Levidian

Definitely, You see an example of this all the time on class forums with posts like "My Hunter class leaders wont let me go BM!" Etc, and clueless leadership like that relays to their raid understanding I'm sure. How can it not? The difference between a strong guild leadership and a mediocre one could very well be the difference from a guild that is capable of having 8+ T6 bosses down, but they are stuck working on vashj or kael because of the mediocrity of their leadership.

@ The OP. IMO raid size should be bumped to 30 with the Xpac adding 5 players shouldn't be that big of a deal and it would leave more room for some alt specs(ret paladin as a good example), and with the addition of DKs well spaces are going to be tight unless in the future blizz wants raids to be balanced around 2 of each class.

 

Fugazor

Actually I would go even further and say that it is all about leadership. Only leaders can force things (focus, pots, talents etc.) and if people don't follow kick and replace with new recruits.

About retadins, it is more about melee dps I would say. How many melee dps you take? Probably 5. One optimized group that have 2-3 rogues, dps war with bs trinket and ench shammy. Sometimes feral instead of 1 rogue but I would rather leave feral druid in MT group. Do you see space for paladin here? No. 5 more spots would probably be 5 more ranged dps/healers or another melee group of doom like above (however 10 melee dps... would cause problems in many fights I assume).

 

Essarhaddon

For most guilds this sort of view leads to not having enough people to raid. The reality as I see it right now is that the demand for raiding in WoW is dropping overall and a lot of guilds are struggling to find people. Partly there are too many marginally successful guilds out there, but that is a function of it being difficult for people to abaondon guilds or merge successfully.

I am fortunate to be in a leadership position of a guild that is reasonably successful, successful enough to attract raiders - but not so long ago (before we really started to breakthrough in SSC) I saw the other side. I know I feel tremendous pressure as a raid leader to keep the success coming or watch the trend reverse over time in my guild. A lot of guilds are not in a position to kick people or they just won't be able to do anything.

 

spronk

Going back to the original topic, does anyone else think its inevitable that one day (soon?) WoW will change the raiding game to 10 man only? Its probably not likely in the next expansion, but I could definitely see it in the 3d expansion, especially if WAR/AOC are very competitive. Simplifies the dev process tremendously. Might be wishful thinking on my part, since thats pretty much the only way I can see myself raiding again.

 

◊ Anias

I think it's more likely that blizzard will standardize raids on the various multiples of 10, rather than down to 10 only.

It's relatively easy to balance a raid around 1 of each class (10 classes)
It's also easy to balance around 3 of each (1 of each of 3 specs of 10 classes)
A caveat of course is that they also need to realize that the ratio for a 10 man group is 2 tanks 2 healers 6 dps if they intend to make 5 mans doable by the groups that do 10 mans.

I doubt we'll ever see (for instance) a 17 person raid, or a 45 person raid as a result of the class numbers and tank/healer numbers.

I also doubt we'll see only 10 man raiding because it doesn't allow for comparisons within class, which is a bonus for some people. Of course, 10 man raiding is nice because it's relatively easy to find 1 of each class that doesn't suck.

The only trouble with 25 person raiding as far as I can tell is that blizz made the decision to go to 25 based on 5 5 man groups, then didn't make 25 person raiding = 5 tanks 5 healers expected in raid. This caused some trouble when going from 25-->10-->5-->10-->25 because their expected ratios were different and thus guilds had trouble swapping content size gracefully. This is similiar to the problem that cropped up in 40 mans with the 4h. Everyone had assumed (conciously or not) that 40 people, 8 classes per faction, in theory it's 5/5/5/5...Then they hit 4h and needed 8 tanks. It's understandable that blizzard could assume "well there's 8 5 man groups, so there's 8 tanks!". I think a large part of the impetus for adding another tank class (deathknights) is that they're trying to make these numbers a little bit cleaner.

