I think you misunderstand what I mean by upper bound. The upper bound is across all encounters, not just one. That any particular 10 man is more or less complex than any particular 25-man proves nothing. Of course it's possible to make a 10-man more complex than a 25-man, especially if you're talking about one of the most complex 10-man encounters vs. one of the simplest 25-mans. The upper bound is set by the most complex 25-man versus the most complex 10-man.

As I said, complexity doesn't scale infinitely up. If it did scale infinitely up, there would always be infinite room above any other encounter to make another one, more complex. At some point, encounters bump into a cap in regards to how reasonably complex you can make the encounter without making it extraordinarily frustrating. Twenty-five person encounters have the cap set higher.

The converse is easy enough to prove. You're asserting that there may exist a 10-man encounter that cannot scale up. For any such encounter, simply double it, requiring a 25-man raid to complete it twice in two rooms, or some such, with a Magtheridon-like box-clicking mechanism to tie up five people constantly. The resulting encounter, purely due to scale, has become even more complex than the original.

GSH is correct in saying that sometimes complexity is just due to scale. That doesn't mean that it isn't actually more complex.

The two encounters aren't remotely comparable. High King Maulgar is an encounter where there are five bossmobs, all of which need to be tanked and all of whose tanks need healing. Wizard of Oz is an encounter where exactly one mob needs to be tanked, and the rest are easily controlled. Comparing the two encounters, you can clearly see how Blizzard had to reduce complexity and difficulty to account for the lower raid size.

I still disagree. They state themselves that more than half a player's time at level 60 and above is spent in a group. They ignore how much time is spent leveling versus playing at 60+. They ignore factors encouraging solo play until 60+, power levelling services, farmers.... The fact that the vast majority of new content is group based suggests the necessity you refute... Why? Because of the reward structure they cite as the largest driving factor in the game's success.

I could go on but I wont because you're dragging me away from my own point. ie. that myself and many, many people who play as part of a progression raid do so because it can be challenging (read NOT work) and involves social interaction with people who have become friends. In short: It's fun.

That paper is irrelevant to said point. I suggest taking context into consideration.

@Praetorian: A reworked Netherspite with a 4th beam that requires some sort of coordination was in the game, that's just the original Magtherion where you needed 20 (or was it 15? something like that, don't remember exactly.) people to click. The original Gruul also goes that direction, requiring an amount of coordination (this time even in a random environment) from players that just cannot be reworked for 10 men content.

But for using spreadsheets, I am sure some people enjoyed doing that but it's far from necessairy and it's been talked up a bit too much for 4h-esque encounters. I think it was DnT (some front running guild in Nax at least) who showed some weird spreadsheet calculations in a video. No clue if they actually used that or it was just a hoax, but it was far from needed.
Having 6-7 tanks running in a circle, taunting off the next is all 4h required. With simple rules like 'if there are 2 tanks at the next mob, skip it and go to 2nd next' and 'if you have double resists, move on to the next mob'.
Along with highly refined spreadsheet tactics for healers/dps:
Healers run in a circle and do not leave unless the next healer(s) are reaching your position and your tank is topped.
Same is true for dps, also don't be stupid and leave a tank on the meteor dude alone. And don't be stupid and run in/out when he can cast meteor.

That's pretty much all the 'spreadsheet calculations' you needed to kill 4h. There is no really comparable fight in TBC, but I don't think it was all that difficult on the rotation/technical side as some make it. Obviously it was easy to wipe due to people being stupid (picking their nose in void zones or running in before marks reset comes to mind), but that is the case in mostly all difficult encounters. At least our wiping was almost exclusively to healers dieing on (invisible of course!!) void zones, tanks standing in such void zones, people not grasping the meaning of 'aggro reduction, stay low on dps' and various meteor based hickups. And the rare double/triple resists, but that was really the smallest of all problems and if you had 7-8 tanks, hardly an issue at all.

I am still very curious how this encounter will look in the expansion. They said it will be reworked and I tried to come up with something that would keep the old spirit of the fight, but chances are it will be an Illidari Council sort of fight. Would be sad, I loved 4h. The wiping there was pretty cool, at least you always saw what was going wrong and where we had to improve stuff. Also changing general strat there happened more often then in any other encounter, I think. Which makes it kinda unique too.
Quite the difference fromt he @#$^@#$ dragon afterwards.
But at least shitty encounters like Sapphiron will be easy to translate to the new Nax. Hope my old FRR gear will be still good then!


