My feeling for this is not good. Alot of people have worked hard to field their 40 man raid groups and substain them.
With the expansion all those are faced with the options people have been discussing here cut people or mass recruit or whatever.
Personally I just feel tired thinking about it I dont long for the expansion at all.
Right now my guild is making good progress in naxx and I enjoy the game but with these changes it feels like alot of things I work hard for right now will just be in vein.

how do you explain progression then? Naxx/MC/BWL intended for 25 level 70's?

Actually now that I think about it more, this might be manageable. If there's an actual credible 10-man instance that gives usable loot.

The lockouts on this 10-man would have to be extremely flexible, either on a per-mob lockout, or an extremely winged with a diff timer per wing. The idea being one day you could have 45, and go with a 25+10+10, and the next day you can continue with people in 10-mans without cross-saved-raidid issues.

Note I said manageable. Not optimal, not even pleasant. But manageable with current rosters. I think I'm going to just pray this is the case because the best alternative I can think of atm is "secret team A roster not revealed until expansion date" which obviously isn't fair to the members.

I'm honestly not trying to be jaded in this comment, but I think you'll find that there will be many, many talented and well geared warriors without a home or doing nothing come expansion time. Probably a few hundred per server with nothing to do. We have 8-9 all excellent warriors who could be the MT of nearly any guild... and realistically thats just impracticle to keep around in a 25 man raid cap. I don't see other classes affected quite this much - maybe its guild dependant, but everyone really seems to come to rely on their warriors a lot... moreso than many other classes. Already acclimated to high healer turnover anyway.

These were my exact thoughts. Unless they make encounters gimmicky, hence requiring hybrids to be doing some specific job to address the gimmick, I don't understand how making raids smaller is going to allow them to do anything more freely, unless it also means making the raids easier. On the contrary hybrids should have even less breathing room. But it isn't really the 25man raids themselves that I'm worried about, it's what's going to happen to the 2 years of work that have been put to building this guild.


I believe that recruiting even more people and creating 2 guilds inside one is only going to be a hell of a nightmare in the long run. But to cut us down to one 25-man raiding guild, we'd be looking at cutting about 25 people off. While there are certain people I could live without in the guild, finding 25 people to boot would include long time friends and people I have really come to like.

6 of our 8 mages have been raiding since the first day we entered MC, and one of the other two was recruited before BWL. 8 of our 9 rogues have been here since the beginning, and the ninth was recruited before we started BWL. What the hell am I supposed to tell these people?

Judging by the breakdown of replies on the official forums, this could work out quite well: 37.5% of players will quit in disgust and each guild will be the right size for 25-man content. :)

In all seriousness, though.. I don't have any hugely strong feelings about 25 vs. 40. But then, I haven't experienced the current high end of 40-man raiding (TDA is only up to Huhu in AQ40, and have only downed Razuvious in Naxx). So from what I've seen so far, I feel that it shouldn't be a barrier to making super fun encounters because the most fun fights in ZG and AQ20 are on par with the most fun ones in BWL/AQ40 that I've seen.

I'm happy to stand back and bow to the greater experience of those who say that fights like C'thun or later Naxx bosses are more fun that you could ever have with a half-sized group, though.

But I'm really, really worried about what this will do to the long-established tight-knit guilds that are focused around 40-man content. I'm struggling to have a lot of faith in the "recruit a few more and run two raids" line of thinking. It seems much more likely that the majority of guilds will shrink (which may happen naturally with people not picking up the expansion) or split in half.

The only way hybrids will be allowed to do their [off]job is if the talents added between 60-70 actually allow them to do unique things... otherwise min/maxing will be dramatically MORESO important as raid size becomes smaller. Remember what I mentioned earlier, and take a page from the history book of online games - as you decrease roster size, stacking and balance becomes a huge issue.

Because no one has mentioned it:

It will take 2-3 months to gear up a new lvl 70 shaman/paladin to what can reasonably be seen as raid-ready material. Presuming that all content at release will be both beatable and challenging for guilds that don't wait for their rerolls to catch up, this means that the new small-scale raid instances will be tuned for a pretty wide margin of stat disparity.

So, how do you design a 25-man dungeon to be skill intensive for a group sans paladins (with new aggro abilities and god knows what else) while simultaneously not trivializing it with a perfectly even class spread. Bonus points if you figure out a way to do it without gimmicks while still actively promoting class uniqueness. It's far, far harder than with the current 40-man model.

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Personally, I dislike the change. It's fairly easy to round up 25-40 people who "get it." Assuming intelligence and patience eventually something will click and the execution will be perfect enough to succeed. With 15 less of said people the permutations possible in what you can do simply diminish and it's something you can't replicate in a smaller environment, no matter how "difficult" or non-gimmicky the encounter be.

MMOs really aren't all that complex. You only have three aspects to an average raid: timing, coordination, and the ability to not suck. Collectively referred to as "skill." It just feels like they cut the coordination sphere solely in the name of wanting more members to feel like they were contributing.

