Reading about the new time frame for 5 mans and the 10 man raid progression gives me wood . My 2 problems with WoW, as a Casuals R Us player, has always been that 5 mans take way too long, and there was no raid progression for smaller and casual guilds. I've never cared about loot other than it allowing me to be able to do the next instance/raid I wanted to do. If they want to give legendary weapons to the 25 mans, and blues to 10 man, that’s just fine with me. I'm just stoked that I will be able to see all of the game I pay for without having to put my kids up for adoption so I could have the time to get into MH/BT/SW.

It will be really interesting to watch what impact this has on the large 25 man raiding guilds. If blizzard tunes the encounters correctly, beating the 10 man boss should be just as much of an accomplishment as beating the 25 man boss. If people get the same feeling of accomplishment from running the 10 mans, and they still see all of the game, will the 25 man guilds just be populated with people looking for world firsts & people who like to brag that their shiny epics have +3 more stats than your shiny epics? The top raid guilds worst problem has always been member burnout due to justifiably rigid requirements for raid prep/attendance/number of days a week. These positions typically get filled by the skilled players at small/casual guilds who have always had problems scraping together 25 people who were skilled/geared/showed up on time. If these small cadres of skilled players can now stay at their small guild and get the same progression, who will fill the spots for the 25 man raids? Some people will say that 25 man raids are more epic and more rewarding, but were there not a ton of raiders who lamented the 40 man raids as more epic? Are these same people now not happily assimilated into the 25 man culture? This is all just my opinion, and I could be talking out of my #%$#$, but I'd be real surprised if we don't see a drastic reduction in 25 man guilds.

Thats seems like a bold unlikely push especially in end-game 25-man raid content. The only reason there are no crushing blows on the first 3 Sunwell bosses are so druids can be viable (Imagine crushings on Brutallus..., also incompatable(sp?) with Felmyst's corrosion). That argument is pretty much thrown out the door because crushing blows come right back into play on twins when they are suddenly "reasonable" given the encounter.

I look at Sunwell Radiance as more of a "hard mode" in which if they really wanted to, could nerf months down the road as an alternative way of dumbing encounters down (See Kael, Vashj, Nightbane, Gruul, Magtheridon as major examples).

EDIT: Tommtomm: 10 mans will never have the same sense of accomplishment as the 25 man version, or as you're hinting at 25-mans will cease to exist and pretty much kill the game for those who prefer larger / higher skilled / "hardcore" raids.

Drastic reduction? Minor if any, similar to downgrading from 40-->25. Less skilled players or those who seem to think its impossible to progress in large raids without the absence of a life will continue to stay in lesser guilds who focus more on 10 mans and the occasional 25 man 1-2 tiers behind the "uber guild" on the server. Honestly when content is on complete farm high-end guilds really don't spend that much time a week raiding... I eventually expect to spend a night in Sunwell and a night in BT for roughly a total of 8 hours a week while waiting for WotLK.

Tojara: While I guess you can consider avoidance/mitigation "broken" In BT/Sunwell gear, I really don't see a major problem so long as they scale threat at the same time. Point is when you have the best gear in the game, you are supposed to be godly --- at least for the remainder of time until the next expansion.

The inability to block (that we know of) doesn't really concern me as I believe there is going to be a total overhaul in how crushings work (if even present at all).

While there might be more 'Sunwell Radiance' style debuffs present in each zone, I doubt this will be the path that they take. I presume that a total revamp in avoidance/mitigation will take place, to fix the very broken nature of avoidance at this stage in the expansion.

I don't see anything weird about 10-manning Arthas or such. The 10-mans can still be challenging, and there will likely be races to beat them. But, that's not 25-manning it, and thus people will still want to do that version for the bragging rights and such.

And chances are that the 25-man version will have most, if not all, of the legendary drops.

I do believe that they're going to do something about it, but just what it is remains to be seen.

As Maledict said, an ability that would allow them to utilize block would both allow them to reach uncrushable and continue using pre-existing tanking gear at the same time, which would maintain the status quo completely.

Another option would be an ability that gave them Bear-esque mitigation. They'd be crushable, but able to take the crushes, although that wouldn't necessarily solve the gearing issue as presented by Fiola.

If the crushing blow mechanic was dropped completely, that would definitely eliminate both the gearing and the ability issue, and would even benefit Paladins to boot (relaxed gear requirements), although that would then introduce the problem of Bear tanks being damn near well suited to tank anything.

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With regards to the tank gear issue aside from the DKs requirements, I'm pretty sure it's possible to build a tanking set that does not have any Block Rating/Value stats on it whatsoever, besides what you get from Defense Rating.

