Flex-Raid Type System

[ZeroHigh]

"Hey guys I have a suggestion, but I'm not gonna explain it to you, just google it!"

Luckily I played WoW, not sure how it'd work, but it'd be an added feature nonetheless. Waiting for that last slot to fill up can suck and in some cases never, then party disbands. Also sucks being the one left out in the cold lol.

Edit - spelling

[Noshpan]

"Flexible Raid is a new difficulty, added in patch 5.4.0 for World of Warcraft, that sits between Raid Finder and Normal difficulty that will be available for pre-made groups of 10–25 players, including any number in between. That means if a player have 11, 14, or 23 other people available for a Raid, they'll all be able to participate, and the enemies will scale dynamically."

That is the definition of Flex Raid for those of you who don't know.

[Lithera]

Unless the mechanics/mob count changed a fair amount, it would just mean taking however many extra DPS while still only rolling with 1-2 tanks and healers. Reminds me of Dynamis back in the day. 30+ person raid but you typically only carried 2 tanks and there'd be 1 healer for each party in the ally except the tank pt which had 2. You would have FCs that ran their two top tanks and any other tank main would be SoL or have to run on an alt class and never be able to Need gear.

[Fuddy]

I vote NO!

[MrKupo]

No. If you want to know why, just google reasons why this idea is disagreeable.

[Alavastre]

Just curious on what the community thinks of a flex raid type system? If you don't know what it is, just google 'What is flex raid?'. Of course there would have to be a raid tier that is a step above 8 mans, but if SE could hash it out, would you like it? Would you dislike it? What do you think the pros and cons are for you and your FC/LSs?

How about you spell it out for people.

Hey I want feedback on this topic.

No, you have to go read a book first.

Come on guys I'm super cereal.

[Codek]

You can't make Flex raids as challenging content. It just becomes impossible to balance out all the variables involved with such a system.

It's much better to just hope SE adds the ability to DF CT with 10 people instead.

[Abovan]

I play both this and WoW (yeah yeah, send your clever WoW insults to the recycle bin), and I was very worrisome about the flex system. In reality, this is how it turned out.

Our static raid team was running the raids in WoW. We had exactly 10 people on the team. (WoW raids are 10 or 25 people.) When the holidays came around with the flex system, we had a few people bow out for some family time, while others were off from School/College/Uni and had the time. The flex system let us take those people in, with normally the group ending up with 13-17 people, even with 3-4 regulars missing. The Content scaled up or down depending on how many people you had in the raid. The content designed difficulty was harder than the "Looking for Raid" system (similar to CT, large group of people who probably don't know each other and about the same difficulty), but not as difficult as a "normal" raid. Their loot rewards were also "in-between" the 2 tiers, so in FF speak, think of about item level 85 stuff.

This system let us raid the end game stuff, with the number of people that we wanted, but without the chaos of what a "Looking-for-raid" group would have, plus our rewards were better. When the team was able to take care of everything and resume normal mode, 10 man raiding again, we were able to take the experience from the "flex raids" which were closer in mechanics and difficulty than the "Looking-for-raid" groups, we were able to plow through the normal mode raids. Now, the idea that we were more prepared for the raid encounters or the overall lack of difficulty in WoW raids are up for debate in another thread, but the fact remains, by using a flex-raid system, our core group of friends were able to continue raiding, but were able to add in a few extra people of the team, and the game was able to dynamically raise or lower the health, damage, and mechanics of each fight to fit our group size.

The hard core raiders, doing the top tier content all the time did not use flex as a raiding mechanism, because they didn't need it for progression. For the people who were playing catch up, or those that had more people than what the raid allowed, it was a far better alternative that having players "warm the bench".

To complicate things in the WoW-world, the talk is to change the raids in normal and heroic (their word for Hard Modes), to use this flex system at the normal and heroic difficulty. Their extreme or "Mythic" mode will be a static 20 when this change goes in. Time will tell on how things go with this flexible raid size as the normal mode raid, but I'm on the side where it may work out as being the MMO standard moving forward, reserving the top tier content for a static size. I disagree with the idea that it's impossible to figure out the variables to challenge the raid on a variable size. We have computers and the study of algorithms to do that for us.

[raelgun]

wish the OP would of addressed the original post better, flex is amazing, people who dont like it are simply those who dislike wow and thats their only argument, flex removes the whole who goes in etc into a run, no more arguing, no more drama, your FC has 24 people, on the scheduled run, only 20 showed due to 4 people having real life issues, is the night cancelled? no, the run can still go ahead, and the boss HP and adds if any get scaled, the amount of debuffs that go out, gets scaled with this as well. the loot drops get adjusted by ratio. Tell me, why is this a bad thing ? if your FC wants to run coil, and has 10 people, yet coil is 8 man, 2 people will have to be sidelined, with flex, you can make it so, all can attend and the content scales accordingly, whats wrong with this ?

for those wondering, the current system in wow was an experiment to see if it works, hence its current difficulty, its a massive success, so much so, its the new standard for the future raids, the mythic isnt a 'standard' its designed for the high end only.
we can have the standard mode in FF14 as flex, no more issues, you can recruit over the minimum amount to take in, and still take everyone in, no need to cancel runs or leave people out.