25 person max raid size for expansion

[kershner]

See, this is the part oft-quoted but rarely argued. How many "more people" is this content accessible to?

Perhaps my wall-of-text post earlier on discouraged readers. Let me make it short and sweet.

The only people this change helps are hardcore players who cannot currently reach 40 players by way of some external constraint. Except for these players, anybody who does not max-limit raid now will not max-limit raid in the expansion.

You can approximate the number of people who will benefit by looking at the number of people who regularly raid Zul'Gurub and the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, but who do not raid Molten Core. On my server, there are very, very few of these players. I suspect it is the same for other servers.

Your assumption is exactly that which I attempted to refute. Simply put, 40 -> 25 will behave as you describe if there were no difficulty mechanism in place. The introduction of a difficulty slider means that 25 pug can complete a lvl70 x 25 instance on 'Easy' mode. Thus more people have access to more content. The same difficulty slider will keep the gear differential between casuals and raiders by rewarding those that play on the higher difficulty settings.

Your argument is a straw-man:
A: The only people this change helps are hardcore players who cannot currently reach 40 players. (Fallacy)
B: Given 'A', the number of people this helps is small.

The argument is presented plausably but fails because the first statement is inaccurate, the difficulty slider enables a wider audience to be 'helped'. Additionally, the principle of constraints I outlined explains how forming a smaller group is also easier.

-Kershner

[Warlock]

The "necessary gear," isn't as hard to obtain as main people think. Most raiders started out with blues from the "end game" instances (Strat, Scholo, BRS, Dire Maul) and then geared up in MC before progressing to BWL and on. The worst part about preparing for BWL was farming MC for the cores to make the fire resistance gear, although you can get around that to some degree if you're a cloth or leather wearer.

I was referring more to the later raid instances here. If my guild is running Instance X and I don't have enough gear from Instance X-1 because I only went to X-1 when they were short then I won't contribute much to the raid (and based on what I hear about some Naxx fights might actually be worse for the raid than an empty slot because I'll die easily and start a chain reaction). If I go to X-1 enough to fill my role in X then nothing in X-2 will be a challenge. This isn't a problem is all you do is progress with a guild in X, it can be if you also want to play in the Y series of instances that don't have anything harder than X-2.

[Skandranon]

Actually, given that the design of my argument was mathematical and not anecdotal in nature, there will *definitely* be a reduction in net 'drama' due to the principles of group dynamics and constraint behavior. Not all guilds will experience this, but on average all guilds will. This isn't 'my personal experience', this is social behavior theory. Smaller groups function better.

-Kershner

I don't accept the implicit assumption that social behaviour theory and constraint behaviour correlate to what we colloquially refer to as "drama" in any way. A constraint doesn't necessarily lead to an issue if everyone's okay with it. You can't even make the argument that "the more constraints, the greater chance that someone makes an issue of it" because it really comes down to the personalities of the individuals involved. My larger guild experiences far more constraints than my smaller guild did at the time and yet there are far less issues because the personalities are different.

I suppose you could try arguing "on average", but neither you nor I have the data to support that claim.

[kershner]

I don't accept the implicit assumption that social behaviour theory and constraint behaviour correlate to what we colloquially refer to as "drama" in any way. A constraint doesn't necessarily lead to an issue if everyone's okay with it. You can't even make the argument that "the more constraints, the greater chance that someone makes an issue of it" because it really comes down to the personalities of the individuals involved. My larger guild experiences far more constraints than my smaller guild did at the time and yet there are far less issues because the personalities are different.

I suppose you could try arguing "on average", but neither you nor I have the data to support that claim.

Your response actually adds credence to my argument. The principles outlined are that there are a set of constraints which interact with each other. These interactions must be managed or resolved for a group to function. Many of the constraint pairs are innocuous or even complementary (as in EST or hates Alliance (for a Horde guild)). Your description states that for your larger guild "there are far less issues because the personalities are different." Thus in your guild (as proved by the fact that it functions) the total set of constraint pairs has been manged or resolved satisfactorily. None of that demonstrates a counter to my premise. The number of such pairings goes down exponentially with a smaller group. Additionally, there are sufficiently greater, potential 'functional groups' of size 25 (due to the smaller set of constraint-pairs) that a greater percentage of the population will be capable of finding a home in one of the groups.

To put it more plainly: "A constraint doesn't necessarily lead to an issue if everyone's okay with it" is exactly the problem to be overcome. Fewer people means that fewer people have to "be okay with it" for each constraint.

