25 person max raid size for expansion

[Lissa]

I think you may end up being right in your analysis but there is one fear of mine. The whole end game is predicated on challenge and difficulty and if that is taken away with the 25 man raid cap you will see droves of elite players leave this game. I read Fires of Heaven and Elitist Jerks (two top end WoW guilds) daily and on both boards there is a lot of good discussion on whether this is the end of elite raiding. Yes the this move by Blizzard will probably equal out the gear difference a litte bit better than the old system as well as give more access to more content to a greater pool of players. This is a $$$ move and it looks to be a good one. Tigole, one of the chief devs, estimated 25% of the playerbase has taken down Ragnaros and 15% have taken down Nefarion. That estimation is probably too high. So that means 80%+ of the playerbase feels ignored and left out. They got their Christmas gift early with with the 25 person raid cap.

Personally i am very disappointed. I loved the challenge of 40 person raiding and have absolutely loved the encounters in Naxxramas. They are by far and away the best in the game apart from C'Thun. Now i can't wait until Beta and see what the actual changes will be and how that will affect the long term raid future of this game.

If the encounters are going to be easier it will mean more access to everyone but you will lose the people who like challenges and difficulty. My guess is the encounters will be easier and that will be terribly disappointing. So who knows.....

I expect that the changes they make will be more of bringing the content inline with 25 people vs. 40 people. You will probably see all raid content lose about 3/8 of their health and you will probably see a little bit of diminishing damage done by the raid content (probably not the 3/8 less) and you will probably see fights like Patchwerk target 1 less target to allow for the removal of 15 people. Overall, I think they'll just scale the encounters for 25 people from 40, but make them no less difficult for 25 people to conqueor than 40 people.