Just playing devil's advocate:

Wouldn't happen. A Tauren warrior with stun resist? The cross-matches would be endless. A Gnome rogue with WotF? PvP imbalance would get further out of control.

The rich get richer?

Size increases are a nice proposition, but as has been noted, would be difficult to implement.

This gets repeated a lot, and while it may seem intutively obvious, really it's not.

It makes sense that Illidan is tougher than Kael. It makes sense that Kil'jaedan is tougher than Illidan. It makes sense that Kael is tougher than Pathaleon the Calculator, and it makes sense that Pathaleon the Calculator is tougher than some mook belf wandering around Manaforge Duro.

Does it make sense that the trash in The Eye is tougher than Pathaleon the Calculator? Of course not. While it's conceivable that Kael's guards are pretty tough stuff, the sheer scale of the power difference - this blood elf guard takes an army to defeat - mocks the integrity of the world if you take it seriously. Amusing questions like "why don't they put the toughest guards at the front" and "why don't the Stormwind Guards sort out all the problems in Elwynn Forest by one-shotting them?" and "how could the Barrens possibly survive an assault from Desolace centaurs twice their level" should remain just that - amusing questions.

When you're actually talking about the theoretical game world behind the mechanics, you have to take it with a pinch of salt and recognise that the mechanics are just that - mechanics. Illidan is a 25-man raid boss because the designers like 25-man content. It's not logical inconceivable that he could be defeated by five heroes. It's not logically calculable that he's exactly slightly tougher than Archimonde and slightly weaker than Kil'jaeden (both of whom, in the "real" fantasy world, outclass him by an incalculable degree). All of these decisions are entirely arbitrary.

It's unlikely that Illidan will be five-mannable at 80. It's plausible that he'll be five-mannable at 90, and it's likely that he'll be five-mannable at 100. What does this say for the integrity of the game world? Nothing. Nothing at all. Onyxia is still Onyxia even after being three-manned. Ragnaros is still a primieval force of nature - he still blew the crap out of the Redridge Mountains - even after people downed him before a single sons spawn.

Now if it's just a matter of opinion, that's fine. If many people think that 25-man raiding grants certain important NPCs a sense of grandeur, that's cool. It's impressive to say "it takes an army to defeat him!". However, that's a very personal matter. Me, I don't like the feel of raid bosses. I have to stuff my suspension of disbelief in my pants every time it takes ten of us to defeat a single forest troll in Zul'Aman. The Valets in Kara make me cringe. I don't feel heroic standing up to Gruul or Magtheridon (the extent of my 25-man experience) with an army of 24 people at my back. If you want to play a general, or a soldier, that's cool. I signed up to play a hero. I don't think there's anything wrong with catering to both, and I'd say that Blizzard agree with me for the most part, if not on the specifics.

You're perfectly correct in your assessment of my response. No, ZA is not my idea of fun. Yes, a 25man styled like ZA would be awful. I intensely dislike ZA because I feel that the entire thing is a gear fight. Mechanics-wise, the optional bosses of Karazhan (Netherspite/Shade of Aran/Nightbane) are more difficult than ZA. The only reason ZA > Kara is because of the huge gear demand the zone places on you.

The whole point of my earlier response was to show how bosses such as Maulgar cannot be reduced to a 10man. Maulgar is a coordination fight, it is "organized chaos". How are you going to tune Maulgar down to a 10man?

Can't do a "wave" style mechanic, because there's no coordination required to take down one after another (see: Black Morass). If anything, it's boring and puts pressure on the healer to "drink fast".

Can't have all the adds and boss hit you simultaneously, because then you have 2 tanks holding down 5 or more boss level mobs. You can nerf the adds and the boss, but then it just becomes a normal instance, and you're only stressing the tanks by forcing them to hold onto so many mobs. Not to mention that every warrior tank will whine about how they need their multitanking abilities buffed, and paladins/druids will reply "It's easy, L2P".

Maulgar is a uniquely 25man fight, you cannot bring him down to a 10man without sacrificing the whole point of the fight, and that is COORDINATION.

