When it was originally announced that the raid size for full raids was to be reduced to 25, there was a decidedly mixed reaction by the community at large. Most guilds here were midway through Naxxramas, and probably having the time of their lives.

I'm not going to go into every reaction, but these were some things that people thought would occur due to this simple change:

1. Raiding content would be far more open to casual gamers. Casual gamers would be able to remain competitive with less effort.
2. Stacking wouldn't happen as much.
3. Encounters could be tuned tighter.
4. Current raiding guilds would have to split their roster, or make large cuts.
5... Probably a dozen other things I'm forgetting.

Remember when this change was announced? Most of us “hardcores” were vehemently against it. Most of the casuals were totally for it. Why? It IS indeed easier to field a team of 25 than 40. However, that is all that is truly easier. Casuals were gravely mistaken if they believed that 25 player caps would change the personal time demands of raiding; and likewise, they were mistaken if they believed 25 man raid caps meant easy (something that Xi spoke to in the old Magtheridon thread – this was a very real reason why casuals were so happy about the upcoming change).

When the change to 25 man raid sizes was announced, many of us who had experienced similar changes in prior MMO's, and FPS'ers or whatever else knew that cutting a group size does almost none of the things listed above. In fact (and always in hindsight), it does quite the opposite. [A side note, this is NOT meant to be about casual’s versus hardcores, only in how we got to this point… this is meant to provide a primer to improve things for everyone.]

Casuals today are near completely shut out of the current raid encounters. On our server this has manifested itself into dozens of guilds folding-up, and the overall server population dwindling, largely being held by PvP. This is obviously largely a fault of poor tuning, and lack of palpable content beyond Karazhan.

Why are most of the current encounters poorly tuned? Lack of a PTR? Is it due to the developers getting used to the change of 25 man vs. 40 man, and level 70 vs. level 60? Basically were the developers not ready for the number changes? Fundamentally, is it more difficult to design a raid for 25 players than 40? My assumption would be no – but perhaps it is more difficult to design encounters where each player is now twice as important – perhaps further segregating skill and execution level amongst diverse raid guilds.

For our guild, we’ve been able to drop almost all of the encounters that we’ve put time into in perhaps 4 hours or so, or between 5 and 15 pulls (I’m not saying they’re easy, that isn’t where this point is going). When the bosses finally die (aside from Gruul), there has been little to no cheering, as it just hasn’t felt epic. In Naxxramas, aside from Grobbulus and Heigan (for obvious reasons), people burst into the loudest cheers and excitement ever when bosses went down, it was thrilling – and come to think of it, this happened for almost all the other previous 40 man bosses… C’mon, Ragnaros (which is still clearly a heartfelt moment for many people as indicated in the “WoW feeling” thread below), Vaelastrasz, and C’Thun? The Naxx bosses generally took far more attempts, yet somehow weren’t quite as frustrating. The bosses in SSC/Eye all feel as if they have artificial and stupid elements to make them harder (like berserk timers that can be overcome by flasking… good god – at least half of that problem will be over soon).

At some point in reducing size, skill becomes a non issue – and “knowledge” is all a small gifted guild really needs. If walking in a circle was the only execution based element to a fight, it would be soloed 90% of the time by a single player. But have 40 people doing this in concert, and you have one of the hardest fights in the game (Thaddius – uh oh, time for a graph… 0.9^40!). The concerto of players, and the potential elements of larger numbers must be a factor in this simplicity.

Is this a purely tuning problem? Is it a 40 man vs 25 man raid problem? Isn’t it a fact that as you add more people, you inherently add the possibility of a more complicated design. 2 people can do exponentially more than 1, as can 4, and thus 5. The fights in Naxxramas were multi-functional and everyone had a purpose – there were many phases, many roles… it didn’t feel to me as if people were often “extras.”
With 25 mans, will it now be that the fights are simply… simpler? With harder execution demands due to the fact that half as many are performing?
You see, I’ve already asked a lot of questions… but my overall, and fundamental question is: What is the ideal raid size?