Assuming in the future that they stick to either each 5 person group in a raid group has a tank and a healer, and we extrapolate a 30 person raid with 1 of each class and spec, we'd have a raid with:

30 people
Arms/Prot Warriors;Prot Paladin;Feral Druid;Tank/Offtank Deathknight (6 tanks, 1 per group)
Disc/Holy Priests;Holy Paladin;Balance/Resto Druid;Resto Shaman (6 healers - you could use a elem shaman if you prefer instead of the balance druid)
Rest dps?

It's a semi-reasonable fit, and not a big jump from 25 person raids. Of course they could still make 25 person raids fit that ratio of 1 tank 1 healer 3 dps if they only make one DK tanking tree, and they cut the balanceDr/elemSh from healing...

 

Copernicus

There are indications that the WotLK expansion might have 10-man and 25-man content in parallel. There's an interview or article somwhere (which I can't find again) that said they were looking into having two 10-man raids from the start of WotLK. It's way too early to guess at what their plans actually will be - it could be a split like SSC/TK at the 10-man level, or it could be a clear tiered progression. Or they could scrap those plans completely.

My best guess at what's going on and what happened is that Blizzard looked at how raiding and guilds handled the raid dungeons in vanilla WoW and extrapolated them into TBC. In vanilla, a guild would cleanly go from ZG to MC and then to BWL. After that, they would pause for a bit in AQ20 and AQ40, but would try to get into Naxx as soon as possible. From that, I believe they drew the conclusion that overlapping content (AQ40 as compared to BWL and Naxx) would be skipped or marginalized and that the 20-man dungeons were viewed as stepping stones into the real raids. Those conclusions applied to TBC were tiered attunements and Karazhan as the only introductory raid zone.

Now in TBC, the jump from 10-25 man raiding is complicated not because of the difficulty in 25-man raiding, but in the difficulty of organizing a FULL 25-man raid. For a guild going from ZG->MC, the main requirement was just getting up to 30 or so warm bodies. MC just wasn't that difficult a raid zone at that point in the game due to gear and talent changes as the game went through patches. The big question for how WotLK raiding will work out is how ZA is utilized, as compared to SSC/TK. If guilds go from Kara -> ZA and just ignore the Tier 5 raiding zones, I'd expect to 10-man raiding in WotLK will be closely tied to 25-man raiding. If ZA is not used that often, I think that 10-man raiding will only be used as it is now, for introducing people to raiding as the first step. In either case, I expect that one of the wings of Naxx25 will be designed for 20 people but raidable by 25, to ease the jump from 10 to 25 man raiding.

 

Forar

First, I'd like to say that I by no means follow the belief that the only way to get ahead in this game is to raid 34 hours a week. That said, 16 a week (and as I noted, often 12 or less) is barely enough time to get our "farmed" content down, especially if we hit a snag (like having to do Hydross 3 times... or for 3 hours).

Secondly; I hadn't looked at the spec's of others on my crew, perhaps in a naive assumption that my people were spec'ing appropriately. But want to hear something funny? The warlock and the warrior you noted? Same guy. His warrior is an alt that he uses from time to time to help out with tanking, because our tank stability often fluctuates between "rawr, we're all on" and "look at all the tumbleweeds go by". Hell, his ACTUAL original main was a mage. The warlock swap happened at the start of TBC, and the warrior has just been along to help out, but may become main swap #2.

Which is part of what I meant when I referenced 'being more than my server can give me'; dedicated, quality people can be rare as hell, and even as the third most progressed guild alliance side (on the most populous server in the North American realms, according to WOWrealms.com), finding people who are a bit lacking isn't exactly a challenge. Hell, I'd be surprised if there wasn't something about my spec or gearing that wasn't a little 'off', but I wouldn't say we were so vastly off in spec's or gearing (on regularly participating mains, at least) that we're being held back like some new crew in greens trying to down Magtheridon.

For the record, I don't blame Blizzard entirely for the fact that my little band of misfits isn't at Illidan yet, but I do think that they are tuning the encounters (even if just the ones beyond where I'm at) poorly, and I think WoWJutsu backs me up on that, even if the Armoury shows that my frustration is merely misguided QQ'ing.

