The desire to make WoW take less time is, I'm sure, not just about the new games coming out, but also because the player base is most likely ageing. Probably about half the players started playing four to six years ago, and hence, have aged considerably. Your high school students are now strapped for time working on university essays, your university students are now married with a demanding job, and your married people now have a child or two to take care of. Most people won't have the same time to devote to a hobby they took up years ago, and it's understandable that Blizzard would want to retain these people by lowering time requirements.

It's difficult to make out the argument here, so my interpretation may be wrong, but are you comparing the choice of whether to run 10- or 25-player Cataclysm raids to UBRS?

They took more than 5 people to UBRS cause the bosses had the same HP and hit for the same amount whether you had 5 people or 15... In other words, more people made everything easier.

Really not sure what you're getting at.

That (extremely badly written) post argues that new bosses will, or maybe might be, designed and balanced under the 10 man limit. This would make killing/zerging the bosses easier at the 25 man level, because the mechanics which would be hard in 10 man would favour the 25 man raid.


This is where it doesn't make sense though because UBRS was literally the same dungeon whether you ran it with 5 or 15. The 25 man raid boss will have more HP and will do more damage. This alone makes it more challenging already. This is exactly how things are now. Plus mechanics which target single players are infinitely more devastating in 25 man than in 10 man instances - just because the chance for failure is much higher (BQL or LK come to mind), and of course also because more players will be targetted, making this entire argument complete hogwash.

"This of course uses the example of the 25 man raid being actually abundantly easier than a 10 man."

The example was over the top for the reason being that everyone else had been using an extreme example of where the 10 man through logistics would be abundantly easier. It was absurd hyperbole, in my opinion, of the majority's attitude of raid bosses. I responded with an absurdity. I suppose a better example would be if the raid cap was removed then you would consider doing LK 25 with 40 people. Even if just for the margin of error, that if you lost 1 person the raid could still finish.

Keeping the discussion squarely on simple numbers, you will find :1) buff and debuff synergy is better in 25s than 10s 2) margin of error is greater in 25s 3) class balance is better- ie think of actually having a battle rez in 25 versus not knowing whether or not you have druid in 10. Each of these points are taken into consideration in designing a boss encounter so that the 25 man version is always intentionally more difficult. Looking at what Blizzard is doing with buffs that advantage is going away. This means you will be expected to have bloodlust, judgment of wisdom, and appropriate debuffs so that your DPS is higher. This forces the 10 man bosses to have higher health pools. With talented abilities becoming baseline, you won't need to bring multiple hybrids to get specific abilities. This will be factored into the 10 man tuning as well.

The 10 mans are currently easier by design not because the raid number is awesome. 40 man raids could have multiples of everything to the point of overkill. You can have 1 of each spec and still have extras which proved 40 is an excessive amount of people. 10 is a small amount of people where the raid might not even have a specific ability available to it. 25 people, however, is just that right amount of people for Blizzard to tune the boss encounters. Just enough buffs/debuffs, margin of error, and class balance make tuning for 25s better. Hence, the reason why cataclysm is getting an overhaul to make the 10 man raids harder so that they can be equal in difficulty to 25 mans. I'm curious as to how so many missed this point that 25 is the magic number for dungeon design and 10 is not. They are bringing 10 man raids up to the standard of 25 man raids.

@ Blutelf "If your response is along the lines of Vashj was a pain on 25 if I could have done her in a 10 man I would, then you have made a grave error. Because, Blizzard isn't giving us a new Vashj but a new Nefarian with different mechanics."

I hope this post cleared up any mistakes made in the previous post.

So your point then is "I think 10 mans in Cataclysm will be just as hard as 25 mans are now in WoTLK because the buff synergy will be the same in 10 mans then as it is in 25 mans now. This will allow Blizzard to design harder encounters for 10 mans in Cata than the WoTLK 10 mans". This, I think, is actually true.

However, what people are worried about is that the 25 man raid model might end up not being sustainable on a long-term basis. It's not even particularly a question of difficulty - if they are too hard, then players will raid 10 mans exclusively. If they are too easy, then people might still prefer raiding 10 mans because of better raider and also loot availability (less contest for melee dps trinkets, leather armour, plate armour, class tokens - it's easy to come up with a 10 man group setup where it's only YOU needing Tiny Abo!)

I think the difficulty question is also partly due to raider pride. It is fun to beat the biggest and strongest boss and receive the best loot and maybe the best title. Right now all that comes from the 25 mans and guilds have formed and adapted around that almost 4-year long period of BC and WOTLK. Now this is all being challenged and that worries people. Are they still going to be the best? Is their self-definition of them being the best raider going to be challenged by them having to go to the (right now, mind you) inferior 10 mans even though they really see themselves having to be at the top (meaning 25 mans)?

It's not helping that 10 mans and 25 mans are going to drop the exactly same loot. Never mind valor points, what are valor points? What can you buy with them? We don't even know yet. Blizzard does not even know yet, I would suggest. How much loot is going to drop? Will it have a different name? Will it have "25 mans" in the tooltip? How are people going to know I am a 25 man raider and not a 10 man raider? There is no character customization in this game, so how will I be able to show off to other people?

