Cataclysm Raid Progression Refinements

klüger · 04/26/10, 3:43 PM

Source: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Cataclysm Raid Progression Refinements

We're continuing to refine the raid progression paths in Cataclysm, and we'd like to share some of those changes with you today. Please enjoy!

The first of the refinements being made is that we're combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn't apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.

We're designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we'll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They'll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.

Dungeon Difficulty and Rewards
10- and 25-player (normal difficulty) -- Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop the exact same items as each other.
10- and 25-player (Heroic difficulty) -- Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop more powerful versions of the normal-difficulty items.

We of course recognize the logistical realities of organizing larger groups of people, so while the loot quality will not change, 25-player versions will drop a higher quantity of loot per player (items, but also badges, and even gold), making it a more efficient route if you're able to gather the people. The raid designers are designing encounters with these changes in mind, and the class designers are making class changes to help make 10-person groups easier to build. Running 25-player raids will be a bit more lucrative, as should be expected, but if for a week or two you need to do 10s because half the guild is away on vacation, you can do that and not suffer a dramatic loss to your ability to get the items you want.

We recognize that very long raids can be a barrier for some players, but we also want to provide enough encounters for the experience to feel epic. For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid. All of these bosses would drop the same item level gear, but the dungeons themselves being different environments will provide some variety in location and visual style, as well as separate raid lockouts. Think of how you could raid Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep separately, but you might still want to hit both every week.

We do like how gating bosses over time allows the community to focus on individual encounters instead of just racing to the end boss, so we’re likely to keep that design moving forward. We don't plan to impose attempt limitations again though, except maybe in cases of rare optional bosses (like Algalon). Heroic mode may not be open from day one, but will become available after defeating normal mode perhaps as little as once or twice.

In terms of tuning, we want groups to be able to jump into the first raids pretty quickly, but we also don’t want them to overshadow the Heroic 5-player dungeons and more powerful quest rewards. We’ll be designing the first few raid zones assuming that players have accumulated some blue gear from dungeons, crafted equipment, or quest rewards. In general, we want you and your guild members to participate in and enjoy the level up experience.

We design our raids to be accessible to a broad spectrum of players, so we want groups to be able to make the decision about whether to attempt the normal or Heroic versions of raids pretty quickly. The goal with all of these changes is to make it as much of a choice or effect of circumstance whether you raid as a group of 10 or as a group of 25 as possible. Whether you're a big guild or a small guild the choice won't be dependent on what items drop, but instead on what you enjoy the most.

We realize that with any changes to progression pathways there are going to be questions. We're eagerly awaiting any that we may have left unanswered. To the comments!

What are peoples initial reactions?

As a player with a fairly limited time to play (2 raids a week), my first thought is that this will blow chunks for the people who do have the time to put in. For me it will not matter either way, since I don't have time to do 10mans in any organized and regular fashion.

This will also be a huge test for Blizzards pve-balancing attempts, where hopefully the difficulties of 10/25man are approximately equal (due to the massive revamp of debuffs/healingspells mainly), though I sure hope this philosophy was developed after LK10 heroic, because that fight is a good highlight of what the problem is with tuning 10mans tightly.

But again, like I said, I don't have a problem with people who play more then me getting more loot faster then me, so the point of this really eludes me, unless its just to boost the popularity/attractiveness of alts.

e:

However, in the same way that you can decide on a per-boss basis whether to try normal vs. hard mode, we might allow you to change between 10 and 25 on a per-encounter basis for additional flexibility. If you started a raid in 25-player mode and then found that you couldn’t get everyone together later in the week, you might be able to downsize the next few bosses to 10-player.

krilz · 04/26/10, 4:03 PM

This might be a guild breaker for my guild. We clear everything in 10-man, we've done Sarth+3, Algalon, Insanity and everything except LK on HC in ICC, but in 25-man we've been struggling getting about 50-60% of all "hard modes" done. Why should people in our guild struggle in 25-man when they can clear everything in 10-man and get everything they want that way?

I'm sceptic. Blizzard might pull it off, but to be honest... I fail to see the point to this change.

Kuku · 04/26/10, 4:08 PM

I think the intent is to prevent burnout and increase enjoyment.

I'll give myself as an example: I had intended to quit WoW before Cataclysm came out. I've been leading 25-mans, 10-mans, and just investing a ton of time into this game. This change will limit the amount of time I, as a raid leader, am required to invest.

Just as importantly, I've always enjoyed 10-mans a lot more. My 10-man is usually filled with 10 great players who can perform almost as well as I expect them to. I cannot expect this level of performance from my 25-man. I always have a lot more fun in my 10-mans.

