Originally Posted by Slowthar
While I agree with the motivation -- to keep casuals interested by giving them a sense of progression/more to do -- but I think the biggest problem with what you're proposing is, as someone said, it so greatly detracts from the "epic" feel of the game, which is what has made the game so great to begin with.
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WoW is about interacting with many, many players. Be it in PvP, raiding, or what have you. The SCALE of the game is what makes it interesting--
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To you. Not to me. I play with probably 40+ people in a guild alliance, most of whom are doing the 25s. I have no interest in the 25s, and similarly in vanilla, the 40s. I've got the MMO part covered -- but the challenging content part is sorely lacking.
To re-iterate an earlier point, it's not how many PCs are running around that makes a fight epic; it's the mechanics of the fight. Ossirian was an epic fight.
Insofar as 5s not being supportable an an epic level, it depends on what mechanics Blizzard introduces. Something I would love to see in the next expansion is an Onyxia-style 5-man.
No lockout. No loot except world drops; only drops a trifling amount of gold. Upon zoning in, there's an NPC who yells STOP! ala the Black Morass NPC. Said NPC has 5 trinkets: a spell interrupter, a +healing trinket, a +threat trinket... not exactly sure what else. There are 3-4 trash pulls and then you reach a boss. Said boss has multiple adds; fortunately, your party gets 2 adds as well. All the elements of a difficult 10- or 25-boss, reduced to a test setting.
This dungeon should be tuned to a very high level of difficulty, as one of its primary purposes is as a testbed for large guilds. Now you don't have to give up a slot to the new mage; you can run them through this and see how they do. And if the night you pick this you don't have any melee dps free, no problem -- bring a 2nd mage, and have them pick up the spell interrupting trinket.
Add Mag cubes or Netherspite portals and this could quickly become very challenging. Anyone who wants to tighten up their game could run this 5 to practice: "man, my multi-target threat generation could be better. Who wants to run House of Pain?" "Me; my situational awareness last night blew."
I would love this. I don't want EZ Mode 5s. I want really challenging 5s and 10s. Lots of my friends get the epic feel from being with 24 or 39 other people: woot! I get the epic feel from being 10% to 20% of the solution.