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I'll be dead honest here. I came from a raiding environment of 72 (EQ) when I started off in WoW. As an old officer in that environment, so much depended on mobilization, so much depended on game knowledge that it was crazy. EQ was marred by exploits of course (ShowEQ and it's kin being chief among them) but the actual raids were a blast. They were min-maxed naturally but if one of your 72 wasn't perfect it rarely mattered. You had focused progression raids and you had targets of opportunity that were mostly a matter of deployment and scouting (see ShowEQ far too often sadly). I loved it but it wasn't perfect.
In WoW the 40-mans seemed to hit it about right. There were obviously encounters that made that number far too restrictive but for the most part, you could indeed take a relatively random group of 40 talented guild members and engage content. Some nights you might call a raid off for lack of healers or tanks or what have you but in general, if you had 40 on you were good. I think back to the days when we raided "AQ32" for a while with some success.
25-person raids are far more restrictive. Given a present environment where there is substantial differences in dps class production, mandated tank numbers for many fights and wildly varying healing needs between fights, it has become too restrictive in my opinion. It's obvious that guild sizes will naturally fluctuate to where you hit Raid + X but when 'Raid' is a smaller number (and off time activities typically also need a solid tank and a decent healer) there is a lot more resentment from people that are sitting out. Additionally, one poor player stands out dramatically in a small raid situation and I'm not convinced that is always healthy. I myself have wiped raids and heroics and so on simply from bad luck or bad decisions. It will happen and it is extremely penalizing in the present design. Much of that will be lifted with trash respawn changes of course but I guess my point is that ideally raids should not require everyone to be at 100% focus level through the entire night every single night. Nor do they, that's a bit of hyperbole, but I think it is a little overtuned at present.
I think you hit it on the head with the .9^C concept for raid difficulty. In old-school 72 mans any encounter that required all 72 people to do anything was hard. It might be Boss X Emotes Y and you have to do Z (think Simon Says as an example) and it was a plain bitch to get everyone on the same page. Magtheridon v1.0 phase 2 was that writ small. The thing is, in order to challenge 25 really good people you need to move the bar to a point where 22 good people and 3 not so good players will be utterly defeated far too often.
The other issue of course is relative class value in smaller raid sizes and that's one I just can't touch right now. I do think there are massive gaping holes in the present system but there is just no way to articulate that without sounding like WhinyMage_02192. Of course these issues for the most part have nothing to do with my class even but from a min-max number-crunching point of view you end up with the ideal raiding guild being comprised of ~80 raiders willing to sub in and out for specific fights and willing to respec many times a week in addition. I don't care for that trend.
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