If the difficulty is "nearly the same"...

[Deleted]

people see 10man as easier cause they get fully gear'd in 25man and then go into 10man after doing the fights and out-gearing the content and going 'lol easy' ...

10mans are not hard either the only part of 10mans that were hard is when raid limitations were in place due to numbers like sarth 3d on 10man was actually difficult cause you needed more tanks that was it.. more tanks meant less DPS which meant longer time on mana for casters / healers which makes a harder fight however fights like this WILL be modelled around having 10 players I have faith in blizzard.

[eyesolated]

...uh, blizz already said they want a ret paladin to be able to slap on RF an be able to tank some heroics and all normal dungeons.

must've missed that. still, not only the raid and emblem models are going to change. the whole game will be entirely different (again). too many missing variables to be able to discuss this in a meaningful way.

[Holyjudge]

25 man raids have always been easier then 10 mans. Why do I say this? It's because if you are doing 10 man and say one dps dies or a healer dies it's usually not a happy ending. Now you look at a 25 man raid and say a dps or heals dies the fight can still be easily done. The only thing that seems harder about 25 mans is the noob factor of filling the roster. What I mean by noob factor is that not everyone in all 25 mans know what they are doing and are being carried. You can carry people alot easier in 25's then in 10's.

[Beyz]

not only is this wrong because of the res gear and random wipe bollocks the others pointed out it's also wrong because, and read this carefully

RAIDING NEVER GOT EASIER

the player base just got more informed and started crunching math. in vanilla we were all in the dark as to game mechanics as compared to TBC or WotLK.

so you want Vanilla difficulty back? start raiding with people without looking up stat weights or established rotations(to include priority lists) or boss strats or using any mods whatsoever.

you can maybe use the in-game stopwatch to look for timers, but that might be cheating a bit.

Quoted for amazing amounts of truth

[conscript]

Basically the way I want it was like in Vanilla.

If you had the concept of Vanilla in Wrath it would've been so much better. How trash were basically mini-bosses in their own right and the bosses themselves were godlike and actually fun to defeat because they were so goddamn hard.

Basically...

Vanilla: It took 3 months or so to down Ragnaros, only a few guilds in the entire world even finished Naxxramas even. (I want raid difficulty like that, maybe not that hard but atleast more of a challenge than what it is now).

To sum it up...

7 days, 100 million health
84 days, 1.1 million health


Nuff said... I want old raid difficulty back. >.>

Take off your rose colored glasses buddy. Vanilla wasn't hard because of strategy or actual boss difficulty. Vanilla was "hard" because most people had no idea what they were doing, a lot of the bosses needed tons of fire resist, and overall the gear and most classes/specs were complete shit. Do you honestly think Vanilla would have been even comparably difficult to Wrath if gear had the same itemization and nearly each spec of each class was optimally designed to take full advantage of a raiding role?

And what do you mean by 7 days 100 million? Heroic 25 LK took a lot longer than 7 days.

[EzriEU]

i can probably tank all of 10 man icc in ret gear and get away with it on half the bosses. in 25 man i could never do that.

Try it in all ilvl 251 gear with your healers being in all ilvl 251 gear and come back to tell us how it worked.


Personally, I'm very excited about the announcement. As many have already pointed out, some 10man encounters over the history of WotLK have already proven to be harder than their 25man equivalent. The general perception that 10man raiding is easier than 25man is mostly based on outgearing the instances by doing them in 25man gear. Once that is no longer an option encounter balancing will start to have a far more important role.

My personal experience is, that today's ICC 10 is, for the most part, actually harder than ICC 25 (barring Hard Modes). I've just returned from a 1 year break (due to frustration with 25man raiding) to focus on 10man-only raiding with a few of my former guildmates. When I joined a well-recruited ICC 25-PuG last week, each and every encounter seemed like a joke compared to ICC 10. The only increase in difficulty came from the usual movement-cripples that just don't get it when to move out of something - a problem I'm fortunately not used to anymore, since it simply doesn't happen in my 10man raid.

