In Kara/Badge/earlier ZA gear we one-shot Hex Lord and took three nights of tries over two resets to kill Zul'jin. I guess anecdotal evidence is useless, heh.

This was my thought on essentially allowing a DK to block with their sword/axe (which in turn will likely mean more 2h swords and axes in raids), because that'd just be a parry (realistically speaking, but this is a game, not reality).

Honestly, I'm hoping they give block a significant buff, perhaps a significant change so that its mitigation is useful. I think the best option would be to significantly increase block value allowed per point. [Think being able to block for 1000-1500 just entering the SWP.] This of course would require a re-balance of shield blocking abilities on the high-end (shield block and shield slam), but it would give usefulness to the block, removing reliance on a mechanic that clearly they're trying to remove already.

Addition: By having a 10-man route of progression, my guess is that this would remove/greatly reduce reliance on badges and badge loots. They'd probably still have their own place, perhaps to buy PvP gear with and so on, but definitely remove the "problems" we are having with badge loot now (i.e. badge loots = BT gear).

The reason I'm upset about the 10 man instances is that I feel Blizzard is taking the easy way out AGAIN. As someone who is admittedly casual, I don't like how things are going. Rather then creating multiple streams for various types of play, Blizz seems to be wanting to continue to jam the one size fits all model down our throats.

I fully don't expect to see/do everything in game that someone who can play 10x as much as me can. That's not fair to them and doesn't value their time and effort.

While 10 man encounters can be very enjoyable, they certainly lack an "epic" feeling... much the same as the transition to 25 from 40. Worst of all, I'm certain that the gear progression will be such that people will have already run the 10 man version REPEATEDLY before they ever to do the 25 man. I'm just not sure how many "/cheer" you will get after you down a boss in the 25 man mode after killing him about 25 times in the 10 man.

I just don't see why Blizzard can't grasp the "MM" part of MMORPG. By next expansion will we be down to 5's?? It's a realistic question given the history

If you're going to argue about an "epic feeling", then you should be vouching for the return of 40 mans. I had a significant number of "epic feelings" in vanilla wow (Rag, Nef, Twin Emps, C'Thun, 4HM, etc) vs. ...well, Kael 1.0 was very epic, as well as some of the SWP bosses.

But that's a lot of variables that lead to the "epic feeling" that are far more than just how many people are in the raid.

No, anecdotal evidence isn't useless. However if your anecdotal evidence that ZJ took longer than Hex is useful then you must accept his anectdotal evidence that Gruul took longer than ZJ is also useful. I believe your original argument was that the 10 man boss ZJ was as challanging as the 25 man boss Gruul, which if you believe anecdotal evidence would mean that his evidence proves otherwise.

A solution similar to the Zul'Aman timed run would be something in the right direction, making the whole instance clearable at a casual pace, but also rewarding good play.

Personally even though I'm in the 10 man raid camp I'm not so happy about this recent news of shared instances for 25/10 man, my fear is that the 10 man versions will be watered down and too simple. I don't really want easier content, I want it to be challenging. I just don't want to deal with being in/organizing a large guild. I'm still optimistic that blizzard knows this and wants to get this right though.

I'd imagine that the 10-man instances' difficulty will scale up, and it'll be more than just bosses hitting for less and doing less abilities (the reverse of heroic versions of 5 mans), of course I'd presume that such will happen with certain bosses/instances, designing a 25 man 4HM will be difficult enough, a 10 man version of that is actually difficult is near impossible to imagine.

However, there are bosses that can scale down to 10 man and still work, theres quite a few bosses in SWP that could be scaled down to 10 man and still probably work with all of their abilities.

M'uru is (at least at the level of gearing he was killed at in his first week), a very much maximized encounter. You can bet serious money that almost nothing in the pre-finale Wrath progression cycle is going to be that hard. Initial TBC raiding was doing its best to continue to scale up in difficulty from WoW 1.0, and it was an utter disaster because only the Naxx guilds were getting anything down. You probably can't make anything harder than M'uru at the gear level he was killed at.

Generally though, difficulty is an issue of how many people you need to do their job right, because every new variable is a point of failure. More people, more connections, more computers, etc. If an encounter will kill you if you have one failure in a person for any reason (technical, bad gear, bad play, standing in fire, etc.), your chance of success is the probability of absolutely none of those occuring. By definition, that gets worse with any additional variable.