Yeah, what praetorian said is true. You would not schedule raids in advance, you check who's online and then go do whatever you can with that setup. Which is a really sad thing. We kinda got lucky as BO moved server mid of August and merged with a guild that one of our officers was leading in his spare time (don't ask).
We pretty much had a raiding core of 65-70 players. Sometimes it was painful as there were pretty much new people to any given fight every other raid, but overall it helped a great deal. 6-7 rogues, 6-7 fire mages and 4-5 fury warriors for Loatheb? Sure, np.
8 Priests for Sapphiron and 6-7 for Gothik? Yes pls, thanks.
This made some things pretty smooth and especially meant we never had to use world buffs. And I am pretty sure that if we wiped buffed like that a few times, I would have quit right there.

In the end all that logistical crap could have been circumvented if you just had an exceptional player base. But most guilds did not back then. For example our dps meters were so different. After a few Gothik wipes I went ballistic and pretty much kicked a mage right there who always did 40k damage compared to other mages who were between 70 and 80k, having the identical job (finding your target fast and doing max dmg), the same gear and knowing exactly where and when what mob spawns.
Any raid without dead weight could have easily done loatheb without either heavy class set up or world buffs, just by having people pull their weight. And some druid wrote here that he tanked 4h with just 11 points in feral. Well, no need to have a gazillion warriors in guild.

Basically blizzard put a very high benchmark on each player for some nax encounters, which made the class composition and extreme buffing necessairy for a lot of guilds (if not all, in one way or another). That's bad on one side, but on the other, the stuff most likely would have toppled over as easily as the raid content in TBC did if they did not do that. So I am kinda torn in between cause I don't mind attempting a difficult encounter for more then the two days it took in TBC to get it done.

Regarding "spreadsheets," no one used them for actual mathematical calculations. But I absolutely made tables to work through the rotations in my head. Just having tanks move to the next corner when they could was nice, but there's more to it than that. You need healer/DPS rotations, all constrained by the condition that you always need people in Korth'azz's corner to soak meteors and if you have any gap it's going to wipe you. It's like a little logic puzzle in that sense. There were tons of ways of doing it, using the middle "rest" periods a lot or a little. We honestly went through about four or five different rotation systems until we found one that worked perfectly for us. I personally did use Excel to visually keep track of who was in each corner and for how long to make sure it all worked out.

On complexity in general, honestly, complexity can absolutely be fun, and it's a hallmark of the encounters that people tend to like the most. That is macro-level complexity, mind you. If Blizzard made a raid encounter where 25 people have to do the Shartuul event at the same time and you wipe if someone fails, it'd be the "hardest" fight in the history of the game, but I'm not sure how successful that'd be as raid design. Very individually complex roles, true. But when I think of complexity I think of a challenge for the raid leader and/or raid strategy folks in the group, who must come up with a plan that works and then explain it to people and fine-tune it as needed.

Look at Kael'thas. That's actually quite complex. P1 introduces you to the various elements, but P2 and P3 are a major headache for a raid leader. You need to figure out your weapons strat, you need to decide who tanks what, who heals whom. You need to make sure weapons are being looted by those who need them. You can't have your Sanguinar tank on the weapon that dies last or he won't be ready for Sanguinar when he pops. You need the mace and staff to die early, you need tons of people to get the staff, you need your Capernian healer to have time to get the mace and then run over to Capernian in time. You need your Kael MT to get the shield, you probably want your Sanguinar tank to get it too. And so forth. Which advisor do you kill first? Which second? How do you split duties if Kael pops before they're all dead (which he surely will as you learn)? You need to make sure you have interrupters at the dais, you need to make sure you have a staff up there. More than one really, or else he might MC the staff guy and then disorient the tank once the buff is gone. You need to be ready for the first phoenix. And so forth.

And then once the last advisor is down, things relax into a more traditional fight with just general guidelines to follow ("DPS eggs, #1 priority," "Don't stand in the flamestrike," etc.).