 

Forar

I know exactly what you mean.

Pre-TBC, some of my guild used to loan ourselves out to up and coming raid crews. We'd grab a few alts and help them learn places like Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, or join up with a ZG PuG and rip that place a new one, ocassionally clutching victory out of the jaws of defeat while we were at it.

One group in particular we loaned 3-5 people on a fairly regular basis for a couple of weeks (perhaps it was months), and they saw immediate and vast improvements in progress. They went from struggling to get Lucifron to killing Ragnaros in a fraction of the time we did. Having someone on hand to help explain strategies, and a half dozen competant to excellent (in comparison, at least) players at times seemed to all but trivialize said content.

This became even clearer when, after the first couple Ragnaros kills they decided to politely tell us that they wanted to make it a 'purely in house' effort and that our services would no longer be needed.

I think they got stuck at Garr for a while after that.

They made it through there on their own eventually, but just having 10-20% of your players advanced in knowledge of the instance/game made a dramatic improvement in capability.

We didn't carry them across the finish line on our shoulders or anything, but sometimes it sure felt like that. The warrior often ended up main tanking, I (as a paladin) led healing and any dps we had on board usually held the tops spots with a large margin, all while often undergeared in comparison to those we were helping.

 

Graul

Nevermind

 

Karamoon

My memory may be fuzzy, but I don't remember guilds following that path on Daggerspine (my server at the time). What they'd do is get enough people to do ZG, then either make a guild alliance, pull in PUGers, or bulk-recruit (weeding people out later) to start the first few bosses in MC. People wanted gear and enchants from ZG, but I only saw it run either in parallel with or after MC. Was this common on other servers, or was DS just a bit odd?

Also, on the topic of 10 vs 25, I think the 2.5 groups thing is something of a problem, but more significant is simply the size. Ten people is a reasonably tight-knit group, all of them can be involved in a conversation, it's not hard to tell what each person is doing, and it doesn't take intense scheduling to get 10 people for an instance run. 25 (or 20 or 40, really anything over a dozen or so) changes the dynamics, so that it's a much more 'corporate' experience, with scheduled days, attendance policies, people who don't really know each other, and so on. 5- and 10-man content feels fundamentally different to play than 25-man, and I think that difference is more significant than any in-game difficulty.

 

Silke

Well I've read through most of this thread and there are a lot of people sharing. So allow me to wax rhapsodic for a bit as well.

I come from a fairly hardcore background though I've never pushed myself to be in the #1 guild but I do push myself to be the best player I can. I do spend a lot of my free time playing these games but it's at the "wrong" time for a lot of the top guilds (I have a job that requires me to be up very early in the morning so raiding to even an "early" time like 11pm is out of the question). Anyway, I've been playing online games since Everquest Kunark. Back then I was in a top 5 of the server guild. We never had many server firsts (unless you count things like tradeskill items) but we had plenty of server 2nds and server 3rds. I was with that guild all the way from Velious to quitting Everquest a month or two after Omens of War which was, not so coincidentally, about the time that World of Warcraft was released. I plowed my way to 60 on a Mage on a 1st Week Role Playing server. I joined an RP server hoping for a more mature crowd. I just turned 30 this year so my tolerance for leet speaking / B-Net kiddies isn't particularly high.

After hitting 60 on Earthen Ring (U.S.), it took awhile for raiding to take hold. I finally settled myself into a decent guild and together we went through Molten Core and finished at C'Thun / Early Naxx last November and December when the PVP patch hit and 90% of the raiding gamewide slowed down. People were doing the PVP thing for easy gear and waiting for Burning Crusade to hit. I REALLY enjoyed raiding back during this time. Progression was fairly logical and since we weren't bleeding edge, all the encounters were pretty well tuned by the time we reached them. The guild worked out for me because there are a lot of weekend raids which I can make and the officers are very understanding about my strict logoff times during weeknights.