Thus, while it is easier to have 10 people have 5 things that have to go right each in order to kill boss than it is to have 25 people have 5 positive results, it is also a lot more "fair" to make a 10-man encounter require each person to have 10 positive results than to require the same in a 25-man encounter. Everytime you add a new variable, you add a chance for that variable to fail. It's just a different sort of strain piling it on fewer people as opposed to bringing more people.

I honestly don't like the idea of having the same dungeon with the same bosses as 10/25 man copies... So if I do 25 man raiding I'll (most likely) get superior gear to the 10 man and since its the same encounters why do the 10 man? Even if I enjoy doing both this seriously takes a lot of fun out of 10 man instances.

Like others have said I enjoyed a lot ZA due to its timed event, more of that please in unique 10 mans that have added optional "twists" to make them more challenging/rewarding.

It makes perfect sense. Take a step back from particular fights for a moment, and look at it in terms of mathematics. 1 person with full knowledge of the encounter, doing a task for an encounter, has a 95% chance of doing it successfully. He has a 5% chance of failing and wiping the group.

As a solo encounter, this task has a 95% completion success chance (0.95^1).
In a 5-man, the aggregate chance of success is ~77.38% (0.95^5).
In a 10-man, the aggregate chance of success is 59.87% (0.95^10).
In a 25-man, the aggregate chance of success is 27.74% (0.95^25).

The more people you add, the more difficult it becomes despite the fact the individual task does not become any more difficult on its own.

If you make the individual task more difficult on its own (definition of greater difficulty: greater chance for failure. 95% success becomes 90% success):

As a solo encounter, this task has a 90% success chance (0.90^1).
In a 5-man, the aggregate chance of success is ~59.05% (0.90^5).
In a 10-man, the aggregate chance of success is 34.87% (0.90^10).
In a 25-man, the aggregate chance of success is 7.18% (0.90^25).

In order for any fight to be reasonably repeatable for any large groups (25+), individual tasks for most of the people must be really, really easy (99% chance of success or greater).

Lets also not forget that this also allows for 2-3 GREAT players to have a disproportional effect. By no means will Blizz tune instances such that Min/Max is required... probably not even close. We all know people in our guilds who just seem to be that 10% better then most at their class/role.

I'm just not following how this is going to do anything but upset people who like UNIQUE large group encounters. Isn't this just going to feel like doing an instance on Heroic?.... and how many of you would be willing to do a 25 man version of Mechanar more then once if they tuned it for 25 people?? That's my point.

I actually get the feeling they are grasping it better than you are. Massively Multiplayer means a persistent world where lots of people can be simultaneously connected. Too many people in the past equated 'massively multiplayer' with 'must do stuff in large groups'. There have been plenty of MMO games where large group scenarios were not the end-all, be-all of the game (City of Heroes, Ragnarok Online, Ultima Online, Second Life, etc.).

The thing is... they *did* subscribe to that belief in vanilla wow. And they realized it wasn't as popular. And despite the caterwauling of the raiders (Remember XI's soapbox post about how sad and emo they would be after killing illidan and mourning the 15 BFFs they were forced to cut from their raid numbers to get there?) raiding in TBC is still a viable and strong institution. All the evidence points to the fact that more people are raiding and getting further in TBC than they did in vanilla wow, and from what it sounds like, even more will be able to do it in Wrath.

Does that mean they'll shrink the raid sizes again in XP#3? Maybe. Maybe not. But they'll make their decisions based on what they believe will make them the most money by keeping subscribers around the longest. I believe the biggest thing they learned from the past four years is "Content accessibility is what most people want".

Personally, I think the 10-and-25 version is nice because it means that you don't have to sacrifice experiencing content in order to play the game in a way that you enjoy. It's not just the easy way out, it may also be the smart way out.

My primary concern is what that means for encounter design. 25-man encounters will be constrained by having to scale it down to a 10-man version. This might mean less innovative 25-man content. It might also mean better 10-man content, but at this point I think they're already pushing the bounds of what an encounter can be for 10 people. I remember them talking back in the ay about how, in 40-man raiding, they could do crazy stuff like Nefarion's class calls that they couldn't do in 5-man dungeon. Something like that could scale to 25, but not to 10, especially on some random offweek where you bring 3 or 4 shamans. That's the most classic example, but there's an upper bound on the complexity of a task that can scale down well. Things like adds, AoE, and having to split the raid group up to handle different tasks don't work when you have less people and a less predictable class distribution, and if that part of the encounter is a defining part of the encounter than the playstyles become divergent.