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Edit: To the people who just advise grabbing 15 additional skilled players for the roster and running two groups: Where do you expect them to come from? The recruit pool isn't that large on most realms for people seeking other than simpering morons. You end up taking them from a former home, in which case someone still gets screwed.

Well Garr is seriously a fight which was clearly designed for hybrids. One that incidentally did not work out at all on the 40-man level.

Tons of small adds that don't hit at all, and when they die the boss gets stronger. That's just asking for a bear to tank an add, kill the add, then shift to caster as Garr powers up.

The reaction of the most raid guilds to this will likely hing on how relevant old 40 man raid loot is when level 70 loot lands.

As a raid leader of a guild that camps around 50-55 actives, my first instinct would be that I can easily find the fat to cut to make my raids stronger overall. It's not really a matter of having bad players anymore, it's just a matter of thinning it to the best rather than keeping people that are just "good."

That being said, if 40 man loot is still very relevant in the raid game after you start hitting BC raid instances, the option of thinning will not really be a possibility - you will pretty mave to move to a 2 raid team scenario. 3 days A Team, 3 days B Team, 1 day 40 man and allow for overlap... whatever.

I do think that it should be possible to design content for 25 man instances that is every bit as challenging as 40 mans have been (if not more so). I've seen them straying away from any ability to carry many members through instances (think end of AQ/half the encounters in Naxx), so I can understand that they feel the need to head in this direction... most of AQ and BWL can be carried by 15 solid people with the rest being mediocre.

They've showed at least a little bit of creative nature with a couple of the .5 encounters, Ossirian, C'thun, Heigan, Thadius - so hopefully they can expand upon that more. I've always held the opinion that they have to look at 40 man encounters by pure possible numbers then reduce everything by 75% (HP, damage output) etc to make up for lacking gear, errors, whatever... as numbers decrease, I can see the margin for error needing to be less. Meh, that's all assuming they know how to balance anything at all... they've contradicted that here and there.

I'm awaiting beta to try to get some feel for how big the skill/gear differential will be from my Dreadnaught Warrior to a basic raiding 10 man Warrior in new BC Content... I'll likely go from there on making plans for how to handle guild numbers based on whether 40 mans can be dismissed to some degree. Time will tell.

Raiders have been very good at working around encounters that cry out for hybrids and just finding ways to overcome them through sheer brute force. Take Jin'do as an example. A better made encounter for a bear tank you cannot find yet there are still lots of people just do it with a Warrior because that is all they know (or all they choose to know). And with enough dps it works just fine.

Again like I said earlier, if you can keep a much larger group of people so you can switch classes in and out as you need them, then all power to you. I'd hate to be one of those people waiting outside until it gets too my fight. Like Gort said, you find a fight that need 4 tanks and you only have 3 warriors, you can either boot someone and bring another warrior, or you have a hybrid class fill in the role. Here's hoping the next tier of abilities give hybrids some real cross over abilities (eg. a healing talent near the top of the feral tree.)

Firstly, I'm in one of the so called guilds where there are like 20-25 core people who do 90% of the work. And so the change is good in my eyes. But I'd like to point out one obvious problem with raid instances becoming more and more skill oriented since the MC days. Look at EJ's recruitment page here. What does it say? Sorry not recruiting don't even bother applying. Sadly this is the downside of 40 man raids and has caused a huge number of skilled players in the game to be left in sub-par guilds. 25 man fixes this.

As long as the skill level required per person remains the same, or is higher, I'm fine with 25 man instances being the max. I've lost count of how many up and coming guilds with a strong base of talented players dissolved so rapidly from only having 30 people logon each night in the last 8 months.

I will say, they should have made it 25 man from the beginning, because now there are going to be friends lost because of this most likely, but in the end I think it is better for the majority of the hardcore skilled raiding playerbase.

It's easy for people who were either A. Well organized enough, or B. Just plain lucky, and are in great guilds now to say "Wow this sucks, we do great now with 40, why change it." But the same people, like EJ or DnT or any guild with closer to 40 great players, would be frustrated as hell if they were in my shoes wiping on encounters for the 90th time because you have 15 people who don't know how to play their class.

I like how they waited until a month after server transfers were open to announce this. I cannot wait to hear the cries of anguish at the massive number of server transfers still in application processes that are cut as a result of this annoucement.

Okay, seems like folks want to talk about hybrids in this thread. It is interesting, the article mentions how they have strengthened druid tanking and discusses how Paladins are going to get a snap aggro talent. And adds,

We are already seeing in this thread a lot of doubt as to whether this will make a difference or not. I do think that going from 40-man to 25-man will help push hybridization - with fewer people to draw from it makes sense to have some who can play multiple roles. (Unless you really want to swap out dps for tanking or healing depending on the encounter). I'm not sure what they've described will really work though. Here's a couple of reasons why:

1) Tanking. We've already got Warriors that are established tanks. We've got Druids who are pretty good tanks too but play second fiddle to Warriors. Now they are going to make Paladins a Tanking/Healing hybrid.