And I can make the argument "the more constraints, the greater chance that someone makes an issue of it". Because that is demonstrably true. Given that an average person will 'make an issue of' a given constraint 1% of the time, given only one constraint the odds of at least one problem are as follows:
5-man: 4.9%
10-man: 9.6%
25-man: 22.2%
40-man: 33.3%

The interactions with many players and many constraints will result in the behavior I described. IE - A 60% reduction in behavioral constraint-pairs (colloquially drama) when transitioning from 40 -> 25.

-Kershner

[Skandranon]

The introduction of a difficulty slider means that 25 pug can complete a lvl70 x 25 instance on 'Easy' mode.

This is an assertion and not sufficiently supported by the available evidence. Firstly, there aren't easy modes: according to the information, there will be a normal mode and a hard mode. Nowhere does it say that Normal mode will be easy enough for a pick-up group.

Even presuming that it goes as you say, difficulty is not the biggest factor impeding raiding. People who don't raid generally don't do it because it's too hard. As I said before, changing the cap doesn't address the two most common causes of not raiding: time constraints and not wanting to be in a "zerg".

If anyone's engaging in a straw man argument here, it's you, for purporting that my initial statement was based solely on difficulty alone.

[Skandranon]

And I can make the argument "the more constraints, the greater chance that someone makes an issue of it". Because that is demonstrably true. Given that an average person will 'make an issue of' a given constraint 1% of the time, given only one constraint the odds of at least one problem are as follows:

You can't express the probability that someone will make an issue of something as a percentage. Some people will make an issue of everything: some people will never make an issue of anything. And you can't make the average argument because guilds are self-selecting: they can choose people who generally don't make a fuss (and people that do will generally find themselves out of the raiding population one way or another).

[Brista]

An important counter argument to my statements above needs to be made.

For the hardcore raider, the content may appear less difficult even though such content is in fact equally challenging or even more challenging.

The cause of this is that in any group the players can be rank ordered by their level of contribution to the whole (a function of skill, gear, class, devotion, etc). Moving from a larger group (40) to a smaller group (25) *should* result in the elimination of those rank ordered as weakest. Thus in smaller raids the per-member contribution to the whole is larger because the remaining play group is stronger.

Imagine taking the best 20 from an MC/BWL guild into ZG. The zone is trivial. From the same take a random subset of 20. The zone is instead easy to medium difficulty.

In addition to the above argument, drama is less in smaller guilds. Not merely 'less', but exponentially less.

For example, let us apply group dynamic theory: Each person brings to the raid group 'n' constraints on the group's play. These include loot desires, personality, play style, time of play, parents, girlfriends, etc. Each of these constraints interacts with all of the other constraints (including their own) and must be sufficiently resolved for the raid group to function. Assume only binary interactions between constraints (personalities are usually tertiary or greater).

For a 40-man raid group with 'n' constraints each there are (40n * (40n - 1)) = 1600n*n - 40n interactions to be resolved. For n=4, 25,440 interactions.

For a 25-man raid group with 'n' constraints each there are (25n * (25n - 1)) = 625n*n - 25n interactions to be resolved. For n=4, 9,900 interactions.

Thus for n=4, 25man is 39% as much drama as 40man.
Changing n from 1 -> 20 moves the % less than 1.

As such it can be said that there is 60% less drama in a 25man group than in a 40man group.

-Kershner

Dehmien | 60 UD Priest | Stonemaul

Does this mean that, mathematically speaking, I can get married to someone and we'll never argue? :w00t:

[Monkey]

Especially if this could be done with both a Horde guild and an Alliance guild working together much as Malfurion, Tyrande, Thrall, Jaina, and others did in the original battle.

That's exactly what I was thinking!

[Quark]

Does this mean that, mathematically speaking, I can get married to someone and we'll never argue? :w00t:

... I think you just won. Thank you for the anecdote that fits so well! :w00t:

Edit: Ugh, another 6-pager. There goes Outline View.

[kershner]

Does this mean that, mathematically speaking, I can get married to someone and we'll never argue? :w00t:

Let's play with some off-topic theory craft math to answer that question.

Let's assume that a standard marriage faces (arbitrarily) 1,000 constraints per partner.

Let's also assume that for each constraint pair, the likelihood of an argument arising per day (you do love each other) is 1:1,000,000,000 (highly compatible).

That gives a 69.4% likelihood that you'll have zero fights per year.

