May News/Discussions

[Kevin]

You offer the example of "why do a 25 man when you could do 2 10 man instances in that time!!!!" but that argument still relies on the faulty idea that the instances need to be designed the same way they are now (because of the loot progression). But there is no reason why there can't be 10 player instances which take just as much time and effort as a 25 player instance. The only reason it's like that is because of loot progression.

ZA is harder than most of SSC in my opinion and took more attempts on most bosses to kill them for us too and we already had a bit of gear advantage on it compared to what we had when learning SSC. It's certainly harder than Mags and Gruul. So even with the progression stuff the way it is, I think it's been proven that a 10 man can be harder than a 25 man.

That being said I do actually find different enjoyment in the different sized raids. Recently I've had very little to do with organizing the runs I just get to go on them. There is less social interaction on the 25 man runs than the 10 man runs. That means that 25 man farm content is way more boring than 10 man farm content to me. 10 man learning and 25 man learning gave me pretty much the same enjoyment. Of course so did 5 man learning in heroic MgT and the PvP fight in heroic MgT is one of the best in the game since the 5 I have on my side has been different on pretty much every run as has the 5 I face. You have to do things differently every single time and you can generally tell pretty quickly if the plan was good or bad. I don't see much of that in 25 mans.

Mt Hyjal is one of my favorite instances though. I do actually like the trash, I do find it interesting. The bosses themselves aren't that great but they aren't bad, there is still enough of a dance to be fun. Of course since that mission in Warcraft III was by far my favorite single player (I replayed it several times and even managed to save the human town, so I saved all the towns) on the hardest difficulty. Nothing else in WoW has really connected with the RTS games that much for me since they were at best references to other things and way more static. But Mt. Hyjal puts you in the RTS missions from an MMO perspective and that gets it a lot of bonus points. The other stuff not so much.

But I get different things from teh 25 and 10 man raids and I do enjoy the 25 mans for the raiding itself. I would love to see a 25 man version of Karazhan bosses (though not the trash, too much trash in there). Some of the stuff that you can do knowing that you'll very likely have 2 of every class (which you don't on the 10 mans, yeah it was designed for 9 + 1, but not so much so that you suffer without it, ZA is a little harder if you deviate too much from 9 + 1) could be fun. Of course some of the Kara stuff shows up in some of the other 25 mans and honestly Aran is better than Solarian.

I do think 10 mans become easier to outgear and trivialize though. The 5K armor I picked up between my first tanking of Kara and what I have currently means a lot more there than it does vs Gruul or Mags. This is simply because 2 healers can't be expected to put out as much healing as 4 healers, the bosses can't hit quite as hard, they can't have quite as many HP. So that extra 400 DPS that a DPS toon picked up in gear means more too. It seems like it should all be a matter of scale but the game mechanics don't work that way.

But I'm fine with that. I'm quite happy that Karazhan went from a challenge in the blues and greens we started with in there to treating it like UBRS and undermanning it or taking alts and just not respecting the place but having a lot of fun because you are goofing with pals. It's hard to get that silly with 25 people, it's just too many people.

Dunno. I like what was announced. I figure we will concentrate on 10 mans. Often juggling stuff to make 2 successful locks but there might be nights where we have 23 or 25 people and then we might just go play in the 25 man version so everyone can be included. It makes a "friends and family" size guild capable of progression and seeing both sizes without really having to recruit.