As a result, I am probably going to play in Cataclsym. Blizzard keeps my subscription.

So, yes, a lot of 25-man guilds will die... and that's fine. Those players will switch to 10-man groups and have a much more enjoyable time.

Ellyh · 04/26/10, 4:12 PM

This is very interesting, I can see that one of the goals of this is to reduce the feeling of burnout from currently running the same content multiple times on different modes just to get that one BiS item (usually a trinket) that only drops in 10 man mode.

This is going to be a massive challenge for the enounter designers to balance because of how the logistics of encounter effects change going for 10-25 players, loosing one player to a mechanic is far more punnishing in 10s than loosing 3 in 25s just because you have more bodies and the chance of your star player being incapacitated is reduced. A classic example has to be rotface and how brutal it was with the 25 man slime spawn timing in 10 man so 1/2 your raid and easily all your healers had to be running from oozes and slimes.

This will be a boost for small guilds and social guilds but I expect the number of larger, 25 man guilds to plummet because of the increased difficulty of maintaining the larger rosters. However if the number of 10 man guilds increases there will be a lot more social drama as people will be far less willing/comfortable being on standby for a 10 man and missing the player with ability X will be much more challenging. Which leads me to suspect that further homogenising and de-emphasising of raid buffs/debuffs will be a necessary component of balancing between 10 and 25 man content as you have a much lower chance of having class X in a 10 man raid. Things like Fort from priests and Int from mages may well be either shared or made non-stacking with alternatives such as shouts and totems.

Warbler · 04/26/10, 4:13 PM

Unless this is Blizzard's way of continuing to downsize the overhead required to run an aging title, I also don't see the necessity for this change. Either you had time or you didn't to run both 10 and 25. I myself am in a struggling 25 man guild, and my dislike of running 10 man instances isn't what is stopping us from killing the Lich King (attendance and raid awareness are). However, every other week I get the need to raid 10 man, so I do. I won't speak to the obvious same gear for less work(barring the miracle that Blizzard can balance 10 man PvE encounters with 25 man encounters), but being forced into less options for the same amount of money seems like a sham.

Jurik · 04/26/10, 4:17 PM

One of Blizzard's stated concerns about making 10-man items point-for-point competitive with their 25-man counterparts is that it would essentially force people to run 10-mans to be competitive in 25-man content (and consequently they would have to tune 25 man content with this in mind). Already this is/was the case for particular items even when 10-man drops are an entire tier below that available in 25. Cutting edge guilds run 10-mans (and to a lesser degree, alt-25s) in order to speed up the gearing process up when new tiers of content are released--if the gear in 10s was better, this "problem" would only be aggravated.

This move also has the side-benefit of restricting the maximum weekly income of badges and thus should deflate the cost of badge gear. Currently they tune the cost of items against the maximum possible badge income (currently 83? frost badges per week) even though the vast majority of their playerbase, even the ones in moderately dedicated raiding guilds, rarely come close to that. For casual players in guilds that only partially clear ICC or get their badges from heroics, 95 badges for a single piece of gear can represent on the order of a month or more of farming. If they can narrow the disparity in badge income, they should be able to find a better balance for the cost of badge gear.

Also, note that they deliberately did not say that HM 10 and HM 25 will drop the same items, just that they will be more powerful versions of the Normal 10/25 items. That is, we could have the normal items being ilvl 300, the HM10 being 310 and the HM25 being 315. This would thus retain the incentive for the "cream of the crop" guilds to run 25-man modes.

ChronoKill · 04/26/10, 4:19 PM

As kuku alluded to and as Zarhym posted, guilds will and should naturally fall into a position that is comfortable and enjoyable for the members, irrespective of loot.

Overall, our goal is that you make the decision between whether to raid with 10 players or 25 players based on what you find fun and not because of the reward structure.

I, too, have had a lot more fun in the 10 mans my guild runs. We have a solid group and I can expect everyone to do fairly well (or at least learn readily from any mistakes that are made). However, my guild's primary goal is 25 man progression, such that any 10 mans are done on off-time. This gives me a 5-night-a-week raid schedule which is something I don't think I can keep up. And yet, I feel obligated to do the 25 mans for the guild progression and the loot.

So whether or not their goal was to reduce burnout, it is certainly one of the outcomes. I concede, however, that there are people who enjoy filling their week with both 25 man and 10 man raids. These are the people who have a legitimate complaint when cataclysm hits and their available raids are ostensibly cut in half.

