The gang raids lairs.
To me, raiding in World of Warcraft is supposed to be fun first. My favorite memories in game are screwing around before pulls, clearing trash and the social chatter of having 10+ friends all in the same voice playing a game together, sure we mostly lock it in during the pull, but if a silly mistake happened you bet its going to be laughed about. And that’s my raid lead strategy, fun per hour, and with the new addition of lairs in 12.1 I think blizzard is giving myself as a new raid lead and the skill tier around me more opportunity to keep having fun raids, killing bosses and laughing.
Patch 12.1 is bringing everything you'd expect—a new raid, dungeon, zone, class tuning, and more—but the feature I'm most interested in is Lairs. (Although discord/guild chat integration which I am veeeeery excited about as a perpetually online person, discord is my only true social media weakness but more about that later).
World bosses have long been an awkward loot piñata, mechanics rarely matter, it’s a zerg fest and often I’m only doing them when quick injection of item level is needed. With lairs, this is about to change I believe and for the better, at least for the raiders on my skill range. So, what is the change? The world bosses are going to become instanced content now with different difficulties. As of this post: (https://www.bluetracker.gg/wow/topic/us-en/2317811-midnight-curse-of-ulatek-ptr-development-notes/) the lairs will have a “scaling difficulty up to flexible mythic with 15-25 players.” This we currently are seeing with Sporefall and its boss Rotmire, which has been a fun end of season boss and a great way to keep people showing up. What really excites me though is, if you think of world bosses as a raid now, suddenly we should get this single raid bosses pretty frequently. Obviously it’s up to Blizzard so not every patch per say but still new content that is also meaningful is a welcome addition I expect in most people’s books. I think the big take away is its another form of raiding content that’s accessible to a group that is in the middle of things. Not Ahead of the curve, certainly not Cutting Edge, but in that comfortably parent/casual sweaty where there is some “aspirational” content and more of it in a scaling difficulty that helps keep a raid moving along for that weekly ping. As a new raid leader, having a bite size thing to learn with too can feel less daunting, I just need to know one fight well enough to explain to strangers. Or if you’re struggling on that eight boss raid and you need a breather, let’s take a break and go knock out a lair we know we can kill. To me raiding is supposed to be a vibe, a piece of content people hopefully are looking forward to because its fun. When you are accidently progging in a heroic pull after pull on a “fun night” you can feel the voice chat morale sink.
Just ran into this with Sporefall myself. Normal is a cake walk, heroic has tight DPS windows that we just couldn’t overcome and now my group is suddenly heroic prog when the intention was to have a good time, maybe even less then sober. The group stuck it out but it’s a new guild, with a new raid leader and I could feel the motivation fading away, you know when the jokes suddenly stop coming and only the raid leader is talking because things are just going sideways. Everyone knows that moment and to have something to bounce to that can help me win back the raid morale is so useful in not a mechanical way, just a vibe way. I want raiding to be fun AND I want my raiders to come back next week. If that means more laughs, more boss kills, and more people logging in next Thursday, I'm all for it.