But that's why it's successful, and satisfying to beat. The macro-level complexity is huge, and the key is to distill things down to bite-sized individual roles for your players. A random player simply may not be able to wrap his head around the above. But if you boil down his role to, "Ok, I heal the dagger tank in p2, I grab the staff and the mace when they die, then I go to the east side and wear the staff and click it and heal the Sanguinar tank, and I have to watch out for Thaladred at all times, and then when Sanguinar dies I go heal people up at Kael" and suddenly it's more manageable.

I strongly object to the idea that t6 content is or should be the same as t5 content except that it requires you to have t5 gear instead of t4 gear. Taking the current version of Gruul and making him hit harder and have more hp so that he gibs a tank who isn't wearing at least 4pc t5 wouldn't make him a t6 fight if you changed nothing else. Or at least it shouldn't.

Indeed. And wow pre tbc achieved that. You began with MC, which was basically tank&spank with adds. We could even say you began with UBRS and MC was just UBRS (tank, dps, heal, some adds) improved : decurse / dispel, random effects to manage (damage shields on majordomo, aoe dmg, shazzrah blink...), and a final fight introducing multi phases encounters. Then we had bwl which introduced aggro management and with a complex final fight : hard 1st phase, reactions to random effects (class calls), chaotic 3rd phase... AQ was parrallel to BWL with this time 2 "T3" fights introducing very different designs : emperors (aggro wipes, caster tanking, ...) and obviously c'thun.
And finally naxxramas, with some fights even more complex and far from the classical tank / dps / heal like loatheb, heigan, 4hm, gothik...

In TBC, this progression works from tier 4 to tier 5 : gruul, mag and maulgar are very simple fights compared to hydross, leotheras, al'ar.... We also have 2 very "t6" fights in tier 5 with vashj and kael but it stops there. Tier 6 is full of tier 5 or tier 4 fights made a bit harder just because they dps more or they require more dps. Only real tier 6 fights, for me, are Archimonde, RoS and Illidan. All others are simple variations of already seen content with harder numbers.

I think the basic problem with WOW for both casual and hardcore guilds, is that you reach your one, specific endpoint (Unable to progress past Kara, unable to progress past Kael, or Illidan down), and there is NOTHING to do for the rest of the time you play. As it stands, PVP is nothing but a frustrating, boring setup with awful PUGs. Arena is ok, but as a Protection Warrior myself, I'm not too keen on spending 100g per day respeccing just to be able to PVP AND raid properly (Not including repairs/consumables of course).

Heroics were a good start to ease this, but they quickly became a complete waste of time due to awful rewards, and even worse, an annoying necessity. I'm sure many people here remember keying their guild to TK with the heroics. I swore off doing Heroics for months because I was SO frustrated with running them constantly to get people keyed.

In order to keep more interest and flexibility in raiding, perhaps Blizzard should take some time to retune the old 40-mans to give proper loot, and bring them up to a better difficulty. As it stands, Naxx is balanced but most of the loot is terrible now, with a few exceptions. As much as everyone hates MC, if it was redone, I know I'd go back to it. BWL and AQ40 are also ghost towns with potential that Blizzard could do a "Heroic" setting for them to bring them back to life.

For those who have cleared everything, or have reached their breakpoint, these options would fill a void where currently there is nothing to do. I pretty much don't even log on unless I'm farming for a raid, or raiding, because there is NOTHING to do.

Nah I'm not. I'm at Kael myself.

I'll come back and continue the discussion on theoretical complexity later but I have to get some work done today really badly first.

However, I wanted to chime in real quickly and say I am kind of glad Blizzard tried this front loading content thing. It's a different model and for the idea of longer spans of competition it was interesting to try, and I can't fault them for seeing how it worked. I'd just think it would be superior for the game if they didn't do it in the next expansion.

No, the upper bound is set by the most "fun-complex" 25-man, versus the most "fun-complex" 10-man. And since that's not so much a hard limit as it is a floating gray area, you're extremely hard-pressed to prove anything.

You still haven't addressed my point regarding limited resources. Is doing a 25-man encounter with only 20 people more or less complex than with 25? Is doing a 25-man encounter with 15 people more or less complex than with 25?

I posit that it is *more* complex, because you have much fewer resources with which to defeat the encounter. By scaling *down* the number of people involved, the complexity actually increases.

