Suggestion: A 6-12-24 Raiding Model?

[Deleted]

EDIT: 6= core dungeon group, 12 and 24 are the raid sizes in my suggestion. Apologies to those that got missleaded by the tittle

During Cataclysm, we saw the raiding community divided and finally weakened from the endless 10vs25 debate.

A recent blue reply, regarding future plans for raiding, openly declared that this dual approach is the way we will raid in MoP as well.
If the system remains unchanged, unfortunately it will lead to the extinction of large raiding teams, and the reduction of interest in people to raid.

Rather than debate on the same topic though, we should better provide feedback on the ways to make dual approach viable again for both sizes.

There are many variables that define this equation, more specifically.

1) Loot
2) Achievements/Realm first/Tittles
3) Locks
4) Management of small size vs. management of large size.
5) People preferences.

By ignoring (4), Blizzard assumed that by equalizing (1), (2) and making (3) shared, they will achieve (5), thus people will select the size they prefer, and that they won’t feel “forced” to raid both sizes same week to maximize loot.

The result was not the expected (or the one stated as expected), and the debate 10vs25, is the immediate result of that failure.

It was predicted before cataclysm even started, and it got verified during the course of this expansion.

How can Blizzard continue to support “intimate” and “epic” approach to raids?

There is not an answer that can satisfy 100% everybody. What we need to consider though, is that to support two approaches, you have to make them both meaningful choices.

Let’s go back to the equation’s variables, and for this thread let’s focus entirely on (4).

Management of large group vs. small group is considerably harder. Thus you will either have less potent team than you would have if you were focusing on small size, with same efford, or you will have to make the -in game- team management a part time job to achieve the same rewards.
Now you could argue, let them do small raids then. The problem is, that by discouraging those people to organize large raids, you are also denying the choice for people that prefer large raids, but don’t want to lead to go for it.
What we could do to ease the burden then?
Stop thinking of 10 and 25 being the god given numbers to raid, is the fast and correct answer.

One basic problem of the 25 people raids is that they don’t scale directly from 10. This makes the transition particularly tricky task.
A model where everything is direct multiplier of one another, will lift this obstacle, to everyone’s favor.

Having to form a team from scratch today you have the following steps.

If you raid 10 you have to:
1) Form a 10 man group
2) Raid

If you want to raid 25 you have to:
1) Form a 10 man group
2) Raid
3) Form a second 10 man group
4) Raid with 2 groups per week
5) Form a 3rd man group
6) Raid with 3 groups per week
7) Combine the groups by EXCLUDING 5 people and form a 25
8) Raid 25

Now, if you had the direct multiplier logic, the following thing will happen

You want to raid small size? It is the same
1) Form a small size group
2) Raid

But you want to raid large size? HERE IS THE DIFFERENCE
1) Form one small size group
2) Raid
3) Form a second small size group
4) Raid
5) Combine the groups WITHOUT EXCLUDING people
6) Raid large size

You don't have to form a 3rd group(less work) and you don’t have to exclude some people that trusted you.

What should those sizes better be?
The raiding groups are a given number of the base dungeon group.
We have 5 people dungeon groups and as such the easier to apply model would have been the 5-10-20.
Only by doing such a transition, you have a way more functional raiding model, which makes the job of the officers that want to raid in large groups easier.

What I would like to suggest though, is the change of the core dungeon group from 5 to 6 people.
That would require a raid UI change but also it would mean only benefits for ALL 3 sizes.

For Dungeons.
It would make the queues in RDF shorter, the make up of groups in general, less tank and healer depended.

For 12 man raids
1) MoP will add Monks. By swapping to 12 we will still be able to include all classes in the raid. There has NEVER been smt called raid in wow that didn’t have the option to include all classes.
2) It will make setup easier. You re more likely to include all buffs and special abilities in a 12 people group vs. 10 people group.

For 24 man raids
It will make the creation and maintenance of teams easier.

A change like that, combined with separation of achievements and potentially different raid locks but shared loot locks, will provide a more healthy raiding model, that would still be in the direction that blizzard prefers, thus offering intimate and epic approach to encounters.
I do believe that a 6-12-24 raiding model, worth’s the trouble of changing the raid UI, I actually believe that it worth’s every cent they will spent on it.

Think about it better.
Even the fact that there is not going to be a 10 and a 25 in our thoughts, will ease the transition from Small VS Large, to a Small AND Large mindset.

Your thoughts?