Approaching it another way:
Let's assume the following:
There is one 'perfect' person for everyone.
A marriage faces 1,000 constraints per person.
All constraint-pairs must be 'compatibile' for a pair to 'never argue'.
There are 6.5billion people.

The odds that a given constraint-pair is compatible is thus: 1:40,164

Humorous, but useless. lol

More realistically. If you don't want to argue, marry a blind-deaf-mute serving a life sentence in a foreign country with no visitation rights. Problem solved, everyone wins.

-Kershner

[Sword_of_Doom]

Your assumption is exactly that which I attempted to refute. Simply put, 40 -> 25 will behave as you describe if there were no difficulty mechanism in place. The introduction of a difficulty slider means that 25 pug can complete a lvl70 x 25 instance on 'Easy' mode. Thus more people have access to more content. The same difficulty slider will keep the gear differential between casuals and raiders by rewarding those that play on the higher difficulty settings.

Your argument is a straw-man:
A: The only people this change helps are hardcore players who cannot currently reach 40 players. (Fallacy)
B: Given 'A', the number of people this helps is small.

The argument is presented plausably but fails because the first statement is inaccurate, the difficulty slider enables a wider audience to be 'helped'. Additionally, the principle of constraints I outlined explains how forming a smaller group is also easier.

-Kershner

Well the reality is there will be no difficulty slider for 25 man raid content. There will be for 10 and 5 person dungeons. Therefore Blizzard has two options: 1. Appease the masses and make the 25 person raid dungeons fairly easy ala ZG20 or AQ20. or 2. Make it the same difficulty as Naxxramas. If the reduction of 40 person raids to 25 person raids was to make content more accessible my gut feeling is that they have no choice but to go with option 1. This move makes no other sense other than for technological reasons. Apparently 25 people stress the servers quite a bit less than 40 do. But again, there theoretically should be a lot more people raiding under a 25 person system than a 40 person system which should stress the servers more.

So i am still leaning towards Blizzard making easier raids simply for the fact that it appeals to the most people and will make them the most $$$ in the short term. Casuals will not stay in this game for a long period of time. The reason Everquest is still around 8 years later is not because of the casual its because of the hardcore. So i am very concerned about the direction of the game. I would hate to see a brain drain from this game (best players leaving for more of challenge) because players will move on if raids are easy.

[kershner]

Well the reality is there will be no difficulty slider for 25 man raid content. There will be for 10 and 5 person dungeons. Therefore Blizzard has two options: 1. Appease the masses and make the 25 person raid dungeons fairly easy ala ZG20 or AQ20. or 2. Make it the same difficulty as Naxxramas. If the reduction of 40 person raids to 25 person raids was to make content more accessible my gut feeling is that they have no choice but to go with option 1. This move makes no other sense other than for technological reasons. Apparently 25 people stress the servers quite a bit less than 40 do. But again, there theoretically should be a lot more people raiding under a 25 person system than a 40 person system which should stress the servers more.

So i am still leaning towards Blizzard making easier raids simply for the fact that it appeals to the most people and will make them the most $$$ in the short term. Casuals will not stay in this game for a long period of time. The reason Everquest is still around 8 years later is not because of the casual its because of the hardcore. So i am very concerned about the direction of the game. I would hate to see a brain drain from this game (best players leaving for more of challenge) because players will move on if raids are easy.

Given all the mixed information on difficulty settings that has been posited in interviews and blue posts, this is the first I've heard that there won't be difficulty settings on raids. Can you provide a source for that statement?

The statements thus far clearly articulate:
There will be a player selected difficulty slider.
That slider will have 5 settings from easy to super hard.
That slider will have 2 settings normal and hard
The difficulty will be set based on the party's level and not player selected.
The slider will affect only expansion dungeons and raids.
The slider may affect older dungeons and raids (SM was mentioned).

Your statement is the first I've heard. I'd love more info on that.

-Kershner

[Ashock]

2400 rugged leather, or given a roughly 80% drop rate from the yeti in Winterspring, 3000 yeti, so at an average kill rate of one per minute, 50 hours. Not horrible, especially since you can start/stop it anytime you like, or you can buy rugged leather off the AH at maybe 3 gold/stack of 20, or 360 gold.

For some classes, bear in mind, this is a necklace easily as good or better than a Molten Core epic.

