and Normal mode, where encounters will adjust in difficulty (probably meaning boss’ life and damage) based on the number of people brought to the group. The lockout is separate from LFR and Normal mode, so you have the option of participating in all three. In addition, loot will have it’s own tier that again will sit between LFR and Normal mode in terms of quality and use the LFR per person method for distributing loot. Additional rewards found in normal and heroic mode but not LFR will be provided in this tier.
The end goal for this system was to cater towards a more social experience by focusing on the friends and family aspect. Like normal and heroic modes, Flexible Raiding will require a premade for people to participate. They used ICC as the primary example of where raiding probably was a the highest, citing that the difficulty level allowed more people to join. However, they mentioned that the lock outs and required number of people in those cases at times may have isolated raiders from joining while making it hard for some guilds to recruit in order to get the full 25 man groups together.
So right now, in standing back an examining the situation, what it seems Blizzard is doing here is simply offering another difficulty level for more casual players once again who are having trouble with normal mode at the moment and suffer from either an excess or limitation on players available for raids. It’s supposed to offer yet another experience for raiding, which seems to be betting on getting the same emotional appeal of ICC without completely eliminating the more challenging aspects of most raiding.
Like everything, there are pros and cons with this situation. Having read some of the comments from the forums, one of the immediate cons mentioned was min/maxing guilds where certain guilds might create a policy for having people do all three versions of raiding just to get as much gear as possible. I can certainly see this oversight on Blizzard’s behalf because of the way the lockout is not shared with normal or even LFR difficulties. Of course, the target audience is not supposed to be those types, but I’ll delve into that in a different section.
Another con is employing the LFR loot system. Many people really hate that system because of the horrible RNG associated with it. Considering that the experience is supposed to be made more social, associating the LFR loot mechanism really defies part of that social experience. At least if they use the random aspect of looting, they should at minimal allow for items to be traded since people are more likely to want to help their friends out in using this system. In the first iteration of LFR, the issues of harassment and item ninjaing were some of the main reasons why the loot system ended up changing. Here, people should trust each other. In short, I would preferring an experience that enhances bonding as people help each other rather than covet and brag about a completely random thing they won.
Next, one major issue that might arise is determining how many healers to bring. Pretty much two tanks are standard to raiding these days, but it’s the healers that end up being difficult to accommodate since they are more of a commodity. Also, will the notion of raid composition make a comeback seeing that the variable number of players can introduce a certain desirability among specific classes/specs?
On the flip side of things, I do think the overall vision is good. I think that games should in general offer variable amounts of flexibility. With raiding, you have issues of warm bodies for the most part which then breaks down into having people with good gear, knowing their classes and encounters. But most of the problem centers around having enough people so providing this extra tier is another positive attempt to bridge that gap to allow another audience to participate (once again).
Also, there’s some interesting side benefits that will come to this style in that there are no prerequisites with regards to gear for entering. In a way, it has the ability to allow good raiding groups to help fresh 90s or people away from the game to catch up (in short, be carried). I do like the idea of this methodology providing rewards that can normally only be seen in normal and heroic difficulty modes as well, which does, indeed, provide an incentive for people who might be jammed doing just LFR, have friends who do raid but do not want to devote themselves to the higher difficulty levels to get a little more.
Next, introducing another difficulty level that’s higher than LFR with the variable group size provides another training ground for people who might want to step it up later in normal modes. In the case of LFR, you get to participate in content but some feel it’s either far too easy or that it’s not a good bridge into normal modes. You really have no way for training towards normal modes with a smaller group so most end up just banging their hands for weeks on some bosses.
Another implication I want to point out is looking at how things will be adjusted overall. Since LFR will be considered the lowest difficulty level, how will it compare to this level? Will the overall difficulty level for LFR be further reduced to avoid situations like Durumu and Lei Shen where things might be a bit overtuned for an incongruous PUG? Or will the Flexible Raid system sit at the level of difficulty that we’re seeing with the current LFR level with the exception of some variable health and damage being outputted by the bosses?
Going back to an issue I pointed out earlier is the idea of the target audience. I think the intent is good but we will have to see how the execution goes. Part of the problem being thrown out there right now is how some guilds might enforce a min/max type of policy, making people do even more work than necessary. I would argue that the lockout period in all honesty probably should be shared with either LFR or normal modes. Honestly, this system sounds more aimed for what was normal mode raiding because of the premade aspect. So having it share the lockout period with normals probably makes more sense overall. If Blizzard does not implement such a lockout system for this, then I would say those guilds that are forcing people to do all three really should examine themselves as well as the people participating within those guilds.
At any rate, the overall idea sounds good but it’ll have to be a “wait and see” policy. The real key will be in how players who do participate in this aspect feels and whether or not the difficulty level is acceptable. For myself by comparison, I think they should bump LFR down about half a notch at least when it comes to certain encounters in Throne of Thunder then use a slightly more difficult version for this mode. That way you get the best of both worlds in each case.