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 would say that 40 man raids for true endgame were probably the best for this game. Since WoW is based on parties of 5, 40 man raids would allow you to have 8 different parties and each of these parties were more easily customizable due to more room and more people.

As an example, back in the day, 4 hunters and a shaman were an average raid group except now that really cannot happen. Fights are based on 3 of each class and 2 of one which can totally throw off a party and leave some people in odd spots.

Could they make a 25 man Cthun? Sure they could. But to do so would have made them shrink the room considerably and that alone would have made much of the epic feel go away.

People said that with 25 mans, they could make content rely on each person's contribution more but they did this before as well. Naxx was the raid instance. With the exception of a few stupid fights (Loatheb), a persons contribution was easily noted in that when he wasn't up to par, it showed.

If you cannot time worth anything you died to Heigan. If you couldn't follow an arrow you died and most likely wiped the raid in Thaddius. Hell, even Grobbulus had some elements, blow up in the wrong spot and it could be GG.

Blizzard had almost everything right in Naxx and they threw all their experience away to start over with 25 mans. Will they ever make 25 mans as grand as Naxx, probably. But they could have more easily had decent content now if they just stuck with the 40 man routine.

I believe that some peoples arguments that a 40 man raid was either too hard to maintain or you had to raid with people you didn't like. This is true in some instances. But that isn't to say that along with 40 mans. Blizzard shouldn't have made more 20 mans. The problem it seems was Blizzard was afraid of Mudflation. They didn't fully understand that it was going to happen regardless so they made instances with blues that were still less then MC gear. This is what hurt for casuals and such. They couldn't advance their characters because Blizzard was too afraid to trivialize MC.

20 Mans were decent for casuals and smaller guilds, 10 mans would have been good as well. Truly Epic End Game Content should have been maintained 40 mans.

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!

Most of us talk about Cthun/Kelthuzad/4horsemen when it comes to good boss design, but those combats are where guilds fell apart in wow. I dont think any guild disbanded because of patchwerk; but one guild I know fell because of ragnaros, one because of Sartura, one because of Cthun, one because of 4horsemen, and one guild I was in disbanded when we were practicing heigan-thaddius.

Blizz most definitely wanted to make these less often because many people quit the game when their guilds disbanded. A 25 man boss would be a lot easier to conquer; but still harder than Magmadar for example. For casuals it kinda backfired yeh.

To the question from the op; 40 was a nice number, but I like 25 too. My server had 2 guilds who killed Kelthuzad, with 25 man raids and classes we have right now, it could have been at least 6-8, and more would have seen the very high end. One drawback I see now; most of us would agree that a raid consists of the leader and 24 others, finding that leader is a lot harder than finding the rest; again for Kelthuzad, an 100 man combat would make 3x the people see the high end. To me, the magic number seems to be about leaders, more than the rest.

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.

Altough I have never seen the Naxx encounter on my priest and neither on my warrior due to attunement. I have to say I do like the 25man instances.

Karazhan, once you know the encounter you breeze through it, blink your eyes when a shaman says he has a green that is better then an epic and wonder about it. I do like the instance but the trash can be mindnumbing at times.

Magtheridon and Gruul, both encounters I like and once mastered can be done easily over and over. Once more 1 issue I have with it, only 1 token drop. But that will be changed after 2.1.

My guild just set foot in SSC and downed the Lurker last friday and it was a thrill I enjoyed. People need to be on the ball, focus and do the right thing. I do feel that with 40 people if someone messes up it will screw up the whole encounter while with the current 25mans you have the more dedicated people in the group. It's a shame other people have to sit out and that they can't enjoy the encounter.

Fun wise I would say 40man instances. Dedication wise, 25man is good for it.

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.

It's odd, for us it's the other way around. We almost always put everything in Vanilla on farm straight away. Only select bosses needed what we called stabilizing (Vael if we had new tanks in raid, Twins if we had a new MT, 3 bugs if we had a new interrupter group, Razuvius if we had a new MC priest). In all cases it was because new key role players needed to relearn the fine print of the encounter.