Druids: cat form, +39 AP, +1% crit, 10 stamina
Rogues: +29 AP, +1% crit, 10 stamina
Warriors and Paladins: +20 AP, +1% crit, 10 stamina
Hunters: +38 RAP, +0.4% crit, 10 stamina

Epic necklaces:

Barbed Choker: +44 AP, 1% crit, +10 sta (drops from Fankriss in AQ40!)
Onyxia's Tooth Pendant: +12 agility, +9 stamina, +10 fire resist, +1% to hit, +1% to crit
Eye of Hakkar: +40 AP, 1% crit (no stamina!)

Blue necklaces:

Imperial Jewel: +32 AP, +7 sta
Mark of Fordring: +26 AP, +1% crit
Stormpike Soldier's Pendant: +18 AP, +15 sta
Will of the Martyr: +30 AP, +10 sta

Yes, the neck is not impossible to get, just tedious. However, for a warrior, his main asset gearwise is/are weapons. There is nothing short of raids that gets into the 60's except TUF, which no matter how much you try, does not fit into 1 hand. Blue one-handers stop in the low 40's, you know that. 5-10 mans, do not help. The high 50's epic 2-handers have such a low drop rate, that it is simply a question of huge luck to just get one after god knows how many runs and even that luck will simply give them a weapon that will be eclipsed relatively fast in ZG, let alone MC and up.

In any case, raiders who are in new guilds that go through all the pains of learning everything new, are very different from raiders who join guilds that already farm, wouldn't you agree? However, it is exactly those ppl that *do* join established guilds that get their items fastest. It is that last type of raider that I have a problem with and there's more than just plenty of them.

I don't understand why so many people get riled up at what I'm saying. I'm not saying that all raiders are skilless players with too much time on their hands, just too many. I'm not saying that raiders in general do not deserve good gear. All I'm saying is that there needs to be a semblance of parity, and in the state things are right now, there is none. In fact my problem is not really with raiders but it is with the whole WoW loot system. Hopefully, it will change for the better with TBC. See, I like PvP and I am excited by the promised changes as they will allow me to do what I want and can do and not be too gimped.

Let me elaborate a bit. At the moment, being on a relatively new PvP server, it is actually nice to go into WSG or AV (instant ques, btw) and be competitive. Almost noone has gear beyond URBS and even that is not common. Those few people that are doing MC, mostly do not have time to PvP, so they are not a factor. The low brackets do not have Crusaded-out twinks. Yesterday, several from my guild did ST. One of the ppl asked another in our party (who was being less then competent) if he's been here before. He said, no. On his old server, he just did the MC attunement and went straight to MC, or something close to that. This is what I'm talking about and it is too common. Too easy to get gear for raiders and impossible for non-raiders. When we start to raid occasionally, I'm sure we will work hard for it. OTOH, 6 months from now (well, that is under the current system), someone entering our guild and hitting 60 would have to put in very little except time.


-A

[Lissa]

Well the reality is there will be no difficulty slider for 25 man raid content. There will be for 10 and 5 person dungeons. Therefore Blizzard has two options: 1. Appease the masses and make the 25 person raid dungeons fairly easy ala ZG20 or AQ20. or 2. Make it the same difficulty as Naxxramas. If the reduction of 40 person raids to 25 person raids was to make content more accessible my gut feeling is that they have no choice but to go with option 1. This move makes no other sense other than for technological reasons. Apparently 25 people stress the servers quite a bit less than 40 do. But again, there theoretically should be a lot more people raiding under a 25 person system than a 40 person system which should stress the servers more.

So i am still leaning towards Blizzard making easier raids simply for the fact that it appeals to the most people and will make them the most $$$ in the short term. Casuals will not stay in this game for a long period of time. The reason Everquest is still around 8 years later is not because of the casual its because of the hardcore. So i am very concerned about the direction of the game. I would hate to see a brain drain from this game (best players leaving for more of challenge) because players will move on if raids are easy.

I think you may have hit on why Blizzard is doing this with your assessment of the stress placed on the instance server by 40 people vs. 25 people. A good place to see this is the Vael fight where every couple seconds you have updates occuring for all 40 people in the raid with Vael's AoE. In essence you have a person getting information from 39 people every couple seconds and they are intern sending info to 39 people as well. This means you that you have 39^2 transfers of information, or 1521 pieces of information going out. On the other hand, if you go with 25 people, you would have 24^2, or 576 pieces of information going out. That's almost a 2/3 cut in information being sent which would put a lot less stress on the server just there alone. Good catch, might even want to mention this on the R&D forums at Blizzard and see if Tigole bites.

