Honestly I liked what they did in ICC with the buff. The only way it could be better I think is if they had made the levels optional. Like, instead of on or off you get to chose 5%, 10%, 15%, so on and so on. Obviously some groups will just chose the highest percentage because it makes it easier (or the lowest because they want the hardest challenge). But it could let guilds that aren't overly hardcore still experience the content without having to wait for a blizz nerf-hammer to swing down. Plus if a guild has got a fight down (like, Marrowgar as the ICC example) then they can increase the difficulty for that boss then switch it back.
I don't know what you would do for loot. Since it would be a ridiculous amount of work to balance and edit the stuff so each tier had it's own iLevel but maybe just save the higher iLevel stuff for the hardmode. Maybe just offer more (as in quantity) drops. So if you do it on 30% buff you'd get 2 drops but if you lower it to 25% there is a chance you get a 3rd one. 20% is a guaranteed 3 and so on. Or whatever, just something to give an incentive to lower the buff without forcing them to.
As for achievements you could make ones for each buff tier (seems too much to me) or just give a standard achievement for beating a raid with any buff level, one for no buff, and then 1 for hardmode. Obviously just make the realm firsts and stuff for the "no buffs" option.
I think when you're dealing with WoW's exceedingly large player base you almost need more customization on difficulty or else you end up making the casual bitch that it's too hard, the hardcore bitch that it's too casual, or everyone bitches except for the people who end up right in the middle.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-07-03 01:38 am (UTC)I don't know what you would do for loot. Since it would be a ridiculous amount of work to balance and edit the stuff so each tier had it's own iLevel but maybe just save the higher iLevel stuff for the hardmode. Maybe just offer more (as in quantity) drops. So if you do it on 30% buff you'd get 2 drops but if you lower it to 25% there is a chance you get a 3rd one. 20% is a guaranteed 3 and so on. Or whatever, just something to give an incentive to lower the buff without forcing them to.
As for achievements you could make ones for each buff tier (seems too much to me) or just give a standard achievement for beating a raid with any buff level, one for no buff, and then 1 for hardmode. Obviously just make the realm firsts and stuff for the "no buffs" option.
I think when you're dealing with WoW's exceedingly large player base you almost need more customization on difficulty or else you end up making the casual bitch that it's too hard, the hardcore bitch that it's too casual, or everyone bitches except for the people who end up right in the middle.