Surely it isn't 25 - just some arbitrary number.
But is it 40?
Is it 72? 100?
Is it Y = X-1 where Y = number of n00bs, and X = maximum raid size? (solo for the right-brained folks).
Should we cut this down to 5 or 10 man only? Should it be increased to Everquest's 72 or greater raid size?

What is the magic number for raids? Will they ever be changed again? Is this it for WoW (perhaps their nail)?

I enjoyed EQ’s 72 man raids. They were difficult, and they were multi-staged and required immense execution. The raids themselves (and not imo as a fault of the size of the raid) were much simpler than the modern generation raids of WoW. But couldn’t WoW have just as easily expanded the raid size instead of limiting it?

There are 9 classes now per faction, each with 3 reasonably viable talent trees (exceptions, exceptions, but lets not). That’s potentially 27 talent trees for 25 raid slots. We are at best at 2.8 of each class in a full raid. With all the hybrids finally coming into their very powerful own, wouldn’t it be nice to make use of the full array and retain the rest?

To me, I play these games to play with other people. I feel that the bigger the better, when it comes to raiding (Key point: up UNTIL the server can’t handle it comfortably – perhaps Thaddius ate our 40 man raids?). I like raiding amongst a large group of individuals, and having everyone overcome the same obstacles. For some reason to me the current raids feel like glorified Zul’Gurubs. They’re difficult for sure (I am not for a second questioning the difficulty of these raids), but they just feel empty. At what level does it go from epic to great, from great to good, from good to whatever/solo. I know this is a matter of personal opinion, and larger raid sizes are always for some reason a largely unpopular stance. Where is your arbitrary line drawn?

I suppose my answer would be in the ballpark of Douglas Adams’s, but I’m mostly curious how the rest of the community feels. I’m not sure it matters how silly your answer is, because a number like “300” isn’t exactly silly to me – its just not technically feasible. But I would like to know. Where is this game going? Are 25 mans really better? And what is the ideal raid size? Is bigger better – or is there a magic line?

I'd like to think, maybe foolishly, that the current content has been affected (effected?) by the same misguided intent that designers made Blackrock Depths and the Molten Core. The sprawl is breathtaking but very unnecessary.

Looking back on WoW vanilla I feel a lot of nostalgia about the frustration of wiping as hound packs respawned on top of the raid, or the rush of fighting through the lyceum, or the first time we were like hey what does [Binding of the Windseeker] do?

But things got better. BWL was hard but once you got over that hump, it was very rewarding. AQ was mind-numbing at points, but eventually got a place in my heart second only to the Nefarian fight. The single C'thun kill I was part of is still a highlight to me. ZG was fun and AQ20 was great also.

Naxxramas left my jaw dropped. So perfect, so balanced, so well-thought.

The current encounters are new; I have faith they will only get better!

But like I've always said... 40 man raids have room for at most seven weaknesses that you can make up for with 33 good players. It seems to me that the ratio is the same for 25 man raids.

Plus, if things don't get better, there's always Warhammer Online

I agree, 40 mans were much better. They allowed for more error, yet also had each person having there own role. For C'thun each person had to be standing in the right spot or else you would be chained. However in Gruul, there are only 25 people that have to spread out over a greater distance, is a bigger room, and even if you are standing 5 yards away from someone its no big deal, your not going to die. If blizzard was truely trying to tailor the game to purely casuals then they would make a limitless raid size, where guilds could literally zerg a boss down with no skill at all.

I agree though that 40 Mans were by far the best, as demonstrated in Naxx as well as other fights, and with the change to 25 man, there is still the same margin for error, while having less people in the raid.

I agree with a lot of your points, most notably the idea that the 25 man bosses aren't as 'epic' as the vast majority of the 40 man bosses (especially Naxxramas) were. The question is whether the cause lies in the fight design, raid size, or loot gained.