[Monkey]

Well the reality is there will be no difficulty slider for 25 man raid content. There will be for 10 and 5 person dungeons. Therefore Blizzard has two options: 1. Appease the masses and make the 25 person raid dungeons fairly easy ala ZG20 or AQ20. or 2. Make it the same difficulty as Naxxramas. If the reduction of 40 person raids to 25 person raids was to make content more accessible my gut feeling is that they have no choice but to go with option 1. This move makes no other sense other than for technological reasons. Apparently 25 people stress the servers quite a bit less than 40 do. But again, there theoretically should be a lot more people raiding under a 25 person system than a 40 person system which should stress the servers more.

25 man decreases server load: Each avatar's location must be messaged to every other avatar via the server. Neglecting NPCS, for any group of size N, this is N*(N-1). For 2 avatars, it's 2 messages. For 4 avatars, it's 12 messages. For 25, it's 600 messages. For 40 it's 1560 messages. Thus, Blizzard can load-balance new raids onto different hardware in 1/3 size increments with the smaller groups.

25 man decreases social load: Similar to the server load problem, each person that you add to a volunteer organization must have (at least) mutual tolerance with every current member of the group. This can be modeled as 0.5*N*(N-1). For 2 people, it's 1 relationship. For 4 people, it's 6. For 25, it's 300. And for 40 people it's 780. The social complexity (which a guild master must manage) of a 25-person group is ~62% less than that of a 40 person group.

Accessibility to Blizzard's endgame is dictated by the number of players who are both willing and able to manage the complexity of a 50-100 person guild with 1200 to 5000 relationships that could all go to Drama-DEFCON1 at any time. By lowering raid size, they increase the pool of potentially successful guild masters and increase accessibilty to the content without decreasing the difficulty of the raids.

Of course, in both server and social concerns, these numbers only explain what is possible, not what Blizzard will choose to do.

[Sword_of_Doom]

Given all the mixed information on difficulty settings that has been posited in interviews and blue posts, this is the first I've heard that there won't be difficulty settings on raids. Can you provide a source for that statement?

The statements thus far clearly articulate:
There will be a player selected difficulty slider.
That slider will have 5 settings from easy to super hard.
That slider will have 2 settings normal and hard
The difficulty will be set based on the party's level and not player selected.
The slider will affect only expansion dungeons and raids.
The slider may affect older dungeons and raids (SM was mentioned).

Your statement is the first I've heard. I'd love more info on that.

-Kershner

I will say this, its not explicit but implicit in a number of Burning Crusade previews. I will try to prove my point with a small quote.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/world-of-warcraft...n/725327p1.html

In a move to ensure that "level up" instances don't get permanently shelved by max level players, Blizzard is working a difficulty system into its dungeons. Basically, it works like this: As you're leveling up, you run through all the Outland instances at their default difficulty. You'll earn gear commensurate for your level, and the challenges will be tuned as such. Once you hit 70, however, your group leaders will have the option of running dungeons on "Elite" difficulty. This will tune the challenges to a level 70 group and increase the relative value of the rewards. At this point, there aren't any plans include such an option for the game's existing dungeons, though Chilton said that we shouldn't dismiss the possibility.

This is the only direct quote i can find that clearly says that level up instances would have the difficulty setting. Within the very same article raids are talked about (25 man) but no mention that there will be difficulty settings. My guess is that making a difficulty setting for a 25 person raid dungeon would be hard to too and from a cost perspective not worth it.

So this still leads me to conclude that if they are truly changing the raid cap size for accessiblity then they HAVE to make the content easier. Otherwise this is the stupidest dumbest move i have seen any gaming company make. Destroy the social structure that they enforced for 2 years and then break that very same social structure for what, no change to accessiblity to the casual player.

I could be wrong on difficulty settings for 25 person raids but implicitly i think there will be no difficulty settings.

[Sword_of_Doom]

I think you may have hit on why Blizzard is doing this with your assessment of the stress placed on the instance server by 40 people vs. 25 people. A good place to see this is the Vael fight where every couple seconds you have updates occuring for all 40 people in the raid with Vael's AoE. In essence you have a person getting information from 39 people every couple seconds and they are intern sending info to 39 people as well. This means you that you have 39^2 transfers of information, or 1521 pieces of information going out. On the other hand, if you go with 25 people, you would have 24^2, or 576 pieces of information going out. That's almost a 2/3 cut in information being sent which would put a lot less stress on the server just there alone. Good catch, might even want to mention this on the R&D forums at Blizzard and see if Tigole bites.

