Do you think the change to multiple raid sizes has ruined Cataclysm?

[Togglespark]

I was originally for it, but I've thought about it quite a bit recently and come to the conclusion that all it did was create two separate communities, and a vast rift in between them.

Let's face it; some 10 man fights are easier than their 25 man counterparts, and vice versa. I've raided both in every single tier on heroic and normal while relevant, and I can safely say that. Don't get me wrong, the amount of balancing required in order to properly balance both to the extent they have been is incredible. Let me just start you off with a small word about of this effect:

"Think about cleaning your room for just a second. For some, that might mean just making your bed, and putting your clothes away. Let's say that means you cleaned your room to 99%. What if you were asked to clean your room to 99.9%? That might entail sorting every single thing in your desk, cleaning all the lint and dust off of every surface, vaccuming, neatly re-arranging your clothes in your closet so they look neat. But what about pushing the envelope further? 99.99% clean might entail going through the carpet with a special brush to brush all the hairs out of it left by pets or yourself."

Think about that just for now. Now, consider that that might only be leaving out 1 thing out of 10,000 things. When we have DPS charts and boss health and thousands and thousands of figures to balance and account for, and new abilities, different specs, weapon procs, stat balance, swing timers, EVERYTHING, everything that possibly might need to be balanced, you have your work cut out for you. Now, think about all that math that needs to be correctly tuned with likely thousands of man-hours needed to do so, and then double it. You have to balance both 10 and 25 player raids. You also have to balance PvP to a degree without drastically altering abilities in a pvp environment.

Now with all that being said, just the fact that both are so well tuned as they are (and you know they are well tuned all things considered), that's an achievement in itself. But why would you want to complicate it to such a degree? Surely, with so many things to balance, at one point or another mistakes can and will be made; it's probability. Over a long enough period of time, the chances of a "Mistake" happening is absolute.

Forgive me for dredging this out in a long post, but I don't think a lot of people who say raiding is horribly imbalanced think as to why it might be, or feel that Blizzard simply doesn't give a shit. It's not that they don't care, I think it's just that it's nearly impossible to achieve the same level of balance in one raid situation than it does in several.

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So, my main point after explaining all that is that I believe 10's and 25's will never be balanced. It's just not mathematically reasonable under such a short time frame as to when raids are released. Starcraft wasn't balanced for several years after Brood War was released to the extent it is today, but they didn't have new units every 7 months, or changes to whole buildings, etc.

I would like to say they could fix this, but I don't think they can. If they chose to say "We are going to take away 10 player raids and revert to a Burning Crusade model", they would most likely hemmorhage players. There are about 4 10 player raids to every 25 player raid group now (ranked), and even sparser of a ratio in non-ranked guilds. If they decided to do a full 10 player raid setting, they would effectively destroy the professional raiding scene, and several thousand guilds which generally have the more experienced players and long-term subscriptions. MOST pro-raiding guilds are 25 player because they've been this way since the beginning of Cataclysm. A lot of them have died already because 10s are much more lucrative to new people. Why would you want the difficulty of finding 25 competent people when it's easy for them to join a 10 right away and begin raiding?

As someone once said, Blizzard is effectively in a lose-lose-lose situation. Keeping raiding in the current model clearly has done little good for Warcraft's health in general, and has destroyed more guilds in a year than have most likely been torn apart in the now 6 years I've been playing.

The reason I've stayed with WoW so long? Well, there are a few. Mostly friends. Lore. The fun of raiding. It's fun, but it's been very dull in Cataclysm. Firelands was too small and generic with hardly any memorable lore, and let's face it; Dragon Soul isn't very climactic. It's not because of LFR at all; it's because the bosses are tired, predictable, and in fact, most of them are just re-used graphics.

The reason I loved a raid like Ulduar was because while you leveled, you learned the faces of the bosses. Each of them had personalities, and even inside the raid they had decent scripting. The story about an old god in itself is exciting; they're the true evil in Azeroth and Titan lore. The graphics were some of the best yet seen in Warcraft just in terms of artistic detail, and each model was unique, refreshing, and was very easy to look at. I still get chills thinking about 0 light Yogg; you felt intimidated when you walked into his room every pull a little bit.

