I think Blizzard's gradated dumbing down of content is for the most part an effective way of achieving several of the OP's objectives. The elite with world-firsts are known and revered amongst those who care about such things by tackling bugged end-bosses with fast respawns and such. Lesser guilds get their kills in over time as bugs are fixed and nerfs are implemented. Eventually, attunements are removed, gear-checks are reduced, fights are made more forgiving -- to the point where alts and fresh players can tackle them.

25-mans converted to 5-mans just wouldn't feel right in terms of mechanics and community. Adding NPCs to some fights is novel and acceptable, but to virtually every fight would get dull quick. Reducing requirements for multi-tank and mass cc fights would shatter the core essence of those fights. Assuming Blizzard put aside the considerable time to tweak 25 -> 5 man mechanics for the sake of saving on artwork, why not spend a bit of extra time and dump selected bosses into new 5-man and rework some of their skills from the ground up? It would then become new content for everyone, not just non-raiders.

As for rewards, there are many options already for fresh players to begin. Why discount PvP in this model? It is a part of the game, and a simple system to participate in for anyone with time to play the game. Skill is not a necessity, but certainly ramps up the rate at which such rewards can be acquired. The badges system is one addition I greatly approve of. It helps to numb some of the pain from stupidity like getting 12 Kiss of the Shards vs. 0 Wraith Blades, and provides a reliable way to gear fresh toons.

To sum it up, Blizzard has done a decent job of tending to customer demand for most of the base issues the OP wanted to tackle. Could they do it better? Yes, but as he mentioned, that would take resources one way or the other. Given the option, those resources are better spent making new content for everyone.

"Dumbing down" is a fix, but only assuming that people actually can or want to progress in a 5 -> 10 -> 25 model. The entire premise of the OP's proposal is that there are those who cannot make this type of progression.

Take myself, for example. I used to raid 5-7 days a week Pre-BC, but real life commitments forced me to stop. It's gotten to the point where I can't even commit to Karazhan runs; I simply will not submit my guild or friends to my disturbance when my real life could stop my gameplay for the day literally at a moment's notice. Therefore, I am resigned to PUG 5-mans and heroics.

I have all the in-game tools needed to raid with my guild, and the gear needed to support it. However, my situation simply does not allow that option to me. Therefore, I cannot make use of Blizzard's intended progression ladder, and my raiding shaman in purples sits because she no longer gets any use out of running the same heroics over and over.

The OP's solution is modeled after Arena Seasons, and it's actually an elegant system of progression. You keep progressing your character playing how you like to play, which in my case would be 5-man instances. Forcing people into certain types of playstyles (PvP, raiding) that they might not like or have access to in order to progress their characters alienates a lot of players.

And it's been covered before, but in terms of Blizzard's resources, it takes a lot less resources to tune an instance or encounter than it does to create a new one.

15 hours of *scheduled* wow sounds like a lot to me, since I'm going to guess you spend another 15 hours a week doing non-raid activities, pvp, farming, etc. I don't actually HAVE 30 hours a week to play wow, unless I want to really cut down on other activities I enjoy. But, that's neither here nor there...

Doing something with people you consider friends is NOT unique to WoW, or video games at all. I bet people on a football team after a super bowl victory feel just as elated as you do after beating Illidan for the first time. We're not talking about comparing "vibe". Just the look, and to a limited extent the mechanics. We don't want to share our happiness with the PUG that we beat an instance with. But we DO want to be challenged, and we do want to be entertained. One can make a 5 man look like a raid. You could build a 5 man encounter to appear bigger than it really is (the temple event in ZF is a good example). You can make a 5 man instance epic in scope (a complete clear of BRD takes as long as a raid, longer then some I would guess). And you can make complex bosses in 5 mans, with interesting and varied abilities (The best example of this I can think of is Arugal, at the end of SFK. There isn't a boss quite as interesting to fight as him for the next 30 levels at least). This can and has all been done. We just want it continued at the end game, so people who don't have 5 dedicated hours, 3 days a week, can continue to have fun in PvE once they hit 70.

Let me sum this up again. 5 man groups are not trying to build the group dynamics that exist in a raid. But that doesn't mean we don't want interesting, challenging, and sufficiently epic encounters.