In Naxx there is a particular encounter, Thaddius, that is almost impossible for a raid group because of server load. Its not uncommon for raid groups to experience 4 or 5 disconnects per attempt. Apparently its a great encounter and unfortunately i have not seen it yet, but even if you have a high end computer you lag on that encounter. From what i gather, reducing raid sizes will do as you have pointed out in the Vaelstrasz encounter, reduce lag and make it possible for all the raid group to enjoy the encounter. It also explains why they almost magically now can change the debuff system from 16 to 40 even though Tigole[u] on the Elitist Jerks forum tries to deny it.

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic...d=7880&p=2

The change in the debuff limitation and the change to the raiding size in Burning Crusade are totally unrelated. Lowering the raid size had nothing to do with being able to allocate more resources to tracking debuffs on raid monsters. We've been doing our best to imrpove the number of debuffs for quite some time. Obviously,we haven't raised the cap as quickly as people would like but there are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes that make this difficult. Implementing the change in patch 1.13 would call for a massive re-tuning of all existing raid content. If we simply wait for the Burning Crusade at this point we can tune the new encounters around the new raid size as well as with the new debuffs/spells/abilities in mind. While some of the loot of the old raid encounters might feel relavent to some, the difficulty certainly will not.

I know some of the changes and decisions we make seem arbitrary to you guys. Someone mentioned there being no reason to have a 500 person cap on guild size. But you can rest assured that there are reasons for caps like that. WoW is an extremely complicated game under the hood. Occasionally we hit technical limitations.

In fact, the change to raid size was debated and decided a long time ago. So long ago that there was talk about Naxx being a 25 person raid (with the same difficulty and loot). However, this would have been too harsh a change mid-stride in a live game. What people aren't considering right now is that when Burning Crusade comes out, they are going to spend a significant chunk of time (depending on playtime, dedication, employment) to get to level 70. It's not like you'll be standing around the day after the expansion comes out lining up to raid. There will be a progression into entering the raid game (leveling up, gearing up etc.).

Also, the reality is that guilds will already be facing challenges. Many people will re-up their accounts and guilds will face an influx of new people. Some people will use the expansion as a "game over" moment, to bow out of the game. Guild churn (both coming back and leaving) is historically very high during expansion releases throughout MMO's. Experienced MMO vets know this.

The expansion affords the development team the opportunity to improve the game. It's the "right" time to make long-needed changes. Also, by the time the expansion ships, all of our sites worldwide will be on upgraded hardware. As techinical barriers are removed, we can re-address certain areas that we saw as problems. The debuff limit is a perfect example of this.

Interesting comments.

[Tuftears]

Yes, the neck is not impossible to get, just tedious. However, for a warrior, his main asset gearwise is/are weapons. There is nothing short of raids that gets into the 60's except TUF, which no matter how much you try, does not fit into 1 hand. Blue one-handers stop in the low 40's, you know that. 5-10 mans, do not help.

Quel'Serrar: 2.0 speed main-hand sword, 52.5 dps, +12 sta, on hit: +13 defense, +300 armor for 10 secs - requires epic book buyable from AH or findable in Dire Maul, plus a successful Onyxia run

Blackfury: 2.1 speed polearm, 62.6 dps, +35 str, +15 sta, +10 fire resist, +1% crit - requires 7 cores which can be purchased from the AH at around 100-200 gold apiece

*shrug* Evidently Blizzard regards the effort of raiding to be comparable to one person spending about 1500 gold or the equivalent amount of effort.

[kershner]

Your comparison of Blackfury to Quel'Serrar is akin to apples and oranges. Quel'Serrar's use is *not* offensive but defensive.

As such, the bonuses to defense and armor far out weigh those to Str, Fire Res and crit, and all of that is prior to the effect of allowing a shield (with compensary stats). Quel is *massively* better for an MT than Blackfury.

That being said, a better comparison is to argue man hours. How many man hours is an epic worth, my numbers from previous cases is 10-15. At 30g per hour that's 300-450g for an average epic. Epics like Quel are much more time consuming and thus represent a better reward. (The comparison fails for many, but is a better sense of work -> reward).

-Kershner

[Tuftears]

I was highlighting one-handers with more than low-40 DPS and two-handers with more than 60 DPS that are available to casual gamers willing to go to certain extremes, but who are for some reason unable to raid regularly.:)

I doubt you'll find many main tanks using Blackfury. To be honest, it looks like a fury warrior's 2-hand weapon, but at its current core requirement, I doubt many raiding fury warriors will want to get one made.