In Karazhan we had to cancel raids at Moroes and Curator (both "farm") because of raid composition and certainly had extensive re-wipes at Aran. Both Maulgar and I hear Gruul needed extensive "stabilizing", meaning lots of rewipes before a second kill gets registered.

But I guess this is how experience can vary.

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".

To answer your question directly, if it were up to me, I would keep tuning where it is right now(minus bug fixes) and up the raid size to 30 with the flask nerfs. 5 people could easily compensate for no flasks(since they would likely be all dps classes or at least 4/1). For more comments, continue reading.

Also, Nothing will ever compare to that first ragnaros kill that I recall in terms of epicness, but I think that the epic feel has a lot more to do with raid dungeon familiarity than anything else. When MC was new, it was so cool because a lot of us had never played a hardcore raid game before and this was all spectacular compared to strath and ubrs, but now, we've all seen it and new content is just new content.

I find that the 25 man raid cap did several things that effected my guild positively.

Back when there were 40 mans, i led my raid/guild for something like 1.5 years before i finally called it quits and moved on. A large part of the reason I moved on was due to the fact that it was virtually impossible to put together 40 fully competent people and at times it became a struggle on my server just to get 40 moderately geared/brained people into a raid. You could almost always count on having dead weight, even if you were a strong guild overall, and I'm sure we could all tell stories about that one guy or those 5 guys and so forth.

With the advent of TBC, I reorganized some old members with some new and have found it substantially easier to make progress because the number of players in a 25 man raid that are dead weight is much smaller and very easily identifiable.(and hence correctable) It is also substantially easier to find 25 people than it is 40, because if I needed 15 more, I'd be almost certain to have at least 5-10 people who really don't belong in a serious raiding environment on my server for various reasons. Instead of being more than halfway thru SSC, we'd be stuck on magtheridon if we needed 40 competent people.

As far as the encounters go, I found the TBC mechanics to be generally better than pre-TB, so I have to disagree with you on the glorified ZG part. I was 100% onboard with you pre-TBC in believing that the 25 mans would suck, but the design turned out to be very high quality and unique.

The three strikes against current raiding is definitely itemization, trash and tuning. Honestly, we probably spent more time learning to avoid the trash in SSC than we did clearing it, because there is just too much trash on the way to morogrim(70-90 minutes). The trash everywhere is generally annoying due to the random death factor and just a general feel that it is wasting your time.

As far as tuning goes, almost nothing was tuned reasonably from the start, and things like hydross are still virtually impossible without flasking to the limit for most guilds, or just 250 cheesing it. Hopefully PTR fixes this for Black Temple.

Itemization is so awful there are huge threads going on here, we all know it sucks, and have commented incessently on it.

Overall, I think the smaller raid caps were good for mid-level guilds, not a factor for high level guilds, and bad for anyone casual. The 25 man content really means that casual players have no place in a raid zone for the most part, but it also gives the best players a chance to shine since they don't need to bring tag-alongs as often.

Would encounters feel less epic if you never experienced 40man raiding before 25man?

I agree that sofar I've not experienced that "wow factor" in TBC-raiding, even Mag who at first seemed to look pretty awsome ended up being rather.. disapointing in the end. Dont get me wrong hes a good encounter, just not something that has a huge effect in comparison to what I've seen before.

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.

To maximise amount of loot per person and the challenge of doing it in a small group. It's how it worked in DaoC.

To get better loot? That would be an interesting idea to play with -- having a "capped" and "uncapped" version of an instance. The "capped" dropping heroic-like loot (at least one epic per boss kill) and the "uncapped" dropping only one epic off the final boss with the other bosses dropping lower ilvl items than the "capped" version.

There are obviously some glaring problems such as the possibility of more casual guilds burning through content faster than "hardcore" guilds through sheer force, and instanced content being digested quicker, but I think there'd be some merit in the idea as well.

