At the risk of sounding like so many people that have posted here and are just making assumptions, I'm currently having misgivings about the whole 10/25 thing too. To quote a guildmate "10-manning Arthas. Truly epic indeed".

It's very early for any of us to assume anything about it - since any info released about this change consists of what, two lines? I suspect that Blizzard DO know what they're doing when it comes to raids, and are aware that just a simple gear change won't really be enough to satisfy the percentage of hardcore raiders out there. I'm guessing (and certainly hoping) there will be enough changes made to keep people satisfied.

To quote further:
The same thing happened on TBC's launch. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't happen again.

I don't believe that the 'epic' feel of an encounter is necessarily based on the number of players working together to achieve some common goal. If an encounter requires lots of people to complete that certainly doesn't guarantee that there will be lots of glory at the end of the night when that pesky boss finally perishes. Likewise, a smaller group of people shouldn't be denied strong accomplishments either. I'm sure many here have played lots of different computer games which succeeded in conveying participation in an epic event while there was only a single player required.

It's all about the design of the encounter instead. Maybe we will see more cinematics in the expansion when on a boss fight, maybe they'll use other tricks, who knows? If the encounter is created to feel epic it will be epic, no matter how big or small an army you bring.
Also, I'd like to think about individual character progression a bit. Our characters will be pretty much combat hardened veterans who've faced down x dragons and y liches and z whathaveyou. Gone are the days of killing bunnies and sorting through talbuk excrement. So why should a group of ten tough as nails characters not be able to give Arthas a run for his money? It's 10 vs 1 and he spent the last few months sitting around on his chilled throne worried about developing hemorrhoids.

It'll be epic allright.

All these people whining about how killing Arthas with 10-men isn't epic, to me, if someone takes 10 Legendary Heroes (and yes, when you're level 80, you *are* a 'Legendary Hero') to kill them, then that seems pretty damn epic to me.

Now I can see where you're coming from in terms of comparing it to 25 or 40 man, but seriously, was Kael (25-man) less epic than Gehennas (40-man)? Hell no.

If 10-man Arthas is designed well, is sufficiently hard (a big if, I know), has rewarding loot, and culminates from a long story line through the whole of WotLK (plus warcraft 3), then you can bet your Ferrari it'll be epic.

There are also a lot of less blatant issues you'd need to work around when scaling encounters down. Take doom for example. Getting a random non-tank member of your raid killed off gets more and more swingy the smaller your raid is. Granted, doom is a pretty uninteresting mechanic, so i'm not heartbroken that it's not viable in 10s. But, anything like controlling a ghost that puts you out of the fight for a significant period of time is going to have trouble randomly targeting without being gamebreaking if it picks a healer every time.

You can also assume someone of every class in 25s if not necessarily every spec and design encounters around class abilities like mass dispel, spellsteal, enslave demon etc and that isn't possible in 10s. On a closely related point, it's a lot harder to tune around potential class stacking.

Hopefully this will be as someone suggested just an art-saving technique. Ideally badguy mcevilsorcerer has a different set of mechanics in each version that are related in theme but with little complete overlap. I'd be pretty happy with that, as opposed to extremely wary of the alternative. I like 10 man raids and enjoyed some standout 25 stuff, but I think both flavors would be watered down if you had to make every encounter work almost the same both ways. Also it would leave the people that play both ways (which i'm pretty sure is the majority of people doing 25s) with a set of heavily redundant content.

Well they can just not use those elements in 10-mans and it will be fine as 10-mans are supposed to be "easy" version of 25-mans.

As for "non-epic style of 10-man arthas" etc. Well it is better to actually being able to do this fight maybe in reduced form with less reward than never experience it at all (beside watching kill movie from some top guild). Also this will make 10-man raids completely viable, not everyone like to bitch with 25-man recruitment and drama shit. With 10-man it is completely possible to make guild with close friends only without need to recruit random people for progress. Plus now nobody will be forced to do any 10-mans if they have guilds and/or like 25-mans more.

Now I just hope that there will be BoJ 2.0, it will have loads more rewards and badges will drop in 10 and 25 mans (more per boss in 25 I would say of course) from the start not after one year when you did X instance 100 times. As side note I hope that also we will see daily quests for all factions so you will be able to get exalted for that nice item or enchant etc. by doing only dailies without need to farm 5-mans.