I have yet to see a reasonable response describing a 10 man Maulgar fight. And my point is, you cannot do that without missing out on why Maulgar exists.

Gruul and VR should be ignored from the conversation. They are tank and spank fights, with the former being a naked gear check fight, and the latter being a loot pinata.

I actually have not seen any statistics regarding ZA. Does anyone have a survey or official Blizzard data on ZA raiding as compared to Kara raiding?

But you seem to be pessimistic about ZA, so I'll take a shot. As I noted above, ZA is entirely about your gear level. The vast majority of 10manners seem to want gear. Who really is raiding ZA for lore? Zul'jin is peanuts compared to Vashj, Kael, Illidan, heck even C'thun, Ragnaros, and Nef.

And yet, what's the point of raiding ZA? You can get ZA-equivalent gear from badges or crafted items. Plus, ZA is too much of a duplicate from ZG, where you also have animal "aspect" bosses, then a final "God" boss. When ZA was leaked, every single raider went "Lollore" at the blatant idea-stealing from ZG.

When ZA was released, we were already getting WotLK leaks, "free" S1 gear, etc. If Blizzard was getting us hyped up about the next xpac and slowly winding down BC, they should have given raiders still stuck in SSC/TK/Kara "free" gear from ZA. ZA should have tuned to Lurker/Prince standards. It should have been easier than Gruul and Magtheridon. And yet, it wasn't.

I want to emphasize this, because I feel that this, if anything, sums up early BC raiding. EARLY BC RAIDING IS TUNED TOO HIGH DAMN IT. You CANNOT expect first time raiders to do well on Gruul, Magtheridon, etc. The demands they put on players are far too high for their progression level. BLIZZARD YOU HAVE TO BABY THE RAIDERS, AT LEAST INITIALLY.

Yes, of course, ZA is one notch above Kara, but still, baby the raiders until Malacrass. Demanding full T4 level or equivalent at the start of ZA is ridiculously stupid.

Heroics are popular because they give tons of badges, which can be redeemed for terrific T4-T5, and soon T6, level gear. It's not because they're fun. Some heroics are tougher than Kara, and yet yield fewer badges on a hourly basis. For instance, heroic Arcatraz and heroic Mana Tombs are far more trouble than they're worth, especially with the Shadow damage bosses they have. But heroic Ramparts and Blood Furnace, as well as heroic Mech/SP/etc, those can be easily farmed, and badges turned in for high level gear. I remember, on the first day of the heroic nerf, our Enhance shaman complaining about how big the nerf bat was. He literally tanked the trash in Furnace, plus 1 or 2 of the bosses. Admittedly we have awesome healers, but it just goes to show you how badly heroics are nerfed now. I'd rather do a heroic Ramparts/SP/etc than a regular SL just because the heroics go so quickly, and SL is so long. Especially with Douchebag the Inciter scaling with your gear level.

I don't want to abandon 5 or 10 man content. Admittedly I'm a 25man raider, but I enjoy the occasional 5 or 10 man drunk run, or running on lesser geared alts, etc.

I'd like to see a bit more uniqueness in 10man fights, and less gear fights. How about a 10man Archimonde style fight? Soul Charge and Doomfire can be easily transplanted into a 10man. Even Grip of the Legion would be fine, since there are 2/9 classes (mage and druid) that can remove Curses. There's a good chance you have at least 1 of those classes in a 10man.

Let's point out a few more things.

In WC3, there were mass battles with lots of participants. There were also "boss monsters" who were defeated. There were armies, and there were individual heroes.

Now, Ilidan was one of the individual heroes. He was millenia old by that time, had already had dealings with the burning legion, had already had interactions with the Well, had helped create Nordrassil, and so on. Similarly, Malfurion and Tyrande were already ancient beings of great power by the time WC3 happened.

But, not all heroes were like that. Thrall was tied up in prophecy and so forth, but was basically just an orc. For much of the storyline, so was Grom, though at one point he got an infusion of fel energy. But even some peons got infused with fel energy. For much of the WC3 storyline, Thrall and Grom were much like our own characters are now.

Mannoroth the Pit Lord was pretty clearly a "boss monster" sort. Who defeated him?