While this is already plausible for a Warrior tank, it's Paladins who would be quite hurt if the itemization team decided to take this approach to shared items. I for one still get a lot of use out of my [Figurine of the Colossus], if only to get to uncrushable on my more esoteric gear setups.

EDIT:

The problem with that is, if you have x item points (say 100 dodge rating, 100 defense rating, 50 block rating) worth of Warrior Tank Gear, trading it in for block-less Death Knight Tank Gear (100 dodge rating, 100 defense rating, 50 parry rating) will leave the Death Knight crushable, because of how much more 'expensive' dodge and parry are in getting to uncrushable, not to mention only getting 3/4ths of the benefit from Defense.

Or, in the other extreme, the DK set makes the DK uncrushable, but the Warrior set is extremely well beyond uncrushable at that point.

From the Curse interview,
So, the raid will drop the game Tier loot, just the item stats on the loot will be different it seems. 10 man will have +40 agility, 25 man will have +60? I can effectively at this point see, people running the 10-man raid after their 25-man raid is done to complete their set bonus. Usually you will be able to find 10 people staying back after the 25-man raid time is up.

And I can see soo many loot issues coming to raids because of this, especially for guilds that use a Loot Council system.

I would rather have the 10 and 25 man raids give totally different loot.

Perhaps my reading was wrong, but I don't think you can get locked out of one for running another. They're for technical purposes, separate dungeons with seperate IDs.

Yeah, but if the RL forgets to set the raid to 25-man mode, and someone that has already done the 10-man that week walks into the instance, it's possible to lock people that haven't done the instance.

This happens very rarely now, but is really easy to do when everyone's walking into the same portal.

A lot of people are saying "obviously the 10 man version will be much easier than the 25 mans" as though this is self-evident and unquestionable. To them I ask, are you saying Zul'jin is much easier than present-day Gruul or Magtheridon? Really?

Because he is not. If you think so, it's because you so vastly outgear all three encounters that you can't distinguish between them in terms of difficulty, or because you are remembering old pre-nerf versions of Gruul or Mags.

There is no reason to assume that just because in the past Blizzard has tuned 10 man encounters lower than 40/25/20 man encounters that they will continue to do so. Except for the logistical difficulty of getting 25 people of the right classes online simultaneously (which is a huge difficulty, yes), there is no in-game reason why 10 man encounters must be "easy."

Or Death Grip will have no impact on anything flagged for PvP.

Why does everyone seem to think they'd have the same entrances? The least confusing thing to do is to have a 10 man entrance in a different location than the 25 man.

/e-peen

That was my question for the Stratics IRC Chat and it actually got asked at the Q&A:

I think this might be the dev quote you're referring to.

BT/Hyjal saw very few bosses that could crush. Sunwell.. so far I think the only one is Sacrolash? So even with Sunwell Radiance, a Prot Paladin can tank everything else because reaching 102.4% doesn't matter. It seems they are already addressing it, and I hope future raid content continues to move in this direction.

There is a perfectly logical reason why the 10mans will be easier / less time consuming than the 25-mans. If they weren't then the 10 man versions would take just as much committement as the 25-mans to complete.

The existence of 10 man raiding isn't for the sole purpose to avoid the difficulty of finding 25 people to raid with. They are there for those who don't have as much time, or willing to commit as much time to raiding. For those guilds who only raid 1-2 nights a week. It gives them content that they can learn and complete on their schedule.

If you make the 10-mans as complex and time consuming as the 25-mans then you vastly reduce the % of the population who can then the content of that instance which is what they are there for in the first place.

The devs posted that no raid bosses have been created yet. Now, when making the zones, do they work top down - 25 mans first, then base 10 mans off that, or 10 mans first, then just make it harder?

I would think 25 mans first, as it would be easier to tone things down/remove abilities then it would to actually make new, harder encounters.

I don't know, I find ZJ, Gruul, and Mag at approximately the same level of difficulty, with regard to the abilities the boss has. The hard part with mag and gruul is organizing the 25 people, honestly.

We took several raids to get down Gruul. We downed Zul'jin the first night we got to him. And both first-kills were done in mostly kara/badge gear.

So yeah, he was. A lot of us felt Zul'jin was anti-climatic after Hex Lord. Hex Lord is definitely a better example of a hard 10-man boss.

From a strategy perspective there are real limitations on the complexity of 10 man raid encounters, this has been gone over before. You can't assume four tanks for example, since that would be nearly half of your raid. Encounter designers may not feel comfortable requiring certain classes (spellsteal, spell reflect, and mass dispel come to mind as very unique class abilities) which restricts their freedom.

