I disagree entirely. The great thing about the current encounters in naxx is that in most of them there are multiple different aspects to deal with (ex. Maexxna - heavy incoming damage on the tank, adds, periodic raid-wide damage, cacooning of raid members, etc...). There's no way to physically do this if there's only 25 people in the raid because the raid would either not be able to cope with it or it would be completely trivial to deal with.

This is a bad thing for those players that enjoyed the challenge of 40man raids.

I think it's likely there will still be 40 man instances, it seems like a big loss for blizzard to just remove them. Providing content with a spread of raid sizes is a good idea, but for the feeling of something epic, and a really huge ass boss that hits for an asston, you just cannot simulate that in smaller instances.

I think what a majority of guilds will do is use this as a way to trim off loose ends. Guilds where they have a good core of 25 people and a bunch of 15 in each raid who are just fillers - bottom dps in their class, not dispelling/decursing, letting their tank die, etc. These are the people who will get cut out as a guild tries to progress.

Making an A raid and a B raid is only going to end in tears. The leader of the first raid picks up the good players, gets some good progress. The leader of the second raid who wasn't online when the first one got run, gets to pick from the few good people who weren't online for the first raid, and the rest of the people who are already pissed off that they didn't getp icked for the first raid. The second raid has a lower overall quality and is less likely to succeed, and just pisses them off even more.

It's going to be hard picking 25 people from a raid of 40 to take though.

I like the idea of having less people in raids. Hell I'm sure if I played a healer, I'd like that even more(weee, less screenspace waste by health bars).

Even tho they're heading that way with encounters that can't be recovered from if you have a few deaths, I never liked the whole MC/BWL thing, where you could very well kill bosses with 5afk or very bad players. You could get shadowflamed on the pull, lose 14people, and still kill ebonroc because he's so fucking easy. And yes, that was with t1/t2 gear, not stuff you have now. Lately tho, in some encounters like chtun, I liked how you couldn't afford having stupid people in your raid. It was a double edged sword tho, as you found out some people were worse than you thought, and making it hard to fill a raid with people able to see a giant eye turning black and facing you. Sadly, they introduced the combat dropping thing during the transition, so now chtun is a joke, even if you lose 12people to dark glares.

On the other hand, small mistakes had a bigger impact in small instances. People dieing on ossirian would make the fight last longer and open you to shitty luck with bad timed aggro switch during crystal clicking, or just bad crystal spawns. Having someone underperform on jindo, or go afk usually resulted in a wipe. The 20man always looked more involved to me, like, there's more stuff to do, because the mobs aren't immune to everything(wow you can actually stun and disarm stuff), or the fights can't be cheapened by stacking certain classes.

As I said tho, naxx is somewhat going that way, I guess they saw their mistakes and tried to fix them. Most fights involve every class in a particular way, especially on fights like heigan(dance baby dance), and you just don't sit there pressing your one button over and over(well that might still be true for warlocks :( ).

Now, I like the idea of having 25people raid instead of 40. But it sure has issues too. First, most guilds currently are made to sustain 40man raids everynight. But most also don't have enough people to sustain 2x 25 every night. That means either mass recruiting or mass kicking, most likely mass recruiting.

Another problem is the A-team B-team concept. In a guild, there's always a better tank, always better priests or shamans. How do you split them, make a perfect team and have everyone else in the other, even tho that means the 2nd team might lag behind on content clearing, which means they'll have less gear, and just totally get lost, and might as well disband and form their own guild? Have the teams mixed, even tho it means you have to learn to play with more than 1team?
What about class balance, do you want to stack the classes the most efficient for specific encounters, leaving the other team dry of some classes(hi raiding without mages ^^); worse, what happens when you only have priests for 1efficient team. Do you gimp both or only go with one, while 20people play with their wee wee. And even if you try to be fair, how fair is it in the end, for people who don't have the most geared main tank. Who will want to go to that raid instead of the one with the "real" main tank of the guild. It's a really tough problem imo.

But well I guess we'll see how it plays, I always thought 40 was too much, and thought 25 or 30 would have been better. The fact we were used to play with 40 for so long might cause problems, especially to small tight guilds, that will have to recruit more new faces, but with the addition of the new class, that's like 6-7new people you would have to recruit right there(or rerolls but then you'd need people to replace them). Can also bet BC will bring new people to the game, to mmorpgs in general. I mean, I know a few people IRL that didn't want to start playing WoW cause there's so many 60s and stuff, and they'd be too much behind. Told them to start on a new server, but they said too many people on these new servers are actually experienced players rerolling and they wouldn't take them in their guilds. Guess they're right too, so BC, since it offers a new level cap and somewhat acts like a big fat eraser on previous content(yea yea tier3 will still be decent but whatever), will probably bring a decent number of new people.

I'm personally very unhappy about this, not in any way due to Raiding perspective, since I assume they will manage to make it fun, but because what this will do with the guild, and for most people, I assume thats where the rub is. The pvp changes looked very nice though, for those who care about that stuff. We had a _very_ bad experience back just before world first Rag kill with the 2 raid group setup, but I dont want to wish that people leave either. The best from my view would probably be a more fluid solution for 50ish people guilds, so that who you clear it with change from week to week, so you dont get a segregated guild, but still a cohesive whole.