How the new raid tier system is almost perfect

[Ghyn]

Just wanted to briefly share my thoughts on the new tier system that was brought with the Amdan Dammul raid and I'm posting this in hopes that future raids will not have the one big flaw that I think this system has:

I've done the newest raid on every tier and I would consider myself an experienced raider in lotro at this point, so I thought I would share my thoughts on this as I feel that my thoughts are shared by many in the raiding community.
First off I want to say that I think the damage and health scaling seems pretty much on point for this raid. Tier 5 damage and health doesn't feel ridicilous and it doesn't feel too low either, so I think the scaling is on point.

Tier 1 - Accessible for everyone. Low on challenging mechanics which means pretty much any type of player can experience the raid story. This is very good for the lowest tier.
Tier 2 - Adds a few mechanics and requires basic knowledge of classes and raiding, but still accessible for many players. This also seems good.
Tier 3 - Similar to T3, but adds a couple of mechanics. Requires a good team who knows what they're doing. Also good.
Tier 4 - Introduces unique mechanics from the other lower tiers. Requires a strong team who knows what they're doing. Very good implementation in my opinion.
Tier 5 - Introduces no new unique mechanics other than the brand new "No more than 5 deaths threshold" It is tier 5 that I have the biggest issue with.

I really enjoyed the initial realease of tier 1,2,3 for this raid and it felt like a good time of progression to prepare for tier 4. When t4 released it was fresh, added new mechanics to work out and felt challenging. I think most people know that there is a progression discord keeping score of how the different kins do and this time the final tier 5 was to be counted as the real progression. The raid on t5 was one shot instantly upon release and beat by multiple kins in the following hours.

Here is where my suggestion comes in. I believe tier 5 should be very hard. Progression should last a long time and people won't mind if tier 5 is borderlining impossible to beat. The tier 5 in it's current form was good, but in my opinion lacked those few extra challenging mechanics. Tier 5 being pretty much a tier 4, just with more morale/damage and a death threshold is not challenging enough in my opinion. I think the no deaths threshold is a good introduction to tier 5 raiding and should stay, but there has to be some mechanics that are unique for tier 5 that are very challenging.

Stuff that comes to mind are for example on boss 1 you could introduce some new add similar to the energized whelpling from anvil or have mammoths spawn two at a time when they arrive. There could be catapult shots being launched into the arena forcing people to coordinate and move around. Boss 2 could have a one shot mechanic if you don't get away with eyes or the command mount. Phase 2 on boss 2 could have 3 warg adds spawn with each add summon or even have 3 wargs spawn from different doors. These ideas are just off the top of my head.

The bottom line is I don't think you need to be scared to make tier 5 "too hard" and I hope in future raids and other instances tier 5 will have unique challenging mechanics and rewards. I want to finish off with saying that this "new" tier system has been brilliantly implemented and has been a big success with the one exception of tier 5 not being challenging enough in my opinion.

[Elmagor]

Main problem... where we can find people for T4-T5 when most of players can't complete even T2?

[Nicname]

Since I haven't yet completed t4+t5 I can't say wheter your critique is justified but from my point of view the difficulty for t1-t4 seems just right, as you just explained. Though the t5 progression (from what I observed) seemed pretty sobering. Like many of the big progress raid kins completed Tier 5 in a short frame of time. Pretty impressive still, but I guess many felt like "Alright, that's it?"
But yeah, as you said: T1 is just perfect for casual pugs, T2 often require somehow good players but not like on a highend POV. T3 is just completable by pretty good pugs and raiding kins/groups. T4-T5 just for really good and competitive players that know each others playstyle and know how to adapt.

All in all it feels a lot more fluent in terms of Tiers than Remmorchant does. The threshold between those tiers are not that huge like in Remmorchant.

[Contrarious]

Main problem... where we can find people for T4-T5 when most of players can't complete even T2?

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[Brinuw]

While I think story wise Threshold is a tad lacking, mechanically I like the fights except for a glaring issue. The same issue plagues much of Remmorchant as well; constant DPS checks.

Speaking only of t1 and t2; in this regards T1 is laughably easy in terms of mechanics and required dps which is good because T1 is advertised as "story mode" and if your group can keep up with killing the wargs in boss2 then you run no risk of failing as there is no enrage timer.
Now the issue comes with t2 where mechanics get added in and moral pools get doubled. This once again adds 2 steps of difficulty to a group that may be just getting their toes wet into the raiding scene and the idea that t2 Threshold is comparable to t1 Remmorchant is misguided as the dps checks for t1 remmy aren't as high as t2 threshold. On top of all this both fights are given hard enrage timers on top of their soft enrage mechanics. If your group is managing to kill adds while doing minimal damage to the boss then you'll still fail as after a time the boss just punches you to oblivion. The skill curve is once again front loaded rather than back loaded and thus as the higher the tiers go the dps requirement gets less rather than more.

Maybe my perception is skewed as I am on a server with a less prominent raiding scene compared to others but I can count on one hand the number of groups that have completed even t3 threshold and very few pug groups are able to pull in the dps to handle t2.

[WhiteWolf21x]

As others have stated, the biggest issue with t4/t5 is simply the number of players that have completed the tiers. I personally cant justify spending dev time on something that only a few hundred players complete. Especially since Lotro has a rather severe lack of content issue.

What I think Lotro raiding needs more than anything is more boss encounters.

Since Throne in 2016, Lotro has had 5 raids, 19 raid bosses (with a small raid coming in the summer.)
In comparison, since 2016 WoW has had 11 raids, 89 raid bosses (with another 10 boss raid on the way.)

Now obviously Blizzard has a larger dev team than SSG, so I'm not suggesting that SSG try and match Blizzards raid numbers. But 5 raids, 19 bosses is way to small to keep any sort of raid community alive over a long period of time. Sure players will come back to try the new content for a month or two, but keeping a large portion of the player base interested in consistently raiding requires a large variety of encounters, not more difficult versions of the same few encounters.

What I would like to see would be less of a focus on tiers and more focus on actual boss encounters. So for Gundabad I would aim for a large 8-10 boss raid, with 2, or maybe 3 tiers. Then follow that up with a smaller 3-5 boss raid later on. This way players will progress through the raid itself. Sure, the top groups may clear it quicker than others, and there may be less of a challenge. But a majority of player base will slowly progress through the raid instead of completing the same 2-4 boss encounters 25 times on 5 different difficulties.