This has been said before, but I'd like to reiterate for those confused: the "Jeff" in that article is NOT Tigole. That's one of the interviewers.

For the record, you quoted Jeff GREEN, the editor from 1up and credited it to me.

I'm not sure if you have been reading the articles, but there will be progression within 10 and 25 person raiding. There will be easy 10 and (gasp) 25 person raids. There will also be extremely difficult 10 and 25 person raids. I think that we have a very good understanding that what keeps some people playing are the things they haven't done yet

So what incentive is there to do 25 man raiding outside of the loot?

This is the biggest question in my mind about this entire system.

The linked item sets thing seems like a slippery slope added on to my earlier post on the subject.

I don't think the 10/25 split idea is terrible, it's not like I want to see the casuals never see content out of some raider spitefulness, I just don't want for some undue extra strain to be put upon us as the cost, having "off days" turned into required 10 man farm time because the set bonuses need to be completed does not seem appealing at all. Not to say that I don't want to ever run any of the 10 mans, but I'd rather it be that I'm helping out some friends, my brother/cousin, or gearing an alt, not putting the finishing touches on my 25 man raiding gear that ONCE AGAIN we aren't going to be getting from 25 mans apparently.

They truly need to be kept separate or this is going to end up putting a lot more pressure on 25 man guilds than people let on. A lot of the not so power guilds(100-200ish rankings) still have that pre-BC feel of "good players carrying not so goods." They are going to get absolutely destroyed by the amount of people who feel the incentive for +30 more stats and the legendary they wouldn't get Loot Council'd anyways isn't enough to stay in 25 man raiding, especially since those stats don't even make them marginally better in pvp since TBC(good change, but it helps my argument =].)

A more engaging and challenging raid experience? If you read the interview, you'd have read the part that says they're aware of the limitations that each raid size brings. They even cited the difficulty of translating the Four Horsemen from a 40 player raid to a 25 player raid, let alone a 10 player raid. Layer on top of that prestige.

There are no details beyond what's been posted from what was probably a couple hours worth of interviewing, and gleaning that much was simple.

edit: To cover myself here, that obviously all hinges entirely on proper design and implementation. There are currently 10 man raiding experiences that are above and beyond some of the available 25 man alternatives. Solarian vs. Hex Lord or a four timer bear mount run, for example.

Whether they manage to pull it off is another thing, entirely.

It was said in one of the interviews that icecrown would be the last raid instance, and it was going to be released in the last patch of WotLK before the expansion after WotLK, this seems to indicate to me they're returning to vanilla wow raid progression, thus limiting the amount of progression you have available, completely different from TBC raiding where blizzard attempted to release all the raid instances at release, which ended up as a disaster because of many, many reasons.

I wouldn't toss that out there just yet either, Sunwell, for having almost 1/3'rd the bosses, looks like it may be fairly exclusive at the top end considering how hard Mu'ru is and after you factor in the growth of the general population+lessening of raid number to 25, and it's effect on kill numbers. If Sunwell is left untouched like Naxx was until it's relative expansion, I don't see KJ kills resembling KT being a large stratch, especially with the circumstances of the near future being relatively equal to Naxx(impending xpac beta being the most important there.) Although it will likely dodge the Thanksgiving+Christmas bullet.

I think it goes without saying that the 25-mans will be harder. And of course they'll drop better loot. At the same time, do I really want to invest more time into a harder encounter for an extra ilvl worth of loot, and the frustration of 100+ wipes just to say "I did it!"

The avenue of just killing Arthas and beating the game in a 10-man environment might be very appealing.

Based off the BC model, I could quit for 6 months, return, farm heroics for gear, trade in badges for high ilvl gear, and become a viable 10-man raider very quickly.

I think the concern that people on this forum have, is this:

Given 10-man and 25-man versions of the same content, the 10-man versions is by default always easier - for the reasons mentioned above, and for logistical reasons. So if the only difference is the ilvl of the rewards (which even look mostly the same), will there be enough people looking to do the 25-man version to keep the 25-man raiding community alive and healthy?

Hopefully the 25-man versions will also be more interesting (where "interesting" sort of means difficult but not just in a numbers way).