That's an example I'm getting at. They need to tone down the challenge in order to let the "moderately less effective manner" also be able to complete it. Imagine if Felmyst or Muru were designed so that you did not need a priest in the raid? The Gas Nova would need to tick for far less, or not hit everyone in the raid. This would make it very trivial for any group that does have a priest, and less of a raid killer for those that dont. Less adds would need to spawn from Muru's Darkness spell, etc.
The closest existing 10-man example of a toned down Gas Nova is the Creeping Paralysis ability used by Zul'jin during the bear phase. If you have a priest to Mass Dispel it, it's trivial. If you don't, but have some paladins to do single-target dispels on the MT and a healer, it's significantly more difficult, but still nonfatal. If you have 0 characters who can remove it, GG.
Funny. On an individual basis, one player can only do so much and the difficulty of the encounter is only so much. But when you start requiring all classes and 2 specs of different classes and add communication that divides the raid in 10 groups, 10 man starts to seem like a cakewalk...
I don't get it why you keep going on about this topic. Is it to prove that Blizzard Won't dumb 25mans down? Because that only Blizzard knows and there's nothing you can prove.
Like I said before, assuming Naxx is going to be inherently the same instance (which more likely than not it will be) there is no point in that because the strategies are already public knowledge and have been so for a very long time.
That's true. It's also true that most fights aren't big secrets after the world firsts. The idea I presented was to give 25maners a priviledge to enter storyline instances first. Nothing really I care about.
Originally Posted by crimsonsentinel
They already mentioned that 10 and 25 mans will be on completely separate raid ID's so a person can do both.
Citation needed. And that doesn't stop them from blocking 25mans from 10mans and vice versa.
The respite that has been Karazhan and ZA -- and was ZG and AQ20 -- was that it was something different. Sure it was easier, but it was also, you know, not SSC/TK. Not BT/HYjal. If it >>is<< the same, albeit easier, it's going to be a hard sell I think.
This is also my main concern.. Will we ever see another Zul'aman or RAQ? Something that we can raid on off days every 3 days?
Gamespy-
"25-person raiding progression is not dependent on 10-person raiding progression. There will be no attunements or keys to obtain, and you won't be locked out of a 25-person instance if you decide to attempt the 10-person version, and vice-versa. 10- and 25-person raids both have their own, independent progression paths, though the encounters should play out very similarly."
World of War-
"All 25 man raids in Wrath will also be available to complete with 10 players. This is so that more players will get to see end game content (Even the Arthas encounter will be available as a 10 man raid).
There will be completely different loot tables for the two different raid types. They will also be on separate cool downs, so players could fight in both the 10 man and 25 man raid on the same day if they wish."
Now, of course, they did mention possibly locking out the 10 mans until the 25man had been bested, but I think it's possible that for Naxx alone, they may change that, to give 10man raiders something to do instead of twiddle their thumbs, and simply have the lockouts for higher level raids.
Can we turn back to a fundamental disturbing topic? Am I in the small minority here, or are a lot of people bothered that it appears there'll be no unique 10-man content? I mean I'm not thrilled to ever experience a semi-required Kara grind again to prep for 25-man raiding, but if the only 10-man stuff is watered-down versions of the 25s, it's going to make for very monotonous off nights.
The respite that has been Karazhan and ZA -- and was ZG and AQ20 -- was that it was something different. Sure it was easier, but it was also, you know, not SSC/TK. Not BT/HYjal. If it >>is<< the same, albeit easier, it's going to be a hard sell I think.
Mideci hit an important point in my opinion. Unique 10-man content has always been nice for a change of pace on off nights. Surely running Kara or ZA is less challenging than BT/MH or any other 25-man, but that doesn't mean that those instances do not serve a purpose in the eyes of a 25-man raider.
Moving on to the 25-man vs 10-man complexity topic, really I cannot see where the problem lies: for the reasons explained by so many posters, 10-man do not offer the same possibilities of a 25-man from an encounter design perspective.
Moreover, it is clear that, generally speaking, 25-man fights will be more complex and some 10-man could become trivial like Kara did under some circumstances.
So what? The whole point of 10-man raids in the eyes of blizzard is to provide easier to beat content to the large portion of the player base who does not seek extremely complex and mean fights, but just a rewarding and laid back raid experience they can enjoy without going through all the trouble involved in organising a group force capable of defeating more difficult 25-man challenges.
So what? The whole point of 10-man raids in the eyes of blizzard is to provide easier to beat content to the large portion of the player base who does not seek extremely complex and mean fights, but just a rewarding and laid back raid experience they can enjoy without going through all the trouble involved in organising a group force capable of defeating more difficult 25-man challenges.
