The lore thing doesn't even make sense. You could kill Illidan in War 3 with ten units easily. Kael would be harder but most would be killable with ten.

Here's hoping that Blizz releases a new 10-man boss before the expansion is out that's tuned to be more difficult than KJ, so people will shut up about the "10-mans can't be hard!" point. 10-mans have a lower complexity cap, and a lower difficulty cap, but do you honestly think that Blizzard has made the 25-man encounters thus far nearly as hard as they could without overtuning them? They could easily have a bullet-hell type Void Reaver battle or something that very few groups would ever clear, be it 5-man, 10-man, or 25-man. If you can't see the game being significantly harder... you've only your own imagination to blame.

While they haven't hit the complexity cap for either 10 mans or for 25 mans, I do believe that leaving a touhou-esque style bullet hell (which i would love, I'm a total shmup junky Shoot the Bullet is one of the best games ever IMO) out of the equation 25 mans have already gone beyond where 10 man difficulty can be brought to. Now take this with a grain of salt because sadly i have yet to see m'uru myself, but everything i've seen and read points to the fact that it just could not be done in a 10 man raid situation. If you were to scale it down to be 10 man viable it would lose its difficulty and while remaining difficult i'm sure, would be nowhere near the 25 man encounter and i don't think much of anything they could cook up for a 10 man raid would be able to match it either.

The truth is that they have to scale 10 man content to what is reasonable to require in a 10 man raid. And the fact of the matter is they will not ever design an encounter that specifically requires a raid to bring along exactly 1 and only 1 of each class. It is perfectly reasonable to expect a 25 man raid to have at least 1 of each class, and even to assume 2 of each class and as such encounters can be designed to test each and every class during the course of a fight. The 10 man design however is limited to testing "caster dps", "melee DPS", "tanks", and "healers". Note this is not the same. Especially when you consider that classes like shadow priests and ret pallys exist, classes that are very very good in a 25 man setting where they are helping to optimize a group and their full potential is being put to use but toss a ret pally in with 2 melee a caster and a healer and all of a sudden they are not so useful and have to rely mostly on personal DPS to justify a raid slot. Same pretty much goes for a shadow priest 1500 DPS is excusable when you are fueling 3 2200 DPS mages and an ele shammy but not so much when the grouping tosses you 2 healers a lock and a mage.

So the question becomes do you design to the lock, perfectly capable of putting up very good numbers regardless of group makeup, or do you design down to the Spriest requiring his very maximum DPS, but no more than that. If you design the first way you remove support classes from the picture in 10 man raiding. If you design the second way encounters are very difficult if you bring a Spriest and a ret pally, but doable, and very easy when you bring a warlock and a rogue because their DPS is just so much better in a 10 man setting.

I remember blizzard saying something that would limit the amount of DKs, not a actual limitation but something to keep everyone from playing them. It just seems that a free level 55 character is going to make everyone level one.

For everyone complaining about a 10 manned Arthas not being "epic", look at how many people were in The Fellowship. How many were there in the Heroes of the Lance? Exactly ten.

One would think having LESS people would make it MORE epic because you do not have as much to work with.

Precisely why we're only being limited to one DK per server. At the very least, an instant level 55 would be perfect for an enchanting/alchemy/other crafting mule.

Well, this is why I differentiated between the difficulty cap and the complexity cap. I don't think Blizzard has come close to hitting the 25-man complexity cap, and I imagine that the 10-man complexity cap is significantly higher than people are giving Blizzard credit for (some seem to believe that it's already been hit.) There are a lot of sound theoretical arguments about why the 10-man complexity cap is lower than the 25-man cap, but that's not to say that there can't be 10-man encounters just as complex as any of the 25-man stuff seen so far. For example, I do think fights like Vashj and Kael could be given 10-man versions that reasonably approximate the 25-man complexity... 10-man Vashj could still have Water Elementals and Strider kiting and Nagas in Phase 2. 10-man Kael could still have all 4 advisors up at the same time as well as all 6(?) weapons in Phase 2. That's not to say that there aren't fights that can't have 10-man versions (4H comes to mind, obviously), but that doesn't necessarily mean they're more complex, just usually that they require more tanks or they require a certain number of niche roles which one maybe can't assume in a 10-man raid.