[Deleted]

This setup has been debated over and over on these forums, the polls that have come out with them always seem to suggest that actually the majority would prefer a 6/12/24, there are no cons to it whatsoever, only pros. Blizzard devs have even stated on the official forums that they do look into changing raid and party sizes to improve the game experience, pity they have not yet.

Only issues I can see are that retuning all 0-85 content to a 6/12/24 layout would take up alot of dev time, but maybe they could just change the dungeons to 6man (this would definitely be a must have if 86-90 dungeons were 6man) which hopefully would not eat up too much time, especially considering its not like they need to make lowbie dungeons tightly tuned anyway, they can just make them delibrately alot weaker than the players. Raids I guess they could just leave alone in the style of the old 40man raids which have not had their numbers required tweaked.

All in all very much support this idea and Im sure the majority of posters in this thread will. Just a pity to see it pop up every month and not really be taken seriously as far as we know by blizzard.

Blizzard need to make drastic changes to their game to complete with the newgen MMOs coming out, they need to innovate and this is one of the few ways they could do so successfully.

[smokii]

tbh i think the problem is that blizz puts the ball in the players court too often.

blizz: "you people complain about every design decision we make, so here you go, make your own damn mind up"

seems to be what has happened.

the problem i see, is that this shouldn't be a choice of a player, it shouldn't be forced onto the responsibility of the guild/pug leader to make the decision, 10 or 25? normal or hard mode? LFR, normal mode then HM? straight to HM? stay at normal mode and be done with it? turn the buff off? use the buff at 10%? 15%? 20%?

i think it's a dodgy move by blizz to put these kind of volatile decisions to the player base, as often guild leaders will have to make difficult decisions - i'd much rather they go back to the old TBC style of raids where you had 10 man raids and you had 25 man raids and they drop gear of X ilvl. not this raid is 10 and 25 man with a hardmode that you can switch on or off and in a couple of months we'll even nerf the bosses by 5/10/15/20%.

to me it actually deals with the scale of things better. for instance, kara is a perfect example of a 10 man raid designed to be a 10 man raid. it's a castle effectively, with narrow corridors and regular sized bosses with the odd dragon thrown in as a challenge (both nightbane and netherspite were challenging fights). but with something like deathwing, where it's a great big fucking dragon aspect, you'd almost want it to be a 40 man raid to really amplify the fact that he's a planet-fucking dragon aspect. being able to take him down with 10 men strips away from the roleplay of that experience (not that i am a roleplayer, but in a roleplay game things like this can make or break the immersion)

take ragnaros for instance - in vanilla, you needed 40 people to take him down, yea ok we were only level 60, but from an immersion PoV, it doesn't matter what level you are, you need 40 capable men and women to bring down this monstrosity. yet he's not even at full power, this is just an avatar of ragnaros!

then comes firelands, ragnaros is on his home turf, we walk in with 10 guys and bend the dude over - it totally breaks the immersion. if it was supposed to be realistic that in vanilla you needed 40 people to kill ragnaros, shouldn't you need like 100 people to kill him on his home turf, or at the very least the largest raid size possible?

honestly, i think they need to stop with the 10 Vs 25 man choice and have specific 10 man raids with ilvl relevant to the difficulty and 25 man raids with ilvl relevant to the difficulty. the balancing act they are trying to pull off by having multiple dificulties AND multiple raid sizes just doesn't work. it's one thing to give multiple difficulties, but a combination of the 2 has caused more headaches than it is worth.

with the introduction of LFR getting 10 people or 25 people together for a raid is much simpler, but the balance of 10 Vs 25 in terms of difficulty and mechanics is an impossible balancing act. i honestly think they'd be better off with:

MoP - tier 1. mogu raid - 10 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 150, 155, 160 (example ilvl's)
MoP - tier 1. Sha raid - 25 man LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 150, 155, 160
MoP - tier 2. mantid raid - 10 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 160, 165, 170
MoP - tier 2. old god raid - 25 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 160, 165, 170
MoP - tier 3. bad monkey raid - 10 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 170, 175, 180
MoP - tier 3. super bad sha raid - 25 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 170, 175, 180

giving every raid an LFR option makes them so much more accesible than trying to balance 10 Vs 25 just seems stupid at this point in the game, it also gives players more variety each tier and the ability to encourage 25 man raiding guilds again that can easily break down into 10 man raids if they have raid roster issues. oh noes, 5 people haven't shown for our 25 man raid, well lets split into 2x 10 mans and try again later in the week.

edit: appreciated 10 mans aren't on LFR, but i think they'd be better off working on a 10 man LFR and to separate the 10 and 25 man raids, than they would be trying to balance 10 and 25 man difficulties for the same ilvl's of gear off the same bosses. as long as they can provide a 10 and 25 man raiding experience each tier, i think they'd be onto a winner.