Wait a second. Tanking is typically the least needed role of the holy trinity. Are we really going to have three classes to fit this role?

2) How good are the hybrids? The biggest thing holding back hybrids from performing other roles is that min/maxing pushes 40-man raids towards "the best" in every slot you can have. So unless you only have 4 Warriors online and your current encounter requires 6, there isn't typically a lot of point in asking a Druid to tank

I've said this before to people and it tends to annoy the Warriors but it is true: Warriors are a type of hybrid. They can perform two of the three holy trinity roles in a raid: tanking or dps. That's a pretty reasonable definition of a hybrid. Why is this important? Because Warriors, as hybrids, are unlike Druids, Paladins and Shamans in one way. This is what is the key difference: Warriors are as good (or close enough it doesn't really matter) at both their roles as any specialist class.

Dozer suggested a new balanced raid makeup would look like this:
If Blizzard follows the current model, this is probably right (albeit too healer heavy). Why? Because it gives me 4 members of an excellent hybrid class (Warriors) who can tank or dps equally well. I could bring fewer Warriors and another Druid + another Paladin but...the druid can't tank quite as well, and can't dps as well. The Paladin - well, we'll see how well they tank with their new snap aggro ability.

In many ways this is speculation because nobody can say for certain how much they are buffing the respective strengths of the hybrid classes. But certainly if they keep the same relative balance as exists today, I doubt this will change much in terms of what classes can do. One can only hope that Blizzard realizes this.

A lot of what this question amounts to is: is scaling in itself a virtue? This is probably a matter of opinion.

A fight like Thaddius scales to almost any number of people. Some people would probably like to go through that with 20 people; some people would with 80. It comes down to which social setting you like better for a guild and raid, mostly. It's more rewarding to have 80 people not make a mistake, but on the other hand, the annoyances related to raiding are much larger as well.

So, as I see it, the real issue is encounter design. Which will let them do more things? Remember, there's no reason that a 20-man fight couldn't have a lot more complexity than anything we've seen in ZG or AQ20.

What are you on about taylor? Naxx is 40 man, so why would this change alter the difficulty, the higher lvls will alter the difficulty, the addition of new instances capped at 5 10 and 25 wont alter the difficulty of an older 40 man instance, which, since some ppl wont have the expansion, and since there is no reason to change it, will remain 40.

Looking back on it, I think the WoW raid endgame has grown into a behemoth that even the orginal designers couldn't have anticipated. It requires an absolutely enormous amount of organisation and time for the raiding guilds to create, massive amounts of man hours from the devlopers to balance, create and populate (as I recall they were hiring an entire team to do raid testing at night, 40 people aren't cheap to hire. And don't say "I'm happy to test it for free", because I think most people would rather rip open the finished product) and the competitive nature is extreme.

One of WoWs original design philosophies was it was the MMO you'd pick up and play for an hour and still get something done, but what you see now after you hit 60 is half the end game content requires 3-6 hours of constant attention. It's impossible to say what the instances will be like, but this tiered difficulty system says to me that you're going to be challanged, but on a smaller scale.

On any given raid night, my guild has 55-60 online, and the class balance is fairly well mixed. Add to that people coming back to check the expansion out, and I don't think it's going to be a case of not having enough to field two teams. More a case of, the people in the lower end teams are going to have to realise why it is people ride their arses when they fuck up.

Poster before mentioned gearing issues - honestly, with the token systems of AQ40 and Naxxramas, if you're extremely unlucky it might take you 4 weeks to regear 5 people.

This news is pretty suprising to me. After spending some considerable time to put together a guild that was centered around 40man content I can't even begin to imagine how to handle splitting into multiple raid groups or cutting away people who may not perform as well as our best raiders. For now I guess all I can do is sit back and see what the playing field will look like when the expansion is released but this certainly does dissapoint me a bit.

Thaddius is the worst encounter you could have chosen for scaling. As the number of people decreases thaddius becomes exponentially easier, because there's that many less chances that something might go bad.

Is that a bad thing though? I'm reminded of somebody's quote about C'Thun. To the effect that Phase 1 is a retard-net. If you can push 40 people through the retard net then Phase 2 is easy.

If you have less chance of something going bad on Thaddius because you've taken 15 retards out of the equation, I'm not going to feel particularly heartbroken.

In fact, if you have less chance of something going bad because you have random chance operating on 15 fewer people, I won't feel bad about that either.

So, is it really a bad thing?

Yes. Doing the correct thing requires some semblance of skill. 40 people doing the right thing for 6 minutes is "skillful". This is what seperates the good players from the bad. The more players you have the more "skill" the encounter takes as a whole upon your raid group.