The OP's system is involved, but I wouldn't call it elegant. It works on the model of Strat/BRS having player caps reduced, which admittedly is one way of handling content accessibility for larger playerbases. This motion in fact sounds quite similar to cries for 5-man raids years ago. Blizzard gave us Heroics in response. And that worked quite well, until they nerfed heroics so badly. Perhaps part of the solution to "challenging 5-mans" is to revert their difficulty. Possibly add another difficulty tier, similar to the Arena style solution hinted at. Add "Legendary" difficulty above Heroic, make everything hit harder, give the bosses some new tricks, raise the ilvl and quantity of epic drops including gems, and drop 2x badges/boss. Continue the trend every so often as raid/PvP gear outpaces the 5-man selection.

As for accessing lore, wait till the expansion, get to 80 and 5-10 man the old lvl 70 25-mans. Just pray Blizz doesn't break something like the Emps and not care enough to go back and fix them... Casual players without the time or desire to be "bleeding edge" will not access elite content when it comes out, when it's still challenging. That's fine. Otherwise, why would it be considered elite, what would the bleeding edge strive for? The player-cap reduction system the OP proposed would actually be a big hit on more casual raiding guilds like mine who are "months behind" world-first guilds. On our relatively relaxed schedule, "Age n" would have come and gone before we ever got around to accessing the content in true raid format. The existence of 5-man versions (even if taking it on 25-man was an option) would belittle our desire to complete it. We in turn would be punished simply because our timetables and compositional resources limited the rate of progress compared to world-first guilds. Even the OP acknowledges any system of making content accessible to a wider mass should be done over time. Waiting for the expansion to raise the level cap should function just as well for the most part, and requires virtually no backwards resource allocation on Blizzard's part. You want to see Illidan the first week he's out? Raid everyday on the PTR when he's being tested, then spend 24/7 downing him the first week he's Live. You want to see Illidan eventually and are willing to put in the time and effort to 25-man him? Keep at it, and you'll see him in a few months. You want to see Illidan, but can't or won't put in the time to 25-man him as he's intended? Wait till the expansion for it to become legacy.

As for 15 hours of raiding, not all of our raiders can stay the full 5 hrs/night. Some can't make it all 3 nights. Some even take entire weeks/months off. Our leadership works around that, and yes it does get frustrating, but results are achieved. 1-2 hours worth of dailies, farming/grinding are enough to cover raid costs. We even offer a standby system which allows excess raiders to go and farm during raid times while still earning credit. While we certainly ask that our raiders reserve some time for us, we expect them to do it efficiently. That's simply not something you can expect from rag-tag pugs, and I see no convincing reason to mold elite content to their needs. You don't have time for 25 mans, you don't have time for it. 5-mans exist for you. You want a challenging 5-man? Ask for harder heroics. Ask for new 5-mans everyone can enjoy.

Expansion content now includes:
# 4x 25-man raids (4 - 9 bosses)
# 2x 25-man encounters (1 - 2 bosses)
# 2x 10-man raids (6 - 16 bosses)
# 15x 5-mans (2 - 5 bosses)
# 15x heroics (2 - 5 bosses)

There already exists quite a lot of content accessible to a wide playerbase compared to limited content. I for one don't buy the argument that Blizzard ignores the casual masses in favor of raiders. Also make note that all 15 5-mans + heroics were available for enjoyment on release, while 2 of the 25-mans and 1 of the 10-mans had to be patched in over long spans of time, bugs and all. Perhaps it would feel like 5-mans were better catered for if Blizz had only released 2 per hub and turned on the remaining over time? Nonetheless, I wholeheartedly encourage asking Blizz for more new 5-mans. Emphasis on new, not backward capped. There are still several zones waiting for fresh instance hubs to unlock lore and excitement

I know I may come off as an elitist jerk with too much time... but I've run the gauntlet from having nothing but 80+ hrs/wk of playtime, to barely having 1-2 hrs every other week, to taking months off. I didn't expect to raid 25-mans when I didn't have time, despite my guild asking my under-geared toon to tag along. I quested, leveled alts, did dailies, occasionally 5-manned, chatted, and sometimes simply enjoyed the view. And I enjoyed it quite well. When I wanted to see Vashj, Kael, Archi and Illidan, I put time into the guild and game. Or rather, when I had time to put in, I decided I'd like to work towards seeing them...

You never really answered the basic question. Sure, 25-man content should be restricted to those who can and will do what is necessary to do it. Why though, should specific named boss X be restricted to 25-man content?

