Flex-Raid Type System

[Macka]

Just so I'm clear on the scaling part, it scaled itself between the two tiers of gear. It wasn't a random item level number.

I'm saying I think the ilevel of a dungeon or raid should be locked to a certain ilevel. Know how mad I would be if I got lower teir gear after weeks of raiding. I'll rather not get any at all.

[KoujiMoreno]

I'm saying I think the ilevel of a dungeon or raid should be locked to a certain ilevel. Know how mad I would be if I got lower teir gear after weeks of raiding. I'll rather not get any at all.

Of course you would get a lower ilvl item, the dungeon itself is less difficult than the tier above it.

[Macka]

Of course you would get a lower ilvl item, the dungeon itself is less difficult than the tier above it.

That's why my vote is a no thank you.

[KoujiMoreno]

That's why my vote is a no thank you.

Alright, thanks.

[Fuddy]

I vote NO!

[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.

[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.