Are you going to be cool enough to have other people admire you? Are you a good enough player to get any raid spot you desire in your guild, on your server, in your region? Are you the player people go to when they have questions, do you receive 15 whispers a day asking you how you'd got that title/tabard/mount/legendary? And if you are right now, are you going to remain in that position once Cata hits?

It's an identity crisis. Yes, for some players it's more important than others. Some may be happy with 10 man raids, some never raid at all. But those don't really complain about the change, do they now? It's the competitive players.


EDIT: In conclusion, I think Blizzard did not and does not handle this correctly (What a surprise! RealID anyone?). There can be very strong feelings involved with character identity which right now is heavily influenced by high-end raiding. By offering more character customization options during gameplay, by staggering the nature of rewards more than "killed Lich King hc? here's your cool title, otherwise lol at you", and also by clearly implementing a method of differentiation between 25 man raiders and 10 man raiders, and being extremely vocal about it, they would have avoided a huge amount of negative backlash. I think whoever was ultimately responsible didn't consider how players would feel when their self-identity was challenged, and that's also why these threads keep talking about difficulty and loot and rewards which are not really the main issue at all.

At this point Blizzard could really just get rid of 25 mans and it would actually improve the situation by having one streamlined progress path. Then we could have attunements again, a shitload of new titles, mounts, tabards, red cloaks, white boots, yellow helmets, whatever, to litter the path and have players be able to form a clear hierarchy of coolness "he's only a Twilight Destroyer with a red cloak, but I'm a Dragonflight Annihilator with blue boots! i'm better! oh wait, that guy has the Sinestra mount AND Quel'Blablas, I suck compared to him better raid harder next time!" I don't really know, but I think this would create a situation where players would know where they are in comparison to others and be able to experience some progress. Which would consist of more than "get to 80, run ICC 10 5 times, run ICC 25 5 times, grats, next alt".

Why do you think GearScore is so popular? Because it tells you when you got better. It tells you right now, there's a number on your screen going up. Moreso, everyone else can see that you got better! You're cool! You're great! You're better than this 4k GS scrub, heh. And of course you're not letting that guy into your PUG :smug: .

It's the same feeling here and why Blizzard just absolutely won't acknowledge that players want to be graded, ranked, actually even gated through content, is really beyond me. Oh, do not get me wrong, they will still bitch like they bitched about any attunement quest ingame, even when it was "jump through lava for 30 seconds, have one healing potion" or "do this questline before killing gruul". But that is better than having the clusterfuck of WOTLK where there is absolutely nothing to look forward to once you're 80.

Thank you for that. As for the rest of your post, I feel very enlightened from reading it. I didn't think about the prestige side of things. I had assumed that when my guild's hardcore raiders level real fast to 85 they will hit the heroics and start a 10 man raid as soon as possible. But, then the slowpokes will hit 85 and ask for raid invites. The guys that took a 5 month break will be back and eventually ask for raid invites. This I would assume would precipitate a 25 man raid just to accommodate the new folks. How it actually goes down is something I'm not sure of now. Maybe the hardcores will gravitate away maybe they won't.

Regarding the recent discussion:
If you want to talk about how the Cataclysm rules are going to affect how your guild raids - that is, actions - go right ahead. If you want to talk about how they affect your feelings, specifically the hot tears soaking your pillow at night, save it for your diary.

This isn't quite right. The mechanics you listed all target 1 person in both 25 man and 10 man. It doesn't matter if your raid has 100 people or 2 people. If every person has a 2% chance of failing, then when "mechanic" happens there's a 2% chance of failure.

There's the obvious advantage that your ten best players are better than your 25 best players. But, I think another major difference is that in ten mans, people expect "mechanic" to hit them and they are prepared for it. In 25 mans it's less likely and so people aren't prepared. This means your chance of failure per person is lower in ten mans, irrespective of player ability, and this is why it's easier.

1. Re: the argument that 10m are by logical implication easier than 25m: Fights can be made to be just as tough, if not tougher, in ten mans. The acceptable margin of error in 10 mans can just be shaved razor thin, much thinner than that of 25 mans currently, and in Cata. This is mathematically true, and not up for debate.

2. The problem this creates, however, is the need to stack raids in 10m because you can't get all the buffs easily. This is supposedly going to be solved by the merging of buffs, but I'm skeptical. Unless they get rid of the very distinct melee/caster buff division, I can't imagine it won't be beneficial to keep a melee group and a caster group on standby, switching them out per fight. And that's just the melee/ranged issue; we haven't even touched on all the other ways to cover buffs.

3. Re: the raider "pride" issue Blutelf posted, I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying Blizzard has an obligation to provide a game mechanical means by which people can socially stratify and compare epeens? If so, I disagree.

I don't know if Blizzard has to provide one or not but it's absolutely true that if they don't create one or create one that has extremely fuzzy lines, the players will create one. Games are by definition competitive, when you try to take that out you get something wholly unnatural and unappealing to a species that has used games to showcase individual or group strength/skill for the last few hundred thousand years.