You've said that the new encounters took less time to learn, and yet are much more frustrating due to arbitrary enrage timers and other gimmicks. So what's the difference between the fights in Naxxramas and the fights in SSC/TK? Hydross, Morogrim, Leotheras, Karathress, Vashj, and Void Reaver all have a time based enrage timer. If I remember all of the elements of Naxxramas fights correctly, only Sapphiron (though I don't recall anyone actually having to deal with it), Faerlina, Patchwerk, Loatheb, and Thaddius had enrage timers - and going off of personal experiences these were (save Sapphiron) the most frustrating encounters to learn and kill in that zone. The overcoming of these arbitrary timers could be the cause of the frustration that so many players are encountering regarding TBC raiding. I know my favorite fight in SSC is the only one without a timer (though it is also the easiest).

The other possible option that you didn't mention was the loot. Whilst progressing through Naxxramas almost all of the gear gained was a rather large upgrade over all previously available loot and gave you something bright and shiny to hang around Orgrimmar/Ironforge with. Nowadays people have loot from SSC and TK rotting in their banks (which should be partially fixed in 2.1).

Personally, I feel that the root of our gripes are a mix of all of these things. 25 man content does indeed feel like raiding a glorified version of Zul'Gurub; but I'm unsure as to how one would decide the ideal raid size. In an interview with a Blizzard CM (I'm unsure as to which one exactly) he expressed that the reason for the switch to 25 man size was to make scheduling raids easier, and that they had essentially run out of ideas to make 40 man content as good as it had been. I have a somewhat conflicted feeling on the matter - I do think that Naxxramas was 'the ultimate' of 40-man content, and I would've been really disappointed had they come out with a new zone that wasn't as good.

I haven't experienced any types of raiding outside of WoW, but being from a FPS background I had an arbitrary number of people that I liked to play with at one time, so I guess I'd need to go play EQ to answer your question!

(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.

I would have liked to have seen the raids uncapped. Let the hardcore go through with 25 (or less), and let casuals get a zerg together. Why not have big public raids, the amount of loot is still the same? They'll have different problems with a lot of people on some encounters.

This has seemed the case to me as well. It's like we need 1-2 spare of each class to cover social obligations/internet outages/etc., but that means having 10 or so people sitting on the bench every night. This "bench player" pool is around the same size we had to carry for Naxx, and really just means that each player gets to raid a lower percentage of the time, because the ratio of raid spots to subs has gone way down.

I agree, with some of the old encounters, you could kill a boss, and be over joyed, and then come back next week and not be able to kill that same boss again, because it is still very hard. With almost all TBC raid encounters, or at least the ones I have seen, once you kill a boss once, you pretty much have it on farm status.

Size matters, but size doesn't dictate difficulty.

See they could have made encounters at the level of MC for 25 man, there is nothing in the number that dictates that a tank-and-spank fight with some decursing (at size appropriate rates) is any more difficult for 25 than for 40.

Well except of course some size mattering aspects:

*) 1 death or DC s 1/25th of the raid rather than 1/40th. The chance of it hitting a key role-player (tank) is almost doubled. But 1/25 isn't a huge chance and for a lot of us (I'd guess) random DCs are a rarity. So basically this means just a tad more crisp execution needed during learning. No biggie.

*) Group composition. It's harder to stack groups to function with fewer of each around. I found sorting raids oddly more challanging than for 40 mans, but in part there certainly was less synergy around pre-TBC which adds to this.

Stuff where one might think that size matters:

*) There is only almost half the number of people to execute a certain function. Meaning attention to a certain function is theoretically doubled. But realistically, in some encounters all cleansers needed to be on it even with 40 and the scale of number of people to be cleansed doubled with the number of cleansers, so it's kind of a wash.

More than anything difficulty is a choice. Did anyone notice that all content starting with 5-mans at 70 are tuned more difficult or lets say more technical than the old 5-mans in vanilla. You see many raid-like elements already popping up in Shettek Halls and Shadow Labs (sorry, just to tease Gurk), with add spawn waves, LoS trickery, kiting/positioning, uncontrolable aggro.