Such as:
- It now becomes easier for bigger guilds to learn fights (by bringing in the rostered extras for learning attempts).

- The potential for raid competence within guilds to greatly increase (guilds can now bring their "second string" players in for attempts, to make sure that when they do have to slot in, they already have plenty of experience for it).

- If necessary, anti-zerg abilities (kazzak heal, green dragon / Azuregos removal of players on death) could be implemented to "throttle back" the zerging of bosses in an attempt to focus more on technical skill than brute force.

- More players get to see instanced content (I'm looking at you Naxx, Hyjal, and BT) and get to at least share some of the experience that the hardcore raiders have had.

- The downside is that casuals that are forced to do the "uncapped" version wouldn't quite get the same feeling of accomplishment as a guild that did it on the "capped" version, but still, they got to see content they most likely wouldn't ever have been able to see except through a kill video on youtube. It does, however, create an interesting point of discussion as to whether casual should able to experience the same content as the hardcore in the first place. For example, if my neighbor and I both bought the same car, and my neighbor (being very knowledgeable in cars) went under the hood of his car and over the course of a few weeks, got an extra 300hp out of his car. Is it fair to me that because I don't have the time, nor the knowledge necessary, that I am unable to get the same experience out of owning the exact same car as my neighbor? It's certainly an interesting question which I'm kind of hoping a few people will be willing to make some arguments for and against.

- Encounters could potentially be tuned to be much more difficult. As this is my last point, I'm going to throw a few quick defensive arguments out there. With a typical hardcore guild that has more than 25 active raiders, it now becomes possible for them to bring in their other players for their attempts. Assuming that more players do make the fight easier, and that learning a fight with 30 is not significantly different than learning a fight with 25, it now becomes significantly easier for them to learn content. Essentially, they are now given a larger margin of error to work with for their attempts. As a whole, they are now able to become more competent with encounters at an increased rate. Fights would then have to be tuned on a more technical basis (ala C'Thun, 4 Horsemen, Thaddius, etc.) to ensure that group coordination and sound planning trumped the "zerg it down" strategy (or even nearly eliminated it altogether).

I wonder how many of you are one of the following:
- guild leader
- raid leader
- main tank
- officer

or were just simple guild members.

If you do not play one of those leading roles, then being in a large guild is quite different. I think it would help understand people's positions when they mentioned what role they had in their guilds.

I think they would have felt epic if we never raided before period. Requirement for a boss to be epic is that it has to be fun. When you finally beat the boss, people screaming in vent, shouting in Raid General and such. Right now its a real toned down version of that with a few "Yes" and "Woot" here and there.

My best guess is, from this point on the only fights people will consider epic are either End zone bosses and totally unique fights. Regardless of raid size.

Edit: I was just a member, my Navy schedule would prevent me from doing anything higher.

I agree with you.

On our server, every successful raiding guild (since the server is not that old + a bit more casual than other servers since the PVP crowd moved on, we only had 2 guilds which killed the Twins and three who zoned into Naxx at all (killing 1-4 Bosses)) more or less broke or at least lost most of their core members. Almost every BWL guild on our server abandoned...

I think such a development shows, without a doubt, that those raids were just playing together to reach a goal, but not because they LIKED to play together. Such a guild was a means to an end, but most players did not like it. Everyone was angry at some others, because of a different attitude or because of a performance which was sub-par compared to your own one. Or simply because one did not like the other at all - still it was necessary to recruit such people to allow progress.

If i remember how many players were just and simply BAD (at the end of BWL we had a hunter doing less damage than our MT... and he had the best equip of all our hunters... we had a paladin with 60% overheal and two priests who still didn't give up the stupid flash-heal only spamming), i still wonder how we could kill the Twin Emperors. Probably just because the other half of the raid played well enough to allow some players to suck.

But do you really want that? Do you want to play with people who are just so much worse than the rest of the raid, because the game requires you to have at least X players of class Y?