Not an entire army. He was duoed by Thrall and Grom.

The point is, in the older games, the precedent is that really memorable encounters with the major entities that make up the lore tended to involve very few participants. The mass combat tended to be more things like sieges, where the people participating were for the most part essentially faceless grunts.

Now think about the actual war of the ancients. Sargeras himself was gonna come through and eat our planet. What distracted him long enough to prevent it? The attack of a lone orc grunt named Broxigar.

Given that precedent from the previous games and literature... Ilidan makes more sense as a 5-man boss than as a raid boss. It makes more sense for the encounter to be personal, involving a few individuals and a ton of drama, than for it to involve large crowds.

(There are counterexamples, certainly. The defeat of Cenarius is a notable one. But to anyone who suggests that only a large team should be able to take out any ${_BIG_BOSS}, one can point out what happened to Mannoroth.)

Not just me. Maulgar exists to teach coordination to a young raid guild. Any raider can see that.

What you're proposing is that people want to fight Maulgar for lore purposes. Fine, I'm OK with that. But you cannot pretend that a 10man Maulgar is anywhere near as difficult coordination- and mechanics-wise as 25man Maulgar.

Ofcourse Maulgar can be scaled down to a 10 man fight, just look at the wizard of Oz fight. The trick is to give a way to cc a boss mob instead of forcing you to tank it. For example:

Maulgar himself: unchanged from 25 man version, hits less hard though (say you need 2 healers for him)

Krosh: is now a melee mob, standard movement speed 25% of player speed. Buffs himself with a speed buff that makes his speed 200% of players speed. Can be spellstolen/purged/dispelled.

Crazed: Caster type mob which will cast polymorph (1.5 second cast) every 13-15 seconds on it's highest aggro target. Hits like a wuss in melee, but if nobody is in range he will do lightning bolts for 10 k damage on the raid

Seer: Heals, can be interrupted, puts shield up which must be burned down.

summoner: Comes with an felhunter pet. Pet can be mind controlled by an orb in the room and used to tank the summoner. Pet can keep himself up indefinetely if controlled correctly.

total group setup:
1 MT (maulgar)
1 OT (seer + crazed)
1 dispeller (krosh)
1 interrupter (seer or crazed, since the OT can interrupt one as well)
1 random (summoner)
3 healers
2 random dps

Just something I thought up in a few minutes, I am sure it is terribly unbalanced, but that is not the point.
10 maulgar can be done. Is it the same as 25 man? No. Does it require as much coordination as 25 Maulgar? probably not. That was never the point though, since this aint a 25 man raid

Addled, to be honest I wonder if we ever fought the same Maulgar. I found the wizard of Oz actually to be every bit as chaotic and difficult coordination wise as Maulgar. Same number of mobs to handle, 15 less people to do so.
The only reasons Maulgar is more difficult then OZ is the pull and that he hits a lot harder. I sure hope you don't consider the pull to be the so special coördination part of the 25 man encounter, seeying how it involves just 5 people out of the 25 and can thus directly copied to 10 man.

Great! Awesome! This is good progress.

Speaking for myself, I've done Maulgar. Did it as a tree-druid healer, did it as an affliction warlock. I remember the failures, the log analysis, the theorycrafting, the experimentation, the eventual first tentative skin-of-the-teeth wins, and the eventual transformation to the point that he was on farm. It was fun. It was exciting. It was great.

But, I thought about it. Did I consider it worth the logistical overhead of organizing 25 people? Did I consider it worth the exclusion of the people who couldn't keep up? (I was part of a guild alliance that was doing it, because none of our individual guilds were big enough.)

In the end... I didn't. I tried it, beat it, enjoyed it, but decided that I felt that for me, it wasn't worth the cost. (I'm a big believer in giving things a fair shot before writing them off, and I feel I did in this case.) In the end, I stopped going.

But I'd still have liked to keep going for lore reasons, and I'd like to have introduced more people to it.

Did you really get the impression that anyone here intended to pretend that, from a game design standpoint?