But if people are focused on difficulty, then there's no reason why a 10-man Touhou boss couldn't make M'uru look like Hogger in terms of execution. The only problem with that is that I think that both complexity and execution are important... but the number of awesome encounters that Blizzard makes which simply require more than 10 people is minimal, and I'm sure if we wanted to fuck around we could dream up some 10-man encounters just as complicated as anything currently in the game.

tl;dr version: The difficulty cap for 10-mans is above the current level of difficulty in 25-man encounters. The complexity cap in 10-mans is almost surely above the current level of complexity in 25-man encounters, but it's really up to Blizz to prove this. I remember people bitching about Kara when a 10-man epic raid was first announced, like they believed that every boss would just be Father Flame or The Beast or something like that (even though we had Lord Val at that point to indicate what could be done.) They were proven wrong, and both of the 10-man raids in TBC are pretty damn awesome.

Ok fair enough, you're right there is a large difference in difficulty and complexity just look at brut, very difficult but at the same time extremely simple. And i also agree that the complexity cap for 10 and 25 mans both have yet to hit their respective ceilings yet. However I believe that by earlier point is still valid when put in context of complexity instead of difficulty. You can never design a 10 man encounter assuming that you will have any given class present. This limits the complexity a great deal. In a maximally complex 25 man (again barring phantasm level from perfect cherry blossom) each class would have to utilize all of their abilities, even the very infrequently used and situationally specific ones. In a maximally complex 10 man however there could be no requirement for any class specific ability. Sure you could give players control of a new NPC (terron) and level things out but this would still only be as complex as that single NPC allows, never being able to reach the complexity of having the full abilities of all 10 classes being put to the test.

Granted this has yet to happen in any encounter but i think for this reason the ceiling on 25 mans is MUCH MUCH higher than that of 10 mans, and while i do not think that 10 mans have reached their complexity or difficulty ceiling, i do think they may actually be pushed to that limit at some point. 25 mans however i truly doubt will ever actually hit their ceiling, mainly because trying to design an encounter where warriors have to rend, priests have to mind vision, druids have to sooth beast etc. all while using their normal abilities and serving their primary function would be unbelievably difficult to design and program.

The 10-person versions will be easier not because of any technical limitations but for two reasons:

- They drop weaker loot (as stated by Blizz) and they will thus be tuned to be completed with weaker gear
- They are aimed at a less "hardcore" crowd (I am inferring this but I think it's a reasonable inference)

It will be a design choice on Blizzard's part to make them easier. That doesn't mean some of them can't be harder than any 25-person encounter that presently exists, but it means that the 10-person version of a given zone will be easier than the 25-person version of the same zone.

Im pretty sure they dont see a reason to limiting them.
Nearly everyone will make one yes, but after a while most will have gone back to their old chars again, maybe using a DK for yet another profession alt or whatever.
And that will still be true no matter how overpowered they might be at release. People are pretty good at spreading out between classes. Not a perfect distribution by any means, but decent. If anything I would be more worried of enough people playing DK's after a while.

The discussion about difficulty in 10 vs 25 man is a bit silly. While 25 mans can probably be made more complex than 10 mans (harder to expect X number from each class being represented etc) it is a non-issue. Nothing so far points toward Blizz even wanting to make 10 man compete with 25 mans in difficulty. That wouldn't exactly make raiding more available to the masses.

Most of the difficulty of 25 man content comes from the chaos of having 25 people involved coupled with the need to stack classes. You can't force class stacking in a 10-man or people will ultimately bitch.

I posted this over on FoH and I'll post it here too. One of the staples of endgame raiding now is the dps burn fight. Patchwerk/RoS P3/Brut.