He's stating that their intention is making 10 man instances just as challenging as the 25 versions, with the 25 being more rewarding because of the increased challenge in organizing/coordinating more people.
The 10/25 split has a lot more to do with how many people you are comfortable playing with, and not being harder/easier. There are many people that enjoy playing with just a close group of friends, at the same time there are others that enjoy a larger group.
They are simply trying to provide content of all difficulties for both types of players. After all this is what wow has been about from the very beginning, not forcing someone to play the game in a specific way, but giving them the option to play solo, in a group, in a raid, doing pve or pvp... and always at their own pace.
(10-man Vashj) would also have to lose the roots/multishot mechanic because you can't assume a pally in every 10-men.
Or, the roots could be modified in the ten-man version to be the standard Entangling Roots spell. A 10-man raid maybe won't always have a Paladin - though I'd debate that - but if it can't guarantee a Paladin or a Priest or a Druid, it deserves to be in deep stucky against an end-of-instance boss.
I think that if you put your mind to it, you could come up with a way to adjust any boss from 25-man to 10-man without losing anything much.
By not making instances require unique abilities, you run into the issue with hunters and rogues during much of early TBC. Early Kara raids often could exclude both classes without much difficult, and in some cases, the raid goes smoother without them.
I think you have a bit of selective memory there, the reason Rogues didn't run early Karazhan was due to 360 cleaves. Why bring a DPS class that constantly needed to be healed when others wouldn't take damage? Honestly, with Hunters I believe it was because most hadn't figured out how to properly DPS yet due to the change in class (this is just my speculation though), but I remember early Hunters were MM and did horrible DPS. Once Hunters figured out the 1:1 macro and to spec BM in Karazhan, they dominated the WWS on some fights (Aran especially).
Also, you need to remember that in T4 content Warlocks and Mages had such a huge advantage due to tailoring. I doubt Blizzard will make the same mistake again.
He's stating that their intention is making 10 man instances just as challenging as the 25 versions, with the 25 being more rewarding because of the increased challenge in organizing/coordinating more people.
The 10/25 split has a lot more to do with how many people you are comfortable playing with, and not being harder/easier. There are many people that enjoy playing with just a close group of friends, at the same time there are others that enjoy a larger group.
They are simply trying to provide content of all difficulties for both types of players. After all this is what wow has been about from the very beginning, not forcing someone to play the game in a specific way, but giving them the option to play solo, in a group, in a raid, doing pve or pvp... and always at their own pace.
Thanks for the link, interesting interview.
I fundamentally agree with you on the reasons behind the choice made by Blizzard, however my view remains that 10-man are generally bound to be less complex than 25-man for the reasons mentioned above by some of our fellow posters.
That does not mean that 10-man fights are necessarily easy, just less complicated.
Anyway, I suppose it could also be said that some of the 25-man extra complexity actually translates into having to organize/coordinate more people, so as I said I pretty much agree with you.
Even if the difficulty would be the same for 10mans and 25mans, essentialy 25mans will get better loot and that means 10mans will be easier for them. Which means 25man guilds will run 2 10mans and 25mans simultaneously if they don't restrict it...
To get away from the 10-man vs 25-man argument, what about loot? Currently, if your guild is using DKP for looting, not a big deal, but what if they are using a loot council idea? You, as a shaman, may run 10-man Naxx in a pug and get your tier8 legs and they are a good upgrade. Then on raid night, the legs drop again from 25-man Naxx and while they would have be just an okay upgrade now, they are a killer upgrade for the hunter in the group (just an example). What I can see is people missing out on real gear upgrades because they can get set bonuses with lower quality items. Does anyone else see this as a problem or something that will just work itself out?
To get away from the 10-man vs 25-man argument, what about loot? Currently, if your guild is using DKP for looting, not a big deal, but what if they are using a loot council idea? You, as a shaman, may run 10-man Naxx in a pug and get your tier8 legs and they are a good upgrade. Then on raid night, the legs drop again from 25-man Naxx and while they would have be just an okay upgrade now, they are a killer upgrade for the hunter in the group (just an example). What I can see is people missing out on real gear upgrades because they can get set bonuses with lower quality items. Does anyone else see this as a problem or something that will just work itself out?
I think you are really putting the cart in front of the horse at this point. Too be honest, your example is no different than "what if earlier in the week/day the Shaman got his legs in a guild 10 man", it makes no difference because you are talking about getting gear in a prior run.
Also, if Blizzard starts worrying about every loot system that a guild employs, then they might as well just stop making the game. It's much too confusing to try to appease those who use DKP, Zero Sum DKP, Loot Council, Suicide Kings, etc. But it does appear (using the latest sets of interviews as "proof") that Blizzard loves the Badges idea, so I can assume we'll see more of that in the future which partially eliminates issues with every looting system.