Today I'm still in the same guild and after struggling through the typical Karazhan issues we're in the early stages of 25 man raiding. Still... I say "still" because we've been doing it for months now and we're just not progressing that well. We've got Gruul down but depending on your typical factors (new people, people not playing 100%, etc) there are some weeks we can kill him in 10 Growths with zero deaths and other weeks where we squeeze out a 17 Growth Shadow Word: Pain kill with 21 people dead. Void Reaver and Lurker Below both went down but now we've really hit a brick wall. We're working on Mag and Hydross and, I have to say, it's not that enjoyable at all.

Perhaps I'm just burnt out but I really don't enjoy Burning Crusade raiding at all. I don't mind wiping and paying repair bills when we're making tangible progress but that doesn't seem to be happening. We'll go in and die 5 or 6 times to Magtheridon without making any noticeable improvement at all. And that frustrates me.

Personally I think that the raiding scene in Burning Crusade is simply too high. Especially the "entry" level stuff like Gruul, Magtheridon, SSC and Tempest Keep. All of this needs a serious beating with the nerf bat and re-tuned substantially. Ideally, I would have preferred another 25 man raid instance that was MC / BWL level difficulty with appropriate loot to give 25 people in a raid guild the chance to work together and gear up. But it's a bit late for that now. I have no problem with their being content that I won't see because it's too difficult for my Guild. I just wish that the bar wasn't quite so low...

 

Tunch

Your guild, that killed C'thun and got started in Naxx before TBC, can't kill Magtheridon? While I do agree somewhat that the raid content is tuned a bit harshly in certain circumstances (mostly 1-person raid wipes re: cubes @ Mag etc), the facts stated above don't really match up. Either you lost a ton of good players over the past months, and set the bar too low with regards to recruitment standards, or... honestly I can't think of any other reason. Any guild that was capable of C'thun pre-TBC should be well into T5 content by now, working on Vashj and/or Kael, at the least, barring massive restructuring/roster churn.

 

◊ Inkm

We where at c'thun and did some stuff in Naxx (the easy stuff I guess) and we're worse off then Silke when it comes to progress.

Our problems rise from a nice combination of the above. Problem with recruiting "better" is the lack of available recruits. Other members figured the grass was greener on another side and all that.

From my perspective, his facts add up fine. Most guilds we used to compete with for server firsts ended up in the same situation. Pre-naxx we used to be a bit behind The Legacy. They're now number 27 world-wide on wowjutsu. Most of the other guilds we used to be on level with simply don't exist anymore.

 

Silke

I didn't phrase it very well. We had killed the Twin Emperors about 6 times and only looked at C'Thun once and did the "easy" stuff in Naxx. Once the PVP patch hit, we had some turnover and we've been on an endless cycle of recruiting and replacing ever since. We invite a new app, they make 10% of our raids and are let go. That happens to us a TON.

As for Mag, one of the things that has really killed us is lack of Warlocks. We only have 2 solid warlocks right now so that really hurts our attempts.

Basically though, my guild is Casual Hardcore. Back before Burning Crusade, we were your typical "15 good players carrying 25 not so good players along" style guild. In Burning Crusade that has become VERY apparent now that everyone needs to be playing at 100% all the time while on raids. I'd like to consider myself one of the "good" players and it kills me to see our lack of progression due to our weaker players. They're great people and awesome guildmates. They're just not A-Team style raiders. People have to be reminded to come prepared. Raids seldom start on time. People die repeatedly to stupid mistakes. All of this wasn't as visible back before Burning Crusade but now it very much is.

The problem is that Burning Crusade raiding is not designed for a guild like mine. It simply sets the bar too high. As I said before, I'm perfectly ok with not seeing ALL of the content Burning Crusade has to offer. But I'm not ok with how little I get to see.

 

Furion

C'thun really was impossible for many guilds who had a mix of very good and very bad players.
On Twin emps a couple of good healers and Tanks with the right strategy were enough to get through, which can be said about the majority of encounters before nax in vanilla.