How do you think the casuals who are attracted to 10 man zones are going to feel when their casual-pug raid goes up against the 10-man version of patchwerk with their moonkin, shadow priest, rogue and two hunters for dps and fails to hit the mark by more then 30% while their guilds "A-team" sporting 2 rogues, a shaman, a warrior and feral druid beats the encounter with 30 seconds to spare?

25 man guilds are expected to man up, recruit/reroll and deal with it. 10-man guilds though, they'll endlessly bitch until the requirement gets lowered and suddenly it's a pushover.

I mean, just look at Arison's post above. He says 'No change for RoS" yet you're ignoring shield reflect. What happens if your guild doesn't have a prot warrior? Oops, no can do son. So we have to cut out the deaden mechanic. But not everyone has a warlock either....so we can't have the mana drain effect unless we seriously gimp his health so that you can kill him before you have to use a felhunter summoned at 30% to clear rune shield. And what if you don't have a rogue? Can't interrupt spirit shock reliably then. So let's remove that. And in P3, what if you lack the aforementioned super DPS group? What if you only have a paladin and druid healer?

When went from 40 man to 25 man raiding, blizzard didn't really reduce the difficulty of raiding, all they did was make it so that you couldn't have 15 people die and still beat Thaddeus with 2 minutes to spare. The only fight that doesn't translate well from 40 to 25 man is 4horsement because it required 8 tanks.

Going from 25 to 10 man though there's a very real chance you simply won't have the class needed to stack against an encounter so a -lot- of gimics that make encounters otherwise challenging need to be cut or otherwise made ridiculously simple.

Anyways...

Here's hoping Blizzard has taken this into consideration and will have different dungeon layouts for the two raid sizes. I'm all for more 10 man content that involves story-line characters. But making 10-man raids basically "25 man minus all the challenge" doesn't sound all that great to me.

Reduce the effect of Deaden (to, say, 50%). That way it works out like Frenzy on Halazzi: you get a significant advantage from taking a certain class, but it's not required. There are other no-mana ways of removing Rune Shield: IF Dispel and Shield Slam. You can interrupt Spirit Shock with other classes too; Shaman and Warriors both have short-cooldown interrupts, and a slight change to Spirit Shock (cast every 5 seconds instead of chain-cast, allowing shorter-lockouts to be used) would retain the flavour. Plus you've got an OT in there anyway, and so it can be just treated like a temporary tank swap (I know some guilds have done this on the real version).

Not every fight can work, but a lot of them do translate pretty well. On a side-note, a 25-man Blackheart would be hilariously stupid too.

You're entirely correct. However, why don't you get off your horse and take a gander over into the Class Mechanics forum right here for a bit.

Blizzard doesn't need to hire mathematians to figure out he optimal DPS cycle for an enhancement shaman. They don't need to figure out on their own that the DPS difference between a Blood Elf Paladin and a Human Paladin will be roughly 150 DPS in high end gear. I doubt they have the math that proves that Spirit is worthless on Mage gear. We have done it all for them.

The one thing WoW has going for it is an incredibly active and incredibly intelligent community. There are people willing to spend 12 hours in Blasted Lands testing PPM mechanics while wearing passive haste gear with absolutely no provocation from Blizzard. They are doing it because they care about the game and about maximising their experience with it and they are making their results free for everyone, including the artsy devs, to look and and learn from. Not using these resources is folly. When you prove that a Talent or set bonus is decreasing a class' DPS why wouldn't they change it? They have the math right in front of them to show it and they didn't have to lift a finger. It is these kinds of things that prove that either the devs don't care about the playerbase except for their money (which I sincerely hope isn't the case) or that they are simply out of touch because of the various sites that host said theory are so far removed from Blizzard (which could be fixed by actually hiring a strong modding team for the Blizzard forums).

