Falwell

Gah, I'm not sure my point got across here so let me rephrase.

I think most raiding guilds would agree that raiding is not about the loot. The loot is a means to an end. The tools used to see bigger and badder content. Bigger and badder new content. When you remove the sense of exploration, mystery and awe that comes with hitting a new boss in the current 25 man scene, you remove a large portion of what inherently drives raiders. This is what I can definitely see happening with the current knowns about this system

If the entire 25 man raid scene consists of nothing but recycled and dolled up 10 man bosses with better loot tables, I fear for the future of large scale raiding in WoW.

 

fractaled

I think there's ample evidence that different people do things for different reasons. And some of them seem to want shinier more-purple-than-yours epics. Judging by the way that S4 items had ratings attached to them, I suspect that they want to please this crowd.

 

Emeraude

Adding ratings to arena items had nothing to do with pleasing any crowd.

Kalgan explained at one point he felt the risk vs reward was out of whack for raiding vs arena. The arena ratings were a way of balancing the risk vs reward problem.

 

Promii

Am I correct in understanding that you believe that we will need pieces from the 10-man and the 25-man to complete our set bonuses? I don't think that is what is implied by the interviews. It sounds to me like there will be, say, a complete T7 set from 10-man Naxx and a complete T7+ set from 25-man Naxx. We can thus complete set bonuses with all T7, all T7+, or a mixture of both. It would be the same as how the bonuses interact on the different season sets of arena gear. The only reason I can see for needing to do 10-mans when 25-mans are your focus would be if some DST equivalent dropped only from one of the 10-mans.

 

Mode

No. Think arena sets. You can have one piece each of season one, two, three, and four, but your set bonus remains the same. His concern is that if the set bonus is really good, it would be worthwhile to farm the 10 man for the inferior piece of gear that gets you your superior set bonus.

 

Bula

As long as the 10 and 25 man versions each have unique raid id's per week I don't see any problem with that. I am averse to making sweeping generalizations but I think we can all agree that 100% of 25 man guilds run or have run 10 mans where the percentage of 10 man guilds who run 25 man raids are very very small. If a 25 man raider is so intent on getting a set bonus that he has to go into a 10 man raid to do so, they will probably do so happily.

 

Promii

I suppose if you couldn't yet beat the 25-man T7+ chest dropping boss, there would be incentive to kill the 10-man T7 chest dropping boss to complete your bonus until you obtain the superior piece.

The point I was trying to make was that, assuming the capability of clearing either version of the zone, you'd be able to get everything you needed from the 25-man version.

 

bellator

Do you seriously believe what you have written actually reflects raid encounters!

Your math proves that if there is a fixed chance of success for an individual to succeed then yes, this fixed chance needs to be higher for larger groups to result in an equal aggregate chance of success.

But guess what, there is no such thing as a fixed chance of success. If there was a fixed chance of success an encounter would not be repeatable, it would be based on luck. As you practice an encounter, as you learn an encounter this % of success by an individual will go up. That completely destyors your argument.

As the more people become better at their task, the chance of the pull becoming a kill increases. If there was some task that people had to do in a 10man and 25man, the aggregate chance of success is lower for the 25man since there are more people. Do you honestly believe Blizzard then designs encounters so that these tasks in the 25man are easier to ensure the aggregates are the same. That would be seriously delusional. 25mans are meant to be harder, they have the better loot so Blizzard doesnt care there are more people, it tells everyone to learn the task and do it

Did you read my Brutallus example. Its a real example disproving your point. Blizzard expects dps to obtain close to 100% maximum efficiency to make this a kill. There isnt a single ten man boss that comes close to this. So the tasks are in fact harder despite there being more people.

 

Addled

Wait, what?

All the evidence (admittedly anecdotal) I've seen points in the other direction. More raiders are quitting and going to PvP for welfare epics, since it's easier, requires less consumable farming, less prep time, and less time overall.

On Moonrunner for example, pre TBC, we had 6-7 Alliance and 2-3 Horde guilds with Naxx progression. In TBC, we have 2-3 Alliance and 1-2 Horde guilds with Sunwell kills. In addition, because of reduced raid sizes, there were a lot more people in Naxx than Sunwell.

I'm willing to bet one of my 70s that most, if not all, servers are more or less like mine.

Really, this is the biggest point. I think we're all agreed that a 10 man version of a raid instance has to be easier than the 25 man version, due to class composition issues and whatnot, and if so, what's the point of doing the 25 man version?

