25 person max raid size for expansion

[Kevin]

I raid 20 hours a week. So far i have been in Naxx 2 months and have received 1 item. So i have put in approximately 160 hours. Naxx bosses drop 1 set piece and i misc. piece. The 4 end wing bosses drop 2 set pieces and 1 misc. piece. We have 7 bosses on farm and get 8 set pieces and 7 misc. pieces a week. Thats 15 pieces divided up among 40+raiders. At best i will get something once per month for about 80 hours of raiding. All the while it probably costs me 60 gold a week in repair costs and another 60 gold in consumables. I easily spend 100 gold a week on raiding and probably more. So for 80 hours of time and 400 gold i get 1 Tier 3 piece a month. Are casuals willing to do solo quests that involve that time, effort, skill and dedication. Raiding is not out of whack to the reward you get for the time effort skill and dedication. I raid because i like the people and i love the challenge of the encounters. I am likely not to get my full Tier 3 set before the expansion. My guess is i will be 4/9.

The big mistake Blizzard has made is there is no other way of advancing your character apart from rep grinds or gear grinds. The gap between casuals and raiders is not merely time, its the willingness to spend the gold and endure endless wipes to get the reward. I have been on countless PuG's that have quit either at Rend or before Drakkisath becuase we wiped. I have seen Baron runs fall apart because of a wipe. Unfortunately MMO's are not entirely devoted to casuals even though WoW is by far and away the most casual MMO in history. Everquest was a hardcore wet dream but a casual nightmare. At least WoW has gameplay elements that all can enjoy.

I don't think it will ever be solved, its impossible. Casuals have the desire to get something that will never involve time and i don't think any MMO maker wants to cater to much to that because that means creating endless content. MMO's are based on timesinks, its the only way for repetitive play. WoW is casual friendly.

I have to agree with pretty much all of this. The big mistake especially.

I have had more fun with the Dungeon 2 upgrade line than most other things in the game. The big problem though is that it came out after my druid had all of T1, my warrior had 5/8 T1 and 3/8 T2. My paladin was in 4/8 T1 and within about a month of those quests being an option was in 7/8 T1 making pretty much all those items more or less worthless to them, the only reason to do the quests would be to do them. I also had easy access to on farm ZG, AQ20, MC, and BWL. Time to reward for the Dungeon 2 stuff was very low.

The one good thing for me was my hunter was actually wearing a mix of Dungeon 1 and the DM "set". We had just started to get into ZG and AQ20. MC was not on the radar. Much of ZG was still in a learning state. So that was the toon that I did the upgrades on and it was great. The gear level made some of it challenging, it gave direction to our smaller guild, it gave a lot of fun, it gave good rewards. Figuring out the 45 minute baron run was a blast. We got our first guild member up to needing Lord Valthalak recently (I've done my first 'random' summons and need to do the 2nd before getting the bracers). We tried him pretty late last night (11pm to 1 am across the 3 time zones we had players from) with a group mix that I don't think was very good for the encounter. Most of us had no clue at all to the encounter because we didn't want to know. Two people in the 10 man raid had looked at what was on WoWwiki. It was great, I look forward to more of it. I had more fun on that than I did learning MC. Mainly because I prefer the smaller groups. Of course for me personally since we are in MC now and working on Rags and I've got 5/8 of my T1 and since we are killing Ony now as well the Dungeon 2 set isn't helpful. That is not the case for all classes though. Our shaman are a great example where the Dungeon 2 set is going to be better for them for a lot of what they do (we still do a lot of 5 mans and the shaman aren't always healers even in ZG and MC) than T1.

So even though some of the issue was addressed, the fact that if you can get the organization in place for 40 people, you rapidly make the value of what has been added diminish. Heck for some classes the ZG and AQ20 stuff is better than MC, even for the primary roles. This I think is good and Blizzard needs to do more of it. Those 2 dungeons really are an alternative to MC for smaller groups. And it was great getting to learn them. It was just as much fun to go in and learn how to defeat Arlokk with a group in Dungeon 1 Set / Dire Maul blues as it was to learn MC that way. It really pretty much felt the same. That group got big enough to go hit MC now, and we progressed very fast in MC in part because we were learning MC in essentially MC gear, and in part because of the experience from learning ZG and AQ20, and finally in part because we did use outside resources.

This of course means that the effort to reward ratio for the people that don't get to play as much or simply weren't at 60 yet when all this started isn't the same as for those who did the learning. I've seen a warrior from one of our allied guilds who can't tank go from blue/green to mostly epic in just a few weeks by being there for our farming stuff. This is the problem that Ashock is getting at. This player wasn't actually skilled enough in my mind to be able to even get the Dungeon 2 set, because a warrior not pulling his weight in a 5 man where you don't have anyone with any epics other than maybe a darkmoon item or the other Dungeon 2 set items isn't going to help you get through it in time. And of course you and Skan correctly argue that these people will complain and want something for nothing. I agree with both sides. I don't like the fact tha it is easy for someone to leech from other and sleepwalk into their epics. Once you figure out MC, it's very simple to just take 20-30 people that know what they are doing, add in 10-20 others that can be pretty much completely clueless and suddenly you have uber geared completely unskilled toons out there. The 20-30 will put up with the 10-20 because they contribute enough that it makes the whole thing easier for them.

This then destroys the PvP world where the best skilled player in the best gear that you can get without setting foot in to ZG/AQ20 or any 40 man, can pretty much get owned by some noob hunter in T1 with a Striker's Mark or Blastershot (I figure this noob couldn't get the quests done to get Rhok). Even if you get the blue PvP stuff for many classes it just isn't as good. And as mentioned the weapons, the equipment that makes the biggest difference, are just not there at all for even dedicated PvP'ers.

So yeah for my part, I really hope they do have epic difficulty 5 mans. AQ40 with the Twin Emps finally showed my a 40 man where, if you consider appropriate gearing, you needed the whole party to be on their toes as much as a 5 man (again consider appropriate gearing). This is a good thing. But honestly I'd rather have the epic stuff in 5 or 10 man sizes (I think 10 mans are my ideal size). I really hope TBC delivers on this. I hope that if you spend 4 months learning and dealing with a 5 man that you can get as much reward as the 4 months learning and dealing with the 25 man that is the same difficulty.