I understand you're making the argument that all the devs need to do is make a game that will keep itself sold. And on a basic level you're entirely correct. But eventually there will come a game that does it better than WoW. Maybe it hooks players in 10 minutes instead of 15 or features some special customizable battle chicken pet of death that the fangirls can't get enough of. I don't know what game that will be, but when it happens WoW will be over. So the question really is, "Do the developers want to make a long-term, popular, community driven game or make as much money as possible before they get their asses creamed by something else?"

Exactly. Instead of thinking "omg how could these mechanics possibly work with only 10 people", you need to think "what is the essential spirit of this encounter?"

Razuvious impossible in 10 man because there might not be a priest? Well, the spirit of the Razu encounter is obviously "control his apprentices and use them to tank him". So stick in a couple of mind control orbs like on Razorgore, and let anyone MC an apprentice and use it to tank him.

Faerlina? Of course you can maintain the spirit of sacrificing worshippers to reduce her power without priests mind controlling them. Put in some worshippers and require people to CC or offtank them, and then "sacrifice" them at the appropriate time simply by pulling them onto an altar and killing them there.

Even a fight like Vael.. how do you do a 10 man version of a fight that involves someone exploding every 15 seconds? Strip it down to the essence: a fight where the raid receives a buff that massively increases their power, whilst at the same time being subject to raid-wide damage and destruction. You could make the burning adrenaline more like Moroes' garrotte, a dot rather than a death sentence, providing a sort of soft enrage timer, kill Vael before so many of your raid group are burning that the healers can no longer keep things afloat, even with the essence of the red.

I just don't see why we can't have Separate 10 and 25 mans in the same instance hub with mostly different bosses (and shared "Big" bosses like Arthas.) That way you still do parallel progression while keeping the 10-mans from becoming Monopoly Jr.-ized.

What if the spirit of the encounter is really really tight DPS? How do you tune it so it's doable without a shaman, and not cake with one?

Give the boss Garr's dispelling aura?

You're not seeing this in the right way, you need to separate the concept of casual players and 10 man raids here. There has to be a progression, just like T4 / T5 / T6, as long as the players can pug T4 and bring their non optimal raid they'll be happy. They'll get to T5 eventually at their own pace and they'll know what to expect in 10 man T6 when/if they ever get there (class stacking/consumables/etc).

The progression curve for 25s in TBC was flawed and we know it, T4 raids were way over tuned at the beginning and the absence of a full sized T4 dungeon like molten core had people jumping straight into T5 right after killing gruul/mag which was too much for your average joe MC raider.

Now imagine a progression curve that was smoother, for both 10s and 25s, where guilds can gather 10 or 25 people and raid the entry level content without a min/maxed raid or full consumables. This gives them some easy content they can be happy with, while also giving them a training ground where they can mature as a group. This is something that is really lacking in TBC. I think that an easy 25man naxxramas will actually encourage a lot more guilds to get into 25s without having to be overly elitist and selective. Maybe they'll stop there and won't be able to progress further, just like there are many Kara guilds that have stopped there and aren't progressing in ZA, I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

In conclusion, yes, there is no problem with having a dps burn fight like Brutallus in 10 man raids, as long as it's properly placed in the progression path.

If the spirit of the encounter is a dps race, then that's what you make. I think everyone agrees that 10-mans can't and won't be as tightly tunable as larger fights due to class issues, and that that's one of the reasons why they will offer lesser loot.

Double post sorry

Whilst you may not think there is anything wrong in a progression curve such as this for 10-man, and I agree in a sense there isn't, it's important to look on how as a whole this will be perceived.

In the move from vanilla to TBC there were a lot of, perfectly reasonable, complaints that raiding was only for the comparitavely small hardcore group. This bought about 10-mans which opened raiding to a far wider audience.

Now however there are a lot of, perfectly reasonable, complaints that whilst there is casual raiding in the form of KZ/ZA they are missing the cooler lore based dungeons such as kael'thas/illidan/kiljaedan. Which has led to this 10/25 man of all instances approach allowing a far wider raiding population to see all the content.