[Deleted]

With the exception of abilites such as defile on 25 mans, I agree that 10s are usually harder, everyone will need to perform at their best to accomplish something, while in 25 mans a failure is usually overcome easily. 25s only seem harder at the moment is because a) you can't overgear them, and b) the elite 10 of a guild are often way ahead in average skill level over the top 25.
It will be fun to balance for blizzard me thinks, a nice mix between abilities that will kill whoever failed at it (harder on 10 than 25) and abilities that will kill the raid or a big portion of it (harder on 25 than 10)

[Gomexus]

not only is this wrong because of the res gear and random wipe bollocks the others pointed out it's also wrong because, and read this carefully

RAIDING NEVER GOT EASIER

the player base just got more informed and started crunching math. in vanilla we were all in the dark as to game mechanics as compared to TBC or WotLK.

so you want Vanilla difficulty back? start raiding with people without looking up stat weights or established rotations(to include priority lists) or boss strats or using any mods whatsoever.

you can maybe use the in-game stopwatch to look for timers, but that might be cheating a bit.

Raiding never got easier? You sure? Did you even play Vanilla?

Lemme give you a breakdown...

1) SUBSTANTIALLY lower health pools across the entire board.

Not comparing to the pools of today....comparing to the fact that almost all classes and gear had a big health boost in BC.

2) EVERY HEALER COULD AND DID GO OOM...omg!

I remember dropping mana-tide...then potting...then hitting a dreamless sleep potion with a tremor totem down (<--pro move) to break the sleep and keep the regen...that was sick back then...and it was also 60% of my mana bar to keep healing, you'd be surprised how many people had no idea what a dreamless sleep pot could do.

3) DPS was not unlimited or sustained.

Hunters had no mana regen...Evocate was 10 or 15min CD...Locks had lifetap, but not a lot of life to tap...war's had problems with rage (if not getting hit it was low to nothing)...and rogue's would have been good cept for their ability design was made for big burst low sustained (i.e. finishers hit VERY hard compared to combo builders which did not).

4) Your guild's first steps into a raid were in full blue's with maybe a couple greens.

If someone was "geared" it meant the class sets from old school 10-15 man dungeons (Strat/Scholo/BRS)...if someone actually had epics...they came from another guild or you were a new recruit.

The bosses themselves were cake...easy strats...mostly tank-n-spank. What was hard were the raiding conditions. Boss Strats are just as easy today...I have yet to see anything involving travelling through 6 zones at the same milisecond to acquire 6 random artifacts from six random spawn rare mobs. Its shit....its move left, move right, stop dps, start dps, pick up the adds, dps the adds, don't dps the adds. On top of that you have your personal flavor of DBM going WAAAH WAAAH DANGER DANGER all in your face.

So maybe you should think about how hard Vanilla was compared to today not only because of the flow of information...but because the game itself was harder (shocking!).

OS and VoA have been loot boxes since day 1 of WotLK...Badges came at the rate of 10+ an hour even as a fresh 80...AE dmg is useful now...instead of useless.

A lot has changed over the years and believe it or not it used to be a harder game than it is today.

MC alone brought your char from a scrub to a hero....imagine doing PvP in all blue PvE items...then suddenly equipping full wrathful....it was that big of a difference.

In WotLk most people stepped in to Naxx wearing full ilvl 200 gear already...they just wanted the set gear and/or a better wep...but pound for pound your char's output was not changed much. (except maybe tanks and that's just because Heroic tank loot itemization is/was shit)

[rollo90000]

For people complaining 10man is easy

link your 10man herioc lich king kill

there's less than 100 guilds who have it (1000 ish players)

to all the complainers. Then come on here and link it done in your 251 to 264 geared chracters

no strict 10 man guild has a kill yet

25 man normal is easier than 10 man normal my alt facerolls both in 3hrs

[seam]

The difficulty in 10 man, if anything is going to be harder.

Take it now, for instance.