What's the difference? A mage "tanks" krosh. A mage "tanks" scarecrow. There's no real difference between tanking and controlling, except that for Maulgar you need healers on each of the characters doing the controlling, and Oz you don't. You're basing a lot of extra complexity on needing to heal the people doing the tanking/controlling, but in a raid of 25 your expected healers are only going to be 7-8 at most, meaning around 1/4 to 1/3 of the raid. In a 10-man, that's around 2.5-3 healers expected, so you calculate what you expect their HP per second has to be for that fight, extend it as long as you need to, and work backwards to figure out the amount of damage the monsters need to do.

Make the Oz mobs a little less controllable, tune the numbers (damage, HP), and you'd easily have an encounter just as complex as Maulgar.

As others have said, there's two sorts of complexities in a raid encounter - the complexity from the perspective of the individual actor and the organizational complexity. Ultimately, a fight like 4h wasn't terrible complex on an individual level for most people in the raid - run here, dps/tank/heal, then after a set period of time run here, repeat, etc - but on an organizational level the fight was incredibly complicated, since you had to account for getting everyone to certain places at certain times based on requirements of tanking, dpsing, healing, meteor soaking, etc. A fight like Kel'thuzad had a relatively low level of organizational complexity, but the number of things an individual had to be aware of throughout the fight (Frostbolts, frost volleys, frost blasts, void zones, mind controls/aggro drops, etc) was very high - the individual complexity is high, but the organizatonal complexity is lower.

It's possible for a small scale fight to have a reasonably high level of individual complexity - look at, say, shade of aran - that is comparable to a 25 man raid, but from an organizational level, it's simply not possible to require as much coordination from 10 people as it is from 25 or 40, because there are simply not as many roles to rill.

The issue with individual complexity as you go down in size is that the encounter can't assume as much about the nature of your raid group. As others have said - you can't have High King as a 10 man because you can't assume a mage to spellsteal tank, a warlock to enslave, 2 ranged DPS or a moonkin to kiggler tank, etc. Additionally, once you shrink things too much, you run the risk or either requiring certain classes or trivializing an encounter with a certain class. You can't very well have an encounter that requires coordinated AOE in a 5 man, or even realistically in a 10 man, because you can't assume those sort of class abilities are available.

People have been saying this for a long time, but it doesn't really hold water either. Look at the Illhoof fight in Karazhan. Are you seriously telling me that an entry level raid would be able to complete it without a warlock? An entry level raid wouldn't have a hard time without at least one priest on Moroes? Would an entry level raid be able to beat Romeo and Juliet without two tanks? What about Oz, with no warlock to fear the lion? No mage or warlock to keep the scarecrow on fire?

There's nothing wrong with requiring a certain class for an encounter. You're not going to balance an encounter for 10 warriors, ever. You can make things broader by allowing more than one class to fill a role (hunter trap instead of priest shackle on Moroes adds), but you can also make it really difficult to do so otherwise (Illhoof Imps).

This whole sacred cow of "You can't REQUIRE certain classes in a 10-man!" should have been put out to pasture a long time ago. 10-man content is not 5-man content. There are 9 classes in the game right now, and it is perfectly reasonable to expect that a class (or at least, a role) is present. It's even easier to provide a secondary out, to make things more difficult but still doable (e.g. a mage on Illhoof Imps, or a hunter on Moroes adds).

A little late to the thread, I think this game takes pacing, without it leads to horrible horrible burn outs. This summer I decided to level my paladin, playing extreme amounts, 12 hours a day almost. By the end of summer I was into Kara and I moved to my new house and after that I just gave up and went back to my usual life. Even smaller content would be nice, close to brewfest and hallows end. I am really excited for the headless horsemen event.

A 25 man raid with 20 is less complex (due to less variables) but more difficult in terms of tanking/dps/healing output. Excellent examples are Gruul and Thaddius. The less people involved, the easier it becomes to do what needs to be done right. But the dps requirement goes up by a lot per person.

Likewise, if you scale a 10 man encounter up to 25, it becomes more complex because more people are involved almost automatically. Healers have (much) more possible targets, any sort of positioning becomes more complicated because they often depend on the positioning of others, etcetera etcetera.

Forgive me if these points were already made (I only glanced at most of the posts past the first couple of pages, as things began to be re-hashed), but the problem isn't with the pacing or the times they released the content, as much as it is with the difficulty of the content they released.

