◊ Kyth

(edit) for the request below about stating your role:

I was an officer, raidleader, and heal lead (all at once, whee) in EQ. In WoW I am merely a class lead, and very much enjoying the low level of responsibility =).



I agree, as do other members of my guild. Although it's made "better" because we're still doing Karazhan clears along with the other content so 25-man feels epic in comparison, I've still heard comments about missing the sheer size of the 40-mans.

But it still feels small.

Maybe it's just something about the "mob": needing to feel like you're accomplishing something with "many" people rather than "a bunch of" people, and nothing more complex than that. Although the observation about room sizes is good. Gruul's room just doesn't seem that impressive -- but sized for 40 it might have.

I play these games because I enjoy raiding -- I dislike Karazhan because it feels like a grown-up 5-man, not a trimmed down raid (the 20-mans however did feel much more like trimmed-down raids.) A friend of mine, after hearing me vent about a particularly frustrating raid night, said "Well I play these games to have fun, that's why I just level alts and do 5-mans." I said "So do I -- my fun just involves 39...err, 24....other people. And sometimes these other people are annoying! But it's still the best fun I know in the game."


Either way we're definitely seeing what was *my* fear about the "smaller raid sizes makes for better play for casuals!": It's much harder to maintain a solid raid roster that allows for real-life while not having so large a roster that 80% of the time, you have high-attendance raiders having to sit on the sidelines. Rotating people through only goes so far in solving that problem.

Cancelling two days of raiding one week because we didn't have enough tanks due to vacations happening to overlap was.... frustrating.

Hybrids help, but only to a degree, as there's still fights requiring particular classes (or particular people with particular sets of resist gear), and even if you can use hybrids you can still end up running out of people if you try to maintain a trim roster.