10 man:
It's harder for everyone to die, as attacks do less damaging overall.
If someone dies, it's likely a wipe.
If 2 or more people die, it's over.

25 man:
It's easier to die, as attacks do fairly high damage.
If 2 people die, it's usually fine.
If 4-5 people die, it's likely a wipe.
If 6+ people die, it's over.



Generally 10 man puts more responsibly on each individual, while in 25 there is more room for slack.

If they make attacks more punishing, that will make people die easier, and also make each death per person more punishing on it's own.


Gonna be interesting.

Raiding never got easier? You sure? Did you even play Vanilla?

I did. And if anything raiding is more complex.

1) SUBSTANTIALLY lower health pools across the entire board.

And bosses hit for almost nothing.

2) EVERY HEALER COULD AND DID GO OOM...omg!

And you usually could wait for them to get mana because you had a healing rotation.

3) DPS was not unlimited or sustained.

Didn't need to be, dps requirements were super low.


Don't forget 20 people could die on most fights and you could keep going on if your raid wasn't trash.

[Albert the fish]

Raiding never got easier? You sure? Did you even play Vanilla?

Lemme give you a breakdown...

1) SUBSTANTIALLY lower health pools across the entire board.

Not comparing to the pools of today....comparing to the fact that almost all classes and gear had a big health boost in BC.

2) EVERY HEALER COULD AND DID GO OOM...omg!

I remember dropping mana-tide...then potting...then hitting a dreamless sleep potion with a tremor totem down (<--pro move) to break the sleep and keep the regen...that was sick back then...and it was also 60% of my mana bar to keep healing, you'd be surprised how many people had no idea what a dreamless sleep pot could do.

3) DPS was not unlimited or sustained.

Hunters had no mana regen...Evocate was 10 or 15min CD...Locks had lifetap, but not a lot of life to tap...war's had problems with rage (if not getting hit it was low to nothing)...and rogue's would have been good cept for their ability design was made for big burst low sustained (i.e. finishers hit VERY hard compared to combo builders which did not).

4) Your guild's first steps into a raid were in full blue's with maybe a couple greens.

If someone was "geared" it meant the class sets from old school 10-15 man dungeons (Strat/Scholo/BRS)...if someone actually had epics...they came from another guild or you were a new recruit.

The bosses themselves were cake...easy strats...mostly tank-n-spank. What was hard were the raiding conditions. Boss Strats are just as easy today...I have yet to see anything involving travelling through 6 zones at the same milisecond to acquire 6 random artifacts from six random spawn rare mobs. Its shit....its move left, move right, stop dps, start dps, pick up the adds, dps the adds, don't dps the adds. On top of that you have your personal flavor of DBM going WAAAH WAAAH DANGER DANGER all in your face.

So maybe you should think about how hard Vanilla was compared to today not only because of the flow of information...but because the game itself was harder (shocking!).

OS and VoA have been loot boxes since day 1 of WotLK...Badges came at the rate of 10+ an hour even as a fresh 80...AE dmg is useful now...instead of useless.

A lot has changed over the years and believe it or not it used to be a harder game than it is today.

MC alone brought your char from a scrub to a hero....imagine doing PvP in all blue PvE items...then suddenly equipping full wrathful....it was that big of a difference.

In WotLk most people stepped in to Naxx wearing full ilvl 200 gear already...they just wanted the set gear and/or a better wep...but pound for pound your char's output was not changed much. (except maybe tanks and that's just because Heroic tank loot itemization is/was shit)

take off those rose-tinted glasses and see the world as it is brother.
a) the health pools were lower, yes you were level 60 now you are 80. the bosses hit according so do the trash. this argument is nonsensical. "omg i had less life bro, i used to have 5k now i have 40k" yeah but the bosses didn't hit you for 15k a whack either.
b)most of this was due to not having the information at hand. if EJ and similar places were running at the speed they do these days i can guarantee you every healer would know and use those tricks. you said it yourself, most people didn't know how good it was. that's an issue with ignorance, not baked in difficulty
c)this is marginally valid, but also offput because people that knew how to overcome those challenges did so and put out amazing numbers for the time. unfortunately those days didn't have massive math crunchers examining every damn spec/stat/item in game to find out what was max combination, you kinda had to guess and find out for yourself what worked. again this is a problem with ignorance, not with game difficulty.
d)again a point only marginally valid. yes you stepped into the place in blues. that being said it was designed to be stepped into with blues. the current places are designed to be stepped into in purples. take away the colors for a moment, you run the lower level instances get gear and blizzard expects you to take it to the next higher tier and balances around that. that never changed, it's always been balanced around that thought.

