20 Man is Good!?!

[Varabently]

The only reason it's 20 man for Mythic is because it had to be more than 10, less than 25 and have round groups. It can't be less than 10 because that would have to be 5 man raiding which makes no sense. They won't make it larger than 25 because it just increases logistics costs, which people would hate. OK, so now we're left with 15 and 20 mans. Now I don't know why they chose 20 over 15, but presumably there was a good reason.

I enjoy 10 mans much more than 20 mans, but mostly because it's easier to pug if you have to, but it IS objectively easier to make encounters for 20 players vs. 10. Imagine you want to make an encounter that splits a group in 2 (there are several in past and present raids). If you have 10 players, you probably have 2 tanks, 5/6 dps and 2/3 healers right? Right off the bat, you can see the groups won't be even unless you have 2 healers and 6 dps. Now if you split to 3 dps, how many ranged and melee? You obviously can't have equal amounts of each.

So you get this odd-numbered issue that's easier to solve with larger numbers.

[Jujudrood]

I can agree with the OP that it's a lot to do with the player base and their finicky attitude towards wipes and guilds in general.
I've seen tons of people come and go because they didn't get the loot they wanted (fairly out rolled) or severely underperformed and cried all night.
It's one of the pains of an MMO; you have to interact with other people who will, more often than not, differ from you.
But as for 20 man, I think it's fine. It's a solid number that is not too much of a logistical nightmare.
40 man was waaaaay too many, 25 man got sketchy at times (based on healer to DPS ratio and whatnot), not to mention 25 man opened the door to even more people to stand in fire. So anyway, 20 is good for the hardest content, where it can be tailored and tuned to be challenging without overwhelming from a player count perspective.
And for anyone who says 10 was the best, well, you can still do 10. The flex system of normal and heroic allow for it. Same goes for those who miss the 25 man raids.
If you want the best and want to conquer the hardest challenges, however, find a 20 or get over it.
If you have trouble finding a guild or getting a roster spot, well, there's an old saying in poker that goes something like this: If you can't spot the sucker in the first 5 minutes, it's probably you.

[Spotnick]

In an ideal world, Blizzard would design 10 *and* 25 instances.

That was probably why BC raiding was fun, Karazhan was designed for 10 man, so was Zul'man, while Black Temple, Gruul and Magtheridon were designed for 25 people.

At least now it's only the mythic crowd that has a fixed raid size, flexible raiding is probably the best thing to have happened in this game. But I really miss being able to do hard content on alts on off-nights, 10 man allowed that, now I'm stuck in heroic.

But it would be really time to remove the cross-realm restriction on mythic.

[clevin]

20 man only is slowly killing our raid. We have 10 consistent people, 5 mostly consistent people and 5 flakey people. We have had a new healer almost every week as people are going in and out of the game and we are one of the top guilds on our server!

If blizzard wants 20 man to be real, they have to lower the difficulty slightly (by lowering the damage) so that previously 10 man groups can carry a few people. Instead, they kept the difficulty the same as the previous tier and now 10 man guilds are trying to find 10 more and are getting a lower tier of players resulting in making the fights way harder.

In this case anything above 10 person would be a problem for you and frankly, even 10 would be int he long run - if you only have 10 reliable people what happens when 1-2 can't make it (sick, other commitment, etc)? Right... you don't raid.

[clevin]

Ive noticed quite a few 10 man guilds on my server zul'jin imploded. New ones are being made but they are all starved for players constantly. BTW I see so many guilds recruiting asking for 680+ ilvl--how is that working out?

The problem is that everyone wants to be a unique flower.

As an example my guild was struggling for people in ToT (low-med pop server, lots of 10 man guilds). We could have merged last expansion but we're a launch day guild that's been around since beta and that's some history to just give up. The other guild was newly created but... no, they wouldn't merge with us even though there's no history there at all. This insistence on being the top dog and independent to a fault gives us what we have - a bunch of frankly prima donna guilds who think they're all that and won't do the logical thing.

BTW, before anyone freaks out, yes I get that some people are in a tight guild with friends. But they've known about the 20 person Mythic thing for well over a year and had that time to debate and decide what was more important, mythic or being tight.

[Postre]

its the best

[Ald]

Lets not overlook the opinion of there being too many guilds, which i believe is strongly contributing to the issue of finding players to fill rosters. Way too many players want to run their own guild the way they want, which there's absolutely nothing wrong with, but many don't have what it takes to do so.

[Vargur]

20, or maybe 17-18 if it's heroic, is perfect. Feels like the raid isn't empty - if you've ever did 10 man, you know what I'm talking about - and it feels more rewarding, since there's a bigger challenge, logistics and encounter mechanic wise. Not to mention the better FPS compared to a fixed 25 man.