Duodecimal · 04/26/10, 4:22 PM

Originally Posted by Jurik

Also, note that they deliberately did not say that HM 10 and HM 25 will drop the same items, just that they will be more powerful versions of the Normal 10/25 items. That is, we could have the normal items being ilvl 300, the HM10 being 310 and the HM25 being 315. This would thus retain the incentive for the "cream of the crop" guilds to run 25-man modes.

Speculation. That would defeat the purpose of this change in the first place. More gold / badges / higher item count, but same quality items.

Tinwhisker · 04/26/10, 4:36 PM

Yeah, the incentives mentioned for doing 25man over 10man don't seem all that hot on the outset.

Gold is worthless now and not an incentive. It will likely be less of an incentive in Cataclysm unless Blizzard is willing to let 25man raiders destroy the economy.
In the current system, Badges/Emblems have a limited lifespan and are worthless quite quickly. I have almost 300 Frost on my main that just sit around (and I never actively farmed them past the first couple weeks of 3.3). What am I going to do with them? Buy Primordial Saronite and sell it for gold that I don't need? Yeah, that's pretty much it. They better revamp this system heavily to make this an incentive.
Loot is helpful but you're going to need to drop a lot more proportionally for 25man or make the tables large enough that the drop rate RNG for 10man is horribly frustrating.

As like is said here, gear isn't the real barrier to completing content and hasn't been for quite a while. 10man raids are inherently easier to organize and hand pick raiders from and thus have a higher probability of success. And as for balancing difficulties, I defy anyone to tell me that Putricide's Malleable Goo or Lich King's Defile is just as hard to deal with in 10man as it is in 25man. Thus 10man will always be easier both logistically and mechanically; give 10man the same gear with an equal chance to get it and it becomes the preferred method.

There are those that say players do 25man now even if they prefer 10man because it's the easiest way to get the best gear. In Cataclysm we may be able to say the opposite in that players do 10man for the easier gear when they would prefer to do 25man.

I just see 25man raiding dying a slow and agonizing death as one by one 25man guilds lose players to all those normal mechanics (raiders leaving because of real life issues and whatnot) but are no longer able to entice new recruits with anything they can't already get more easily in a 10man. Eventually all raiding guilds are then forced into the 10man model whether they want to be or not.

Edit: Yes, I realize I have a lot of Frost because I was doing both 10man and 25man but the cost of items was based on the fact that players would be. Assuming the number of badges goes down, the cost would go down proportionally and I'd be in the same position under this system.

Ellyh · 04/26/10, 4:38 PM

Correct. There should be no circumstances under which you kill a boss more than once per week on the same character. However, in the same way that you can decide on a per-boss basis whether to try normal vs. hard mode, we might allow you to change between 10 and 25 on a per-encounter basis for additional flexibility. If you started a raid in 25-player mode and then found that you couldn’t get everyone together later in the week, you might be able to downsize the next few bosses to 10-player.

This comment from the blues fills me with dread. I see this as being way way to suceptable to abuse and drama and causing no end of heartache for guild leaders. Assuming they can really tune difficulty to be identical then you should be staying with your existing raid size for the entire week.

Jurik · 04/26/10, 4:38 PM

Originally Posted by Duodecimal

Speculation. That would defeat the purpose of this change in the first place. More gold / badges / higher item count, but same quality items.

At this point everything is speculation, yes.

However, I think you're confusing the "purpose of this change" with the "impact of this change".

The purpose of this change is clearly to separate and tune the 2 raid types without having to consider that the bleeding edge players and guilds will gear up from both. They don't want to make running 10-man a pre-requisite to 25-man progression: it inflates the difficulty and time-cost of 25-man content. They probably don't particularly like that 25-man raiders easily clobber everything in 10-man (hence the Herald and Dedicated Insanity achievements)

There's nothing in this change notice which reverses their previous stated intention of making 25-man raiding the pinnacle of PvE progression. They previously stated that they felt that people should be rewarded for organizing 25 raiders; that if 10-man raids gave the same rewards, that 25-man raiding would become superfluous because generally it is more complicated to organize and execute even when the fight mechanics and tuning is exactly the same.

In my opinion, dropping more gold and badges (which for all intents is just more gold after the two months of a tier) and a slightly better ratio of purps per player per boss isn't much of an incentive. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the HM 25-man drops to be ever slightly more shiny than HM 10-man drops.

Doroteasenjk · 04/26/10, 4:48 PM

Guilds organized around 25-man content will continue to flourish, if they have been flourishing.