I have no idea why Blizzard is fucking up their raids so hard, but I think it's just an unfortunate series of events. The lore around Deathwing isn't nearly as good as Titan lore. Titan lore is more original than a big dragon that wants to kill everyone. Not only that, but who the heck are the bosses in Dragon Soul? They're not just unmemorable, they're practically unknown with not even new lore to encompass them.

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Why I think MOP could be the saving grace of Cataclysm: New lore. I think with total freedom in art direction, lore, and some better mechanics in-game for story telling, I think they could easily make another Ulduar-level raid when it comes to enjoyment and memorability. They also have equal opportunity to totally mess it up with predictable characters or bland storyline. I think they might do it, that is if they aren't actually trying to cut costs. Dragon Soul just felt SO lazy that it couldn't have been just poorly executed, but we could all be wrong.

TL;DR. I don't think 10/25 being "equal" is doing any good for raiding, and I believe they could be successful if they were separate. I also believe MOP could easily produce exceptional content at the level of Ulduar, but could equally be as generic as Cataclysm was if they actually ARE trying to cut costs.

PS: I think I gained some Geek Experience Points there. Gotta love the long-winded posts about a video game, right?

[Oatz]

At the end of the day, I just enjoy 10mans better. I don't want to feel like I have to do 25m (something I don't enjoy). In fact being able to do 10m competitively is what enabled my guild to even exist as it is.

They really don't have to be equal on every fight, and they aren't going to be. Who cares? If it's a competition-sense, then 25m can rank themselves with other 25m and 10m can compare with other 10m.

At the end of the day, people vote with their feet. The VAST majority of people are doing 10m.

[Sildor]

I completely agree with you. However, at this point it's pretty much too late for blizzard to do anything. 25-man is already breathing its last breaths, and unless something radical is done 25-man will be no more. Since the vast majority of guilds right now are 10-man guilds, I don't see it as a likely step by blizzard to go back to 25-man being the dominating raid size. At this point very few guilds are even doing 25-mans, so the development time spent on it is fairly wasted, not to mention the extreme dissatisfaction within the community of the two raid sizes and the hateful 10v25 debate is not helping. The most likely step is one raid size, most likely 10 or 15-mans.


Unfortunately, the two raid sizes being considered equal will just have to be added to the pile of bad mistakes they made but can't really undo since the community got too used to it and backtracking would be even more painful.

There was nothing wrong with the Wrath model, nobody really complained about it, and yet they had to screw it up...

[Deleted]

I would love the removal of 10 mans and 25 mans and the introductions of 15 mans, would be a perfect raid size.

However if they keep 10 and 25 man, I don't think there should be any advantage of raiding 25 man over 10 man (Although there already is presently with more loot etc etc) just because a few people want to raid 25 man and have blizzard force people to raid 25 man.

There was nothing wrong with the Wrath model, nobody really complained about it, and yet they had to screw it up...

There was nothing right with the that model, it forced people to raid 25 man due to having superior loot and what not. And not sure how you cannot say people didn't complain about it, or do you think the current model was introduced by a whim from Blizzard? The new raid model is the best thing that ever happened to wow.

[TecPontificates]

Agree with Oatz; 10 vs. 25 are different leagues as far as ranking competition goes.

I used to enjoy 10 man raiding as an accessory to 25 man raiding. I am hoping that in Mists of Pandaria they will use the same tech they invented for LFR to abolish the concept of a raid lockout and instead make it a per-encounter loot lockout so that we have the option of doing both every week if we choose (or to even raid with more than one group on the same character).

The only negative impact the change has had is that it is slightly harder to recruit for 25 man guilds because as Oatz mentioned many people prefer 10s, and that there are fewer 25 man guilds on each server. This has probably been great for Blizzard as their income from server transfers has surely gone up.

I would also much prefer if your achievements noted which version of the encounter you completed it on. Instead of a single criteria achievement, I'd like to see:

Heroic: Madness of Deathwing

• Defeated Deathwing on heroic difficulty (10 player)
• Defeated Deathwing on heroic difficulty (25 player)

Whereby completing one of the two criteria nets you the achievement. When we look at applicants for 25 man raiding we obviously prefer people with 25 man experience since many of the encounters are very different in the two modes.

[Pikevinge]

No, so much more goes into an expansion than just raid-lockouts. One single thing doesn't "ruin" an expansion.

