Are Blizzard trying to remove 25 mans so they could add 15 mans?

[KCguy]

Times have changed. 25 man was all the rage back in Wrath, but now in Cata it's 10 man. Of course the shared lock out has a lot to do with it, but I think it's also the fact that logically 25 man is tougher to put together. In guilds you need at least 25 reliable people every week. pugs? that's almost impossible. I don't many 25 man Firelands and especially Dragon Soul pugs.

[Rizendragon]

I personally hope they try this. Going to a single raid size would fix a ton of the problems that currently plague PvE. 25's have a great feel, but 10 have better logistics. The best of both worlds is 15. Not too many schedules to work around while giving the feeling of an epic raid size. yes some ppl will quit because 10/25 man was better etc, but i personally it will be better for the game in the long run.

[Deleted]

If they wanted to remove 2man they would jst do it they did it back then with 40 man. Personally i think 15 man is a poor excuse for a raid, i think and feel that the right feeling of raiding starts with 20+ below that it just feels like some schlightly bigger dungeon group. But that is a personal opinion.

[Nestoras]

There is no reason to kill 25 and not 10 and add 15.
10 and 15 are very close together to justify 2 sizes like that to be raiding options.

To kill 10 on the other hand and replace it with 15, is not so unreasonable. But 15 doesnt persuade so much about being small enough. And also 15 and 25 have the same issue with scaling, that 10 and 25 have.

15 is a golden solution for a single size raid system. Not very small, and definately not big.

Also i noticed others talking about 6 people groups and 12,18,24 people raids.
The benefit of having a 6 people core dungeon group, and the way things scale regarding raids are interesting.

The problem is that this is too much of a change maybe, while a single size raid of 15 people, require very few changes to happen.

15 can make for optimum setup, with all the buffs and all the special abilities available.
15 can include monks
15 can be still considered relatively intimade, but at the same time for the people that like larger raids not small enough to make them feel "they are doing an oversized dungeon".
15 will allow for the people to put behind all this negative energy that 10vs25 brought, and enjoy raiding once more
15 will minimize resources for balancing and will allow the allocation of more resources into designing and creating better quality content developed especially for a given size.


One size is what the game needs right now to recover from cataclysm.

[Deleted]

if Blizzard removes 25 man, i will quit playing wow.

This and some more text so i can post

---------- Post added 2012-03-26 at 06:52 AM ----------

15 can be still considered relatively intimade, but at the same time for the people that like larger raids not small enough to make them feel "they are doing an oversized dungeon".

This.. 10m for me feels like an oversized dungeon.. and 5 members more wont change the feeling... I only get the RAID feeling in 25m...
Blizzard KNOW that there are ALOT of 25m guild out there that would NOT like the scrapping of 25m raid..

Blizzard would have liked to do a 15 man raid size if they were starting from scratch today. However, for now they are sticking with both 10 and 25 man.

[Sprucelee]

There is no reason to kill 25 and not 10 and add 15.
10 and 15 are very close together to justify 2 sizes like that to be raiding options.

To kill 10 on the other hand and replace it with 15, is not so unreasonable. But 15 doesnt persuade so much about being small enough. And also 15 and 25 have the same issue with scaling, that 10 and 25 have.

15 is a golden solution for a single size raid system. Not very small, and definately not big.

Also i noticed others talking about 6 people groups and 12,18,24 people raids.
The benefit of having a 6 people core dungeon group, and the way things scale regarding raids are interesting.

The problem is that this is too much of a change maybe, while a single size raid of 15 people, require very few changes to happen.

15 can make for optimum setup, with all the buffs and all the special abilities available.
15 can include monks
15 can be still considered relatively intimade, but at the same time for the people that like larger raids not small enough to make them feel "they are doing an oversized dungeon".
15 will allow for the people to put behind all this negative energy that 10vs25 brought, and enjoy raiding once more
15 will minimize resources for balancing and will allow the allocation of more resources into designing and creating better quality content developed especially for a given size.


One size is what the game needs right now to recover from cataclysm.

Spoken like a 10-man raider. I never see any 25-man raiders make these posts, 15 is not a "golden solution"

[MoanaLisa]

It doesn't make sense getting rid of 25-man raiding given LFR being in the game. They are likely to continue to support 25-man comps for LFR so they are also likely to continue to provide normal/heroics as well for 25. This would be simple common sense to me.

[kalinah]

They said if they could start from scratch there would be only one 15 man size. No 10 and no 25 man raids.