In my opinion, the 2 most difficult raid fights in the game were released as the first 2 raid encounters- Gruul and Magtheridon. In there pre-nerf, original forms, these were strategical and skill based nightmares for guilds to get past. Coincidentally, they were also my 2 favorite fights in TBC before they were made significantly easier, simply because they were the ONLY fights where you actually had a real challenge and worry of a rough night of wipes each time you came to them, no matter how long you had them on farm. They remain the only 2 fights in TBC that required absolutely heads up, great play from EVERY member of the raid. Anyone slacking on any job in either of them had a very high chance to result in a wipe. Had they released these encounters at or near the end of the content line, instead of at the beginning, I think things could have gone much better at both the beginning of expansion raid scene and the midway point, which is where we are at now.

Also, the major problem Blizzard has run into in TBC is that instead of the 4-5 months it took the very first guilds to clear Naxx (released in June, if memory serves me correct, and KT died somewhere in late September I believe), you had the front running guilds clearing BT/Hyjal in 1-2 weeks. While that isn't necessarily a terrible thing if you can keep content coming to compensate for that pace, when you average 6 months in between major raid instance releases, that is killer to the top end guilds. While the time between the release of BT/Hyjal and Sunwell won't be drastically different than it ever has, the time between the instance being completed and the next content release will be the greatest ever. I'm far too lazy to check exact dates right now, as I'm watching football, but I believe Naxx was released in June and TBC hit in January, which is a 7 month lull. I seem to remember AQ coming in January/Febuary, with Naxx hitting in June, which is a 5 month lull. 5-6 months has been the general pattern between content release. What is different is that Naxx was cleared in September, which left only 3 months until TBC for the top guilds, AQ was cleared in March/April and left roughly 2 months until Naxx for the top guilds (obviously the issue with AQ was the impossibly un-tuned C'thun, but it at least stalled the 1-2 day farm mode raid weeks, for better or worse). BT was released in June/July and cleared the same month, within a few short weeks, leaving basically the entire 6 month gap before content hits with all of the top guilds being done.

Blizzard appears to be dumbing down there content. Perhaps a large part of this is that raid size is now 25 instead of 40, and it is significantly easier to field a high quality raid or to stack a fight however needed. But the fights currently deemed as "difficult" really aren't all that tough. Kael'Thas is extremely overrated in it's complexity, and for most guilds who raid 4 nights a week or more, is killable in 2 days to a week. Vashj, while enjoyable, is similarly easy. The most "difficult" fight in BT from a pure skill level is Reliquary of Souls, which has been learned and killed in 1-2 nights by most guilds.

This is why I was such a fan of the original Gruul and Magtheridon fights. Sure, you can attempt to claim they are purely luck based, but you would be wrong. They brought an element of luck to the table, but allowed you to use skill to power through it. There were times when you would have people die or things go wrong and there was no way to prevent it, but these things never caused your wipes. The wipes were caused by the random, small bad luck being combined with overall poor play. I feel fights as difficult as these 2, in there original form, are necessary now that raid sizes are down to 25. A guild can have a very high level of "skill", and can stack a raid to greatly increase success on any given fight much easier with 25 than they could with 40, making a fight like Illidan, which most likely would have been a nightmare for a 40 man raid, a fairly straightforward and not overly complex or difficult kill to achieve. While encounters that are on the high end of the difficulty scale could prevent the majority of the player base from accessing or finishing content, simply nerfing them once the top end guilds have been stalled on them and eventually killed them for awhile would keep things moving along, just as they did with Gruul and Magtheridon.

Long story longer, the problem with the current content, in my opinion, is not about when it was released, but rather how long it took to clear once it was released.

If you think that "most guild that raid 4 nights a week" will kill Kael'thas in one reset, I'm pretty sure you're not realistic, I would say that 3-5 is a more appropriate number.
Kael might be a bit overrated difficulty wise, but that is doubly true about Reliquary. Once you know the mechanics of that fight it is pretty much tank and spank. The only really hard part of execution is for the tank to reflect Deaden (which is on a precise timer), and for two interrupters to stop Spirit Shock (which is completely predictable). Everything else in the fight is just business as usual, so I don't really see where this big skill check happens here.