[Brett Skullcrack]

I don't think the numbers matter in reality. In reality you can't just take two 12 man raid groups and make one 24 man raid. You'd end up with 4 tanks, or too many of a particular class/spec, or whatever. And some people in your 12 man groups wouldn't want to do 24, and some don't want to raid with the people from the other group, one of the raid leaders must step aside, and so on...

The real solution, whether you want 6-12-24 or 5-10-25, is to have entirely different content for each format. If there's content you can only get to by building a highly skilled 25/24 man team, then you'll start seeing many people organizing them.

[lunchbox2042]

They should make 15 mans the only raid size. This will end the debate.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

6man isn't a raid, 12man and 24man is in many ways easier to balance and otherwise work out mechanics and loot.

If you raid with 6 people then what's your setup? 2 tanks 2 dps and 2 healers? It would make NO sense to make 6man raids, first of all think about tanking. Tanking has allways had a role of one of two in every raid tier, if you go with 6man raids that means you need two tanks out of 6 people. How would you do it with "raid buffs" in 6man raids?

I would agree that 6man DUNGEONS make sense but for actual raiding no, just no.
12man and 24man raiding makes alot of sense, easier to balance, easier to determin how much loot drops and so on.
Just look at how it's now in raiding, 10man drops 1 tier per 10 player, 25man drops 0.8 tier per 10 players. Same thing with mount drops, 25man drops 2 mounts, 10man drops 1. It makes a huge differance in the long run and it's extremely importaint in the "gearing up phase" of each tier that come out, I hope blizzard doesn't continue this method of giving out tier gear (most importaintly).

[schwarzkopf]

If there's content you can only get to by building a highly skilled 25/24 man team, then you'll start seeing many people organizing them.

Incorrect, you just have content that almost no-one sees. That is poor allocation of resources to content design.

In Vanilla - I didn't get to see most of the end game content, because it was too damn hard to find a raid team. I was level 60 in around Sept 2005, and only got half way down MC before Burning Crusade. Most of the people I know didn't get past MC, most were stuck in Strat/Scholo.

However - I think they have turned the dial WAY to far to easy in Dragon Soul... in Lich King I got to around 9/12 Normal by the end of the expansion (which more accurately reflects my skill/commitment level). In Firelands, just got to 8/8N before the Dragon Soul expansion.

With Dragon Soul, I was at 8/8 pretty much 2 months in, and am now working on heroic modes ... which seems a little 'too easy'.

[Brett Skullcrack]

6man isn't a raid, 12man and 24man is in many ways easier to balance and otherwise work out mechanics and loot.

If you raid with 6 people then what's your setup?

He didn't mean 6 man raid groups, he meant changing 5 man dungeons into 6 man dungeons. Which would also alleviate the tank shortage if you get 4 instead of 3 dps per group.

---------- Post added 2012-03-01 at 03:09 PM ----------

Incorrect, you just have content that almost no-one sees. That is poor allocation of resources to content design.

Nope. "Almost nobody" in a game with 10 million people is still a very large group, worked perfectly fine in vanilla and TBC. It makes no difference how many people see some particular piece of content, what matters is that everyone has fresh content that suits their skill level and play style -- something WoW is missing now. If anything, Cata showed us that "optimally" allocating resources to content design leads to a dull game that people don't want to play.

I think you hit the exact fallacy that's causing WoW to fail: Thinking in terms of optimal resource allocations and business motives. Instead they should be putting the players first, like they did in Vanilla. At the end of Vanilla they had created enough content to keep 95% of their player base busy, yet they still went ahead and created a great raid called Naxx for the remaining 5% -- that's how you build a loyal fanbase. It worked for Apple too. If you look at their product development process through conventional business goggles, you'd call it insanely inefficient, waste of resources, and down right idiotic, yet it's a process that has made the company one of the most valuable in the world -- because that process only cares about the user, and pays no attention to budget constraints or any other business nonsense.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

He didn't mean 6 man raid groups, he meant changing 5 man dungeons into 6 man dungeons. Which would also alleviate the tank shortage if you get 4 instead of 3 dps per group.

Yeah I noticed.