Blizzard really needs to sort out the difficulty scaling from normal to heroic before they attempt that. if they make legendary similar to heroic with everything just hitting alot harder they may end up with them beeing a gear/skill check for tank and healer only while DPS is more or less pointless and certainly don't get any harder challenges.

With legendary you could very easily end up in a situation where all the DPS only wants to do legendary, because well they can do it just as well and likely no major difference compared to normal, but all the tanks and healers need to grind like crazy to meet the gear checks.

Though DPS upgrades beeing pointless in large parts of the game, and DPS having much lower gear and l2p checks compared to tanks/healers needs to be sorted regardless.

What do you think of heroics?

Not really.

1) Where's the actual content progression?

If Heroic Ramparts were accessible to folks in dungeon blues, but Heroic Slave Pens required people who had geared up in Heroic Ramparts first, and Heroic Mana Tombs was further along still, and there were quest chains or something that indicated the right order to you, that would be a lot better.

2) Where are the actual new experiences?

If we were still running strat/scholo et cetera today, but Blizzard had kept adding new Heroic/Uberheroic/WTFPWNheroic levels to it, with better and better gear, would people find that acceptable? Of course not! There needs to be a trickle of actual new stuff -- new to this group, at least. Recycling the content, or at least the lore behind the content, of the larger raid instances, scaling it down or rewriting it for 10-man and then 5-man teams, would be a way to achieve that.

Heroics would have had the same lifetime that normal dungeons had without the badges. Ie, you would run them a handful times then never go back. Badges could have been inserted anywhere. They might even have scrapped heroics and just have had badges in normal 5-man dungeons.

I think heroics overall have failed. They were supposed to be a challenge but only were so because they were horribly balanced at the start with tanks being one or twoshotted regularly, rogues eating cleaves that killed them all the time and mages being by far the preferred dps class because of sheep. Later on now that they fixed them they are pretty much the same as normal dungeons, having only served to make normal dungeons redundant.

If I understood OP correctly, he isn't looking for something like heroics anyway. He is looking for a continuing morphing of raids into smaller raids and then into 5-man dungeons. That is a completely different beast.

Actually I meant with reference to your (reasonable, IMO) suggestion that it might be confusing for there to be multiple versions of a different boss or dungeon. It doesn't seem to be a problem with heroics.

They have the additional benefit of making the leveling-up dungeons count as max-level dungeons. I.E. there are 15 5-man dungeons of roughly comparable rewards/difficulty for level 70s, but without Heroic mode, Ramparts et all would be a little too wussy for people to run regularly, similar to how BRD/Maraudon were.

Lady Vashj being taken down by the same number of players as needed for Hydromancer Thespia? Somehow that isn't quite as epic and significantly diminishes any relative danger between the two and the degree of achievement for downing them.

On the other extreme of what you're proposing, there have been noted accounts of ultra-elite buffed-to-the-teeth players 3-manning Onyxia and 10-manning MC back when they were on-level. Wait to be +10 levels of the content and have green gear which surpasses the epics those guys packed, and they should be even easier to 5-man. Effectively removing the 25-man restriction over time. Instead of being a restriction, it becomes an option to bring up to 25 over-level toons to make the situation even easier.

As already mentioned, I feel Blizzard made a mistake in nerfing Heroics so badly. New tricks need NOT be restricted to bosses alone. DPS/CC should not be made ineffective. It should be made more challenging. Borrow from 25-mans, such as the dispelling packs to Kael.

Here, I'll throw in an example of potential boss changes using Murmur:
# Normal - Murmur's Touch places an explosive countdown on one target.
# Heroic - Murmur's Touch places an explosive countdown on one target. All players are pulled to the target.
# Legendary - Murmur's Touch places an explosive countdown on one target. All players are pulled to the target and everyone but the target is debuffed with a 50% slowing magic effect, dispellable.
# Valiant - Murmur's Touch places an explosive countdown on one target. All players are pulled to the target and everyone but the target is debuffed with a 50% slowing magic effect with a 3 second silence.
# Dauntless - Murmur's Touch effects everyone but the highest agro. All players are pulled to the highest agro.

If you want an elegant PvE scenario which emulates progressive arena gearing beyond badges, tiering heroics is that solution.

1) The cheap, but potentially lore-pleasing way Blizz could do this is to set up attunement chains of sorts. Gear requirements need not be standard armor/weapons, but could be quest-effect items necessary to control mechanics in progressive dungeons. Think getting a Tears of the Goddess type item from Sethekk in order to defeat Murmur. The downside is it would place restrictions on content access, which is possibly counter to the desire of the OP.

