Something that I haven't seen brought up much at all is what is going to happen with outdoor raid encounters. I haven't personally seen any news about them, so Blizzard may have just dropped the concept entirely. If they haven't, how do people think they might be reintroduced in the expansion? Will it be a better idea to tune it to the difficulty of 40 people, or rather the 25 man size. If the raid interface cap stays the same, then I could see these encounters becoming much more about guild cooperation to get 40 people.

Some of the encounters were never tuned to require 40, and some are easier with less people, but it could be an interesting dynamic, and a way to keep some 40 man raids.

People keep grasping at straws as to "Well, maybe they could do X just to keep a few 40-man raids," and "I don't believe there won't be some 40-man content." Having put guilds through the pain of a downsizing, doing all new instance content in 25-man cap format, what possible reason could Blizzard have for retaining 40-man raids for "some" content? Other than pissing off people by making them shift guild size up and down like a yo-yo? The worst possible thing they could do to raiding guilds is drop raid sizes to 25 and then shift them back up again in the future.

Tell that to all the warlocks who have been watching mages and priests roll on their Dreadmist for the last 2 years.

For the most part, itemization centers around 4 roles, not 9: tanking, melee dps, caster dps and healing. In most cases, the classes performing (or wanting to perform) those 4 roles want the same loot. Rings, trinkets, necklaces, weapons are all in contention. Unless they make sets with "Restricted to Class X" on them, you will have contention. Even where itemization creates gear that is clearly better for one class than another (say Mantled of Wicked Revenge vs. Deathdealer shoulders), lots of people want to take whatever drops first. Nine classes in 10-man instances won't magically fix the greed issue.

Blizzard is not a huge fan of them, so it looks like there will be no more new ones atm. With all the new dungeons added and new quests, I don't think people will worry about it too much. The old ones will stay up of course.

After people have leveled up a bit, Blizzard may add one or two outdoor bosses, but not at release.

IRT (thread):

Is it impossible to conceive that on a "raiding night" in the TBC era, the 45 online members of a high-end raiding guild may be split with 25 in Coilfang, 10 in Kharazhan, and the rest in the PVP arenas with (as Tigole says) equivalent reward structure to high-end raiding? Do the best of the best guilds just not have anyone who enjoys PVP? We're far from the best, but we certainly do.

I think the issue of "the rest of our raid team will be shut out with nothing to do" is spoken from the perspective of a game like WoW in August 2006 where the only real end-game activity is raiding. The information currently being disseminated by Blizzard representatives indicates that they are aware of this and plan to remedy it by offering end-game activities under different paradigms (raiding, mini-raiding, PVP).

Assuming that's true, I don't see why the decrease in raid cap necessitates the destruction of the best guilds. In fact, now they can become the best at more than one thing!

EDIT:

IRT #434:

I think outdoor raid encounters in Outland are unlikely. The previous ones don't seem to have been a large success, and outdoor raids have awkward interactions with world PVP, which is seemingly one of the things stressed in the expansion content areas.

I think Blizzard got it right with Kazzak / Azuregos. Nice loot that can supplement other loot you can raid for. They got it wrong for the 4 Dragons, the best NR really can't be obtained elsewhere. That was supposed to be handled by all 4 spawning at the same random time, but due to the way they have it set up with server resets (maintainance) they're always respawning when most people are at school/work, giving off-peak raid groups all the kills (at least on my server).

But DPS is a large part of raiding, and the PvP rewards could be an upgrade to some of a healer's gear, depending on the stats. Or to counter this argument, Blizzard could add special healing and/or tanking rewards (similar idea to the Rank 14 healing mace).

Oh I don't argue the potential value of the pvp items for DPS if they are indeed equivalent to the PvE side. But unless they create entire sets for healing/tanking roles, I won't see it worthwhile to climb a PvP ladder to just get the one or two items for that role(ie, you'd have to be insane to want to get rank 14 *just* for the healing mace for PvE).

You, uh, wouldn't, with the new system. You would get enough points to buy the healing mace, and then buy it.

You, uh, missed the point. It was a comparison. I'm saying that unless these PvP rewards for the new ladder system (or the plan vanilla Honor points that they are implementing) have specific gear for Raiding roles (not just shadow priest gear, elemental/enhance shaman stuff) then the support classes won't be able to use the PvP system as a method of "staying current" with the PvE content. This was a response to the idea that you could have people who weren't able to get into the 25 man could go do the PvP system to "catch up on gear.

But that wasn't an idea presented in this thread by anyone AFAIK. I think we might be arguing at cross-purposes?

It's been suggested by me, at least. While, to the extent that Blizzard has said that the best gear in the game will be equal to the best PvP gear.