When my old guild was dismissed, we (two others and me) created our own one with different goals. The primary target is not progress anymore - it is happiness. I want to be in a guild where everyone respects EVERYONE else and likes everyone else (that might be not possible, but at least the respect part is important). Our recruitment is done completely different to what our old guild did (and their follow-up guild still does the same mistakes). We have no forum to apply, we only invite players we saw ingame for some weeks and where we are sure that they fit into our raid (performance-wise and social-wise!).

Yes, it will take longer until we can enjoy SSC/TK but i prefer to wait some weeks if everyone in the guild is really happy. So far really everybody of us says that it's the best guild situation he has ever experienced. We have a very flat hierarchy and everyone in the guild feels that he is really a part of it and not just a "machine" that performs a certain task for it's master and can be replaced easily.

There might have been guilds with a similar clima and with happy players. Even huge raid guilds with 60 or more members - maybe. But there is no such guild on our server. The player pool of dedicated raiders is definitely limited. And after seeing most vanilla wow raiding content, you do not want to start over explaining others how to play their class. You want motivated players, sharing your own attitude. But there are simply not enough of such players on several servers (and char transfers to successful guilds on others servers do not make it easier).


But now please take a look at all those guilds who are clearing 25 man content right now.

Are those new guilds who formed in tbc? Starting from scratch? I'd say 80% of those are old Naxxramas raiding guilds and the other 20% formed newly but FROM old Naxxramas raiding guilds, witht he same core members. When i went through progress websites and checked the guild pages, on almost every screenshot you see a lot of Tier 3 stuff.

But do those guilds realize that there are ALOT of excellent players in this game who just never had the opportunity to get T3? Just because there were not enough of them or not enough could find together (RL friends, good ingame friends.. social things that make you stay in a guild you do not fit in). Without having any T3 at all, the TBC progression is a lot slower. If you additionally start a completely new guild with only 3-4 people and you want good and nice players, it takes time. Yes those incoming nerfs make it hard to see that it's not just the easier bosses that make some kills possible, but it's also just guilds advancing.

Without having played together for whole Naxxramas, new guilds miss a lot of raiding experience and a lot of equipment base. But they will learn this. Just wait some months and you will see the first "new" guilds in SSC/TK. Those guilds would never have been posible without the change to 25 man raids.

I know that some are "angry" about Blizzard for creating Karazhan as an entry raiding instance. Multiple Karazhan raids killed most of the old guilds (competition between teams, "team A" vs "team B", not enough raid places), because the players were afraid to be behind in terms of progression. Progress was all it was about. Some even quit because they could not level to 70 fast enough.
If you now look at it from another point of view, it's completely different. Start with any small guild. No, not a casual guild, just a small guild of good players who play together because they know and like each other for years. Karazhan allows them to gain raid experience and starting equipment. It allows them to show their server that they can perform well. If allows them to find others who share their attitude and who want to join them. It even allows two guilds to find each other (based on progress) and cooperate on 25 man raids. When we started our guild, at the beginning we aimed for 15 players to find a cooperation raid for the 25 man instances, because we just loved the flair in our small guild. Since there was no equal guild on our server at all in terms of progress and dedication, we then decided to grow slowly.
Still, Karazhan is the perfect entry level. It's not about giving casuals a chance to step into 25 man raids, it's about giving guilds a chance to form, it's about experience and equipment and it's also about learning to knew others.

Good players do not want to sit there and do nothing. If there is no progression, they move on. For 40 man raids, it was required to recruit players, even of they sucked, to fill the spots. It was needed for progression. If you did not do it, they joined other guilds, changed the server or stopped wow. Now you have something to do (Karazhan), while at the same time, you are growing. Guilds can advance without being stuck until they reach the required player base. That's a huge step forward in terms of guild management imho. It was not possible with 40 man raids, the step from 10 to 20 to 40 was far too big. 10 to 20 (2x Karazhan) to 25 is something different and alot easier to manage.



For an old Naxxramas guild, you might have lost a small bit of the "epic" feeling regarding raid sizes. But for every new and motivated guild with a strong core, it's the best that could happen.