[Seriss]

Multiple raid sizes are fine. They're cool. But the shared lockout is not

[Deleted]

I like the different raid sizes, I think that the shared lockout sucks as it basically cuts your raid time in half. Despite the fact that it now matches gear across all sizes, 10
mans in wotlk felt like a good entry point.

[Oatz]

If you don't have a shared lockout, then you feel compelled to do both 10 and 25 or otherwise fall behind. Shared lockout is good.

[Deleted]

Has anyone mentioned to the op we've been doing 10man before Cataclysm?

[Bullettime]

Copied from the other thread

Blizzard needs to consolidate the raid sizes in order to be able to bring some of the luster back into raiding. They have too many settings to balance and the 10vs25 split keeps them from making needed adjustments to either setting without fear of repercussions by the playerbase and a potential pendulum shift in what players raid.

10m is easily the most popular option among players, and not just for the easy way out that many 25m players seem to consider it. Many of the 25 > 10 conversions that happened were done in T11 which was significantly overtuned and more difficult on 10m outside of Al'akir. If the the vast majority of the playerbase seems to prefer 10m raiding, and let's face it, they almost always have and only did 25m for the obvious rewards, compromising for a 15m setting could give the best of both worlds while giving that small intimate setting. By focusing on the single setting, Blizzard would have more room to add content to the raid as it's time spent on tuning the content, they could fix loot issues such as the RNG and loot saturation issue that murders 10m, not have the legendary acquisition issues, etc etc. 10m gives the intimate raiding many want but is too buff and comp restrictive and is hard to balance accordingly. 15m would alleviate that without any drastic shifts.

The raiding game would only get better if Blizzard could focus their development time on only LFR, 15m, and 15m heroic instead of LFR, 10m, 10m heroic, 25m, 25m heroic.

[Togglespark]

Switching to 15m has the big issue of destroying some of the most loyal of the fanbase; the hardcore raiders in the top (still existing) 25 player raid groups. A lot of sponsorships are 25 player raids like Paragon or Blood Legion, and to kill those guilds effectively (which it most likely would; just the drama alone) would definitely hurt the community in a very poor way. Think about it; Blizzard taking a shot at their most valued customers? I can hear the forum posts now. "Blizzard doesn't care about its loyal players", etc.

And yes, some guilds have raided 10's since Wrath, and heck, even since BC. You guys were a huge minority then.

[Oatz]

Well, the same arguments were made when they reduced 40 to 25.

[Sadinar]

While I definitely agree on several points, I think you're assuming a correlation with a causation here. I agree that dragon soul/firelands has felt...bland, for lack of a better word, but it has nothing to do with 10m vs 25m raiding. You said it yourself:

I have no idea why Blizzard is fucking up their raids so hard, but I think it's just an unfortunate series of events.

And I agree. I think a big part of the problem was the fundamental design decision with cataclysm.

With Burning Crusade and Wrath they created NEW things. For wrath they had to create all new things with the scourge and everything that went on in Northrend. New things were designed, developed, and put into the game. But look at Cata. Most of the design time was spent revamping the leveling process. There is a ridiculous amount of new content while leveling. Unfortunately, its new in that we haven't done it before, its not new in how we view it. To most players, being able to level more efficiently is nice, but it wasn't a deal breaker for us. Not having new things is a deal breaker for us for raiding.

Now, Blizzard has said before(and I think it makes sense) that raid instances and the like aren't developed entirely after the expansion starts. ICC and BT and stuff were definitely thought out and designed etc before the expansions were released. For cataclysm, much of the development time was too spread out; we had new level 85 content that needed to be created, new dungeons and raids that needed to be created, but the designers ALSO had to go back and redo nearly every zone. Thats a lot of split in design time that I think the effects have been felt throughout the expansion.

I do think the 10vs25 has slowed down raid development. As you said, there is more things that need to be accounted for, and I think its pretty clear designed even difficulties(or even close to even difficulties) for 10m and 25m eats up more time. But thats not why these raids feel bland, i think. I think its more that so much development time was spent pre-cata revamping the leveling zones, and not enough was done actually generating content at the high level.

And because of this, I AM hopeful for MoP. They can focus exclusively on high-end raid content and don't need to worry about the old zones(except perhaps a little change to BC zones). They can move past it, and given the new freedom and time, I'm hopeful that it will play out in an effective manner.