What's flex?

It's a raid that scales as people join or leave. So there is no urgency to have everyone arrive on time. You can start with one amount as as more show up they can come too. It's brilliant and the next xpac will use it heavily. It means a lot less ppl will be left out from raiding .
 
It works like Ewoks said. You still need to have at least 10 people, but from there you can have anywhere from 10-25.

I hope they change it, because currently it requires less skill than normal raiding, and is looked down upon by a lot of normal raiders. The drops are not as good (lower item level, stat budget, and it says "Flexible" on it), and not all the normal mode boss mechanics are present. Having cleared both, I can say that flex is MUCH easier than normal mode. It's part of the philosophy of Blizzard that everyone should get to see everything, regardless of skill - but it's a step up from LFR (which I will never do again if I can help it!). It's a good way for people to see content that don't have time to join a raid team though.
 
If I understand it right in the expansion the flex will be the new normal. I do hope they make it the challenging content and not an easier version. I believe you can start with seven or eight to clear trash as long as the tenth or more shows up by the boss.
 
Flex is no longer a difficulty unto itself, but it is now the descriptor for the number of participants. Normal and Heroic are no longer 10/25. They are both Flex. Raid Finder will also be Flex though I am not sure how that would work in terms of when the queue would pop. I would suspect it will launch at 10 and then people could trickle in?

With the release of Warlords of Draenor, there will no longer be a distinct mode called “Flexible Raid”—because flexibility will be the underpinning of how most raiding works. Normal mode will scale flexibly to support groups of any size between 10 and 25, as will Heroic. There will no longer be “10-player Normal” or “25-player Heroic”—there’ll just be Normal and Heroic, and they will both scale to fit the number of players present. Even Raid Finder will benefit from the addition of our Flex scaling tech: no more needing to stand around staring at a boss waiting for your group to fill back up if someone has left.

The only place where Flex scaling doesn’t quite suit our gameplay goals is the most extreme difficulty of raid content, where razor’s-edge tuning would be impossible to achieve while supporting incremental raid sizes for each additional player. Thus, we are introducing Mythic difficulty with a single, fixed 20-player size, which will offer the pinnacle of raiding for the best of the best and the highest-quality rewards and prestige.
Click to expand...


Mythic is the new "heroic" and it is 20 man, non flex. It is also the only difficulty where you cannot invite cross realm participants.

Last but not least, Normal and Heroic will allow groups to be built out of Real ID and BattleTag cross-realm friends, and all raiding options will be on separate lockouts—meaning boss kills in Raid Finder, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic will not be shared between them, and you can kill each boss in each difficulty for a separate chance at loot each week.
Click to expand...

As noted above, each difficulty will have its own chance at loot. They have also done away with raid lockouts (though I believe this started to happen this expansion with LFR) and now you are just locked on each boss (loot locked, unable to loot)

The quotes are from this WoW Blog Entry, a good read for questions surrounding raiding as we move forward.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top