I like the direction where this is going since I always hated having bad players in my raiding team, but there needs to be real content for the somewhat less gifted 25 man raiders in wotlk and something to get the whole 25 man raiding game started. One full dungeon with a lot of bosses and a tough but eventually beatable last boss. No switch between different dungeons but a clear and manageable goal for the entry raiders. Seems like new Naxxramas will fill that role and I think thats great.

For me personally I think it would be best to have content for all roster sizes (5, 10, 25 in BC, not necessarily optimal) on different levels of difficulty, so every dedicated raider can get a shot at those different setups even if he isn't the best player and the good players have a meaningful PVE alternative to 25-man raiding in smaller teams. This means that the rewards of the top end 10-man content should be significantly better than the rewards of the low end 25-man content, but have a lower ilvl than the rewards of the top tier 25-man content. Not sure on how to balance 5-man content here, this depends greatly on how blizzard manages to tune that around different group setups, but I think you could put better rewards in the top end 5-man content than the entry 10-man content.

Having somewhat high end content ready for smaller groups might alleviate the problem of the huge "bulk" (4-8 hours straight) and overall (16++ hours/week without taking farming time into account) time investment to put into 25-man raiding a little as well, which probably keeps quite a few good players out of the higher level pve content currently.
I think it's great to have alternative (not just supplementary) PvE progression paths and BC seems to head into the right direction when it comes to 5 (heroic is nice, although same ilvl for most of 5-man content instead of a little more progression isn't) and 10 man content, assuming ZA will be on par with t5 loot.

World bosses (unreliable) and 20-man dungeons (too easy, too few) in Vanilla were not a good alternative since they didn't offer much of a progression but were mostly on the same (low) level itemwise. The 5/10 man content on lvl 60 didn't offer any kind of real progression either although progression seems to drive many people in WoW.

 

snape

On the contrary, I believe the 20-mans in Vanilla offered great progression for when they were released, especially considering the spellbook drops in AQ20 (which were practically necessary in Naxx).

 

Ribeye

You say "There needs to be content for less than gifted 25 man teams," and I would argue that there is. Pretty much every fight till Kael can be accomplished by less than gifted 25 man teams and several fights that are absurdly easy exist as well. There is an entire 10 man raid dungeon for these same guilds as well as a host of 5 mans, heroic 5 mans, and 70 levels of quests.

The problem apparently isn't that the content isn't there, it's that each guild eventually hits a roadblock of their own creation based on the level of "giftedness" they are determined to have. This roadblock then destroys them as lack of progression results in people leaving or the guild disbanding.

It's not blizard's job to ensure that every group of friends that assembles under a guildtag be able to beat the game. It frustrates me to no end that on my server there are 5 guilds with several good members drowning in mediocrity for all the same reasons, and yet none of them ever make the leap of thought to combine their better members and progress that way.

If being with your friends is more important than accomplishing progression, and don't get me wrong, thats a worthy reason, then by all means enjoy your friendships and your game. But if you are interested in progressing, and its important to you, then make the smart move and surround yourself with people who play the game like you do. Life is too short to be in a guild that constantly annoys and frustates you with its incompetence.

 

Linnet

It's tough. A lot of the people in this situation are officers or class leaders (just based on my observations on guilds I know) - there's a lot of pressure on them to stick it out and try to make something out of what they have.

My experience was also of being in a guild that had the twin emps and first couple of bosses in Naxx on farm, but couldn't make much headway in TBC. Some people left for more progressed guilds, some left to start their own guild, some stuck it out, some quit the game, some quit raiding, some rerolled on other servers.

It would have eased the strain to have some less demanding 25 man content available. Something to tempt people into the raiding game and not have too hard of a brick wall right at the start.

