08-14-2006, 03:08 PM
Quote:I guess I'm not seeing what everyone else is seeing, because I frankly cannot find much upside in this change. I can see that a lot of people are enthusiastic about it. I imagine responses like these are what prompted them to make it in the first place.
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The prime beneficiaries are small hardcore guilds that are limited by numbers - like groups of RL friends. I emphasize small hardcore guilds because they must want to progress, and be willing to spend hours wiping, farming repair money, farming consumables. They must be all those things and yet be unable to add people in any way.
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To increase raid availability by less than one percent, Blizzard has instituted a change that is certain to be hugely negative to existing raid guilds. Yes, 40 man raiders are a minority of active players. But screwing them to improve the lot of an even smaller minority is poor judgment.
This is what nobody seems to be talking about. If the new 25-man raids truely are as difficult as current 40-man content, then no PUG will ever be able to do them. Period. To beat that sort of content, you need a group that will come back the next week to learn from their wipes. This requires a de-facto guild with enough organization to raid at least semi-regularly.
Casual guilds would be able to field a team, but would they have the dedication to last through multiple wipes per weak, spend time thinking, reading strats, watching videos, etc. and come back next week to learn from their mistakes and try again? Maybe for a couple weeks, but for the months required to master a single instance? I'm not so sure. My guess is that most will give up after a couple weeks of little or no loot and large repair bills/consumable expenditures and go 25-man BWL or run one of the easier instances in the expansion.
If people have enough motivation and persistence to work through the wipes and learn the instance, then I would consider them hard-core players by definition. This change basically just reduces the size requirement of a hard-core guild, it doesn't lessen any of the requirements for success.
People have also sighted organizational problems with 40-mans and stated that 25-mans would be easier to manage. I would argue that this is backwards. As stated, guilds are sized to be as close as possible to having 40 people on for raids without going under. If there are any more than 40, people get left out and play alts for the night or just /gquit if it happens with any regularity. With less than 40, encounters that have already been mastered can probably still be done and new encounters can still be attempted for the learning value, but the chance of actually progressing starts to go way down. In a 25-man raid, however, being down a man hurts much more. This will make attendance and attrician even bigger problems with 25-man content where all-hands-on-deck is required for progress. If people are having problems filling a 40-man to progress now, I don't see how they will fill a 25-man consistantly to progress at all in BC. Being down a man or two will become an even bigger problem than it is now.
Overall, it just seems like the small hard-core groups that have raid content opened up to them will be more than offset by the downsizing of current raid guilds. Sure, some will form new guilds, but some will probably just quit. Of the new set of guilds, those who's leadership and members had problems filling a 40-man, but were able to progress with 38 or 39 will find it twice as hard to progress with 23 or 24. It just seems like a net loss no matter how you slice it, but perhaps I'm missing something. Anyone care to enlighten me?