I have no problem with something like that happening in a smaller raid, I actually think it makes the game way more interesting, it promotes hybrid classes and creative thinking. If a healer gets knocked out then maybe that moonkin or elemental shaman or shadow priest in your raid can take over healing for the short time needed. Just like we have off tanks, we can have off healers.

Solving a problem is a lot more interesting if you don't have all the right tools to do it the straightforward way. Terestian Illhoof comes to mind, you have people getting sacrificed, there's adds to deal with, an imp that you can choose to kill to debuff the boss or not. There are many ways to deal with all of these elements and yet in the early days of karazhan we wouldn't think of doing it without a warlock seeding or deviating from the "standard" strategy. But as we've found out, it's not really needed, a dps warrior can kill the adds almost as fast, or letting them pile up and then coordinating aoe from multiple classes can work too. The dragonhawk boss in ZA comes to mind as having many possible approaches as well.

As long as you're not making a single spell 100% required (like being forced to banish a mob or else the raid wipes, or having to spellsteal a buff just to survive) then almost any raid composition can find ways to succeed as long as it has a reasonable amount of class variety. If it means some people have to respec or collect multiple gear sets, even for a 10 man raid, I'm not going to be complaining.

See, this is what I don't understand. It's a weird definition of epic that, even in fantasy, is almost exclusive to MMO raiding. Most fantasy is one hero, or at most, a small company of heroes, trying accomplish a seemingly impossible task and/or kill a supposedly invincible Evil Overlord. Most fantasy *games* are like that. You have your heros who are doing what others cannot.

It says a lot more for character strength and importance. Even in settings with large supporting casts, the actual conflict is handled by a handful of characters, if that.

Even Warcraft lore, and to a fairly large extent, in-game World of Warcraft lore, is individual-driven. Highlord Morgraine would be a good example of this.

There is nothing inherently "wrong" with 10 heroes, certainly with some sort of assist from NPC heroes (Sylvanas, Jaina, Tirion Fordring) taking on Arthas. Especially with no clue as to what the goal of the fight would actually be at this point.

Even if you insist on using player strength, our characters are to the point where they *can* clean out what used to be 5-15 man Level 60 content by themselves, and in some cases (with mechanics and specialized gear) kill raid bosses solo. Another ten levels would presumably mean a similar geometric increase. At that point, why *aren't* you a serious badass hero?

What i fear most is encounter balancing and varierity. Either you have to limit varierity a lot for 25 men due to 10 man or suffer from bad class balance in 10 men raid. I guess best way to solve both is to make encounters different. While on approach it might look like double work, the freedom should greatly reduce the difference in time spent on designing bosses/thrash.

what they say is that they try to get the core of the fights to the 10-man and to expand the fight for a 25-man.

They talk about naxxramas, but I think it would be better to look at it from the other way. Take a 10-man fight and think how to expand it to make it a good 25-man.

Think of Netherspite. Like having adds spawn out of the portals that have to be defeated while you take on the dragon.

Or having Moroes have 8 adds instead of 4. In the core it's still the same fight, just harder and with more variance.

I was actually pretty fired up about 10/25 man versions just because it's a logical reuse of assets. Set up a dungeon and then just use designers to configure it for different party sizes (and in the grand scheme of things designer time is cheap).

But I'm disappointed they are going to make the armor the same (and who knows, probably continue to reuse the art a 3rd time for PvP). There is value in having a distinctive look that relates to your character's individual progress and it's a shame that Blizzard doesn't seem to value that as much as the players do. I realize that art is one of the most expensive components of game development but Blizzard is making a healthy profit so I don't think it's unwarranted to challenge them to stop copping out like this.

At the very least, it would be nice if they could have continued to experiment with upgrading art like they were doing with smithed weapons... where 25 man shoulders have an extra effect or "flare" on top of what you'd get for the 10 man version.

I see this as a blending of the MMORPG genre with the online side of RPGs like Diablo. How many people did it take to kill Baal, after all? And wasn't it still pretty darn epic? And didn't killing him on Nightmare mode trump doing it on Normal mode?

To put it in another way - for those of you who played the Warcraft RTS series, you defeated all these mighty enemies entirely single-handed, as one person playing a game. Of course an RTS is different from an MMO, is different from an RTS. And yes, the solo players, the 5-man players and the 10-man players are essentially playing a different game from the 25-man raiding community. So?