A big one, at least to me, is that healing allocation is necessarily more obvious in a 10-man because there are less healers. Part of the difficulty of 25-man encounters is figuring out how to best allocate healing, both from a raid leading perspective when deciding which healers to invite and who to assign them to, and from an individual healer's perspective moment-to-moment as they decide what spells to cast. Designing an encounter that requires no more than four healers (probably the limit of healer stacking in a 10-man, it's the same ratio as bringing 10 healers in a 25-man) will necessarily make this process easier.

Notes from Eurogamer:

• Northrend is considerably larger than The Burning Crusade's Outland with a far richer variety within single zones than you can find anywhere in the existing game.

• The two raid tracks work similarly to Burning Crusade's Normal and Heroic modes.

• Scarlet Crusade will return in Dragonblight, the first zone in which players will encounter Arthas (who will not be patched in until the very last patch before Expansion 3).

• Zul'Drak is a single, giant ziggurat zone. The Argent Dawn faction returns in Zul'Drak.

• Inscribers will create glyphs that allow players to modify their spells and abilities. Going by the first recipe, which requires Peacebloom, they'll rely on the Herbalist gathering profession. Every player will get a new spell book page to which they can add six glyphs - currently, four major and two minor.

• Major glyphs will be effective in combat - adding damage over time or stun to a physical attack, for example - while minor glyphs will give convenient or cosmetic improvements, removing the need for some spell reagents.

• DKs have the ability to raise the corpses of fallen enemies and allies. Allies raised in this manner will be able to control the ghoul. Enemies raised will become the DKs pet (i.e. a Warlock pet). DKs can heal their pets similarly to a Hunter or Lock.

So they can just lower the bear armor bonus, or raise the armor on plate gear, or whatever, to balance as necessary. It's been pretty clear for awhile that crushing blows are going to be going away as a raid mechanic; this is just one more nail in the coffin.

Also, for what it's worth, I really don't see them adding a block mechanic for DKs. First of all, there's no point in having a class that tanks in plate with no shield if you just re-create all the mechanics of a shield through other means; it just waters down what would otherwise be a distinction between the tanking classes.

Second, block is only one of the four benefits from defense (five if you count crit fortification), and blocking is by far the least valuable outcome from a mitigation standpoint. If crushing blows aren't a concern (and all signs point to them being eliminated soon-ish) then losing block still leaves you getting > 90% of the full value from defense rating/skill.

On the other hand, the 10-man encounters can easily require much better individual performance from the players present than 25-man can. It's just simple mathematics; as the number of people increases, the individual tasks have to become easier or you stand next to no chance to repeat the encounter with any degree of certainty.

So yeah, maybe you can't require 4 tanks, or fifteen rogues, or a mana burn/mind control rotation. But on the other hand, you can make it more individually challenging by requiring someone kill this, tank that, CC the other thing, all while doing the special dance, standing in the white fire and avoiding the black while the other guy stands in the black and avoids the white... a collective amount of things a player has to do that would be near-impossible in a 25-man because all it would take is one person to screw it up and wipe the raid. And you can require these in a 10-man, because it's got fewer people so it can be repeated much more easily once they get it right.

This makes no sense, it isnt simple mathematics. Just because the number of people increases does not in any way mean that the tasks have to become easier. One way they make encounters (not all) more challanging is by making sure that everyone has to perform at their best. Go ask SK-Gaming if they feel that Muru allowed for a large number of people to have "easy" tasks.

As another example, look at dps races in 25-mans such as Brutallus where all dpsers need to know their class inside and out to perform at the absolute maximum dps levels possible. Now look at all the 10-man encounters where the same is needed? I can't think of a single dps race in 10man which requires such levels. And the reason being that not all people who raid 1-2 nights a week read all the forums / do all the theorycrafting and know exactly how to maximise their characters dps to 100% of it's potential. Now don't get me wrong, this doesnt make them any less skilled, it just means they dont want to put such committment into it. If you make 10mans require all dps to know exactly how to maximise their dps, it would stop an awful lot of casual guilds who arent interested in such committment, and again reduce the number of people seeing the content (which is not the intention of 10-mans). Thus for dps in such cases, their task has to be easier than the later 25mans.

Er, they can do this type of thing in 25 mans. They're doing it just fine in Sunwell. One person making a mistake and wiping the raid is just as possible in a 25 man as in a 10 man. By this logic, 5 mans have the highest challenge potential, and I just can't agree to that.