The main issue I have in todays "fight" from 10man vs 25man is that the fundamental requirements (numers required) in 10man is lower per player as opposed to 25man. 10man Ultraxion for instance requires a lower dps per player than 25man does, simply meaning you have to be better or have better classes in 25man to do Ultraxion. Same thing goes for extremely many of the fights in cataclysm, THAT said the damage taken in 25man from big raid mechanics like crackle on heroic Nefarian can be mitigated with a wider use of raid cds like disc priests bubble and so on. 10man does not have that luxury, that often makes 10man slightly "harder" to survive certain mechanics which also can be the reason why dps requirements are lower on 10man.

The issue with implementing a 15man raid size is that 25man guilds that have been raiding together for years basicly have to cut away 10 of their friends while 10 has to find 5 new one. If any changes should be done then making them as small as possible is going to be ideal, the 12man raid from 10man simply means you can get your 2 replacements a permanent spot and then find 2-3 new people. For 25man guilds then going to 24 it hardly matters at all, there's allways someone that can step out in such a large group.

[Deleted]

6man isn't a raid, 12man and 24man is in many ways easier to balance and otherwise work out mechanics and loot.

If you raid with 6 people then what's your setup? 2 tanks 2 dps and 2 healers? It would make NO sense to make 6man raids, first of all think about tanking. Tanking has allways had a role of one of two in every raid tier, if you go with 6man raids that means you need two tanks out of 6 people. How would you do it with "raid buffs" in 6man raids?

I would agree that 6man DUNGEONS make sense but for actual raiding no, just no.
12man and 24man raiding makes alot of sense, easier to balance, easier to determin how much loot drops and so on.
Just look at how it's now in raiding, 10man drops 1 tier per 10 player, 25man drops 0.8 tier per 10 players. Same thing with mount drops, 25man drops 2 mounts, 10man drops 1. It makes a huge differance in the long run and it's extremely importaint in the "gearing up phase" of each tier that come out, I hope blizzard doesn't continue this method of giving out tier gear (most importaintly).

Apologies the tittle is missleading.
I did mention 6 man as the core dungeon group, 12 and 24 the raiding sizes.

Thank you for bringing the direct loot scaling into the discussion, i mentioned it in EU forums, but my post was getting too long again
It is a very important element to take under consideration for tier/normal combined loot, mounts, even legendary aquisition ratios.

To the other posters, thank you very much for your replies, i will need to read them carefully and bring my two cents in your thoughts to return the favor

[asharia]

even 10man guilds have excess people.

you cant have a roster thats exactly 10 people, because half the time someone is away and you're screwed.

you have 11-12 people, and if you have extra on the night, people take it in turns to sit a boss. if you dont need something off a particular boss, offer to sit out and let joe in. then, someone else will come out and let you back in next boss.
it also helps for bosses that might require more or less healers, or more or less tanks or dps etc.

a lot of the time you will have people away, and only have 10-11 show up for a night

[schwarzkopf]

Nope. "Almost nobody" in a game with 10 million people is still a very large group, worked perfectly fine in vanilla and TBC.

Sorry - but if 1% of people see it and it uses up 50% of the development resources, that is factually poor allocation of resources.

It did NOT work fine in Vanilla...

[Deleted]

This setup has been debated over and over on these forums, the polls that have come out with them always seem to suggest that actually the majority would prefer a 6/12/24, there are no cons to it whatsoever, only pros. Blizzard devs have even stated on the official forums that they do look into changing raid and party sizes to improve the game experience, pity they have not yet.

Yep I have seen it in the past myself, and if I remember well, I did not support a poster talking about it. Back then though, there was complete silence from blizzard, and I did support the idea of one size raids for the next (unanounced) expansion. Still believe it is the permanent way out of debates, and that has many advandages.
What I am suggesting here, was written with my mind on this statement from a US blue

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...01?page=13#259

On the other hand, this model does have the benefit of the smallest possible impact to current guilds, while being infinately more functional than current model is.

Only issues I can see are that retuning all 0-85 content to a 6/12/24 layout would take up alot of dev time, but maybe they could just change the dungeons to 6man (this would definitely be a must have if 86-90 dungeons were 6man) which hopefully would not eat up too much time, especially considering its not like they need to make lowbie dungeons tightly tuned anyway, they can just make them delibrately alot weaker than the players. Raids I guess they could just leave alone in the style of the old 40man raids which have not had their numbers required tweaked.

Current dungeons are undertuned already. I think they can safely do the transition without risking smt important.