 

Copernicus

It's such a minor concern right now with so little information (sum total of information right now - four glyph slots!), but I really hope it's possible to bank inscriptions.

I love the ability to change between various specs in TBC right now, where a character can switch between multiple roles or PvP/PvE for only the cost of a few dailies. I'd hate for a character to feel locked in because they picked up a healing inscription.

 

gnoop

On the flip side, there are a lot of guilds that run Kara and maybe delve into ZA but never step foot past that. Progression isn't necessarily the best indicator of raid population. For various reasons, there are many guilds out there only running 10-man raids.

 

bellator

I'm sure i'm being extremely optimistic in looking for a response, but i'm positive many people would love clarity on how you define easy/extremely difficult in terms of 10/25man raiding.

One way of interpreting your sentence would be along the lines of..... There will be easy 10 (Karazhan) and (gasp) 25 (SSC) person raids. There will also be extremely difficult 10 (ZA) and 25 (Sunwell) person raids. Clearly, despite them both having a scaleing difficulty in the examples i have filled in, the easy 10 mans are easier than then easy 25 mans, and the difficult 25 mans are more difficult than then difficult 10 mans.

The other way of interpreting it is that on the 10 man side the difficulty of the later instances will be that of the 25mans atm (60 hours learning time Muru style). This would be quite a radical and fascinating idea since whilst the current 10mans play an important role in the raiding structure, for the current Sunwell raiders I dont think there was 60 hours of learning time involved in the whole of KZ and ZA together, let alone for a single boss.

The question is which interpretation is correct?

 

katholas

Not only is this wrong for the reasons listed in the above post, it actually proves exactly the point you are arguing AGAINST. Due to the fact that it is always harder to get more people to do everything right, 25 man content will ALWAYS be harder than 10 man content.

Not only that but when you build a 10 man encounter to be as difficult as you possibly can you have to do it while looking at what you can assume will be in the raid. I know in our bear runs we frequently go w/o any mage in the raid at all and hit the timer with ease. So would it really be reasonable for them to assume there is a mage in the raid and design a boss that needed to be spell stolen? Or what if our tanks for a run happened to be say a druid and a deathknight? Wouldn't be very good to have an encounter that needs shield block.

So what you end up getting is an encounter that requires your DPS to perform to the standard that you would hold the least capable class for the job to. Same for your tanks, same for your healers. AOE damage will have to be healable by a pally/druid. DPS requirements can't assume there will be every warlock curse on the target(or even a single warlock curse). You end up having a watered down encounter even at the very highest you can tune a 10 man boss just because it would be fairly unreasonable to require every single 10 man raid be made up of 1 of each class.

 

Cranch

Taking what has been quoted from Blizzard, I suspect the intended plan is:

1. On initial release, only some 25 mans are available (no 10-mans.) Pro guilds work on them. They get a chance at world firsts.
2. Whenever a 25 man final boss is completed, the corresponding 10 man becomes available for smaller guilds. They get a chance to experience similar encounters as the pro guilds.
3. On initial release, the best loot from any of the 10 mans will not be quite as good as the first 25 man loot. I.e., the progression is 10->10->10->25->25->25, e.g.
4. There'll be a release of the 10 mans lockout eventually for all servers, to compensate for those that don't have the necessary pro guilds.
5. Pro guilds will use the 10 mans primarily for alts or recruits, thus reducing burnout. Note that anyone running the 25 mans regularly will have no reason to run the 10 mans (e.g., there'll be no badges from the 10 mans you can use for 25 man gear, nor will there be any item that pro guilds will find necessary.)

If the above is actually what happens, I look forward to the release.

 

• Chicken

I wouldn't call this a completely accurate comparison. Kalecgos is a lot harder than the easier bosses Naxxramas had to offer, and Brutallus after him also offers the kind of barrier Patchwerk used to offer in the Abomination Wing.

Of those 6-7 Alliance guilds and 2-3 Horde guilds how many of them had Naxxramas progress beyond the the first few bosses? On the server I'm on all four guilds that currently have any Sunwell kills are guilds (Or are reforms of guilds) that progressed beyond the harder bosses in Naxxramas; the guilds that progressed past Patchwerk to put it bluntly. There were numerous additional guilds that had managed to kill bosses in Naxxramas, but all of those only killed the earlier and easier bosses. The level of progress these guilds have varies a bit, a few of them have recently killed Illidan on our server and they managed to kill Kael'thas before the attunement was dropped, while for most of these the recent attunement dropping was their first chance to see inside of Hyjal and Black Temple.