I took this as a sign of what it Will be like for Titan.

[Rizendragon]

Spoken like a 10-man raider. I never see any 25-man raiders make these posts, 15 is not a "golden solution"

Then enlighten us as to why 15 isn't the golden solution? i raided 25 hardcore for a while and I personally feel that 15 is the solution for logistical and size reasons. 25 feels quite crowded imo and 10 feels too sparse. Adding 50% more bodies to a 10 would actually do wonders for the feeling of "holy shit this thing is so powerful that we need a lot of very powerful people to bring it down".

[Linoleum]

if Blizzard removes 25 man, i will quit playing wow.

this and I know many others who will as well.

[Seezer]

I think there should be 500 man raids.

---------- Post added 2012-03-26 at 07:39 AM ----------

Then enlighten us as to why 15 isn't the golden solution? i raided 25 hardcore for a while and I personally feel that 15 is the solution for logistical and size reasons. 25 feels quite crowded imo and 10 feels too sparse. Adding 50% more bodies to a 10 would actually do wonders for the feeling of "holy shit this thing is so powerful that we need a lot of very powerful people to bring it down".

There is no solution needed when people have the choice between 10 and 25 mans. By keeping 10 and 25's, blizz are totally fine. But if they just make 15 man and only 15 man raids, that's a massive risk that they aren't willing to take. They stand to piss off alot of people for little benefit.

---------- Post added 2012-03-26 at 07:43 AM ----------

I took this as a sign of what it Will be like for Titan.

Who said Titan will even be a game with raids?

[Rizendragon]

I think there should be 500 man raids.

---------- Post added 2012-03-26 at 07:39 AM ----------

There is no solution needed when people have the choice between 10 and 25 mans. By keeping 10 and 25's, blizz are totally fine. But if they just make 15 man and only 15 man raids, that's a massive risk that they aren't willing to take. They stand to piss off alot of people for little benefit.

---------- Post added 2012-03-26 at 07:43 AM ----------

Who said Titan will even be a game with raids?

I more still see it as an illusion of choice. I tried raiding 25 with 3 different guilds this expansion. I gave up after that and accepted that 25 was dead at all levels except for the top levels. Ever 25 I was in collapsed because ppl were running around in his from 10 man. Something does need to be done, and I personally think the fallout will be less than people think.

There are 10milion subscribers I see a max of 2 million leaving if they implement a single size raid grp. As others have said it would reduce development time and resources on Blizzard's end while taking care of a ton of issues on the player's end. Others have said that they will continue to support 25 for lfr, but I can actually see a few issues straightened out in lfr with the 15 man model as well.

[Deleted]

Unless MoP brings something new that will stop the slow decay of 25-man raiding we are currently experiencing, I can totally see 15-man raiding being introduced as the only option in the next expansion (the one after MoP).

It's obvious that both players and Blizzard recognize why this raid size would be the golden solution, there is no need to repeat what others already mentioned in this thread.


With every expansion, Blizzard tries to simplify, revamp or remove outdated mechanics and introduce something new that actually makes sense even for new players. Having two raid sizes with awkward patches to make them "equal" (Totally broken loot system says hi!) is a perfect example of an outdated system that exists only because it historically evolved into current state. As longs as significant portion of players are enjoying it, it's okay to have something like that. But with less and less players doing 25-mans, it's less and less profitable for Blizzard to spend resources and development time on maintaining 2 raid sizes (balance issues, encounter mechanics, raid instance design to support both group sizes, etc.)

Of course, some people would not be very happy about this change. But this generally doesn't stop Blizzard from implementing changes when they think it'll do good for the game - just like when they moved away from 40-man raid model, scrapped raid attunements, abandoned hardmodes, introduced valor point gear and so on.

[Maggibesti]

I was reading another post about death of 25 mans possibly.
So I also remember a discussion about 15 mans and they want to do it, but feel it will be crowed with both 10 man and 25 man raids.
15 mans maybe replace 25s?

Remove 10mans and add 15, im good with that. I am a Classic, TBC and WotLK player, and I like 25-40mans, not 10mans (or even 5 man raids like people were begging for). If they kill 25 than I'm unsubscribing, I cant stand 10mans. 15man could be fun, but I think I would prefer 25>15 man raids.

[Kunz]

Bring back 40 man raids !!!!one11!!!!one!!!11one!!!!