All in all very much support this idea and Im sure the majority of posters in this thread will. Just a pity to see it pop up every month and not really be taken seriously as far as we know by blizzard.

Blizzard need to make drastic changes to their game to complete with the newgen MMOs coming out, they need to innovate and this is one of the few ways they could do so successfully.

QFT.

tbh i think the problem is that blizz puts the ball in the players court too often.

blizz: "you people complain about every design decision we make, so here you go, make your own damn mind up"

seems to be what has happened.

I will have to agree with you on that, regarding LFR, RDF, and Cataclysm raiding model, and with ICC buff and DS nerf. Those are not real choices though. You can't raid with the buff off, you can't keep doing dungeons the old way, you can't raid 25 if there is no 25 left.

Those are fake choices deliberately placed there, while blizzard is actually pushing things to the direction they believe is best for the game. In the bottom line, they keep making the choices for us, since usually the one path is easy and streamlined, and the other full of new obstacles, that were not there before. This is another issue though and I would prefer to keep it on topic.

honestly, i think they need to stop with the 10 Vs 25 man choice and have specific 10 man raids with ilvl relevant to the difficulty and 25 man raids with ilvl relevant to the difficulty. the balancing act they are trying to pull off by having multiple dificulties AND multiple raid sizes just doesn't work. it's one thing to give multiple difficulties, but a combination of the 2 has caused more headaches than it is worth.

When they went for 10 and 25 sharing content, a part of me reacted bad. I felt the immersion was lost. You can't fight a boss with 25 and then the same boss with 10. A boss is an entity, can he be scaled according to the number of people placed against him?
TBC was a much more RPG model than wrath and cata was. But after 2 expansions I don't believe they would reverse it.
Furthermore, for the guilds back then as for the guilds today, the odd 10/25 model was making the transition hell. A 12/24 would work much better, even in TBC raid model.

edit: appreciated 10 mans aren't on LFR, but i think they'd be better off working on a 10 man LFR and to separate the 10 and 25 man raids, than they would be trying to balance 10 and 25 man difficulties for the same ilvl's of gear off the same bosses. as long as they can provide a 10 and 25 man raiding experience each tier, i think they'd be onto a winner.

If they design separate content, I estimate that there should be small size LFR as well, since LFR is part of the game now. But I seriously doubt that this is likely to happen when they obviously try to reduce costs, and because for small guilds, half of the content will be “the lost raids of MoP”.

Tbh I think there is just too much ado about nothing (or rather for the amount of people that raid). 800 000 shared the raiding sizes of 10 or 25 in normal and HM. Then suddenly LFR was introduced and that rocketed up to 2 million. I feel there is just too much request for tinkering with something that is used by quite so few people (compared to pvp or other non-raid content)

LFR is NOT raiding m8. It is a theme park for people to see how raid design is, boss models look like and then roll for loot.

That said, my beef is that usually with that fact that a 5 man dungeon needs 1,3,1 (tank dps healer) a 10 man raid needs 1-2, 5-7, 2-3 and a 25 man 1-2, 15-18, 2-5 (or something). Ideally you have a 5 man group and fights are designed so you grab 5 x 5 man groups and that is a 25 man raid. Actually it was the "unfair" treatment of tank and healer spots that cause our guild the most problems in the end.

The dungeon stopped being a social activity since wrath. People meet with other people only in normal mode raids in our days. That is why to use 5 man group as base and state that 2X5=10 and 5X5=25 is faulse.
The problem is that 25=2,5X10. That is an odd number and it creates many extra problems, next to the ones you cannot avoid when you prefer and try to raid in the large group for raids.
If you actually read my post you will see it explained extensively.
Also bare in mind that although not all wow players raid, many care to raid when and if they have time at some point.
Also, each tier's total number of raiders, indicates the ACTIVE raiders and not the total of the playerbase that raided at some point during the 7 years that this game is available.
Raiding is much more important than the % of customers that raid at any given moment.

I don't think the numbers matter in reality. In reality you can't just take two 12 man raid groups and make one 24 man raid. You'd end up with 4 tanks, or too many of a particular class/spec, or whatever. And some people in your 12 man groups wouldn't want to do 24, and some don't want to raid with the people from the other group, one of the raid leaders must step aside, and so on...

DS raid required from 10s to have 1,5 tanks 5+0,5+0,5 DPS and 2,5 healers.
You want to say that someone that tanks in 12 cannot dps in 24? Or that someone that heals in 12 cannot dps in 24?