Personally, i NEVER want to be in a guild with more than 40 members again, at all. For sure. We are now 23 (+4 non raiders) and i know everyone really well. I want it to stay this way, when we slowly increase in size until we are ~30-35. Magtheridon will go down soon, all are SSC attuned. We are no casual players - surely not. I don't think 25 man raids are casual-friendly. But i never exptected them to be. Smaller guild sizes do not equal to casual gaming. But there are also a lot of hardcore players who invest much time into this game who do not only care about progress. Progress is not worth to abandon friends and fun. And a small guild allows you to have more of this and less things that annoy you.

It's about the perspective from which you look at it. For a huge raiding guild, it might be worse with 25 man raids. For every smaller guild (no, did not say casual guild!), it's an enormous advantage. And now please look how many guilds cleared Karazhan (or Gruul) and how many have Mag down and are clearing SSC/TK right now (and show me those without the Naxxramas advantage in equipment and experience).

http://progress.clan-hdlx.de/REALM_318 (our realm.. Circle of Unity was my old guild, their follow-up is Endless [founded with ~30 members], we are Per Noctem [founded with 3 members], Mizar Alkor is more or less dieing), click the English flag on the top left side. Just compare Realms and compare Guilds. Click through their websites. Look how many are in SSC/TK, how many killed Mag and how many clear Karazhan or Gruul's Lair.

http://progress.clan-hdlx.de/ is nice to see the german guild progress.

There are so few 25 man raids right now. Wait some months, things will change.

Speaking as a Class Leader, Raid leader, officerish type person in my EQ days (Many, many game firsts, always on the cutting edge of content), and an officer, raid leader in WoW (FAR more casual to keep myself from heart/brain asplosions)...

After many, many years in EQ, I became hooked on 54-man raid size. 72 got to be incredibly absurd to manage, and you began to recruit random people who could hit a button when needed just because you were out of other people who could hit a button.

Switching from 72 to 54 took 0 creativity out of raid encounters, and I'd argue that the 54mans were far better over time, as they had the same "epic" feel, and you werent dragging along people who never would have made it into the guild based on skill.

In WoW, I would go with 40 being a pretty good number. 25 isnt enough, and honestly cuts down some of the options you allow with more.

So many enjoyable fights exist for 54 in EQ and 40 in WoW that just cannot be replicated successfully with lower numbers.

I'm not entirely sure how you would begin to take an event such as Vaelstrasz, Nefarion, 4h, ect, and scale them down to 25 people, while keeping the same feeling of intensity.


in a 40man enviornment, you can design large scale encounters where you NEED to have 6-8 passable tanks, 8-12 healers and 6-8 dps/cc types. These 8 mobs must all die at the same time or they do evil horrible bad things to you, and each requires a tank, healer and CC class (some spit out elementals, some beasts, some undead, you have to control these while the remainder of your raid alternates between taking out adds and dps'ing down each mob).

Scale that to 25 people, and you're suddenly at 4-5 big guys, equating to fewer adds, fewer "oh shit" moments, fewer places to screw up. When the difficulty is in the 8 mobs, in the needing your entire team to hold together keeping 8+ things under control at all times, not necessarily the perfect execution (though that does become a factor) of the encounter, its cheapened by dropping down to 8.

Scripted events work much the same way. Take (apologies to those who dont know much about EQ, but the dev team got amazingly good at 54 person scripted events, and WoW lacks that kind of encounter) the MPG raid trials in EQ. Part of the fights were the enormity of the encounters. the waves of 6, 19, 12 that rquired everyone to be on the ball. Some werent even too challenging, but they were amazingly well done encounters that left people with a sense of accomplishment when completed, and couldnt be scaled down without completely throwing off the entire focus of the fights,


Its incredibly easy to scale encounters UP to a higher number of people, though they tend to become a bit easier due to raid makeup. It is rare to see a well designed, engaging encounter scaled down to lower numbers.