Epic with 40 ppl trying to coordinate, run around and get blown up and smacked to the ground

[Sheamous]

Back in the days the 40man raids felt epic the first few times you got to do them, very soon you discovered that it was indeed a huge clusterf***....25s are great, feel really good, IF you have the guild to do it. 25s in a pug on my realm near to impossible, and there are just a handful of guilds that do the 25s. Raidsizes really correlate with the landscape of guilds on the given realm.
On Proudmoore-EU there are not many guilds with a lot of members that actually do consequent raiding, but there is a huge bunch of guilds with small member numbers that do the 10s. On other realms this is different, as far as I could experience it. There are more guilds with larger member numbers consistently raiding 25s and lesser small guilds.

So changing the raidsize directly affects guildlandscape what they maybe don't want to do atm since in my opinion they do not really know yet where they want guilds to go. The way they handle the guildperks and the lack of information concerning guilds may be due to the fact that they simply don't know which direction to take with guilds.

[LazarusLong]

There is no reason to kill 25 and not 10 and add 15.
10 and 15 are very close together to justify 2 sizes like that to be raiding options.

To kill 10 on the other hand and replace it with 15, is not so unreasonable. But 15 doesnt persuade so much about being small enough. And also 15 and 25 have the same issue with scaling, that 10 and 25 have.

15 is a golden solution for a single size raid system. Not very small, and definately not big.

Also i noticed others talking about 6 people groups and 12,18,24 people raids.
The benefit of having a 6 people core dungeon group, and the way things scale regarding raids are interesting.

The problem is that this is too much of a change maybe, while a single size raid of 15 people, require very few changes to happen.

15 can make for optimum setup, with all the buffs and all the special abilities available.
15 can include monks
15 can be still considered relatively intimade, but at the same time for the people that like larger raids not small enough to make them feel "they are doing an oversized dungeon".
15 will allow for the people to put behind all this negative energy that 10vs25 brought, and enjoy raiding once more
15 will minimize resources for balancing and will allow the allocation of more resources into designing and creating better quality content developed especially for a given size.


One size is what the game needs right now to recover from cataclysm.

Interesting, I haven't thought about changing 10 to 15 man. But in the end this is probably going to lead to the same result - demise of 25-man raiding. Although lot's of people that aren't enjoying 10-man (myself included) probably would be satisfied with 15-man and won't quit.
Still, I would try 25 to 20 man raids path first.

The 6-12-(18)-24 size have quite a few advantages (dps to tanks and healers ratio for starters. That is why SWTOR 4-8-16 is a huge mistake by the way). It also creates a place for "support class" (dedicated buff-debuff classes) playstyle. But I doubt you can change WoW to fit this new group numbers. New game? Sure.

[Deleted]

Interesting, I haven't thought about changing 10 to 15 man. But in the end this is probably going to lead to the same result - demise of 25-man raiding. Although lot's of people that aren't enjoying 10-man (myself included) probably would be satisfied with 15-man and won't quit.
Still, I would try 25 to 20 man raids path first.

The 6-12-(18)-24 size have quite a few advantages (dps to tanks and healers ratio for starters. That is why SWTOR 4-8-16 is a huge mistake by the way). It also creates a place for "support class" (dedicated buff-debuff classes) playstyle. But I doubt you can change WoW to fit this new group numbers. New game? Sure.

I believe that the guy is more inclined into a single size system, as he states later in the post.
I, on the other hand strongly supported the need for a more radical change towards converting the core 5 man dungeon group to 6 man dungeon group, and the raiding model into a dual size 12/24 as a consequence of that.
4 man dungeons or whatever they re called is a huge mistake, in games that are embracing the holy trinity model.
It wouldnt be so bad for a "Guild Wars2" type of concept, but for WoW/Rift/SWTOR/Conan and the likes would be devastating.

I expressed the benefits of such a change in this thread:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-Raiding-Model

I do believe that a change like that has the minimum impact to existing teams, and at the same time you get the maximum benefit from a dual size design regarding
1) Team logistics (upsizing downsizing smoothly)
2) Nice scaling from core dungeon to large raid of the tank+healer vs DPS ratio (currently goes typically from a 40% tank+ healer requirement to a 28% in 25s)
3) Perfect loot distibution in small/large raids
4) Slightly less RnG for the smaller raid size
5) Slightly better setup and the option to include all classes in MoP for small size
6) Faster queues in RDF and LFR
7) Better chances for balanced fights due to better scaling from the small to the big size.

The major set back for such a system is that it is involving UI changes and rescaling old content.

Other than that it would be the best dual system it can be for shared content.