2) Certain bosses could be active only on harder modes. This is already in effect for Heroic Shattered. Include more challenging mechanics, borrowing from raid mobs could work to that end. Think giving the 5-packs in Shattered the shield toss and spinning sword skills from Bloodboil and Gorefiend trash. Sentinels in Arcatraz getting 1-shot the Robot's skills from Council trash. 5-manners get to experience 25-man mechanics, 25-mans stay 25-man. 5-mans still have to progress to harder modes to experience these mechanics. Win/win?



25-mans don't have to be demoted to 5-man status in order for 5-manners to experience the mechanics they contain. A sense of progress and increasing challenge/rewards can be applied to existing 5-mans without demoting 25-mans. And if you simply must access the 25-mans themselves with 5 players, keep waiting for the level cap increase.

While true, the mechanics aren't necessarily relevant.

I have friends who want to see BT. They don't care about seeing any of the mechanics that are currently in BT. They care about it from a lore standpoint, from a story standpoint.

What's ironic to me here is, many truly serious raiders care almost exclusively about the mechanics and the details surrounding the encounters, learning the fights, overcoming the challenges, et cetera, and would still be content if the lore was a lot more thin. But many of the people who aren't raiders care deeply about the lore, and would be very satisfied to experience that lore even as simple cutscenes. So designing things so that you have to raid in order to experience the lore seems upside down.

You've contradicted yourself here. The progression of bosses with regard to realism is meaningless. Who are Kael and Lady Vashj? They're powerful heroes. By comparison to Ragnaros? They're nothing. And yet they're massively more powerful in game than Ragnaros is. More powerful than C'Thun, too. They're not intended to scale realistically. Raid trash takes 25 people to kill because it would be very dull if it didn't, but the realistic world proposed by such a system of exponentially scaling naga and fel orcs is ridiculous.

Best to suspend disbelief really. If Onyxia can be three-manned, does that make Hydromancer Thespia more epic than Onyxia? Of course not. Isn't Ossirian supposed to be the most powerful, rather than the least powerful, of the Anubisath? What about Hakkar? Surely Hakkar is a mite tougher than Zul'jin? In Warcraft 2, Kargath and Gorefiend were roughly as tough as each other. Since then, Kargath has become super-charged with fel energy and Gorefiend has died. Their level and raid size in WoW tells you nothing whatsoever about their actual relative power in the theoretical setting.

No. Not win/win. Win/lose. 5-manners don't care about 25-man mechanics. Why on earth would you think that they would? 5-manners care about 25-man NPCs (I say NPCs rather than bosses to communicate that it's not their abilities, but their identity, which is relevant) and they care about 25-man loot. Hateful Strike is neither here nor there. Only raiders care about Hateful Strike, and only because caring about it is a necessary component of success, not because it's remotely interesting in its own right.

Again I would ask, where did you get the notion that mechanics were relevant?

From the original post:
Several examples are listed in post #4.

Meaningful progression is a steadfast of all computer RPGs. Requesting it, or adding it, does not in any way represent an aberration. It represents a return to form.

Mechanics are relevant. It's an important aspect of interactivity in the game. Without having mechanics to deal with, the whole game may as well boil down to walking up to NPCs and clicking chat bubbles with pages of lore. Watch a movie, read a book about it. The cutscenes approach could work well. Does anybody bother fraps'ing the full dialogue of end-bosses? I admit those 30-60 sec scenes are entertaining the first time, but get annoying fast after the 10th time.

I won't claim to be very knowledgeable about lore and relative power between all bosses. The way I see it is their relative power in their respective domains. Ragnaros > Emp. Nefarian > Drakkisath. Vashj > Thespia. Whether Kel'Thuzad > C'Thun > Nefarian > Ragnaros is something I don't claim to know, but is more a result of how Blizzard decides to implement their relative difficulties. The lore and the mechanics could be completely indifferent to each other in defining any relative importance.

Each boss/instance is designed with a certain raid quantity in mind. Onyxia is intended to be downed by 40 on-level characters. Thespia is intended to be downed by 5 on-level characters. That Ony was successfully 3-manned by on-level characters shows that it is possible for smaller groups to take on extreme challenges, which I thought was an extreme take on 5-man players demanding more challenging content for their quantities. It does not lessen Onyxia's difficulty on-level vs. Thespia's. If anything, it proves smaller groups can take on extreme difficulties far beyond the intended design.