If you put in place a progression path where the difficulty does ramp up significatnly towards the end so that 10-man arthas raid is only doable by a mimimal hardcore portion of the 10-man raiding community, it will bring about the same complaints that content is restrictive and the best 10-man content/boss in game is not being available to a wider population.

Unfortunately there is a small minority that don't believe that 10-mans can't and won't be as tightly tunable. I don't think Oldmandennis was saying there can't be dps races, but was infact agreeing with what you are saying and trying to explain why there can't be as tightly tuned dps races in 10-mans as there are in 25-mans.

I disagree vigorously with essentially all that you posted here. That's not a condemnation and it really isn't a basis for an argument either. We disagree and I imagine it is fundamental and probably healthy in nature. I'll still clarify a point or two though just to vent but I will certainly keep it short.

First off, I think that Blizzard is indeed using the metric of "X people are still playing A Class" and thinking that is a fine thing. I do not agree. That's enough about that. Games (any games) are funny things indeed but 'fairness' and 'balance' are tricky beasts.

On to software in general though and Oracle DBs specifically... tolerance of errors is what the user (in this case, Blizzard) makes of it. I've been a part of several mission-critical rollouts and the maintenance of same and what is acceptable for WoW would not be in some other cases. How much of Blizzard's riches should be spent on a solid DB? That's arguable. Could it be bulletproofed? Yes, it could be. There are many, many, Oracle live DBs out there that have much, much higher transactions-per-second layered over much more complex backends and using far stranger tools on the front-end. They all can be run in essentially a zero-downtime setting and have hot changes made in real-time. It costs but damn, it sure as hell can and is done.

The LFG functionality hit a peak in EQ. That system worked, worked well and was not patented or otherwise restricted. It should have been stolen wholesale.

As to item and set bonus design, I don't really know what to say. Give your potential bonuses a single pass by anyone that raids and plays that class perhaps? I mean, literally, one pass would kill off 95% of the worst offenders.

Anyhow, as much as I may protest, you'll still likely feel that this is a rebuttal and really it isn't. There are many, many reasons that Blizzard does what and how it does things and I honestly do know why. It's a shame the last bit of polish cannot be accomplished but I take some pride in how things turn out regardless of it not filling my OCD needs.

Sure, the "Spirit of the Encounter" can be preserved. That still doesn't mean any 10-men encounter can ever be as remotely interesting as a 25-men if both versions will have to co-exist. Simply put - a challenging 25-men encounter (say, Vasjh) would be not even preserve a fraction of the complexity in a 10-men variant. Why? Because there's less people involved.

Sure, you can make a cool 10-men encounter that feels epic on top of it and I'm sure you can make a 25-men version of some of these. Moroes is actually a pretty decent example of a semi-challenging encounter (for its place in the game) that would work in a 25-men environment. That still doesn't mean you can make interesting and challenging 10- and 25-men versions of each and every of the, what 50?, raidbosses that WotLK will sport.

Reversed, if you take a 25-men encounter and turn it into a 10-men and you want to preserve difficulty by changing numbers while STILL keeping it doable with a random group, which seems to be what 10-mens in general are aimed at, these encounters would be a joke with a stacked raid. So I may need to change my statement here a bit:

Complicated 10-men encounters don't exist.

As for the examples I've seen so far: arbitrarily tacking on difficult elements by introducing more randomness to an encounter is not making it more interesting - just more frustrating.

When ZA came out, my guild had killed Gruul, Mag, VR and Lurker, so we were hardly a top-end guild. We went there and cleared it the second evening in. No, ZA is not hard - or rather - it isn't complicated. You have every boss figured out in about 20 seconds and from then on it's just execution. Yes, I was playing with experienced raiders.

The whole point is that there must be a challenge, a reward and a sense of accomplishment for the 25-men groups. If lore, loot and progression are taken out then WHY bother 25ing?