When I saw the 5-mans it was clear that Blizz wanted to step up the overall difficulty of group content. I think for most 5-man normals and heroics that works well.

The number thing actually matters much more in Karazhan. There variation in raid composition, gear and individual performance are really felt, because of often for specific things there are maybe 1-2 people in the raid who can do anything about certain things at all . There is no redundancy or fallback. Any DC will hurt during a boss fight. Composition has to be tight and stacking helps. Paradoxically this is entry level raiding and it really looks like that by putting a 10-man first Blizz meant it to be a sliding entry for new raiders.

But it certainly would have been possible to design Karazhan encounters to be less composition sensitive by requiring less specific abilities to be present in raid.

I think what happened is simply that the two goals: Stepping up difficulty, and making raiding more accessible through size (10 is very accessible) were too contradictory and difficulty won. That was additionally confounded by tuning. It seems like testing got to somewhere early in Karazhan. Most of these encounters were sensibly tuned (given the setup sensitivity starting already at Moroes, but that's encounter design). Aran already needed tweaks etc. But even R&J and Maiden saw changes after launch.

In some sense it feels like Blizz encounter designers and test raiders designed stuff that would be fun and challenging for them (i.e. people who have designed and played everything through Naxx and know the premise of the encounter they play, hence having extra head-start on the learning curve, sometimes even a lasting advantage because some mechanisms may never become fully apparent). Unfortunately that leads to encounters that are certainly not accessible to a lot of folks, even those with extensive experience.

The reason why I think that's probably not so far off is something that Kaplan wrote when the first complaints about various aspects of the TBC raiding game came in. It wasn't his response to the lack of backflagging or the pot situation. It was the response to encounter tuning. The casual raid leader asked why R&J was so hard (early he'd have the real potential to burst shot tanks). The response was that he "felt that Karazhan wasn't overly difficult". From an experienced raider perspective this may be true. From a casual perspective it wasn't. Since R&J got retuned maybe because Blizz too sees subscriptions canceled now with people giving specific reasons why - like encounters that are just too frustrating to win the challenge/frustration/reward triangle even if internal perception was that it wasn't too difficult from the designer perspective.

Unfortunately encounter design difficulty is just one thing that's hurting casuals (and some more progressed), attunement is the other, but that's the not topic here (and I've ranted about that ad nauseum elsewhere already). But it's also on the point of accessibility, which is the main trouble with raiding right now. It's paradoxical because WoWs entry game wins because it understands the accessibility point so well.

I do think Blizz either needs to find a sustainable solution to 1 and 5-man endgame that keeps people interested or make raiding accessible again. Otherwise I can't see how they can keep people interested if there is nothing to do and succeed with.

Why would the "hardcore" limit them selves to 25 if there was no cap?

I dont think a 25 man instance is necessarily less 'epic' than a 40 man instance. Basically it is up to the raid designers to make something of it. Take for example the Maulgar battle, not a very hard battle, but imo is not comparable to the ZG or Aq20 battles. It is much more akin to the 40 man battles. Well balanced fight, apart from a few roles(MT and mage tank) not very dependent on who is doing it. We did it with lots of mellee and with lots of casters both worked fine. So yes you can make quite decent boss encounters with 25 that are not too critical on who or what (Mag is another example, though still some tuning required).
Sadly enough this is one of the few 25 man battles (not been to TK yet) that i feel have the right mixture of things to do, balance between randomness and execution and no obvious enrage timer. The devs have for the rest not been very creative; too many bosses are imo : "lets do random ability X and Y and Z and hope for the best, and lets add an enrage so the only tuning we have to do is tuning the enrage timer". There is no structure in the encounter, no logic.
Basically the idea of 25 man is not that bad. If the devs have the creativity it should be easier to organize than 40 mans. But I have the feeling that atm they dont have a real philosophy when designing encounter apart from "needs to be hard enough".