Massive success for my raid team. Highmaul was a bit of a pain as we went back from 10 to 20 (after having lost too many in ToT to continue as a 25 man raid team) it would've been far easier logistically if nothing else if 10 man was kept in the game. But you don't have to bemoan the peaks and troughs between two raid sizes and it's not an excuse why a certain boss may be a roadblock for your guild but isn't for others etc.
I can fully respect people who think it was the wrong decision, and acknowledge a lot have suffered from it but ultimately it was the right thing to do for a more settled raiding experience.
Unmitigated disaster.
People think that guilds breaking up is a zero-sum game; those people just get absorbed into the bigger guilds, right?
Wrong. When guilds break up some raiders outright quit and it can avalanche quickly as even the casual roster quits as well, due to their friends being gone. It seems like Blizzard did their very best to sever the social ties in the 10-man guilds, and guess what, people left in droves. Which of course fail-cascades into more guilds imploding (due to lack of recruitment) and quiting.
My personal experience: When we switched over to 20 man it was a train wreck, even though we had started recruitment about 10 months before we actually started raiding, and the officers were really passionate about it. Some people quit 1 month into WoD and then we were in a constant rollercoaster of flash-recruiting to go to Mythic. People complained about lack of progress, drama ensued by some people that thought the rest were not pulling their weight etc. Soon the entire leadership team quit and while the guild still exists today and actually raid 20-man mythic, almost all the old-timers have quit the game altogether. I quit as well since we had lost our group identity and raiding didn't feel as fun anymore, with the group being 80% new people. Legion is the first expansion I do not consider buying even just for the levelling experience.
In reality this only allowed Blizzard to get lazy; so it's a huge win for the devs (or is it, the sub numbers say otherwise) and a mjor fail for the majority of the raiding community.
Don't care. We had the option to raid 10 man on the highest difficulty before this expansion. We sure as hell should have it now and in the future.
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Nonsense. Most of the bosses were drastically easier on 25 man. The only one I can remember being significantly HARDER on 25 man was Klaxxi.
Garrosh 25 was an utter joke compared to Garrosh 10.
And why did 10 man need to be done away with? We had 10 man for 6 years with great success and reception, and other MMOs have small raid sizes too (typically 8 man). It's clear that MMO players want smaller raid sizes. It's just more enjoyable.
See, this is what's great about having these arguments in 2016. I can just point at all the other MMOs that opted for smaller raid sizes....INCLUDING WoW... whenever someone like you brings up nonsense arguments about how 10 man is bad and needed to go. If it needed to go, why did we keep it for so long in the first place? Why did other MMOs opt for that direction as well? Your argument might have held water back in 2007 but a decade later it's easily debunked. So, one again: I LOVE the convenience of having years of 10-man raid design backing up my side in these sorts of arguments. It sure helps a lot and it sure does help expose the baselessness of arguments like yours.
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And there you have it, folks. THIS is what every one of these arguments turns into. People sit here and rant on about how people just need to harden up and accept a general reversion to the "good old days" but as soon as they are confronted with any counter arguments their points break down and they quit the thread after about a page.
Sorry to say this, but to me it sounds like you were unable to adapt to playing with new players ...
As you just said yourself, your guild is still raiding mythic, you just stepped out.
You can't really expect things to stay the same when you go up in roster from 10 to 20 raiders. Changes are expected in leadership and the social side of the game.
I wonder how the mythic + dungeons will be for people. So many people seem to enjoy playing with small groups. That might actually be part of the answer for them I myself like larger groups as it's often allot less stressfull to raid lead
For all the people using ToT and BRF as metrics even after their patch, keep in mind 2 things:
- people keep doing BRF Mythic after it was relevant because it has a 100% drop mount and really nice transmog which ToT did not had.
- BRF mythic still drop BiS trinket for unholy DKs.
There are more reasons to do BRF than ToT outside its tier and yet less players did it.
During march 2015 WoD still had 7.1Million players (BRF was released early February at that point it was close to 8M if you look at the graphs), while ToT was released in March 2013 and the game had around 8.3Million players so please stop using the decline of players to make a point.
Last edited by Magnosh; 2016-05-20 at 12:27 PM.
I wouldn't know if mythic raids were successful in WoD because I got bored with the raids after completing them in normal and heroic, and didn't feel compelled to run them in mythic.
What I don't understand is the I like bigger raids thus its the only way to play mentality. I prefer smaller raid sizes I raided 40, 25, 10, and now 20 and I by far enjoyed the 10 more than any of the others but I don't and have never wanted to block those that prefer larger sizes from doing what they enjoy. We had a system that allowed both that while it caused arguments between people trying to wave their E-peen around largely worked well for 2 xpacs.
What it looks like to me is there are a lot of people out there who were upset when 10 mans came about because some of their raiders left the 25 man guild they were in previously (like I myself did giving up an officer position on a server first guild) opting for the 10 man route because the raid size fit them better and that caused problems or killed their previously successful 25 man. These people had the same options then that they are spouting off now, merge or recruit to fill the roster and keep raiding the size you prefer but they ran into issues finding people to fill those slots however it can't possibly be because most of the player-base just preferred the smaller groups no it had to be because the 10 man was evil and easy and was stealing away their raiders blinding them from the true light of the larger raid sizes.
I have raided in every raid size this game has to offer and at the highest level in each and I continue to raid 20M today however my enjoyment in raids today isn't close to what it was the last two xpacs and that is 100% the fault of 20M
You're using your own personal preference to guide your thinking on the matter. While you may have preferred 10Ms and they were undeniably more popular than larger raids, the popularity of 10M had more to do with the logistical ease of the raid difficulty than the fact that "most people preferred small raids." The developers themselves have stated on multiple occasions they prefer balancing larger raid sizes because in a game with as many specs/classes as WoW, it's the only way to get fair representation. The fact that Blizzard incentivized 25M for the entirety of the time 10 and 25M existed is further proof of this.
It's not so much people hate 10M because it took away from their 25M, it's that while 10 and 25 coexisted, the raids were plagued by balance issues between the two raid sizes as one was always harder/easier than the other. 20M fixed raid size fixed this issue. Now, you can argue the size of the raid they chose is "too large" and that's fine, but I dislike this commonly used hyperbole of "10M HC was more popular" used to discount the opinions of players who preferred larger raid sizes. Class representation means something even in endgame raiding and that is simply impossible with a smaller fixed size.
"Hardcore" is a question of attitude in my book, not time investment. We also only raid 3 days a week and do Mythic, but to describe any of us as "casual" would be silly, and we play way more than that during the week.
"Casual" to me simply means not to be striving to play optimally or caring about that (and there's nothing wrong with that) and generally struggling to get into, yet alone clear, the highest raiding difficulty. Whether that's due to inability or lack of interest, whatever.