Granularity in Raid DIfficulty

There was a time when any given raid had only one version. Blackwing Lair was always meant for 40 level 60 guys. Serpentshrine Cavern was always supposed to have 25 people at level 70. Wrath introduced first two different sizes of its raids, which also corresponded with higher difficulties. Naxxramas, Eye of Eternity, Obsidian Sanctum, and in 3.1, Ulduar, all had a 10-man size and a 25-man size, with the difficulty and rewards of the larger raids tuned a little higher.

Ulduar also introduced the notion of hard modes - tougher ways to fight the bosses that would yield higher-quality loot. In Trial of the Crusader, this became the true "Heroic Raid" mode which exists today.

The latter two raids in Wrath had four difficulties - 10 man, 10 man heroic, 25 man, and the granddaddy, 25-man heroic.

Cataclysm shuffled things around a little, tuning 25-man raids down to be ostensibly equal in difficulty to 10-mans, but rewarding proportionally more loot to reward the extra effort needed to organize them. Tier 11 and Firelands existed within two difficulty levels - normal and heroic. 4.3 brought a new wrinkle to this, bringing back a third difficulty with the Raid Finder. Raid Finder difficulty is there to compensate for the impossibilities of being well-coordinated with a fluctuating PUG.

In many ways, Raid Finder feels very much like the 10-man difficulty of Wrath - a simpler version of the raids that you would generally not have too hard a time on, and a great way to introduce someone to the experience of raiding.

The thing about game difficulties is that there are many ways for someone to feel satisfied with their experience, but I imagine most people will play a game on the easiest difficulty. Sure, challenge is fun, but if your motivation is more to see what it's like to topple those bad guys, you'll probably find it satisfying even if it's not as difficult as it might otherwise be.

The Raid Finder difficulty makes downing those bosses very doable. After most people have learned the fights, wipes are unlikely (except on particularly tricky fights, like Lei Shen or Dark Animus.)

I think there's definitely a place for an easy raiding difficulty in WoW. The amount of time and effort it takes to be good enough (and geared enough) to raid even in normal mode is fairly substantial. I haven't run a heroic raid fight on heroic at the correct level since the Gunship Battle in ICC, but considering how difficult Normal mode has been for the last two expansions, I have to imagine Heroic is pretty damn brutal.

Raid Finder would seem to fill that niche, but there's a big, inherent flaw in it: it only works for groups put together using the Raid Finder. If you run RF, you need to PUG, and for many, PUGging defeats the fun of raiding. (I actually don't dislike running RF, but running with a guild is obviously preferable.) This means two things - you don't get the playful banter or the relaxed pace of running with your guildmates, and you're also locked into the 25-man raid size for the purposes of making role-balance as favorable to filling up your slots (it sometimes amazes me how few people run tanks.)

It seems to me that what Blizzard needs to do is create an Easy mode for raiding, that you can set your raid difficulty to should you need to. The great thing is that the groundwork has been laid. If you were to set your difficulty to 25-man Easy, you'd literally just get the version of the raid that you get in Raid Finder, but with each branch connected the way that it is in the normal and heroic versions. Ten man would have things scaled down the way they are on normal and heroic, but surely there's just a coefficient they can apply to things like healthpools that would do the trick.

This solves many problems, some large and some small: It lets casual or beginning raiders see the content without subjecting themselves to the unpredictabilities of RF. It allows you to forgo the RF loot system if you so choose (it's been good to me on Jarsus, and works better than Dragon Soul's Need+, but all those money bags can get a little sad after a while.) It also allows you to go back to old raids to pick up the Raid Finder version of various armor pieces for transmog after you outlevel the raids (even though I prefer the normal-mode version of Mage tier 13, I have almost a complete set of RF-version, except for the gloves and belt. I'd love to be able to get matching pieces, but alas.)

Don't get me wrong - Raid Finder is a great tool. But for those of us who really prefer raiding with the guild, but can't seem to make a dent in normal modes for whatever reason, this seems like an obvious solution that could be easily implemented as part of a new expansion (or even a patch - the raid finder itself came in with a patch, after all.)