Unity

Early raid content needs to keep some ability to obtain useful gear right through the expansion. If new players start avoiding the WOTLK-Naxx because the current season of honour gear is outright better then where are they going to learn to raid?

 

Lamaros

No, 1 tier below means 1 tier below. Rewards are not the same thing as encounters. Period.

Kaplan:

Behind the Blue Curtain: Discussing Wrath of the Lich King with Jeffrey “Tigole” Kaplan : The MMO Gamer

 

Shakes

Item levels don't always correspond to easier or harder. I think everyone agrees Kael or Vashj are harder than Rage Winterchill, even though Rage drops items a tier ahead.

The reality is though it'll be easier because you have 10 people not 25. On an individual skill level I fully expect 10 man raiding will be as hard as 25 man raiding, it's just the dynamics of the numbers. It's a greater challenge of maintaining a roster large and balanced enough for 25 mans. And the increased risk of a key person not being able to turn up on a given night when you're relying on 2.5 times as many people.

Also consider if every person has a 5% chance to stuff up and wipe the raid, in a 10 man raid that's a 60% chance of success on any given attempt, in a 25 man raid it's a 28% chance of success on any given attempt. The more people you rely on, the more things that can go wrong, even if everyone is equally skilled.

In reality the numbers are probably more like your best player has only a 1% chance of stuffing up, your 10th player a 5% chance, and your 25th player a 10% chance. So it skews it even more in favour of the 10 man, because you can cherry pick your best 10 and leave out the 11-25 members.

For what it's worth ,I suspect that 10 man raiding will be wildly more popular than 25 man raiding in the expansion for these reasons. Relying on 24 other people not to stuff up is less fun than relying on 9 other people to stuff up. And finding 24 other people who wont stuff up is significantly more tiresome than finding 9 other people who wont stuff up. Even with gear a tier behind, so long as people are capping out at the end of the progression path too quickly, where's the reason to want to do 25 mans?

For comparison, consider 2v2 arena is the most popular bracket despite the fact that 5v5 gives faster rewards for the same ranking ...

 

flyingtoastr

So you're tying to tell me you could get through Tier 6 content in full Tier 4 gear? No you couldn't. You went to the easier dungeons of Tier 5 to get the next set of gear because that was what your gear was tuned for.

1 tier lower means lower healing, tanking, and DPS requirements (along with the fact that its very doubtful 10-mans will be a tight as 25-mans for composition, watering them down further) which means easier. Do we really have to argue about this?

EDIT: I'm not saying there won't be hard 10-mans (Arthas better still be a bitch on both versions) I'm just saying that logistically equal level 10-mans are going to be easier than the 25-man version.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Zaniel

If you consider to disregard or ignore valid counterpoints, I'd say there is no reason to continue the so-called argument at all. See the previous post regarding Kael (T5) vs. Rage (T6), and try to say with a straight face that Rage is the harder fight.

Also, with the right players you can get Illidan dead with players running around in T4 (though perhaps not full). I was still using the 2pc when we got Illidan. Then again, I am a rogue, and our 2pc T4 was crazy.

In the end, though, I will not go so far as to say the 10man instances will be harder, because I've yet to see Blizzard's plan for those. Pulling from my knowledge of past experiences and encounters, I'd bet that the 10mans will be easier simply because of scale... as everyone else keeps saying.

 

PSGarak

This tangent isn't particularly relevant. The point is, being able to stay in Kara and get better gear is silly but understandable now if you're not into 25-man raiding... it will be silly and pointless when there is a progression of 10-man content available.

My personal opinion on a reward scale is that, as a relatively casual-friendly game, WoW should always reward increased effort but that the rewards should suffer rather large diminishing marginal utility, so that 'hardcore' players will have an advantage to show for their effort but that advantage is not insurmountable. Like, twice the time/effort/skill/etc should net at 10-50% increase in power/loot/reward, but not double. As such, I think a combination of a hard lock-out on higher-tier rewards, plus a badge conversion rate somewhere between 3:1 and 10:1 is a good thing. You can run back content for faster gear progression, although it's not nearly as effective a use of your time. Players that want to put in the extra effort can, and they get rewards out of it, albeit small ones. The other good alternative mentioned above is badges for consumables (or gems or whatever).
However you go about doing it, I think it's important that every badge have a potential badge-sink, whether it's a higher-tier conversion or a consumable grocery store, or a badge casino or whatever.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

flyingtoastr

Instead of comparing a "gimme" fight to a dungeon cap boss why not compare two bosses in the same position. Kael versus Illidan. Magtheridon (pre-nerf) versus Vashj. If you want to compare easy bosses look at Winterloot versus Void Reaver.

