I am going to add onto what
Srly has so clearly pointed out as a massive issue in its own right. It could be a separate post, but I think it belongs here because these are ripple effects that are, in my mind, pretty serious byproducts —
- From a new-to-Phoenix player's viewpoint, it's extremely difficult to template our characters with raid feather items when they require credit for actually doing a specific part of a given raid.
For example, my thane template is going to require 10 feather items when said and done ( multiple weps for switching ), but the last raid I went on didn't do a full clear ( due to our lower numbers ) and just went on a direct path to the Queen and King. Thus, I missed out on at least half of the feathers and the specific kill credit required for the pieces I needed. I don't have enough plat, being new, such that I can buy the feathers/credit from someone.
- Piggybacking onto that, from mid's perspective, it ripples into RvR and being competitive at the same rate as the other realms.
The time it takes from dinging 50 to being templated is much, much longer than the other 2 realms when feather items are required/desired. That directly results in so many of our realmmates being less templated and therefore less effective in battle—and that's on top of being underpopulated.
I think some additional solutions could be —
- Do away with requiring credit in order to obtain feather items altogether.
I.e., if you have the feathers, you should be able to buy whatever you want. This would be HUGE! And a bonus side effect in the positive would be eliminating the insane amount of "WTB x item, TG credit for 5p" spam in trade chat.
- Each raid should scale in difficulty/reward ratios based on the numbers being used ( this might already be a thing, but I haven't seen whether this has been confirmed or not ). Although, there's a potential here to also punish lower numbers again if the quality of drops scales with numbers—we'd be in the same boat there. Maybe we scale the amount of drops, not the quality? /shrug
In closing, I'll add one additional, slightly tangential point —
- My guildie and I would love to begin to lead mid DR and TG raids that are more time-friendly for the U.S. players, as most of our mid raids currently seem to cater to the EU/CET crowd from what I've seen, but I don't think we'd be able to get near the numbers required to do the raids in a time-efficient manner during our primetime, at this point in time. This means that the U.S. mid players that can't do raids in the 4-7 AM EST/CST/PST time range are at even more of a disadvantage.
Thanks for taking the time to read if you made it this far! These suggestions on top of Srlys' would go a long to in allowing all mids a fair chance to get to experience the raids and their benefits, as well as being able to template their characters at the same rate as the other realms.
P.S. I tried to bold and italicize to make the important parts stick out for easier speed-reading, but doing so inside of the list markup seems to be buggy or works differently than the editor suggests.