But ok, let's for a moment put aside mechanics. All NPCs, raid bosses included, now replicate mechanics, stats and loot tables of lvl 1 Kobolds, but retain their current names, titles, size, model/skin and dialogue. Would this work in terms of satiating desire to access lore?


EDIT: A flash of innovation just sparked. Not quite fully formed, but I'll toss it out to see whether this might be a more reasonable approach to lore exposure for the masses without totally destroying the epic nature of raids:

Observer mode. Allow a certain number of players to tag along on raids as observers. They cannot interact with other players. They can interact with objects and NPCs for dialog only, not to actually activate anything. They are only visible amongst other observers in the raid, invisible to actual raiders. They can read raid chat, but cannot write; possibly a toggled option for raid admins.

There are no raid IDs associated with observer mode. That should help with finding guilds running desired raids/bosses. Observe (though not fully experience) and access lore which was previously inaccessible. Better than a movie or cutscenes, because you're actually there to watch the action in person, live.

I suspect that they're working towards making 10 mans a real progression path, and they've outright said that 5-man kael is part of a new design philosophy where you get to play with the big lore characters even if you don't raid. I think trying to make a 5-man progression path work would completely fall on its face, because class stacking eclipses gear level by too great a factor on that scale. And it goes beyond the cc issue, which is mitigable. It even goes beyond the fact that some encounters really encourage a specific kind of tank or require interrupts or defensive dispels. A group of spriest, lock, prot pally, ele shaman, healer, or one of feral tank, rogue, rogue, dps war, resto shaman seem pretty likely to completely trounce dps or longevity checks that would challenge odds and ends groups of considerably higher gear level.

It's awesome that they're going to include the kaels and illidans of future content in smaller instances. It is pretty silly that the main plot is all in 25 mans and the 10 mans are unrelated subplots including "lol trollz," but I don't think you always have to let people have the same encounter, either mechanically or in terms of lore. Skirmishing with a distracted or weakened big name character or fighting him with assistance (preferably before the raid version, in terms of progression, release time, and plot timeline) is nice in that it doesn't feel patronizing to the small groups or cheapen the encounter for the large ones. I think making simplified, undertuned, small-scale mechanical mock-ups of the 25 man fights is too likely to come off as a sad parody of the real fight. Encountering vashj in the context of a 5-man does not have to mean a pitched battle against a dumbed down version of 25vashj. Even little things like having kael show up and speechify a little before delegating your extermination to an underling are a significant step up from the current situation.

Expecting to experience the same fights 25 man raids do without getting 25 people is silly and impractical. Not because you're not entitled or some other elitist nonsense. You just aren't going to be able to replicate everything across every scale, and while 5 and 10 man content need to exist, there isn't any reason they need to be the same events as 25 man content. That said, not being able to experience the 25 man content shouldn't equate to not interacting with arthas or kil'jaeden or whatever.

I also think there's a lot of work to be done on the logistical end of making 25s more accessible. I suspect some of the people that only do small group content do it because they have 5-15 friends that play and hate the overhead of turning that into a guild, or don't have a schedule that allows for committing a bunch of set raid times that overlap with that many other people. Raids are a lot more frustrating and less fun if you're pugging people, or if you don't have a mostly consistent group from week to week. I don't have an implementation on this front though, or even know if it's really blizzard's job to build better guild-finding tools.

What they do however control is how much time you need to raid at in a stretch to make it worthwhile. The fixes that come to mind here are shorter but more challenging trash clears/less trash with shorter respawns, and more non-linear instances. By nonlinear i do not mean "you can technically walk by hydross and lurker but still need to do a bunch of their trash" i mean, "go this way for gorefiend+his trash, go that way for bloodboil+his trash", etc.

Lot of arguments seem to say that 5-man fights must be simple because they have to work with any tank, any healer and any three dps. Perhaps expanding normal group to consist of seven members would allow to make more complex 5-man fights. With seven members Blizzard could make fairly safe assumptions of having wider class/spec representation on a normal group instances (eg. having an off-tank, off-healer and more CC). It shouldn't really affect on difficulty of forming groups as in the most cases the amount of groups are limited by tanks and healers, not DPSers.

Of course some mechanics are relevant. You were explicitly talking about replicating specific mechanics. I addressed this in the fourth post in this thread, but I'll explain again.