Winterloot was specifically designed to give you free loot as a reward for beating Kael (just like Void Reaver was specifically designed for free loot after going through the shitstorm that was TK atunement), I don't think its of particular value to the discussion.

And we're not talking about "oh I was wearing a few pieces of kara gear on Illidan". We're talking about full raid full tier below. You don't have other items filling in the slots, you have everyone 10 ilevels or more below that instance. There is nothing else to wear. They will have to be tuned easier or else it will be impossible for anyone except the 25-man raiders to do it (which I think Blizzard is trying to avoid).

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Lamaros

How hard something is is relative to the people doing that thing. If group A just does 10 mans and group B just does 25 mans then it's irrelevent what loot is avaliable in the content they are not doing.

Now, granted, we can expect that people doing 25-mans will also run 10-mans, and that they will find these 10-mans easier if they are doing it in loot they have gotten from 25-mans runs. I said as much originaly. But that doesn't mean that 25-mans will be harder for them than 10-mans will be for those who are not running 25-mans.

As for 10-mans being inherently easier due to people not being as likely to be rejects. Well this doesn't mean that much, it just means they can be tuned on a finer edge than 25mans at the same point of difficulty as they have less of a 'stuffup' factor to account for.

There is no logical reason that 10-mans must be easier than 25-mans. If it turns out that level 1 10-mans are actually as hard as level 2 25-mans then all they'd have to do is make the level 2 10-mans the level 1, and the problem is removed.

This is all ignoring fights that are heavily execution based and not gear focused.

Now, there may be some reasons to believe that Blizzard will not actualy do what they have said they indend to do, or that they do not realise how to do such a thing (making two valid progression paths but giving one better loot is a bit of a confused stance to me), and it may well be that 25-mans are harder than 10-mans, but that is not what they have said they intend to do.

 

Rivkah

The one issue I really see with having a straight cutoff of badges from one tier to another, is what happens if you're saving up for an item and your guide drops that tier out of their raid schedule. All of a sudden a bunch of people have leftover badges that are utterly useless and likely to stay that way. Kind of like heroic badges were for some people till new items were added or the conversion to nethers and gems existed. I like the suggestions folks are making about allowing you to convert them into non gear items though, that's a good way to allow people to make use of their extras.

 

Shakes

Given they've also said that attunements are going away (correct me if they've changed their mind on this), why do we have to compare end bosses? You don't have to fight the end bosses anymore if they're too hard, just move on to the next tier.

 

Axanor

Everything they've said has indicated they're moving back to the style of release we saw in 1.0 and with Sunwell. Frontloading all of the raid content was an absolute disaster.

 

Camaris

What about some kind of conversion rate between tokens of different tiers? Say, when a new "season" of PvE starts (in a new patch or whatever) 10 or more "Badges of Tier 7" can be exchanged for 1 "Badge of Tier 8". This would allow people to clean up their reserves, although it should be expensive enough so that you can't comfortably farm the previous tier tokens.

 

Benita

I haven't read anyone mentioning yet that the BT badge loot was released as x-1 loot, not x. Even if you could use x-2 or x-3 content to get it, it still was not x.
I'm not disputing that it was too easy to obtain enough badges to buy that gear (easy as in difficulty, not time), but i doubt its 100% like the new system will look like. Also badge item prices did climb, sadly not in the same speed it was easier to obtain badges (daily, 10mans).

Those items and the attunement lifts did make it possible for some new BT/MH guilds to rise, but those are not close to being equal to the fully farmed BT->SWP guilds.

It made more content accessible to more players before it will be rendered obsolete and had almost no impact whatsoever on the cutting edge content raiders, except maybe easier pug heroic runs, alt gearing or recruitment/rerolling possibilities.

A change well done and not world of casualcraft if you ask me.