What Blizzard seem to be moving towards is having (effectively) a single player RPG, an online small-group co-op RPG and a MMO, all sharing the same plotline and servers. You tackle the same content in storyline terms, in whatever format you personally find most appealing. Seriously, what is not to like? Frankly, I don't even mind if 10-man Arthas gets knocked over before the 25-man version. Put in a 5-man version or a solo version too, why not? To continue the Diablo analogy: if you killed Baal on Hell mode, does it matter that Joe Bloggs from down the road killed him on Normal mode a month ago? If they made a Diablo MMO and you killed him with a group of 25 people, would it matter that Joe Bloggs killed him solo, or with a group of 5?

The reward for doing 25 mans over 10 mans will obviously be getting a bigger challenge. Which is what some people want.
Probably less people than those who raid 25 mans now, but unless you start running out of guilds to join it will just mean 25 man guilds become more "elitist" and wanting to raid for the same reason: the challenge of boss fights.

Seems pretty fine to me.

I personally raid for exploring content, lore and kill some fun bosses, and I cant rule out I would change to 10 mans if Blizz got them right. End game raiding these days takes more time than I would like, even though the reward in pure fun and feel of accomplishment is there. But surely I would rather want to kill the more difficult 25 man (and thus 'fun') version than the 10 man version, given unlimited time and will to play.
I doubt 25 mans will go anywhere, but the effect on how 25 mans will work is hard to tell.
With 10 mans as the "more accessible raiding" for those who want that, will Blizzard make 25 man raiding even harder/time -consuming in Wotlk? Or will they continue to make 25 mans easier over time.
When 25 man raiding stops being the only serious end-game PvE there is (and tbh heroics and current 10 mans hardly deserves being called end-game), it makes it easier for Blizz to fine tune 25 mans to what the 25 man raiders want.
It will be interesting to see if they do so.

I also hope they use the idea tossed around in one of the inerviews, of 10 mans not being available before the end boss in the equivalent 25 man instance has been downed (or some boss before that, depending on which time frame they want. Like "kill Muru" or " Kill Kiljaeden" would open up a Sunwell 10 man version).
It preserves some of the exploration for the 25 man players, and tbh such a time lag is fair in my opinion, since the 25 man raiders might be assumed to be the more hardcore players spending most time (generally speaking), so they will be there to consume the new instances faster than the 10 man raiders.
A time lag between 25 man and 10 man also reduce the incitement for 25 man raiders to go back to 10 mans for gear up.

Of course a fail-safe mechanism would have to be in place for servers where no 25 guild could clear an instance in a reasonable amount of time.

Can't help to wonder if Blizzard are going to miss the point entirely. As I don't think the issue with the 25-man raids currently are the problems of getting 25 people into the same guild. Just that many players don't enjoy letting the game take over their lives the way it does when you decide to play in 3-4 hour sessions that are planned in advance.

I seem to remember Karazhan being several 3-4 hour sessions for our group before summer last year. Don't think it would have made much difference if it was a 25-man. The thing that makes 25-mans less uninteresting now is just the need to be in a guild that is organized for raiding; with a fixed schedule and attendance requirements.

However if Blizzard makes the 10 man raids essentially the same way; so you would need to be in a guild that focus on the 10-mans. With raid leaders that make sure the raid team is balanced, and with a fixed schdule to raid then the 10-mans might not be very fun either.

Might be dissapointed since when I first read about this I imagine something similar to how Karazhan is now. That is gather one solid tank and one solid healer and perhas decent 2-3 DPS; and then spend 30 minutes or so filling the group with whatever is in friends lists or /lfm.

If Blizzard thinks about making the new 10-mans like Karazhan was a year ago before all the nerfs then the scale down from 25 to 10-man might be a bit pointless. At least for me I'd really prefer it to be basically possible to PuG 75% of a group from start and still do well. But doubt thats what Blizz are imagining when they talk about 10 man progression.

I guess its something worth thining about really. Is the number of players that are in the raid what makes 25 mans so unaccessible; or that the content force scheduling RL around the guilds raid hours to a certain extent.

I honestly think this change cements the fact 10 man content will never really be difficult. Some even those who raid 25 mans enjoy 10man content to, and WANT DIFFICULT 10man content to face, but you can already see any 10 man that has any semblance of difficulty will lead to hundreds of posts crying about how they are casual and shouldn't have to pay attention in their 10man etc. Pretty sad imo

I don't see hundreds of posts crying about how ZA is too hard. Or how about bears should be easier to get. Maybe you think ZA is too easy for a group in full Tier 4 though?

