And if you are currently rotating 55 to 60 people through 40 raid slots the alternative is?

Its pretty much what i plan to do. Level up, take in the new scenery, and have some fun. Once some of us hit level 70 evaluate the guild at that time. For once it will be nice to just logon whenever and run a 5 man or something.

Cut the fat out. I think most large raiding guilds will do some sort of purge.

That really hurts guilds that started out as friends and ended up with successful progression. I can't imagine what it'd be like to drop 20+ people who i've raided with for 1+ years. But back to reality, most people in my guild are dead weight and I can't wait for BC :).

Back around January or February, we had too many people for one MC raid and people didn't like rotations. So we tried to fill spots with recruits and the remaining spots were filled with alts whose mains were in the other raid. The idea was that it takes time to recruit good people, so the alts would sortof carry us into the stage where recruiting was done. It failed though. I'm not even sure in hindsight, but it seemed like the people with alts tended to either get burned out or crucial people silently vanished because they didn't like being in a raid that was slower than the old one due to sub-par alt gear and such. Splitting a farm-content raid into two raids is a different picture than what will happen in BC though.

I think if you can encourage cooperation between two raids, you can avoid a lot of the drama (assuming you have good leaders/core in each raid). For instance, maybe if it's the norm for one person in each raid to log everything possible and record a low-quality fraps for new boss fights, then post that for everyone to see, both raid groups will get the benefit from one anothers' experiences. I think the way to go would be to have shared DKP and allow people to swap between raids when needed (rogue1 talks to rogue2 and swaps raids for one week), but generally stay with their primary one. Ideally, the times of the two raids could address time zone issues as well. I'd bet that even with times catered to particular time zones, you'll find some people with no preference - those people could be used to balance the raids (make sure both have enough of spec X or leadership in class Y)

I really hope my guild doesn't go down the 2 seperate raid group path. I see a mountain of drama in our future, if that's the case. Guilds have enough drama as it is.

No matter how equal you try to make things, there will be an "A" group and a "B" group.

Have fun fighting with raid ids when raid A can't go because MT 1A is offline and raid B's MTs are locked in their own instance. If they change how raidids work this may not be an issue.

Where does Kharazan fit on the progression map? My understanding was that it was a level 70 epic zone somewhere in the same general difficulty/reward range as the other top-end zones in BC.

If so, we aren't even necessarily talking about two 25 man raids running the same zone, we might also be looking at a 25 and a 10 running two different zones. Raidids also would become less of a problem then.

Is there more concrete information I haven't found yet about how Kharazan relates to the Burning Citadel in terms of level 70 endgame?

The way it's being hyped, at least by the playerbase, is that Kharazan will be the gateway into BC raid content. It will trivialize all our previous raid gear, be far more difficult and take much longer than any 5-man, and be the 'endgame' for the supercasuals. I think it's also going to cure cancer, but who knows.

So this is what we might call a Wild Assed Guess, yes?

What they will do is what everyone else has done, move on to other guilds. Just because they aren't associated with the guild I'm in doesn't mean they are going to go all emo and stop playing. People change guilds all the time, it's not like a homeless guy on the street.

I'm not too worried about the bulk of the class being the fat because the instance caps are much smaller. You only need 1-3 good people for a 10 man and 2-4 for 25. If we had to replace all 7 of our warlocks right now, it'd be a catastrophe, Garr would become a real struggle to get past. But if we lost 2 or 3 right now, hell they don't show up very often anyway. I can understand the concern of showing up for your first 25 man run and there be 1 mage, 1 warlock, and 5 warriors. I think the BC is going to really shake up everything that the game has come to so far. Guilds are going to shuffle themselves around, players are going to reroll Draenai and Blood Elf, current characters will stay at 60 while new mains level 60-70, some people will be slow levelers and you won't see them in raid with you until a few weeks after attempts begin. All of this is going to contribute to the changing of the player base.

That sounds like it could be exploited badly for farming. = P

25 man raid, split into 5 groups. Group A is loot enabled, Groups B-D aren't. Clear instance, collect loots. Group B starts an instance where they are loot enabled, Groups A, C-D help clear, B collects loots. Rinse, repeat, depending on how many times you are able to clear the instance between resets.

For instance, if implemented now, I'm sure some guild could clear a BWL instance everyday, for 7x the drops than normal.


I wonder if they plan to use checkpoints to get around the current lockout system. Divide a raid instance into 4 "wings", and expect players to be able to clear one wing a night. So first night, Groups A & B clear wing 1. Second night, Group A is short raiders and gets a few B people, but it's alright since they're going into wing 2, where neither Group A or B are locked out.

Yeah I guess those instances you will be doing while you are levelling aren't PVE content.