The thing you call "resource complexity" is the same as overtuning an encounter, and that can be done regardless of the raid size. Doing most of the 25 man encounters with the appropiate gear and 15 people will have you running into problems like berserk timers, HPS and not enough tanks to go around. It's definately more difficult, but it doesn't prove the point you're trying to make.

You could get the same "resource complexity" by taking a 25 man encounter and tune it for 40 people. Now you don't have enough resources to go around either, and instead of 15 people - you now need 25 people to work together to beat the boss.

RoS isn't much skill, you need 3 compitent people (1 tank 2 rogues), Teron is far more demanding because it really could hit your weakest players first every time and royally screw you over.

But it also could hit your 5 best players and allow 10 members of the raid to basically be asleep and still kill him. All I'm saying about RoS is that it is the only BT fight that really requires everyone to be alert and perform- tank, healing, and dps all have to do there part. They don't even have to perform at amazing levels, they just have to perform at a level close to average.

I don´t really get what the argument is about, after all if a content isn´t released you have no choice but to not play it. If it´s released you can choose what you want to do. So if you would´ve really prefered slower releasing you could´ve played as if the content wasn´t released anyway, making no difference, while those who want it released can play it. Also the guilds that are still in TK and SSC would be at the same place regardless of release pace, obviously.

So if you´re looking to always be the top guild, maybe it could be bad for you if they release content faster. But if what you want is to play the game the way you like to play it, more content is always better.

To add to it I really think it´s silly all the old raid content was completely made absolute when TBC hit, kinda disappointing for both those that have farmed the content for the gear and for those who have yet to see this content and never will, at least not in a challenging way. Even now people start thinking about how useless their stuff will be when WotLK hits and get unmotivated to defeat content which makes it hard to recruit members at least for guilds that aren´t top-end. They should've done some minimal work to make level 70 versions of all raid instances, be it 40 or 25-man, and heck imo even heroics for all/most of the old world dungeons - lots of content for minimal work the way I see it. Not to mention all the lvl60 5-man and outdoor content is completely useless as well due to how it's unbalanced compared to outland, which again with little work could be made heaps more interesting to play.

There were several very hard fights in TBC, mainly magtherion, gruul and al'ar. People complained until they got nurfed to make them piss easy. The only difference was that in pre-TBC the only fights that were techincally doable but very hard where in nax. Everything else was reasonably easy, after it got patched from broken to doable.
But pre-TBC the guys who would complain about encounters being too difficult were on nef or somewhere in aq40 and there were just not hundreds of people whining about content being too hard. Plus the pvp patch made most casual guilds stop raiding and wait for gear reset anyway, so there was not that much time to hit a rock and ask to get it nurfed. The people that kept raiding after the pvp patch were in there to defeat the difficult stuff cause they wanted to see the content and finish it. Those people don't ask for stuff to be made easier.

This is not meant to be harsh or critism, I agree nax timing/size was a mistake and not enough people saw it. But it's just why TBC content is so easy. People complained that not enough players saw nax so they designed raid content for the broad masses now and when they made it too hard, they adjusted it. That's all there is to the difficulty of TBC fights vs some of the hard pre-TBC encounters.

Apologies for the long post, been doing schoolwork all day, so I missed like 24 hours of conversation.


Not arguing that complexity = the goal, arguing that fair distribution of difficulty includes complexity, thus parallel 25 mans and 10 mans would not be the same difficulty due to this complexity limitation, thus I don't think they should be designed with equal reward.

Not that ALL 25 man encounters are inherently more complex, but at the theoretical maximum while still being fun it's simply a fact.

That's not even close to equivalent, transitions between 2 tanks (1/5 of a 10 man) are vastly simpler than 3 tanks which is less than 1/5, when you go to 1/5, that's a 5 tank rotation, not even CLOSE to as simple as a 2 tank rotation (or interaction in any way)

Making this change would eliminate the burst, you can't have a dangerous burst fight while still expecting the same duration and HPS per person, it wouldn't work. As soon as you lower it to expect 10 people, either you're no longer at risk of a tank getting burst if you mess up (hence simpler) or the overall HPS/Duration has to be shortened significantly (hence simpler)

Other people pointed it out, it is simpler, just harder numerically. Putting out 20k raid dps with 20 people isn't more complex, it's harder numerically.