25-man Gruul has seven really notable abilities: Growth, Hateful Strike, AOE Silence, AOE (Delayed) Freeze, AOE Knockback, Cave-In and Shatter

Is he notable because of any specific one of these abilities? I don't believe so. In order I'd say he's characterised by the following:

Growth (he's a giant gronn and he gets bigger)
AOE Knockback (this is really noticeable to everyone)
Cave-In (omg rocks)
Everything else

However, in raid mechanic terms (i.e. what you have to pay attention to in order to complete the fight in a 25-man raid) his abilities are roughly as ordered:

Growth (soft enrage timer)
Shatter (l2spreadout)
Hateful Strike (needs a second tank)
AOE Knockback & Freeze (makes Shatter non-trivial)
AOE Silence (bit of a PITA for the healers)
Cave-In (something for the MT to think about in an otherwise trivial fight for him)

If you removed any of these abilities, it wouldn't be the same fight in 25-man. It would probably be trivially simple, especially for experienced raiders. However, most of these abilities could be removed without changing the character of the fight at all. If he no longer used AOE Silence, would anyone even notice? If he no longer shattered, or no longer froze everyone, the fight would play completely differently, but he'd still be Gruul the Dragonslayer, ruler of the Gronn and Ogres.

What I'm saying is that lore-wise, if you want to think about it that way, certain bosses need to have certain abilities. Demon hunters need to metamorphosise. Vashj needs a bow. Kael'thas needs to cast fire spells. The character of a certain boss is wrapped up in certain concepts and mechanics without which they wouldn't be who they are. However, this is different to the exact mechanics specified in the 25-man raid encounter, which go beyond this and add in additional abilities to make the fight interesting and challenging for a raid.

High King Maulgar is defined by having a council of ogres with different abilities which need to be taken care of. He is not defined (characterfully) by requiring a hit-capped mage. Nalorakk is defined by switching between a troll and a bear. He's not defined (characterfully) by being able to one-shot the tank if there isn't a second tank present. It would still "be" Nalorakk, Bear Avatar of Zul'Aman, without that specific abilities. To raiders who are only interested in the mechanics, it would feel like a different fight. To non-raiders, or anyone who hasn't seen the 25-man version, it would be awesome.

The first problem that arise from the proposed idea is
1) It would take a shitload of dev work to constantly retune old content, and the workload would only get bigger and bigger over the lifespan of an expansion.
Which brings us back to the old "We will rather make new content [for everyone], than re-do old content" Blizzard has stated often.

What I would like to see more, and I also believe would be more feasible are
1) 5-man progression on its own.
Imagine TBC released with 6 heroic instances, then 2.1, two more was added, being more difficult and giving better gear. Later again a totally new 5 man might be added, both normal and heroic, and again "harder" (requiring better gear, not necessarily more complex) with better rewards, etc...). It should of course be through staggered release (just like 25-mans should) to keep the content last longer. and allow people to gear up for the next ones.
The goal would be to have more unique 5-mans being released in patches, rather than releases of "Illidan Lite".
It wouldnt even have to take lots of extra Dev work time. since, lets be fair, did it really add much to the game that we had 15 different Heroic 5 mans at TBC release? (which meant people just did 2-3 of them, and ignored the others most of the time), many of those heroic instances could have been released later as harder 5-mans (whereas the normal ones was of course needed for the leveling experience).

2) "Library of Azerothian History" (or whatever you would call it - it could fit well into guild houses ^^ yet another thing I would like to see). Anyway, it could be a compromise of "not too much dev work" and making everyone experience the most important lore.
Through this library, players could "re-experience" important bosses from the previous expansion cycles. Think Ragnaros, Nef, Cthun, Kelthuzad and such. In a 5 man version (maybe with NPC characters if that would work), a 10 man, and the 25 man version (retuned for the new lvl cap).
It would keep it at a handful of bosses for every expansion (pick the most interesting lore-wise or just the most memorable ones) while allowing everyone to experience old bosses.

I like this idea very much, even though I don't think there is much use for a 25 man and 10 man version of said boss, such a group can always do the real version. For 5 mans and more importantly even, solo players it would be amazing. You can tie this in with the lore very well.