The numbers matter for the given raid model I am refairing to. In the given Cataclysm model, combined with blizzard announcement, and RDF problems in dungeons, a 6-12-24 IS more functional than a 5-10-25.

If you leave that out and state:

The real solution, whether you want 6-12-24 or 5-10-25, is to have entirely different content for each format. If there's content you can only get to by building a highly skilled 25/24 man team, then you'll start seeing many people organizing them.

Then I can agree with you totally on the matter that many more large teams will be formed by the people to see all the content available.
Still, even in a TBC like model, direct scaling from 12 to 24 will offer bigger functionality if you are after upsizing, and it will allow larger guilds to downsize easier as well to experience the 12 man content.

They should make 15 mans the only raid size. This will end the debate.

One size raids have MANY pros and 2 cons

1)Existing guilds will have to alter their roster drastically
2)There will not be choice. I don't find it as a draw back, but apparently Blizzard wants to support “intimate” and “epic”.

I wouldn't argue at all if they were to announce that we will have 15 or 18 or 20 people raids only in MoP.
But I focused on explaining how to make a system with choices more viable, having in mind that blizzard wants to maintain a model that offers choices.

Incorrect, you just have content that almost no-one sees. That is poor allocation of resources to content design.

In Vanilla - I didn't get to see most of the end game content, because it was too damn hard to find a raid team. I was level 60 in around Sept 2005, and only got half way down MC before Burning Crusade. Most of the people I know didn't get past MC, most were stuck in Strat/Scholo.

However - I think they have turned the dial WAY to far to easy in Dragon Soul... in Lich King I got to around 9/12 Normal by the end of the expansion (which more accurately reflects my skill/commitment level). In Firelands, just got to 8/8N before the Dragon Soul expansion.

With Dragon Soul, I was at 8/8 pretty much 2 months in, and am now working on heroic modes ... which seems a little 'too easy'.

I have friends in my realm that were top level and had similar activity in Vanila.
I will also have to agree that DS is tuned WAY to easy as well.

But 40s are not 25s(24s)
And gating in Vanila and TBC is absent from today's raid model.

Having the above in mind I will have to agree with Brett's quote on your thoughts.

Nope. "Almost nobody" in a game with 10 million people is still a very large group, worked perfectly fine in vanilla and TBC. It makes no difference how many people see some particular piece of content, what matters is that everyone has fresh content that suits their skill level and play style -- something WoW is missing now. If anything, Cata showed us that "optimally" allocating resources to content design leads to a dull game that people don't want to play.

I think you hit the exact fallacy that's causing WoW to fail: Thinking in terms of optimal resource allocations and business motives. Instead they should be putting the players first, like they did in Vanilla. At the end of Vanilla they had created enough content to keep 95% of their player base busy, yet they still went ahead and created a great raid called Naxx for the remaining 5% -- that's how you build a loyal fanbase.

With the remark, that back then, gating was preventing people from seeing content that was within their skill and potentials.
Again though, we re going off topic, so I will not expand more into it.

even 10man guilds have excess people.

you cant have a roster thats exactly 10 people, because half the time someone is away and you're screwed.

you have 11-12 people, and if you have extra on the night, people take it in turns to sit a boss. if you dont need something off a particular boss, offer to sit out and let joe in. then, someone else will come out and let you back in next boss.
it also helps for bosses that might require more or less healers, or more or less tanks or dps etc.

a lot of the time you will have people away, and only have 10-11 show up for a night

Trying to relate this to anything written in this thread and I fail to do so without starting wild assumptions.
Never said that a 10 group runs with 10 people only without problems, or a 25 for that matter.
Never said also that 12 group would, or 24.
When I say
1)Create a 10 man group
2)Raid
I obviously mean a group of people that according to attendance is enough to keep raids going.
Care to elaborate?

Again, thanks to everybody for your thoughts on the matter
Keep them coming!

[cFortyfive]

Sorry - but if 1% of people see it and it uses up 50% of the development resources, that is factually poor allocation of resources.

It did NOT work fine in Vanilla...

According to that they'd just need to improve the space in between the mailboxes in stormwind and Orgrimmar which is like 99% of the content for 99% of the customers.
Apart from the easier scaling I don't see that much improvement though. This alone might of course be worth it.

[Brett Skullcrack]

Sorry - but if 1% of people see it and it uses up 50% of the development resources, that is factually poor allocation of resources.

"Poor allocation" by what definition? That's what they did in vanilla and TBC and sub numbers were skyrocketing all the way through. It's only in WotLK when they started cutting corners and trying to use the same content for everyone that sub growth hit a wall, and in Cata where they further cut back on content (8 or 7 boss raid "tiers" lol) when subs started plummeting.