Looking forward to a better tuned system in wotlk, the badge inflation might be one way of doing it. It already takes most players a month at least to get one of those BT items. If you want to motivate them to stay only one tier in difficulty below the cutting edge, that would be the way to do it without telling them they farm easier stuff for nothing.

 

◊ arison

Perhaps a hybrid badge approach could work. Have every boss drop the same kind of badges, but have random trash drops and bosses drop single-loot items (i.e., not group loot) that are tier badges. Have items cost N boss badges and 1 Tier Badge. Guilds could allocate tier badges as they see fit. This would allow low level farming to help (to some degree) pay for higher tier items while preventing low level items from regularly being made available to higher level. Sure, you could always run with a higher level group to buy some tier tokens, but that happens today anyway.

In effect, tier tokens would be like Hearts of Darkness or Sunmotes (except BoP) and act as a tiering differential to combine with other mats (in this case, Badges of Courage instead of primals, bars of metal, etc).

 

• Playered

So replicate Naxx or AQ40 roughly, which were the only token gear system which didn't feel alienated from the dungeon as it actually involved resources from running the instance to aquire it - Naxx in perticular to how it went, dont know about BoP though as it will differ from how they seem to want to save on bag space and provides less use to the ever living Guild Banks.

 

bellator

I'm a little unsure exactly what you were referring to in my post with this, so apologies if this goes a little astray.

When i'm talking about content in terms of tier x, x-1, x-2, the best way to link loot to the content level is based on the ilvl of the items that dropped. If we take Black temple as tier x, we can see the ilvl of loot in there is predominately 141 (with Illidan loot being 151). The latest round of badge loot was ilvl 141 (with weapons being 146). Thus i would say that this loot is most certainly of the same tier as BT, and thus should be solely obtained by BT badges and not tier5,kara,heroic badges (based on a wotlk system)


I would disagree slightly here. Whilst you say it was both the items and attunement lifts that allows more content accessible to more players, i would say that the attunement lift alone would have done this. The attunement lift was a change well done, but the BT loot from heroic content was not well done. The issue isn't that harcore raiders are upset with casuals obtaining the same loot through easier means, its the fact that Blizzard changes the goalposts wherby the hardcore have to work at the highest level of content to obtain their loot and then x months later when the hardcore have their loot then same level of loot is obtainable through much easier means.

Maybe i'm just nostalic to the way it used to be in vanilla. Clearly defined levels of content each providing their own clearly defined level of loot.

 

Benita

The first new amount of badge loot was made available in 2.3 with ZA. It was t5 equivalent and t6 was outfarmed already for most hardcore raiders. S3 also came around this time and brought loot that was equivalent for pve on this level or at some parts like badly itemized pve weapons even better than the BT pve versions.

If the x of the "x months" is 8-10, then thats whining on a very high level. SWP gear was available with the release of the badge gear to the hardcore raiders and it's not like alot of guilds killed brutallus without ever entering BT. Except for the few weapon itemization gaps the badge gear is still worse than T6.

New levels of content providing cutting edge loot is good, speeding up all the lower tier gear progression isn't bad for anyone though.

I agree though that t5 instances were rendered obsolete from a pure effectiveness progression point. Thats why a badge inflation might have solved this (1 badge per boss in heroics/t4, 5 in t5/ZA, 10 in BT, itemprices x5 for example). If anyone wanted to farm a weapon in 200 heroic runs then, by all means, have fun.
But we still had and have t5 guilds on our low-pop server for what it's worth.

 

rhea

Some guilds get started later. It's not that "hardcore" farmed T6 for months, they just started earlier. The point of speeding up those who started later is for them to give chance to finish the content before next expansion. But you can only speed them up that much. It has really nothing to do with how hard the content is (ok, easier content will be easier, but harder stays the same, eg. BT, MH and Sunwell).

 

Oneiros

This is one reason I am not really anxious for the 10/25 split tiers. It is already hard enough to find a decent guild if you aren't in one already. I think that a lot of middle of the road guilds might even go as far as to abandon 25 man raiding in general, as the majority of players (at least IMO) do not care about the content so much as just getting purple gear. Some people enjoy the 25 man raid because it is more fun to them and it is a better way to experience the content, but with the 10/25 tiering, there will be a whole lot less guilds running 25s as the majority that may struggle at the 25 man level or who are aspiring to be a 25 man raiding guild will just forget about it and run 1 or 2 10 man groups.