Obviously the fact that we're now doing 25 person raids still seems to indicate there's a loss of raiders on the server I'm on, but something important to remember is that there's always been a low amount of people that are willing and capable of leading a raid or a raiding guild.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Talgog

25-person tasks will reach the point of impossibility/arbitrariness exponentially more quickly. In that respect, and in terms of organizational logistics, they are more difficult.

10-person tasks can apply a degree of difficulty to each member that because of cumulative probabilities would be entirely unfair in a 25-person setting. The same goes for 25-person scaled up to 40. You increase the difficulty of what a given person has to do, the task requiring the biggest numbers fails first. Yes, that means that the larger numbers can be "harder." It also means that a designer cannot push individual members nearly as hard.

Blizzard does not, generally, choose to be complete bastards in encounter design, by making encounters for max-size, min-maxed raids that also require a bit of luck and perfect play from the members of said raid on complex tasks. They certainly *can*, and for Sunwell it looks like they have, but people don't tend to like those sorts of things and thus there isn't much of a market for it. Burning Crusade has had a few things that screamed arbitrary and unfair, and people hated them.

 

Vaeys

The only mention I remember seeing of having a 25man needing to be completed before the 10 comes available was Icecrown and Arthas - otherwise the indications was that the remainder of the 10/25 availability/progression were completely separate. And they were tossing around the idea of limiting it, not set in stone.

Each pair of 10/25 would have 2 sets (similar looking), the 25 version being better than the 10, but pieces from either being used to count towards the set bonus.

Semi-curious to see how the badge system works - there will be new types of badges from heroics, but will raids also drop them? Different set of badges, different set of loot? Heroic set pieces for badges, or badges + questline, or questline only?

 

Sillia

But it does not, because people are not robots. Sometimes people screw up. Maybe somebody interrupts their concentration. Maybe someone's connection drops. Maybe someone misses the raid warning. Maybe somebody's video card doesn't display the fire on the floor. Maybe somebody's mind wanders and they just screw up.

These are all extremely real situations that can and do happen. And they play into the chance of somebody to NOT screw up, giving them an overall sub-100% success rate.

The various factors thrown into the encounter are what changes the success rate. If you assume the player has full knowledge of the encounter and knows exactly what he or she needs to do, then there are still factors that can cause that player to fail. This is what I am talking about. By purposely introducing more factors that players have to deal with, you increase the chances of someone screwing up somewhere.

The difference here is that it is much more forgiving to raise the individual bar for 5 and 10-man encounters than it is for 25-man, because you have fewer people to screw up. That's the point. You could do it for 25-man, but it would make it too hard for most of the target audience. However, you have a much freer hand to do so with smaller-group content. Which is my point.

It isn't delusional. Seriously, just look at the raid encounters in this game. That's *exactly* how they are designed. What do mages do for the majority of raid encounters? They do their optimal DPS cycle. What do hunters do for the majority of raid encounters? They do their optimal DPS cycle. What about your warlocks that aren't tanking? Their optimal DPS cycle. What about your healers? They're putting out as much healing as possible for as long as possible.

You do the same thing, over and over. Occasionally have to wear shadow resist gear and still do DPS, or you have to run away from people when you get fatal attraction, or you have to move out of the fire, or click the spikes and throw them at the shell, or you have to click the cubes, or you have to avoid the floating orbs. But the majority of the time, you aren't doing these things - you're just doing your optimal cycle over and over again until you have to do something else.

That's what raiding is right now - a small group that has something dynamic to do, and the rest of it doing the static stuff. It's exactly how it is designed.

Here's an example. Think Teron Gorefiend. Instead of killing him via regular DPS, the entire raid consists of everyone doing shades the *entire* time. Failing to handle shades the entire time. Everyone in raid doing it successfully dealing with ten waves of constructs in a row = win.

I read it. It also doesn't do anything of the sort. Brutallus is a pretty massive gear check; as you get better geared, Brutallus will become easier and easier. The actual chances of screwing up on Brutallus go down as you get better gear, because you really don't have to do that much if you are DPS on that fight - you just do as much DPS as you can. You aren't doing something radically different.

The great Samuel L Jackson said "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence". Just because they have not made an encounter that requires a 10-man DPS burn like Brutallus, Patchwerk or whatever does not mean it is not possible. It just means they haven't done it yet, for reasons they decided. If they actually have a reasonable 10-man progression, we'll probably see encounters like that, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to do so.