Our team b killed razorgore before team a. Lets call them Team 1 and Team 2 this time, anyhow we NEED 2 teams...so we can field more shadow priests!

5 and 10 man content do not interest me like 25 man or 40 man content. I started out online rpgs playing diablo 2, which had a what, 8 player cap? I really got into the whole team work aspect of a rpg and so far, wow seems to have taken that idea and made it better. When people ask me how fun wow is, i always tell them, "it's amazing cuz you have 40 guys workin together to get stuff done." Saying "it's amazing cuz 5-10 people can clear a dungeon" isn't nearly as exciting or impressive.

I think people should really stop and think about what wow requires in terms of pve success. you have 40 different people on at one time, who are spread out all accross the US/Candada, collectively fighting thru an instance. People have been playing wow so long that it seems normal, but for the average joe, getting 40 people together online is a pretty crazy feat.

edit: grammar/spelling

Its team 1 and team A. Or Team One and Team Alpha. Or Team Alpha and Team Omega, etc. No hard feelings that way..

Of course how it will all work remains to be seen.

If your not interested in my anecdote about our experiment with two MC raids early on in our raiding days you can jump to the bottom to see pros and cons.

We ran 2 raid groups for 6 months or so. We had our first raid with our long time members then we started a second raid for alts and new applications. At first their was a lot of resentment on the second raid group towards the main raid group because at the time they had rag on farm (bwl was brand new then) and the second raid group was struggling with finding a tank that could stance dance for magmadar (we are horde), the second raid group really thought we should have divided the players from the main raid group up. At the time that was something we were completely un-interested in, we already had rag on farm in the first group and it was working fine, we preferred having a solid raid and a new raid instead of having two mediocre raids. Eventually the second raid group found the right tank and started progressing and getting geared up then the interesting things started happening. The second raid got more and more geared up and attrition on the first group slowly switched the balance. For a month or two both raids were running simultaneously racing to kill rag first. By the end of that month the second group was consistently killing rag first, by the consecutive month there was such a huge turnover in the first raid group that it was a struggle to even get them to rag. As we started doing more BWL/AQ40 we couldn't fill 2 MC raids anymore so eventually the experiment ended.

Anyway here is the quick summation of the pro's and con's

Pro:
Fielding two raids gears up a lot of people more quickly. Having multiple raids on farm content makes progression content a lot easier as you have a huge pool to draw from for your progression raids.
Assuming you find a reasonable line to divide players you can create a competitive environment.
People are more likely to find a group that matches there play schedule.
Shared Bank

Cons:
You need far more people to field two raids, at some point you will be recruiting twice the number of people you are used too.
Two or more raid leaders are required at all times.
If one raid is a failure, you will loose the good players you couldn’t fit in your successful raid to other guilds and attrition.
Switching players for class balance becomes a nightmare if raids aren’t progressing equally.

Team Hell for Leather

AIDS. It's going to cure AIDS.

Given that current 20-mans are on a twice a week reset, is it possible they'll extend that to 25-mans as well? Or would that introduce too much loot at too fast a pace?

On a side note, if there wasn't new content to defeat and everyone got their Tier 4s at a faster pace than they do now, would that be terrible for the game? I'm not trying to push an agenda or start a hardcore versus casual flamefest, but what would the effect be on the larger guilds if there wasn't the next big thing to defeat?

I'm wondering this because as the game becomes larger, I figure the percentage of hardcore raiders becomes a smaller percentage of the base. This would make tailoring the game to us less a priority than being casual friendly.

Is there even a confirmed full 25 man instance besides Black Temple? The ones I have heard of (Magtheridon, Prince Kaelthas) all are supposed to be Onyxia-style single boss quickie 25 man encounters that reside in generally 5 man winged instances.

And there has been some rumor that Black Temple will not even be opened on release, but patched in. Which makes sense, it will take a few weeks for any guild to get to it (assuming Karazhan is 2-3 months before farm, and Karazhan is necessary to clear before BT) so why even have an instance open that no one can see for at least a month.

The bad thing is many of the guilds pushing hard to Naxx have severely overrecruited in the last few weeks and many run extremely large raid rosters now. It definitely is going to be drama llama time when expansion hits and people start figuring out the best ways to min/max and stack specs/classes.

Blue posts have already confirmed that all 25man content is on the standard 1 week reset timer.
As I understand it, some of the 10 man content is also on a 1 week timer. The 5 man instances will be just like they are now, no lockout timers.

Wouldn't that be assuming 25 mans are going to be easy?

Back when we first started doing Molten Core it took as all week of attempts to clear all the way through the instance, I doubt Blizzard would cut the raid timer down. Just because its 25 man doesn't neccessarily mean its going to be short and easy.