Deeper bench -- more alternatives, more specialized players, more people to backfill.
Deeper crafting/gathering bench. Going outside a guild for enchants and cuts and raw materials is always more annoying than not.
More resilience (?) to weather, earthquake, end of academic year.
More chatter, and perhaps more social aspect.
More synergy -- having 3 types of priest makes sense in a 25-man, not so much in 10-man

PuGs will still run 25s because they are easier to fit people in, especially people learning the raids or people not as flexible. Pure DPS specs will still need raids to run.

Exemplar · 04/26/10, 4:59 PM

Loot is a bit of a confusion. Currently 10 drops 2 items, 25 drops 3. If loot is to be an incentive for 25, then you need more than 2.5 times the loot to drop. This means possibilities would be 10man - 1 loot, 25 - 3 loot, or 10man - 2 loot, 25 - 5+ loot.

Suddenly 25man has nearly twice the loot per boss. This is loot inflation. Very rapidly all desired items (from bosses you can kill) are gathered. 10man is loot starvation - a standard loot table is 10+ items currently. Run an instance 10 times and you've still got a 35% chance never to have seen a specific item if only one drops per kill. RNG hostages.

Then there's "that hard boss." Typically the last boss of an instance. The one the 25man just cannot kill for weeks/months. While working on it, it gets to Monday night. You can either let it reset, or you can kill it on 10man for a bit of loot. You'd be stupid not to kill it, right? So: "Okay, you 15, get out of the raid, the other 10 of us are killing it." Guild Drama Ensues.

Unless 25 is severely undertuned, 10man will always have an advantage. Namely it is easier to gather 10 good players than 25 good players. At least in a guild already sized for 25man. Downsizing is easy, upsizing far more difficult.

Tinwhisker · 04/26/10, 5:04 PM

Originally Posted by Doroteasenjk

Guilds organized around 25-man content will continue to flourish, if they have been flourishing.

Deeper bench -- more alternatives, more specialized players, more people to backfill.
Deeper crafting/gathering bench. Going outside a guild for enchants and cuts and raw materials is always more annoying than not.
More resilience (?) to weather, earthquake, end of academic year.
More chatter, and perhaps more social aspect.
More synergy -- having 3 types of priest makes sense in a 25-man, not so much in 10-man

PuGs will still run 25s because they are easier to fit people in, especially people learning the raids or people not as flexible. Pure DPS specs will still need raids to run.

Except that all those things aren't true.

The minute you need specialized players you forfeit "Bring the player..."
Going outside the guild for crafting might be annoying but Blizzard has made alt'ing so easy that I've got enough alts that I rarely even have to ask in guild. I don't think I've gone outside the guild for anything in years.
I've found smaller guilds to be more social because everyone knows each other just that much more.
"Having 3 types of priests..." is all well and good until you remember that we can all dual spec and in Cataclysm, gear will be a non-issue across those specs.

As for PuGs running 25mans, you seem to have forgotten that running the 10man will lock you out of the 25man. If PuGs do happen, it will all be on alts. I do find your characterization that pure DPS specs will be a bit disadvantaged true, scaling down from 25 and 10 is not 1:1 and a lot of pures may find themselves relegated to PuGs. Now, that's probably a bit far-fetched and a bit of fear-mongering at this point but definitely within the realm of possibility if things go south.

Originally Posted by Exemplar

Unless 25 is severely under-tuned, 10man will always have an advantage. Namely it is easier to gather 10 good players than 25 good players. At least in a guild already sized for 25man. Downsizing is easy, up-sizing far more difficult.

Zarhym said in a later post that Blizzard has in the past and is willing to change raiding mid-expansion. But it's because of this right there that if they make a mistake and kill 25man raiding, it will probably never fully recover. Blizzard is playing with fire here but it's the 25man guilds that are in danger of getting burned.

swills · 04/26/10, 5:36 PM

Originally Posted by Kuku

I think the intent is to prevent burnout and increase enjoyment.

This.

I think it's clear that Blizzard is leaning towards positioning WoW as a game that doesn't require you to login every day in order to get the most out of it. We've heard other speculated changes along these lines such as the replacement of the 'Daily Heroic' with something that resets less frequently. This definitely seems like an conscious decision on Blizzard's part.

Remember too that they have Starcraft II out in 2010, and presumably Diablo III sometime in 2011. I could definitely see some types of players thinking "I'll have to drop WoW when DIII comes out" but if WoW only takes up two nights a week, then it becomes much easier to play both. It seems like a pretty shrewd business move to me.