---------- Post added 2012-03-01 at 08:57 PM ----------

With the remark, that back then, gating was preventing people from seeing content that was within their skill and potentials.

Eh, what "gating"? Everyone's monthly fee has always bought them exactly the same thing, access to the game. How far you get in the game has been then up to only your skill and time spent. Well, until the new model where Blizzard feels that players should not be required to actually play to "see" all the content and get the gear.

[PBitt]

Yeah, 6 man raids don't really make much sense. It's a five man group with one more added person, I wouldn't really call that a raid...making heroics harder is all you need to satisfy decently challenging content for small groups. I would support bumping 10 mans to 12 mans to allow a little more room for composition/buffs etc but that's about it...what difference is there between 24 and 25 man? Yes, one person I know but that just doesn't make sense to change, it's not as simple as doubling everything from one version to the next.

As a current 10 man raider, they really need to add a little more incentive to the 25ers...yes they get legendaries faster and I would argue you are more likely to gear up faster, but I would be totally cool if the solution was as simple as, rather than having a complete different set of gear or changing ilvls, they simply add a piece or two that are incredibly well optimized to each boss from 25 man only. Nothing really game-breaking, but, you know, an additional option..a belt with 2 sockets and better stats instead of a belt with one socket, for instance. Otherwise, though, I really don't understand why 25s would die in MoP...yes there is LFR but that has nothing to do with people's needs to run a real 25 man raid any more than it does now.

[Brett Skullcrack]

As a current 10 man raider, they really need to add a little more incentive to the 25ers...yes they get legendaries faster and I would argue you are more likely to gear up faster, but I would be totally cool if the solution was as simple as, rather than having a complete different set of gear or changing ilvls, they simply add a piece or two that are incredibly well optimized to each boss from 25 man only.

Ok. So how would you feel about having tiers with one 8 boss raid that only has 10 man mode and one that only has 25 man mode? Since Blizzard is only putting out 7-8 man raid tiers these days anyway, you'd still get as much 10 mans content as now, but 25 man raiders would also get something to do.

[cherb]

This setup has been debated over and over on these forums, the polls that have come out with them always seem to suggest that actually the majority would prefer a 6/12/24, there are no cons to it whatsoever, only pros. Blizzard devs have even stated on the official forums that they do look into changing raid and party sizes to improve the game experience, pity they have not yet.

Only issues I can see are that retuning all 0-85 content to a 6/12/24 layout would take up alot of dev time, but maybe they could just change the dungeons to 6man (this would definitely be a must have if 86-90 dungeons were 6man) which hopefully would not eat up too much time, especially considering its not like they need to make lowbie dungeons tightly tuned anyway, they can just make them delibrately alot weaker than the players. Raids I guess they could just leave alone in the style of the old 40man raids which have not had their numbers required tweaked.

All in all very much support this idea and Im sure the majority of posters in this thread will. Just a pity to see it pop up every month and not really be taken seriously as far as we know by blizzard.

Blizzard need to make drastic changes to their game to complete with the newgen MMOs coming out, they need to innovate and this is one of the few ways they could do so successfully.

Retuning old content would be nothing more than a waste of time. 40 mans were never retuned when they moved to a 10/25 model in BC, don't see why 10/25 mans would need to be changed at all. Old content is old and should stay old.

[Zamix]

tbh i think the problem is that blizz puts the ball in the players court too often.

blizz: "you people complain about every design decision we make, so here you go, make your own damn mind up"

seems to be what has happened.

the problem i see, is that this shouldn't be a choice of a player, it shouldn't be forced onto the responsibility of the guild/pug leader to make the decision, 10 or 25? normal or hard mode? LFR, normal mode then HM? straight to HM? stay at normal mode and be done with it? turn the buff off? use the buff at 10%? 15%? 20%?

i think it's a dodgy move by blizz to put these kind of volatile decisions to the player base, as often guild leaders will have to make difficult decisions - i'd much rather they go back to the old TBC style of raids where you had 10 man raids and you had 25 man raids and they drop gear of X ilvl. not this raid is 10 and 25 man with a hardmode that you can switch on or off and in a couple of months we'll even nerf the bosses by 5/10/15/20%.