And Blizzard has shown that they're willing to put in items with just +healing on the PvP stuff. It's reasonable to assume that the expansion will allow for raiding gear to be obtained from PvP. Or, an even more radical concept, socketed gear that has good stats. If the purchasable PvP breastplate has four sockets and good base stats, then the PvPer could arrange for either a bunch of +dmg gear, or a mixture of mana regen and healing.

Thanks, I think? Note how the following, which I said:

in no way implies what you said:

I think you're zeroing in on my use of the phrase "equivalent reward structure" in a way that I didn't mean. The argument you made requires an answer to:

which has not been given in the information provided by Blizzard, although I think it's far from impossible. Nevertheless, I don't think it's a relevant point because my example of having 25 in Coilfang, 10 in Kharazhan, and 5-10 PVPing wouldn't be repeated nightly with the same people in the same groups. The 10 PVPers one night could be in the Coilfang group the next night, and vice versa. This would incentivize obtaining both PVP and PVE sets for everyone, making even the "shadow priest gear" worthwhile for members of your high-end guild.

My post above wanted to distinguish between a night of WoW1.0 and WoW:TBC for a high-end guild. The idea was that for a guild of 45 online members nightly:

Now
40 people raid Naxxramas. Remaining 5 fuck around in the trivial 5-man instances, farm, or bore themselves to tears with the non-skill-related HWL grind.
TBC
25 people raid Coilfang/Illidan/whatever. 10 people raid Kharazhan. 10 people PVP. Groups rotate nightly between these 3 activities.

The point being that with worthwhile activities (not just in terms of phat purpz obtained) available outside of the megaraids, there is no need to simply "let go" of a large portion of your core member base, as implied by posts earlier in this thread.

EDIT: Post is IRT #446.

I'm really not surprised that they are downsizing the raid size. We have to remember that the top end elite guilds are by definition few and far between. A guild like DnT or EJ doesn't exist on every server. Hell, in my old guild, I could easily think of 15 people to cut, because it was 25 or so people that I liked, and 10-15 people that I couldn't stand. This change is going to bring the end-game content within the reach of a lot more people and to the devs that is presumably what they want. My very first guild was with a community I had been with for years and years. We maxxed out at running ZG, but to go further to the 40 mans, we'd have to really go outside our circle. It just didn't work, and the guild fell apart eventually as some of us moved to endgame raiding guilds.

I think everyone would love to have a guild with the cohesiveness and singleness of purpose like DnT or EJ though, so this change is very saddening. I would absolutely abhor being in Gurgthock's shoes and trying to decide what to do. When you have 40 kickass players, how in the hell do you decide who to cut? What do you tell them? It's not impossible to do, but it's the closest thing to it.

As for complexity of encounters, I am sure they can still design them to be just as interesting as Naxx. One thing that WoW has going for it is devs who really know how to create content. Also, generally speaking, the lower the number of players, the greater the consequences for someone screwing up and dying.

I think overall it's a good thing for a large majority of the playerbase, but for the high end guilds it's absolutely awful. There's just no way to get around it, and it's largely from a social scale too, the 40+ people that you've grown with over time suddenly being sliced apart.

I think snowy made a great point here. Sure, guilds like EJ or DnT will have problems to adapt. But 80 % of the raiding populations either raid as a guild alliance, as a loosely organized raid or in a guild that is not as tightly knit. Smaller raids will enable those groups to play in a guild community that is much closer to those tightly knit guilds that are dominating the high end raiding nowadays. I am really looking forward to raids where I don't have to wipe ten times more because some folks don't have a clue what is going on. Smaller groups will make raids much more homogenous than they are now (exceptions those uberraids).
Furthermore ZG raids did enable more casual players to raid because the degree of organisation is lower. Even if the new encounters are more challenging than ZG, folks will be able to cope with it (that happened when aq20 was published).

yep, my feelings exactly.

I think its also conceivable, that while the large majority of guilds will continue to carry some clueless people, that these screw-ups if you will, will be far easier to train and improve in a 25 setting than a 40. When you have 40 people and 8 of them are messing up at once it's kind of hard to even see all the mistakes being made, let alone to try and take the time to stop and explain to that person what they are doing wrong or how to play it correctly. More often than not people just say F**k it, cuss out someone or call it a night. In a smaller setting you might only have 4 or 5 people screwing up and it should be much easier for the class leader or whoever to take that one person that just doesnt get it aside and see if they are redeemable with a little work. The same theory that a smaller classroom means the teacher can provide more assistance to each student and the overall grades of the class come up.