Say for example you want to do Ragnaros. You go the museum, where you find his hammer and a questgiver. He sends you on a questline around Blackrock mountain involving all the dark iron lore and the hydraxian waterlords. At the end of the questline you receive splinter of Sulfuras or something and the quest sends you off to the Caverns of time, where you can relive the fight together with the raid from guild X, that got the server first kill (just scripted NPC's who have the same names as the people who first killed that boss on the server). The fight itself is completely scripted and the NPC's will kill the boss on their own eventually, but you still get to wack away at him and watch him die.

I would be an amazing experience for people who don't raid at all and a nice e-peen for the guild that got the server first kill.

Unfortunately I don't think Blizzard's AI right now is capable of recreating a fight like Archimonde, even it is completely scripted, but if it was possible it would be very cool.

Now to get this thread back on topic, I don't think scaling raids down to 5 mans wil ever work. 10 mans however must be possible with a few changes, mainly involving specific classes being needed (give items to replicate those abilities, like tear of elun = slowfall) and forced player deads (teron, azgalor). I can't imagine adapting Gruul, mag and the t5 instances to 10 mans takes more time then developing Zul'aman.

I want to enumerate some of the problems facing WoW right now that I feel this system addresses, and also answer some of the repeated flaws in it.

WoW Problem: Blizzard's current solution might be doing more harm than good

My inexpert analysis of the forums right now suggests that 2.4 is going to be problematic. Sunwell is no Naxx, that seems clear. Between high quality badge gear for non-raiders, greater availability of epic gems, dropped attunments and the small size and apparently low level of challenge in Sunwell, 2.4 seems to be pissing raiders off more than it excites them.

Is this a widespread problem, or just the opinion of a whiny minority?

In any case, these issues are being blamed squarely on "casual" players who, we are told, demand better quality loot for no effort, and want to be able to wander into BT for the free epixx without having killed Kael and Vashj first. While there are obvious exaggerations being made, it's difficult to rationalise any other reason for relaxing the attunements than the designers desire to see more people in the instances.

By comparison, the proposed system sharply distinguishes between 25-man and 10-man content. I don't know for a fact that it's better, as I don't have the mentality of 25-man raider who feels that other people should be excluded from their content. However, it seems that people do consistently object to nerfing of previous tiers - this system does not do that. They also object to rewards being freely available for less effort - this system does not avoid that completely, but it does attempt to formally and specifically address it. There are intended to be rewards only available for completing the 25-man instance, and additional rewards (mounts perhaps) only available for "server firsts", intended to work in a similar way to Arena season victors. These two factors together should provide a genuine recognition of those who did complete the hardest content, and did it when it was hard.

Meanwhile, other players will be slowly earning their improved loot in retooled instances which are smaller, rather than easier.

WoW Problem: Turnover in players is a pain

My guild consists of RL friends, so I can't speak from personal experience about how much of a problem this is. I do know that players are being forced to play their mains because their alts are not well-geared enough for progression content, and we're unwilling to "waste" time gearing alts that could be spent on progression.

Something I hear a lot from raiders is how irritating it is to regear a new member or alt, should someone leave or your composition change. There's not much more to say about this other than that access to smaller group, shorter lockout versions of instances helps you to gear up new members or alts much faster. The 25-man versions of the instances are there as well should you wish to use them as a "proving ground".

Also, as sometimes said of Tier 0.5 and Heroics, they can be used as a way to identify skilled or dedicated players who are not yet in a raid guild - someone who has gone to the trouble of pugging 5-man Karazhan to gear themselves out (assuming 5-man Karazhan is genuinely challenging) is a better prospect than some random guy in blues.

Age System Problem: It would take a lot of development effort

Well yes, obviously. But this seems to miss a critical point. Blizzard have already said they want to address the problems of lack of progression content. They recognise now that there needs to be a 10-man progression just as much as there needs to be a 25-man progression. Apparently Kara->Zul'Aman->Nothing is not good enough, and they are planning "more" in WOTLK. There's no real excuse not to have a 5-man progression too.

This system reduces the effort of putting out 5-man, 10-man and 25-man content every major content release, which is what they should have been doing from the start. Of course that's more effort than solely releasing 25-man content. Releasing 5-man Karazhan, 10-man SSC/TK and 25-man BT/MH is a whole lot less effort than releasing Magister's Terrace, Zul'Aman and Sunwell in one patch.

You think they should stagger it? Well, that's what they're doing right now, and it seems to be pleasing no one. Raiders (and a lot of raiders, rather than a whiny minority) are complaining that it's been too long since Black Temple was released. I assure you, it's been a lot longer since any 5-man progression content was released.