Substitute 40-man and 20/25-man in there, and you've got complaints that people were making pre-BC. It wasn't valid then, and it isn't valid now.

People aren't going to ask for nerfs to the hard stuff as long as there is easy stuff available; there haven't been massive nerf requests for the high-end 25-man raids because there's a good selection of easier stuff available currently. There are several bosses in Zul'aman who are certainly harder than several T5 bosses, and the timed run is definitely a challenge, but there's not been any significant demand for nerfs, nor any sign of any willingness to do so.

Blizzard hasn't attempted to make top-level 10-man content yet. It remains to be seen whether that's due to willingness or balance.

I saw it mention about tanks... but what about the ratio of healers?

If in a 10 man you bring 2 healers, in theory to maintain that ratio you would have to bring 5 healers to a 25 man.

But raids currently are bringing what 7-9 on average with 1-2 fights asking for maybe the 10th and 11th?

And then, with 2 healers... are we going to see the rise of even more Shamans? Think about how much more effective 1-2 Resto shamans with totems/heroism will be in a 10-man as opposed to a Priest or Druid. (Granted, Priests, Druids and Paladins could be in line for lots of buffs, but I find it diffuclt to believe either Priest or Druids will gain anything on par to Windfury/Wrath of Air AND Heroism).

But then again, I've always thought these ratios were off. 1-3 tanks for 25-mans, 1-2 tanks for 10-mans, 1 tank for 5-mans. Those numbers never did seem to add up (that is, I always thought 25-mans should need more tanks to match up with 10-man and 5-man).

Shamans are very good (probably too good with the buffs) but we don't have any problems bringing druid and priest healers to ZA right now. I don't see why that needs to change.

I can't speak for all servers, but now there are regular Gruul pugs, which certainly wasn't the case immediately after the (entirely necessary) 2.1 nerfs. There are also many ZA pugs, which is a far higher level of content than was being pugged a year ago. The same happened pre-BC, to a lesser extent. Hell, a year ago we hadn't even got 2.1, and Karazhan still had hard-mode Aran and Nightbane (amongst others).

Casuals haven't been "stopped" at any point; the overall progression rate is just much slower than the high end players, and depends a lot on the amount of mudflation.

It's not that uncommon to bring 3 healers on a 10-man, which is the same ratio as 7.5 healers in a 25-man. If you're just trying to farm a place quickly, you don't bring many healers, but when learning both Kara and ZA (at "appropriate" gear levels) 3 healers felt very comfortable.

We can't really say anything about how effective shamans will be in the new content since we don't know anything about new spells, new talents, spell ranks, or possible adjustments to current ranks. I'm not hoping for nerfs, but I would not be surprised at shaman nerfs relative to other classes -- call it conservative scaling if you will. Conversely I'd be surprised if paladins didn't gain some form of multiple target healing, since it's no longer just a problem limited to raid encounter design (see: 5-man Kael). Or, to throw a curveball, what if Power Infusion had a group version in the expansion? We'll just have to wait and see.

Beyond that though, the number of healers you bring to a 10-man isn't necessarily 2. When people were just getting into Karazhan, 3 was pretty common, and some early Nightbane kills were with 4. Though granted, that fight was totally different from what it is now. Similarly the socially acceptable number of healers to bring for a ZA clear sort of depends on where your guild is, progressionwise. If you're doing it with T4 gear, 2 healers is going to be mighty rough.

Like some earlier posters in this thread have said, the 10-man setup may let hybrids actually be hybrids. Perhaps we'll see the return of Shadow Mend, and shadow priests can act as offhealers without it wreaking havoc on their mana bar. Stuff like that.

I'd venture to say that 3 healers while learning Kara/ZA would be the norm. Anyone's experience really contradict this?

The thing that I like most about this is that most guilds have cliques of players. It's just the way humans behave. I can actually do serious raiding with my close group of friends. I don't have to deal with all the people I dislike or worry about recruitment, or any of the serious logistics that come with 25 man raiding. That's why I don't even 25 man raid anymore. It stopped being a game for me and more of a second job organizing a ton of shit, mediating disputes between players, etc. This is possibly the best thing to happen to the game in my eyes.