You obviously have some Guild/Raid Leadership experience as do I and I know exactly what you are talking about. Sometimes the pressure of making decisions over what to do this weekend in our raid lockouts can make or break the team and someone will cause drama and possibly /gquit.

to me it actually deals with the scale of things better. for instance, kara is a perfect example of a 10 man raid designed to be a 10 man raid. it's a castle effectively, with narrow corridors and regular sized bosses with the odd dragon thrown in as a challenge (both nightbane and netherspite were challenging fights). but with something like deathwing, where it's a great big fucking dragon aspect, you'd almost want it to be a 40 man raid to really amplify the fact that he's a planet-fucking dragon aspect. being able to take him down with 10 men strips away from the roleplay of that experience (not that i am a roleplayer, but in a roleplay game things like this can make or break the immersion)

take ragnaros for instance - in vanilla, you needed 40 people to take him down, yea ok we were only level 60, but from an immersion PoV, it doesn't matter what level you are, you need 40 capable men and women to bring down this monstrosity. yet he's not even at full power, this is just an avatar of ragnaros!

then comes firelands, ragnaros is on his home turf, we walk in with 10 guys and bend the dude over - it totally breaks the immersion. if it was supposed to be realistic that in vanilla you needed 40 people to kill ragnaros, shouldn't you need like 100 people to kill him on his home turf, or at the very least the largest raid size possible?

I didn't play vanilla WoW but from what I hear about setting up 40 mans took a long while and today setting up a 25 man raiding guild can take weeks-months depending on how good you and the base team is. I can't imagine putting together a 100 man raid team. That is just silly work to go in a raid with 99 people and keep all 99 of them motivated through endless wipes on a boss before finally getting the kill.

honestly, i think they need to stop with the 10 Vs 25 man choice and have specific 10 man raids with ilvl relevant to the difficulty and 25 man raids with ilvl relevant to the difficulty. the balancing act they are trying to pull off by having multiple dificulties AND multiple raid sizes just doesn't work. it's one thing to give multiple difficulties, but a combination of the 2 has caused more headaches than it is worth.


with the introduction of LFR getting 10 people or 25 people together for a raid is much simpler, but the balance of 10 Vs 25 in terms of difficulty and mechanics is an impossible balancing act. i honestly think they'd be better off with:

MoP - tier 1. mogu raid - 10 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 150, 155, 160 (example ilvl's)
MoP - tier 1. Sha raid - 25 man LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 150, 155, 160
MoP - tier 2. mantid raid - 10 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 160, 165, 170
MoP - tier 2. old god raid - 25 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 160, 165, 170
MoP - tier 3. bad monkey raid - 10 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 170, 175, 180
MoP - tier 3. super bad sha raid - 25 man. LFR, NM + HM - ilvl 170, 175, 180

giving every raid an LFR option makes them so much more accesible than trying to balance 10 Vs 25 just seems stupid at this point in the game, it also gives players more variety each tier and the ability to encourage 25 man raiding guilds again that can easily break down into 10 man raids if they have raid roster issues. oh noes, 5 people haven't shown for our 25 man raid, well lets split into 2x 10 mans and try again later in the week.

I can see what you are saying, make 10 man raids actually designed for 10 manning and 25 mans designed for 25 manning them, thus mechanics will differ. As opposed to now we have a hybrid system pretty much anything that happens in 10 man happens in 25 man but with bigger numbers to compensate for the 15 extra people. I doubt Blizzard will ever go back to the unshared lockout and different ilvl rewards from 10 and 25 man raiding because while that solves some problems the raiding progression currently has, it brings back the problems we already had for 2-3 expansions.

Why should a bigger guild be rewarded with better gear just because they are bigger?
The answer to that is that they shouldn't get better gear just because they are bigger. Blizzard already acknowledged this and thus the same ilvl gear is rewarded.

now we ask the question
Why run 25 man raids when I can run 10 mans and get the same achieves and gear?
Because you actually have the numbers to run 25 man raids and no more. You are a bigger guild and you want to include more people in your raids without having to split up. You run 25 mans not because of better gear but because you are the bigger guild, but that doesn't mean you are the better guild.

[Brett Skullcrack]

The numbers matter for the given raid model I am refairing(sic) to. In the given Cataclysm model, combined with blizzard announcement, and RDF problems in dungeons, a 6-12-24 IS more functional than a 5-10-25.

As someone who is intimately familiar with running a 25 man guild (both recruitment and raid leading), I really don't see your point here. Two more players required here or one less there is not a fundamental difference. It might be pleasing from a theoretical point of view, but in practice 10 vs 12 and 25 vs 24 make no difference.