We run LC. I see that as something that can be worked out, with a good loot council. Relative size of upgrade should be a criteria you consider. It depends how you count the 10's, whether you track the loot or not.
I can easily see my guild running the 10 mans on off-days to get an edge in the 25's, particularly if the 10's are a stepping stone between the previous 25 and the current 25 in terms of gear ilvl and relative strength. Should the people that do that on their off-time be penalized? My thought is no, but at the same time, by picking up better gear, they're essentially make the new shiny a little less of an upgrade that they have to have the first time it drops.
It'll be something we would most likely end up working it out on a case by case basis.
I'm excited by the news that doing the 10's wont lock me out of the 25's or vice versa. It means more for me to do, if I want to do it.
What I can see happening is people that try and work hard for their gear outside official raids (by, say doing 10-mens in the weekend) getting shafted by LC on official raids because it's a lesser upgrade for them than it is for the guy that never bothered to upgrade his quest greens.
The same can (and probably is) happening right now where the die-hards will get their t5 belts crafted before even starting on Lurker, grab the best possible badge items and grind endless hours of AV to get those S3 honor boots, only to see the slighty superior tier6 shoulders go to the lazy paladin that couldn't be arsed to upgrade his chess event drop.
It all depends on how your LC works and as such I don't see any signigicant changes there.
I think that if you put your mind to it, you could come up with a way to adjust any boss from 25-man to 10-man without losing anything much.
I agree in general.
The point to take away from that is that Blizzard can apply one general design to the instance, and then tweak accordingly. If the 10 or 25-man instances get short changed, it'll be more through a lack of testing than actual design issues,
Thats a rather silly blanket statement you made - the easiest encounter you can do regardless of raid size is a simple tank/spank mob which there are many of really - there is not a bottom limit to complexity like there is an upper limit to hold them back, they can do something really really pathetically simple in a 25man or 100man if they wanted.
I wont insult your intelligence by naming multiple examples of sub Kara/ZA level 25/40man raid bosses in regards to complexity.
Here's one though: Jan'alai (10man, more complex) vs Golemagg or Sulfuron (40man, near-basement level of complexity of what exists).
Please note I made no real reference to the complexity of 10mans or whatever the argument is about, just that there is no real lower limit (in any size) to compare to an upper limit from either - my personal belief is that 10mans wont be able to compare without forcing specific class/specs due to limiting raid size, we will see in how classes work at 80 but untill then... concerned.
That's the whole point. Keep in mind the other blanket statement: That 25-man content is inherently and (implied) always harder than 10-man content. That's simply not true. Logically speaking, this is the premise:
Statement 1: All A are less than all members of B
Statement 2: X is a member of A
Logical Result: Therefore X is less than all members of B.
However, if there exists an X that is a member of A that is NOT less than any member of B, then statement 1 is proven false. Likewise, if there exists at least 1 10-man that is harder than at least one thing from the set of all possible 25-man content, then the statement is false. It's logic. That's why I don't believe anyone who says '10-mans cannot be harder than 25-mans'. It's a logical mistake. Are *some* 25-mans harder than *some* 10-mans? Sure. But conversely, is it possible to make 10-mans harder than 25-mans? Sure is. You've proven that very possibility in your above example.
Note that I am not discussing complexity here either. It's just logical proof and the way sets and members of sets work.
I think the point of the 10 mans is to provide a progression path for small group raiders, not a casual set of instances for 25 man raiders. So it's aimed at people who won't be doing the 25 mans, and to them it is unique.
Rasputin, I think you're probably correct as Blizzard is conceiving it. But for those of us that have raided 40 and 25 mans, the 20/10 mans have always been a "unique" content break. It appears that's going away with Lich King. If I'm reading it correctly, it's a fairly severe dimunition of the gaming experience for those people, who represents a not-small portion of the playerbase.
It took a mere two unique 10-man zones in TBC to offer the content variety and similarly just two 20-man zones in original WoW. Having even 4 10-man zones in Lich King, none of which are unique will certainly be an upgrade to the group you identify and certainly be a downgrade to those of us that have enjoyed playing in both types of raids for 3 years.
Making the 10 mans not different for the 25 man raiders is a lose for them, but I would say that is a small portion of the player base, maybe at most 20%.
Anyway, for raiders that want to stick out, the ZA Bear mount will be removed in Wrath.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
Making the 10 mans not different for the 25 man raiders is a lose for them, but I would say that is a small portion of the player base, maybe at most 20%.
Anyway, for raiders that want to stick out, the ZA Bear mount will be removed in Wrath.
Didn't they say the bear mount would be unavailable after the level 70 content cycle back when ZA came out? Why are all of you acting so surprised about this?
[Edit] If you already have a bear mount, obviously you can keep it. All they're doing is removing the ability to get it from the chest run.