Obviously, but a non complex fight will be simpler than the same numbers thrown together but more complex. My argument is that I don't believe we can create 10 mans at the level of higher end dungeons now that are that difficult and complex yet still fair, hence why I am opposed to equal rewards from 10 mans.

Risk versus reward is well accepted as a part of raiding on these boards, it's why a lot of alliance guilds didn't bother killing Viscidus very often. Risk is the risk of wiping, losing time, and gold, reward is items. A simpler 10 man giving the same loot would be an issue with risk versus reward.

It disproves something entirely different from what the point is. Me saying Illidan is more complex than Attumen is basically the opposite equivalent of that point. Some 10 mans can be more complex than some 25 mans, I never denied that. At higher levels 10 mans fall behind.

Again, no one's denying this, however it doesn't prove anything about the later dungeons, and the harder/more complex 25 mans, much less at the ceiling of enjoyable and complexity.

It's subjective in the fact some people enjoy more things, in terms of for the overall game population with blizzard making those decisions, there's a pretty small range of how far they'll go. And quite simply, take the 10 man you imagine here, and add a 4 tank transition in there and it's more complex and not possible in a 10 man.

Obviously, but it's not that every 10 man is simpler than every 25 man that is being argued, and until there is an argument for a 10 man fight more complex than every 25 man fight, the data stacks in the favor of my argument, on top of the fact that in theory you'll always have more complexity with more people.

This is like a "God exists because you can't disprove him" argument. (not arguing God's existence, saying that ahead of time, just that kind of argument is bad)

With the maulgar one, as soon as you remove a task (like healing a mage taking a lot of damage) that is a reduction in complexity, sorry.

And as has been said, a 25 man with less people doesn't add complexity, it adds numerical difficult (gear check/dps rotation skill check) and in many cases (Gruul/thaddius) reduces complexity as less people need to perform a certain action.

Requiring one is not an issue, requiring certain numbers beyond one is. It would be unreasonable to expect to be able to shackle 6-7 mobs in a 10 man (was done in Gothik) or 4 tanks in the raid (Kael) yet reducing any of those reduces the complexity and difficulty of the encounter.

Playing at a slower pace for a competitive raider is hardly an option. Beside, that wouldnt exactly help reducing the feel of the progression lag in the game (which might or might not be seen as a bad thing)

Again, if the way people like to play the game is being in a top guild, more might not be better.
Also, is more instances at the same time really more content? If you end up rushing through T5 or anything else, to reach "the end" is it more or less content?

Having all the old raid instances thrown into the raid progressing would be content overload in my opinion. Im sure many would hate to feel forced to go back to instances they already farmed to dead pre-TBC.
What they might have done, was taking the old raid instances, tweaking it a bit, not a huge amount of rebalancing though, lower the player cap to a reasonable amount for lvl 70 players, and have the bosses drop badges which could be traded for some decent gear, outside of the normal raid progress, and a 1 day reset timer or whatever would fit.
Doubt they will ever do it though, while it might be minimal work, its in some ways work spend on content X% of the players has already seen and dont want to see again, and Y% of the players didnt see before and dont want to see now either. Sure, the population who wanted to see Naxx but couldnt might be quite big, and they will get a chance in WotLK, but how many really hungers after seeing lvl 70 MC who didnt already try it at lvl 60.

Rewarding people for experiencing it at a higher lvl than intended might be a good idea, but totally rebalancing those instances would be a waste of resources.

I dont see why its such a problem content gets obsolete after some time.
It might be a problem lots of people dont get to experience some of the great content, but the solution for that shouldnt be reusing the same instances again and again every expansion. They should get a glimpse at the content when its actually "new", not two years later in some "second edition BWL".
Nerfing earlier raid instances in the same expansion is one of the ways to do it, the question is if its enough, if they really want more people to experience it. You dont get the impression all casuals are running into SSC just yet, but who knows how it will look in 6 months, with more instance nerfs/player buffs.
Not that it even looks like Blizz are overly concerned about making content only a minority sees, so I guess we shouldnt either, as long as they keep doing it.

Content is made, used and thrown away. Sure it should have a decent lifetime first, relative to the time it took to make (and Naxx' lifetime wasnt long enough for the size), but at some point you have to let go.