People sometimes assert that the reason to play a game is to face challenges. This is true of many people, certainly. But I think for the majority, it's not actually important to present them with actual challenges. In fact, it's counterproductive. What people really want is to feel challenged. Everyone wants to believe they won just because of their own skill, that if they'd done slightly worse they'd have failed. But people don't actually like to fail. So the trick is to make encounter that everyone or almost everyone can actually beat, but which gives the illusion that they're only winning because of some great skill or ability.

Truly expert players won't fall for tricks, and will in the long run only feel like they're being challenged if they actually are being challenged. But there are an awful lot of players for whom that's not true at all, or true to a much lesser degree, or slightly lesser degree.

I do not care about making a 10-man Maulgar actually be as challenging as the 25-man version. I care about making the players who go through it feel like they've done something noteworthy.

It'd be cool if there were multiple true progression paths for the multiple types of PvE players.

Have a soloable progression path which suits the people who don't want to even learn to play in a rudimentary fasion. Don't let the progression end, but have it remain a few steps behind where the 5-man folks are.

Have the 5-man content tuned for a typical basically-competent PUGmonkey, someone who can learn about basic threat and crowd control and so forth, but who isn't very sophisticated. Let this level of content be friendly to off-spec tanks, and off-spec healers, and PvP-spec rogues, et cetera. Let this be the PvE content that PvP folks can freely participate in fully. Let it produce rewards that are better than the solo stuff but not quite as good as the 10-man stuff, but which never stop progressing over time.

Have the 10-man (and maybe 5-man heroic?) content be tuned for small groups of people who are willing to hunker down and theorycraft and optimize quite a bit more than that, but who aren't willing to, say for example, require their buddies to install any mods, or forbid the enthusiastic young tankadin from trying to tank some particular encounter because he's the wrong class, or cancel the run if no mages show up. Go ahead and make it so you need on-spec tanks and on-spec healers to do well, but allow any on-spec tanks and on-spec healers. (For example, this is the level of content in which crushing blows, lethal debuffs that must be dispelled, and enrage timers should probably be introduced.) Go ahead and have it produce rewards which are a bit better than what the normal 5-man stuff does, but a bit worse than the 25-man stuff.

Have the 25-man (and maybe 10-man heroic?) content be tuned for the truly serious folks, the folks who thrive on the coordination of the Maulgar fight, the folks who are sorely disappointed at the Magtheridon cubeclick nerfs, et cetera. This is where the folks who care about world-firsts (or even server-firsts) belong. Have it give the best rewards.

Just make sure none of the paths dead-ends for long. Seasons would be a great way to do this.

Heck, imagine if all the content up to BT were in the game when the expansion was released, but not open yet.

First PvE season, all the level 70 5-mans are open, and Karazhan 10-man is open, and Gruul 25-man is open. Second season, on a predictable schedule that people can plan ahead for, a few (but not all!) of the 5-mans get Heroic versions, and 5-man Karazhan opens up, and 10-man Gruul opens up, and 25-man SSC opens up. Each includes better rewards than the last season's endgame in its own category, but the current season's 25-man still has better rewards than the current season's 10-man. A few seasons later, PUGs are handling 5-man Gruul, some folks are facing challenges in "The Eye" 10-man, and the really serious folks are in BT.

And all along, a few soloable quest chains that are mostly implemented via dailies have also progressed as the seasons advance. As an example, consider the Netherwing dailies. Imagine if, the first PvE season, only the Neutral quests were there, but the second PvE season, the Friendly quests opened up, and then the next season the Honored quests opened up. Now, even the soloers know there's progression coming, that when that big raid guild is finally able to step into BT, at least they will finally be able to earn that dragon they've been working towards for months.

Don't think thats true at all. Not this late in the games life. For any kind of content to be aspirational content its nessecary that the players actually want to try said content. I am going to bet that pretty much every single player who wants to raid have done so by now. Meaning if they aren't still raiding the options are:

1) Don't have time for it. Might be intressted but whats the point of playing a game where the content you are intressted in is blocked for you because its too time consuming, or conflicts with other real life obligations?