[Izenhart]

For people complaining 10man is easy

link your 10man herioc lich king kill

there's less than 100 guilds who have it (1000 ish players)

25 man normal is easier than 10 man normal my alt facerolls both in 3hrs

No, and no.

There are 142 guilds who killed LK10HM
There are 9 guilds who killed LK25MH

[seam]

No, and no.

There are 142 guilds who killed LK10HM
There are 9 guilds who killed LK25MH

To be fair, 142 of that 142 is people who had ICC25HM gear, outgearing LK10HM by a full tier.


It's like going to ToGC in full 264. It trivializes it.

[Sallego]

There are a lot of valid points here, but I agree with those that are saying 10s are harder than 25s atm, if you are doing a 10m progression. If you walk into 10s with gear that's better than 251 then maybe not so, but for a guild that only does 10s, like mine which is a close knit group of friends, 10s are much harder. It requires that all of your raiders are competent and know what they're doing because if only one person dies it's normally a wipe. I was just in a 25 ICC that had 10 people die on Putricide and still finished no problem. Take that in comparison if 2 people die in 10 man (which is less percentage wise) do you really think you could finish the fight?

[HavokHeart]

25 mans will be easier.. more room for error.

See: Naxx when LK launched.

[Fligahgigook]

There are a lot of valid points here, but I agree with those that are saying 10s are harder than 25s atm, if you are doing a 10m progression. If you walk into 10s with gear that's better than 251 then maybe not so, but for a guild that only does 10s, like mine which is a close knit group of friends, 10s are much harder. It requires that all of your raiders are competent and know what they're doing because if only one person dies it's normally a wipe. I was just in a 25 ICC that had 10 people die on Putricide and still finished no problem. Take that in comparison if 2 people die in 10 man (which is less percentage wise) do you really think you could finish the fight?

Sounds like those 10 people all died in the last 2-3%

[snowblind]

Nuff said... I want old raid difficulty back. >.>

There's a very clear and defined line between difficult and stone walls.

A good number of raid bosses in vanilla were checks of some kind, or deliberately punishing to some aspect of your raid. They were not difficult, because encounter designers hadn't quite gotten out of the EQ mode (remember: some of the main encounter designers were leaders of bleeding egde EQ1 guilds)... they were just punishing, like EQ raids were.

Half of the fights in Molten Core were punishing to melee in some way. One of them couldn't even be fought with anybody but the tank in melee range. They've progressed a long way from that. I don't want to see another raid full of brick walls and various checks. I'd rather see the fights be interesting and challenging, not boring but needlessly difficult due to some arbitrary mechanic.

[Gomexus]

take off those rose-tinted glasses and see the world as it is brother.
a) the health pools were lower, yes you were level 60 now you are 80. the bosses hit according so do the trash. this argument is nonsensical. "omg i had less life bro, i used to have 5k now i have 40k" yeah but the bosses didn't hit you for 15k a whack either.