 

• Disquette

I think that the model being explored in the Baron run, and now Zul'Aman, is the right way to do things. Background, I'm a casual in an Illidan killing guild, I've cleared TK several times, but not Mount Hyjal or BT - the non-casual members do that. This is why I'm going to only use examples from SSC/TK - I wouldn't feel comfortable using a fight that I've only read about as an example.

I've said this for a long time - Let people excel in a setting as far as they can, and let them get better and better at it. My personal issue is that I think it should not be limited to the 5 and 10 man dungeons. In terms of the current raid setting, we could see the following systems:

Method One - Raid Controlled Difficulty:
Vashj - Keep the encounter the same, with the change that you can deposit the tainted core in either the current location, keeping the encounter the same, or deposit a tainted core in the "heroic shield generator". For each core you deposit in there before using a normal shield generator (which disables the heroic shield generator), you increase the spawn rate of the elementals by 1 second, and you spawn an additional naga each time they pop.

This way, the raid chooses how difficult they want to make the encounter. High end guilds might choose to deposit 2 tainted cores in the heroic shield generator before taking down Vasjh. Guilds getting their first kill would not be using the heroic generator at all.

Rewards for doing the harder version could be something like:
1) For each heroic core used, incraese the Nether Vortex drop by 1.
2) For each heroic core used, add 5 marks of the Illidari
3) If at least 2 cores are used, garuntee a weapon drop in addition to the regular loot (honestly, if you're dealing with 3 times as many nagas as usual, this seems reasonable).

This is a balanced dps, tanking, and healing bonus.

Method 2: Race the Clock
Already investigated by Blizzard, apply this to Lurker. 5 Prisoners are held in underwater cages below lurker. Each submerge after the 3rd, Lurker eats one. Lurker always eats them in order. For each prisoner saved, the prisoner will give the raid a piece of loot. If the pirsoners are eaten in the order a, b, c, d, e, the loot is best on prisoner A, down to the current level of lurker loot on prisoner e.

for instance:
prisoner e - Bracers
prisoner d - Feet
prisoner c - Legs
prisoner b - Weapon
prisoner a - Ranged/Wand/Idol of the highest iLevel

This is a dps bonus.

Method Three - Survival

On voidreaver, any time a person drops below 20% health, the whole raid gets a 5 minute debuff that persists through death. When Void Reaver is killed, 3 chests spawn that contain loot in addition to the loot that's on VoidReaver's body. The chests can be opened by people with:

chest openable with 10 debuffs or less: contains a nether vortex and 3 marks of illidari
chest openable with 5 debuffs or less: contains a loot table of offhand weapons people actually want - here's looking at you, rogues and shaman, and an epic gem
chest openable with 0 or 1 debuffs: 500 gold, fun and useful trinket loot table a 'la Vanquished Tentacle of C'thun, barov's peasant caller.

This is a survivability test, with fun rewards

The point
Guilds on the high end would probably want to want to do these encounter still. Or, even if they didn't want to, it'd be less painful attuning new people for Hyjal if there were monetary and item rewards which they could opt for.

Guilds that are stuck on 1/4 TK, 5/6 SSC would have a chance to use their familiarity with Void Reaver and Lurker to make their work even tighter, while at the same time giving them slightly better loot which would also help their progression.

I don't think that Final bosses (Illidan or Archimonde) should be exempt from this either - see the Vashj example. Now that my guild does 2.5 nights of raiding and clears everything in the game, there's really not much to keep the interest outside of people filling out their gear sets, and keeping in shape for Sunwell. Having a tiered reward system would help alleviate this problem while at the same time not punish guilds who are learning. The main additional work blizzard would have for this would be creating the additional loot tables. All in all, without having to do additional artwork (beyond loot), having a small amount of additional encounter scripting, and very little tuning (hey - this is the bonus gear - if it's too hard, don't complain), it seems like a fairly resource-effective way to extend raiding wow's life in both the upward and downwards direction.

----- sig ---------------
Discoepfeand - rogue / Disquette - shaman
A stormstrike / shocks /watershield timer-bar addon: http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/9729/
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