Originally Posted by
Ygorl
Talen, what 10-person raid doesn't have Heroism/Bloodlust? You mentioned Skull Banner, as has been previously acknowledged, and that's true. But personal cooldowns exist in 10s just as much as they do in 25s, and will be stacked with Heroism just as much. What's different other than perhaps being able to keep Skull Banner active for a higher fraction of Heroism?
Regarding differences in target counts, true. However, most mechanics that affect one person in 10s affect three people in 25s. Most that affect two people in 10s affect six in 25s. This is actually a higher fraction of the raid affected.
In addition to typically-higher DPS requirements in 25s, you also have (as I believe was alluded to above) an increase in failure chance. If there's a mechanic where screwing it up wipes the raid (which there tends to be!) and any given person has a 1% chance of screwing it up, due to lapse in attention or cat on keyboard or lag or choking on beer or whatever... If it happens six times in a 10-person raid, and 18 times in a 25-person raid, you've got a 5.85% chance of it wiping the raid in 10s and a 16.55% chance of it wiping the raid in 25s, with raiders of the same skill level! Another reason why 25s are harder even if they're not mechanically any more difficult.
Some people have argued that there's more room for screwing up in a 25, less personal responsibility. I'll join with the people arguing against them. If you're working on a fight, there are generally two situations: Either you're having a hard time of it, pushing progression, and any victory will be by the skin of your teeth, or it's easy. In the former case, having someone lying dead on the ground is probably going to mean failure, regardless of raid size. I've seen this time after time after time, raiding 25s, where a new boss will not go down until we do it with nobody dead. In the latter case, if the fight's easy, it's easy. If having a few people dead doesn't matter, then who cares? You were going to kill it anyway, regardless of how many people are in the raid. In the hard cases, where one person licking floor kills the attempt, you're in the situation I covered in the previous paragraph: 25s are harder.
I'm in a guild that raided 25s for, what, 5 years? Recently, due to our relative lack of progression and to the fact that keeping a 25 running requires 2.5x more people than running a 10, we downsized. It was sad. I and many others would still love to be raiding 25s, but we just didn't have the people to do it, and were having no success recruiting people. It was a vicious cycle. The first week of doing 10s, in which we raided for seven hours, we killed four new bosses. Two of them were bosses we'd never seen before.