All current 10-man raids were not designed as cutting-edge or top-end raid instances. They were all designed with a "casual"-er audience in mind, and 10-man raiding in general is currently designed as Raiding-Lite. WLK's 10-man raiding may change this, and if it does, I expect that the difficulty gap will narrow considerably. The important thing is, the entire design philosophy of 10-man raiding is changing. It's going from a second-class entity to a first-class one. That means that all previous 10-mans are completely invalid as a baseline for projecting about future 10-man raids. No 10-man has ever been designed in WoW that wasn't intentially dumbing it down. (And despite that restriction, some of the encounters are pretty innovative compared to contemporary 25-man encounters.)
Regarding complexity of 10-man designs: The reason that 10-man raids can be more complex, and more epic, is that you can require more raid members to perform multiple raid-critical roles. With a 10-man Instructor you could actually require all 10 people in the raid to do the MC at some point, by using MC orbs and adding an exhausting debuff, and letting the adds be CCable in addition to tankable. Vashj P2 could require people to be splitting DPS between several targets instead of having strict job assignments... note that such a split-DPS situation being common would alter a 10-man's prefered DPS class in the direction of affliction warlocks.
Class composition for 10-mans will, I think, emphasize flexibility over the traditional 25-man and 10-man min-max ideal. Rather than bringing 2 tanks, 3 healers, and 5 DPS, you will bring classes and specs such that you can switch between 1-3 tanks and 2-4 healers with a gear swap as the situation requires. This was already true to an extent in Karazhan, in that you often saw a DPS warrior acting as offtank and elemental or shadow specs picking up healing when necessary. This could be emphasized even further by encounter design laxing the "numbers" requirements in favor of play challenges. Or, at the least, replacing "hard" numbers requirements with "soft" ones, like replacing a hard enrage timer on a DPS race with a steady ramp-up of some mechanic whose controlability varies by composition, like CCable adds.
As far as killing off 25-man raiding, there will definitely be a decline in the number of people doing 25-man raids. However, I think this is actually a return to balance, not a deviation away from it. There are a lot of people doing 25-man raiding right now when it isn't their prefered playstyle, but it's what's available right now in terms of progression. A lot of people, myself included, would probably have chosen a 10-man raiding model, all else being equal, but went from 10- to 25-man raids because that's where the game leads you. In some sense, people like that "shouldn't" be doing 25-man raids in the first place, and it's a good thing that they won't be doing so anymore.
What this also means is that the guilds that do keep doing 25-man content instead of splintering to 10-man content will be the generally hard-core and old-school raiders. Such a change of audience would give blizzard license to up the difficulty curve on 25-man raiding considerably, especially since they aren't locking people out of experiencing the content by doing so. It's something that they probably won't take advantage of at first, but if they do I think the top-end of raiding will benefit from it.
To provide a little perspective from the other end of things, speaking as the leader of one of those Kara guilds, ZA is very difficult for us, in our Kara gear (though it is getting more approachable as we get more badge/MagT gear.) I think the main issue that alot of you guys are missing is that going Kara->ZA without any other T4/T5 content is not really a smooth progression in terms of gear. I think the difficulty gap is a bit wider for that jump than it is (or was, pre-nerfs) from T4 to T5 or T5 to T6. We've got the first two bosses down, and we were about 3 seconds short of the first timer chest on our last run, but we have a lot of trouble even with trash in there and it is going to be a long long time before ZA is 'easy' like Kara is for us now (and that's still a 2 night clear, about 5 hrs total). So, arguments about 'the 10 person bosses will be too trivial' really only matter for that cutting edge of players, I think, the actual intended target audience like me will still struggle with things at first and we will have to work our way through the hard way.
Anyway, down here, we're all ecstatic about this change, because it promises, finally, a real raid progression that we can manage with our little guild alliance, without getting bogged down in all the extra management overhead that comes along with 25 person+ content. None of us begrudge "real" raiders their gear advantage, and it sounds like that will be maintained; the only thing that is a bit annoying is that T4 is spread across both raid types. Fixing that, and giving us access to far more content in the expansion means Lich King is the best present Blizzard could give to guilds that are in that casual/raider borderland like us and many others.
I think you folks should also consider just how much this is going to open your recruitment possibilities at level 80. Right now guilds that are sitting at the end of BT wanting to go into Sunwell have to cannibalize people from other big raiding guilds to get someone even close to geared well enough to contribute. With a full 10 man progression sitting one gear tier behind the 25s, suddenly the possibilities for recruitment look *much* better to me, especially since there's that set bonus preservation thing going on. In the end I think it will open raiding to a much bigger segment of players, and that can't hurt anyone I don't think.
05/12/08, 5:55 AM
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