In most cases, people can and do improve in guilds if they stick around long enough. When you have a massively large guild, with less personal connections, it is tempting to just kick people or go back into the recruit treadmill and hope for a better roll of the skill dice on the next applicant. Even though this often turns out to be counterproductive in the long run. The same reason companies tend to keep around and prod slackers rather than constantly turn over new people. Now though, because losing a couple people will have a bigger impact in a smaller group there will be more impetus to actually keep your same roster together and try to work them into shape. Which if done successfully will strengthen your guild far more than going through endless tryouts hoping to find that diamond in a haystack. Because constant recruitment and guild jumping just promotes a mindest that guild hopping is the normal and accepted advancement in the game. Unfortunately, this mindset works the other way as well and leads to your best players leaving mid to low guilds to join the very best for faster advancement. Which is one of the very things that contributes to endless frustruation and essentially kicks a guild several notches back down the ladder where they just came from.

Although we don't know what they're planning for Shamans yet, cat form offers mana-less DPS whereas the current Shaman needs to use the mana he needs for healing to DPS.

I wouldn't count on that. Druid aggro still scales better than Warrior or Paladin and you can probably expect lots of bosses will be immune to the snap aggro talent just like they are immune to Taunt/Growl today. But what really gives Warriors the edge over druids is slightly better base damage mitigation (which I'm not sure Paladins can achieve because a lot of that comes from Wrath and will come from Dreadnaught which is class-restricted), improved shield block pushing crushing blows off the hit table (which Paladins can't do), and then the "oh shit" abilities like Shield Wall, Last Stand, etc. (which Paladins don't have - LoH doesn't count because you can always use that on a Warrior or Druid tank anyway). Not to say Blizzard won't give Paladins some of these things from 60-70 but if you judge the future based on the present the theorycraft says they won't be there without some changes.

couple of thoughts:

1) if the cap had been raised from 25-40, recruiting would still be necessary. A and B team problem wouldnt have come up but the recruiting efforts would still have to be made. so i'm wondering how people would react to that.

2) to the guy that said omg no more 2 dorf priests. deal with it, horde have had to since day one -- having raided both alliance and horde i KNOW how overpowered that is and how crappy tremor is compared to that ability. i cant even see bringing more than 2 priests to a raid right now in my guild -- and guess what im horde so i STILL wont have fear ward. now you have fear ward AND tremor totem. i dont feel bad for you. im tempted to say shut up noob but praetorian would prolly kick my ass. we're getting paladins finally but in every fear fight alliance guild will STILL be ezmode. learn 2 stancedance like we had to. You can still bring ONE dwarf priest and be ahead of us.

3) my guild IS a guild that will benefit from these changes most likely, and props to prae for being objective. i can objectively feel bad for EJ and DnT for the totally crappy stuff headed your way because of this, both as a leader and as a friend to the people in your guilds. and i applaud praetorian for being objective and saying you know....EJ is not the norm. the norm is guilds that cant do what we do every nite and for them these changes are a positive thing.

4) fact: every guild will lose some % of membership due to these changes. even guilds like mine where this is prolly a positive thing. but its a fact that eventually every guild loses some members to having kids, getting married, life in general. attrition, like shit, happens.

5) I said this on the hybrids in 25 mans post. Your hybrids dont have a hazy future in guilds where there might be 2 teams going. Hybrids are THE future of your guild. Your hybrids are ID savers. Instead of going ezmode minmaxing where a druid tank at boss 1 becomes one of your top healers at boss 2 -- do it that way. Not only are your hybrids great at doing multiple things in one fight (ex faerlina -- bear tank, heal, depoison), theyre going to be the reason you dont have to tie 6-7 warriors to one instance id. Or how ever many mages and rogues. And if your hybrids are good enough, they should be able to get the job done.

6) Rerollers. I think people are --- for those of you focusing on the suckiness of benching 15 people, while this doesnt entirely solve the problem, keep in mind that there are probably people in your guild interested in playing a shaman or a paladin come expansion. and you will need if youre horde 4-5 pallies on your roster for one 25 man. at least 4 shamans if youre alliance. and those people will most likely be GUARANTEED to have a raid spot in group 1 --- and still have a free id on their mains to raid with group 2. That takes the number of people youre benching down to under 10. Youre still benching people but not as many. Why recruit people to play pallies/shamans? Having in guild rerolling=win. Not a total solution but a partial solution.

Is this going to suck in part? Sure. Overall I dont see the sky falling upon the masses though. Your uberguilds will either leave WoW or recruit 15 more people. And to EJ and DnT I completely sympathize with the decisions you have to make.

Maybe i just look at the positives.

Raiding the same (long) instance twice a week is pretty much a fast ticket to burnoutville for even the most dedicated players.

Bumping for shameless self-promotion.

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3152971

(The extent to which Delemos and I independently said the exact same thing is mildly frightening, BTW.)

Yeah, that IS sort of freaky ;)