2) Tried it and failed. Not beeing skilled enough as a player. But still wants the character to be the best. Seeing people in raid gear only serves as a remainder of how much of a failure said player is. Should drive players away form the game more than anything. Any n00b gear comments, from the wonderful WoW community, would help alot here.

3) Tried it and found it boring. Frustrating and possibly a chore with crappy logistics and militaristic time requirements. Seeing someone in raid gear would just be Blizzard telling you that they either want to have you as a second rate player, who might get some crappy left overs in the form of welfare, or you'll just have to accept that raids it is and endure that content.


Think its silly to belive that raids have any kind of positive effect on keeping people who aren't raiding. Might be true while people look at the raids with intresst and are trying to get into raid guilds. But by now most players are certain to already have tried it. The only reason most players aren't raiding already is just a total lack of intresst. Pretty sure given that new raids with better and better gear given out would more serve to drive people not intressted in them to other games.

But then again given how slow Blizzard appears to be with developing new content I am pretty sure that if they decide that they need to spend more effort to keep the 5-man crowd around; and wants to make a true 10 man progression path, then the 25 man content is dead until another MMO that focus on large scale PvE raids is released.

The idea with raiding content beeing an inspiration for lesser gifted folks is pretty much like a football club where people have great fun playing together that suddenly tells everyone that now if you want to get an actual salary, and be truly honored members, you need to switch to curling. Only problem is that most don't enjoy curling. Don't think that would be the best idea.

requiring to two interrupters in the raid does not seem that unreasonable to me, but 1.5 seconds is probably to fast. Make it 2.5 and put the heal on say 30 seconds cooldown so even a mage can keep cs up.

Then nerf Maulgar's dps to only require 1.5 healer orso


No justicification about the orb, it is just a mechanism for mind control. From a lore point of view it makes a lot more sense to make a questline which introduces you to Maulgar and at the end of that you receive *Gnomish Demon control Cap* Which can only be used to control that felhunter.

In fact you can make controlling that felhunter the hardest part of the entire fight, just take some inspiration from the shartuul event. I never said it was going to be a free ride in the park.

I never said he still has blastwave. Then again, him having blastwave in combination with being kited around the room must be fun. That is probably too hard for Maulgar though, so just do him without the blastwave.


A yes, my bad indeed. I totally forgot that. Anyway, as I said earlier you only really need two interruptors, one every 15 seconds on crazed and one every 30 on seer. And if your OT is a druid and your MT a warrior? just swap them around. This is supposed to be hard afterall.

As I said in my original post, it was just something I made up in 5 minutes. It is in no way the perfect raid encounter, if that was so simple, then blizz would be churning out 5 raid instances a month. The point was to prove it is possible to convert maulgar to a 10 man. Yes ofcourse you lose elements of the fight, but you retain the core of it. The only boss mob who really had his abilities changed is Krosh, since he specifically needed a mage.

I acknowledged this myself.

No one is pretending anything of the sort. I have explicitly said the exact opposite, several times.

I don't want to disagree with Douglas' point about lore, but I'd like to re-iterate the OP's point about progression. Comments about today's heroics are somewhat moot, since there is currently no progression associated with them.

If *waves magic wand* heroic Mech got re-itemized with better loot, would I start running it again, despite having done the place to death back when it dropped 5 badges? Yes. Why? Progression.

Also, if we start talking about serious 5 progression, which I believe is separate from "I'm a serious PvPer, so what PvE do I do?", then I think we can start introducing some class composition models. We already have that for big raids (X tanks, Y healers, Z1 melee dps, Z2 ranged dps for SSC/TK, but for MH, that changes to X', Y', Z1', Z2'), so I don't see any reason why we wouldn't for the 5s. MT, OT/DPS (or possibly OT/OH), MH, DPS, DPS? MT, OT, MH, OH/DPS, DPS? We could go around -that- one for awhile, too.

Lastly, earlier, someone was asking Douglas about his raid experience. Just to nail that coffin shut, yes, I've been on guild/alliance firsts of raid boss kills, so I know what that's like. And yes, it was very, very cool -- but I am unwilling to do 25s due to other factors. Which, as the OP keeps repeating, is fine for both me and my 25s friends.