You obviously didn't play Vanilla. Of course bosses did not hit for 15k...they did hit for 3-4k against a tank with 6k buffed hp...yeah that's 50-75% of a tanks FULL health. So that geared tank doing raids now with 50k fully buffed health...imagine him getting hit for 25k or 35k...it does not happen...not in a single hit. Wanna argue...let's just say "tanks can not be the victim of a critical strike" yea enough said. If that's not enough...look up the Valor set from Vanilla...now tell me how much dodge/parry and block tanks were running with. Tanks took a lot of dmg and they took it often...so often that in a 40 man raid you had to have 8-12 healers....all of which would run out of mana constantly.

b)most of this was due to not having the information at hand. if EJ and similar places were running at the speed they do these days i can guarantee you every healer would know and use those tricks. you said it yourself, most people didn't know how good it was. that's an issue with ignorance, not baked in difficulty

Regardless of tricks you still went oom on any progression boss out there. Sure if people knew it would be a little easier...but the point was not the flow of information...it was the fact that Healers DID go oom...not every once in a while...all the time. So much so that a guild had to bring double the healers you'd think...just so healers could rotate and regen mana for a lil while and let someone else take over.

c)this is marginally valid, but also offput because people that knew how to overcome those challenges did so and put out amazing numbers for the time. unfortunately those days didn't have massive math crunchers examining every damn spec/stat/item in game to find out what was max combination, you kinda had to guess and find out for yourself what worked. again this is a problem with ignorance, not with game difficulty.

Again, you obviously did not play Vanilla. There was not a centralized source like EJ. What there was was community forums and class based websites that did do the numbers...cept guess what? When only one spec is viable...and the only stats on gear are Base Stats + Spell Power (Healing) or ATK Pow it doesn't take a genius to figure out what is better...you my friend are looking back using current knowledge. There was little to nothing in terms of hit/armor pen./expertise...MP5 was barely around and generally only found on higher level gear (like MC+). Crit was there but your best geared rogue spec'd for highest crit may be flaunting 21% crit.

It was easy to tell as a Mage that Item X with 50 int and 14 SP is better than item Y with 34int and 10 SP...this is why EJ was not needed...there were no numbers to crunch...at the most it took a little thought to contemplate bonuses lost. Combine this with the extremely limited number of abilities each class had and voila...who needs to crunch numbers?

DPS just plain out sucked...it was at best burst...at worst steadily low.

d)again a point only marginally valid. yes you stepped into the place in blues. that being said it was designed to be stepped into with blues. the current places are designed to be stepped into in purples. take away the colors for a moment, you run the lower level instances get gear and blizzard expects you to take it to the next higher tier and balances around that. that never changed, it's always been balanced around that thought.

Again, you obviously did not play Vanilla. MC gear was entry level raid gear...and it was MILES better than the best blues you could get.

Atm the biggest upgrades between T9 gear and T10 gear are base stat increases and set bonuses (most of which are designed to not improve your class but to keep you halfway even with other classes).

When you got out of blues and greens in Vanilla you went from struggling to heal a 5 man to being able to tank and heal yourself in that same 5 man...it was a very large increase in your characters output.

If you really want to continue thinking that Vanilla was Easier or the Same as WotLK then take a serious moment to think about how many guilds have quit the game because of one singular boss in a singular raid...then attach the fact that he was the second boss in the 2nd tier raid...

Vael in BWL...dps doesn't matter? He was the most pure example of a dps race...and he single handedly ended A LOT of guilds on every server. That one encounter is probably the biggest reason very few people saw Naxx 1.0. Look it up.

[Deleted]

25 is so much harder because of the bad framerate arrghhhh!

PLAYINGSHADOWPRIESTWITHTHISFRAMERATEHURTSMYDPSARGGH!!!

[manniefaces]

My primary concern is that this will return us to the very awkward WotLK-release situation where 10-man raids were actually HARDER than the 25man version due to strange tuning. Mind you, it was the re-released Naxx, nothing about it was actually hard, but still. 25mans are more difficult because 15 more people means 15 more ways to die to any boss ability that can damage the raid in some way. I really don't understand those that claim that 10man raids are somehow currently more difficult than 25; if that were the case, why are there a lot more guilds deeply progressed in 10s, and yet stuck on the LK-normal in 25?

Balancing 10/25 raids to have the same difficulty seems like an impossible nightmare, but if Blizz thinks they can do it... we'll see.

That's why they have Beta testing. Blizzard designs stuff better than anyone else. I have faith.