I believe in Harvey Dent.

 

bellator

It's not whining in the slightest, i think you just misunderstand my point. In original wow, you had tiers of content (20mans,tier1,2,3), and each one of these gave loot equivalent to their tier. Nowadays, as you pointed out, its more a case that the hardcore raiders do content(highest tier) and get rewarded loot(highest tier), whilst everyone else through badges can get loot (highest tier-1) regardless of the tier of content they do. This is my main issue.

Whilst it may not be bad to the very low tiers as they get higher loot more easily, and not too bad for the hardcore as they have already outgrown the loot (although still a minor slap in the face to them), the area it is bad for are those inbetween, the guilds who are busting a gut trying to complete Black Temple seeing people get rewarded the same for clearing Karazhan.

 

Valerian

The guild recruitment forums are always full of guilds needing people. The point being if the 10/25 split kills 25 man raiding, that simply means the large raid concept was a poor option to begin with. If there is an alternative to it that people would rather do, why try to force it down our throats? That said, I do doubt that 25 man raiding will die with the expansion. As much as people say they don't raid for gear, I suspect its still a relatively high priority for most raiders. Why else continue to farm content for so long, especially if its not gear thats holding you back from higher tiers.

 

bellator

You've misunderstood Oneiros. He is saying that if the risk(time/committment/skill) to reward ratio of 25-mans is very poor compared to that of 10-mans, then this is what will kill the 25-mans. It has nothing to do with the large raid concept being poor. If 10-mans only gave grey loot and people stopped doing them it doesnt mean the small raid concept is bad just the risk/reward ratio is bad.

 

Mordekhuul

I suspect you'll find this true. In fact, a friend guild on our server that has been pushing MH and BT content (while working on Vashj/Kael) since 2.4 hit has already flat out announced on their forums that they will be focusing exclusively on 10 man content in WotLK if it all goes as they suspect.

To them, a guild that traditionally used to stay fairly small and once did 40 mans by pairing up with my guild, but then recruited by necessity in TBC because they wanted to see more of the end-game (and my guild could easily run 25 man content in-guild given our larger size), it means a return to their tight admittance policies (only skilled players that will get along with current members, are mature, etc) and the ability to work through all of the end-game content in a tighter, friendlier, less stressful group.

 

Smurrf

I foresee a tremendous amount of guilds doing Naxx-10 right off the start, with only a relative handful of guilds attempting to coordinate Naxx-25. For one, while a number of people will be ready to raid shortly after release, the larger, more casual population simply won't be. And there's going to be holes to fill in most guilds' raiding rosters.

Lesson learned from the last expac? Make sure you have more bodies on hand than what you need to raid before the expac comes out, at least at the casual level. There's going to be people who will take a break from the game (or simply stop playing), and getting the stragglers leveled and geared will take a bit of doing. So while it'll be relatively easy for most guilds to enter Naxx-10, entering Naxx-25 is going to take a lot more effort.

I do believe, though, that as time passes, the portion of the population doing 25's will ramp up considerably. I would wager that (setting aside the hardcore raiding guilds) what we'll see is that when a good chunk of the population is doing T-8 10man, that's when we'll start seeing more people doing Naxx-25. They'll be geared for it, they'll have a basic knowledge of what to expect from the fights from having done them as 10's, and there'll be more time to be able to review new applicants to raiding teams and get them to mesh with their groups. But I don't ever expect that the number of people doing 25man versions will ever outweigh those doing 10 man versions of the same event...and I don't think it'll even be close.

 

◊ zirky

Regarding "welfare badge epix," how exactly does Johnny McWeaksauce and his weekly KZ and heroic farming guild eventually acquiring high ilvl gear affect anyone? Its not like given ilvl kit, his guild will suddenly go from their 3-4 hour KZ's to slaughtering BT. Chances are what's holding them out of the end game raiding scene is not gear. So they can run KZ a little faster and maybe "pwn" that much harder in AV. Raiders thrive on new content to beat and consume it rapidly. Most "casuals" aren't even brave enough to venture into the atunementless BT and MH to take out the first few pinata bosses. They're still throwing their badge 141's at Vashj.