 

Liebestod

It's inevitable that some of the 25-man encounters would have to be significantly dumbed-down for 10-man environments, unless Blizzard simply stops designing encounters with a certain degree of complexity. This was already a concern with the 40->25-man step, and it'll show up with the Naxx changes, but 25->10 is a much bigger change in terms of how much less the smaller group can do.

Thus I hope that 10-man mode is more than simply having bosses rescaled, and having them drop lower-ilvl loot. I would kinda expect for most instances to possibly have 1 or 2 bosses unique to each mode, Blizzard's flirted with the idea with Heroic instances on and off after all..

 

Phlis

I expect it'll likely be along the lines of Kael'thalas 25->5man conversions. Most of the elements which make the encounter difficult removed, but still enough there to be interesting. Honestly, Kael'thalas phases 1, 4 and 5 works fine as a 10 man encounter, just with some number tweaks: the size of his magic shield, and egg health, would have to be lowered, and thats about it.

 

Vhex

The problem is that so far "Extremely difficult" translates mostly into "stack the right classes."

Which doesn't work well in a 10-man guild. In those casual environments you usually can't bring "Okay we need a protadin and a feral druid to tank the Eredar Twins" because all you may have available is a warrior and a pickup DK.

If they introduced the job system and talent stables and whatnot, then maybe. But as is, I foresee a -lot- of bitching about 'difficult' 10 mans being too difficult for the crowd they are aimed at.

I mean, maybe you don't remember, but I recall a lot of bitching in the early Kara days about a lack of shadow priests when SP's made half the encounters there pretty trivial.

Anyways...

Personally I was hoping this meant Blizzard would have a 10 man and 25 man wing with different layouts and mobs and whatnot. Maybe even a wholly different timeframe. Like 25 man naxx would be a pristine fortress and 10 man naxx would be the 'ravaged' naxx that is in the middle of raising itself again to heed the Lich Kings call. So maybe 2 of the 4 horsemen are still dead, 10 man patchwerk is missing an arm, and instead of trying to kill Kel'Thuzad, you need to prevent him from being raised.

Finding out that it's going to end up possibly being "Same shit, hits harder" is a bit of a dissapointment. While I'm all for the 'let's wait and see how it turns out!' I've lived through enough "No seriously guys, we have a miracle patch that we're holding back for release!" to know that we shouldn't keep our mouths shout, even about speculation.

Now is the time to speculate, bitch and offer suggestions because nothing is going to change in open beta. Any failures we point out in open beta are going to take until patch 3.2 to get fixed, or later (hi2u Rexxar questline in TBC).

 

• Lima

It sounds like they are considering it for all 25 mans to me from this quote, he doesn't mention Icecrown/Arthas.

 

Vaeys

One of the articles mentions it in the context of Arthas/Icecrown, must not have gotten around to reading that one yet.

WoW Forums -> Wrath of the Lich King Media Coverage 5/9/08 for an "official" compliation of new coverage links (I don't remember seeing that linked here yet).

I wouldn't expect Naxx to be limited from the start regardless of what they do - but the others (especially if they space them out over patches) are likely to be fair game.

 

Siddown

At the end of the day, as we are all still playing this game well after release, I think we can assume that Blizzard knows a little bit of what they are doing. The people who are worried about 25 mans dying obviously haven't been reading about the part where it states that 25 man loot will be superior to 10 man. Some might do 25 man raids solely for the Lore, but most do it for the progression.

People who do 10 mans only will always be behind those that do both. This also potentially eliminates the need for guilds to continue to run old 25 content for the DST of WotLK.

 

flyingtoastr

Every time someone says something about Blizzard knowing what they're doing I glance at my 4-piece bonus and die a little on the inside.

Regardless, the real "problem" with back farming for things like a DST could be solved much easier than splitting progression. The only reason people are forced to farm a gruul still is because the itemization (specifically with Trinkets, just as in pre-TBC) is terrible in higher instances. Its not a problem of "oh I want a DST so lets go run Gruul", its "oh there isn't really anything worth using except DST so lets farm Gruul". Smart itemization would easily compensate for this.

For example, the devs had a chance to make some really stellar class-specific trinkets (the T5 drops or Ashtongue rep ones) that could have replaced things like a DST. These could have then been replaced by some really well itemized trinkets in Sunwell. Instead, all we see are very lackluster (and useless in the case of a couple classes) class trinkets and trinkets from SWP that still come out lower than something from 3 tiers before. This is a purely itemization issue.

Divine Favor still costs mana.