Raids of Different Sizes Cannot be Tuned to Equal Individual Difficulties

[RyanEX]

You forgot Sartharion 3D.

Oh Wait...

That was harder 10man than it was in 25. Imagine that.

[cineplex]

Go outside, making formulas for raid encounters.. I am just, I don't know what to say.

..what.

[Pendergrass]

Go outside, making formulas for raid encounters.. I am just, I don't know what to say.
..what.

It's a fun question. The maths are "in your head" kinds of stuff, and the results are illuminating.

Sarth is an interesting point. The difference between 25 man and 10 man is a difference between 20% DPS and about a 6% DPS loss, if one DPS dies. The fight gets harder on 10 man because it changes into a single point failure case.

To answer one of my own questions, earlier, which is ask what is meant by having raids be of equal difficulties, with the answer that boss fights have equal overall success probabilities. Otherwise, the extra loot is meaningless. If a boss drops 3X as much loot, but twice as many tries are needed to succeed, then the boss really only drops 1.5X as much loot. (Probably somewhat less, because of the extra organization time required for the larger raid.) That would defeat the stated rationale.

Questioning my second assumption is fair, and there are many fights which can be tuned. But, there also are fights where a single player failure will cause a wipe.

[ComputerNerd]

There are far too many people trying to argue against this new mechanism, and I bet that most of those are regularly running 25 mans because they have the numbers and so do not care for those stuck in 10 mans.
Spend less time trying to pick fault with the idea, and consider the reasoning behind it in the first place.
It is for the purpose of progression, and not making that only realistic for those who can run 25s, since that gear is the near necessary stepping stone most of the time between tiers.
This allows both bigger and smaller guilds to progress providing they can do the content, irrespective of what size raid they can get together.
25s will drop proportionally more loot, not an excessive amount, but enough to still make them worthwhile, and 10 mans will be just as realistic for progression.

[LeperHerring]

In case you are too dumb to realize it yourself: 10-man instances are faceroll in WLK when you use 25-man gear. When you use 10-man gear those are usually lot harder than 25's. This is the main reason why both 10 and 25 man raids drop exactly same loot in Cataclysm. To prevent 25-man raiders from overgearing 10-man instances and turn into drooling morons in forums whining how the content is too easy.

How about you at least try to comprehend the argument before calling people dumb? This has nothing to do with gear. Most people these days raid 10 mans with low geared alts which do not overgear the instances. The issue is that many mechanics simply do not scale well between 10 and 25 men - I have given many examples of such mechanics in ICC. Kara and ZA had some great 10 man fights, but that was because the designers were free to design the encounters and the rooms specifically for 10 players rather than trying to stretch the same fight for 25 players.

[LeperHerring]

-nobody initially tackles fresh Instances with undergeared alts and succeeds.

Duh, they go with mains that are geared from the previous tier.

-the 10 man kills on normal and hardmode initially and world first happend by guilds who infact outgeared the 10 mans with 25 man gear. That is why Paragon killed LK 10 heroic a looong time (and without a buff) before the 25 man version.

-that is why pretty much any 25 man guild is further advanced in 10 mans than 25 mans.

Irrelevant, the argument is not about gear, it's about the mechanics.

-you NOW do 10 man ICC in "undergeared alts" because we have had a 10% and now 15% buff, those "undergeared alts" often still finish or fail a raid around 6/12 or 8/12 and the "undergeared alts" have infact also ilv 264 frost badge gear at their disposal....and they could "casually" collect a minimum of 19 badges per week for 4 months by doing a daily random heroic (15 mins) and a weekly raid (30 mins)

Yes, I NOW do ICC with 15% buff. I THEN did it with 0%, 5% and 10% buffs, what's your point?

Of course gear helps trivialize 10 mans. Once again, if you'd make an effort to understand what's being said instead of just jumping in and arguing for argument's sake you'd know the point was about mechanics. The point is that mechanics like spreading for empowered shock at princes or air phase at BQL, biting at BQL, tombs at Sindragosa p1, plague handling at putricide etc etc are pretty much trivialized when going from 25 to 10 man. At the same time, complexity of 25 man fights is limited by the fact that the mechanics must scale down to 10 man. Blizzard has made many great 10 man fights and many great 25 man fights, but no fights that scale well between 10 and 25 man versions.

Instead of making great, different 10 and 25 man encounters, they choose to save some money on development trying to use the same content for both 10 and 25 man encounters and end up with a fight that's below average on both modes - I'm sure Mr. "Voice of Reason" has some logic to think why it's great they do it though.

[Holyjudge]

Only reason 25 man raids seem harder to people is cause usually you will have 5 to 10 fails in it. Now in these so called 25 man raiding guilds you will have a group A 10 man raid which consist of the guild master and his officers and the tanks from the 25 man runs. These people will have the best gear available to the guild from the 25 man runs and will outgear a 10 man ICC run. 10 man ICC is not tuned for the 25 man ICC gear which makes it seem as a joke to those guys. Now if you take a small guild that only does 10 man ICC it becomes a harder instance for them and if say this group has 1 or 2 people that fail on fights all the time they won't be able to get anywhere where as in a 25 man if you have say 4 or 5 fails the fight can still be completed rather easily. So for me 25 mans atm are easier and give the better of the two's loots. Which doesn't make much sence to me. 25 mans should almost have downgraded loot cause of the noob factor it allows.

[Error302]

this is all rather moot, whatever equations ends up accurately representing the difficulty curves of 10 and 25 mans does not matter, because unless those 2 equations are parallel, there WILL be an intersection. at that intersection the raid "difficulties" are equal.

[Deleted]

Only read the starting post -
both assumptions wont work

1. in todays 10 and 25, a single dead player does not mean a total fail, the encounter can still be beaten

2. if a single member fails, it can either wipe (healer or tank failed) or not matter at all (dps failed)

Tuning on different sizes can be done to match a similar difficulty, but with slighty different mechanics to work with.
25 need smaller or weaker boss aoe skills than 10 people,
10 player dont have the same giveway to choose tank and healing amount (25 can almost always choose to 2or3 tank and 5or6 heal and still succeed, wont work in 10).

[Amgyn]

only read the first post and your flaw ist basing your "logic" and "math" on non-cataclysm raids.

its like applying the WOTLK 25/10man raids to Vanilla 40man raid mechanics... it doesnt work...

[ThalliumPR]

1)
Your assumptions are flawed. One persons failure rarely results in the failure of the raid. In fact, the failure of one person in a 25 man has less of an impact than a 10 currently.

You assume that x!=1 somehow implies x=0, which is incorrect. Imperfect success is not failure. If you wanted to somehow have a standard to apply failure, it should be a more reasonable percentage of the raid. Such as 75%, or 60%, or 50%.

2)
Your equations are too simple and do not possess some very important details. 25 man raids compensate for poorer players with more buffs and utility. While a 10 man may not have an enhance shaman, or may only have one paladin buff, or may not have a battle rez, 25 man will most likely will have (more), allowing for more shittiness among each individual. Therefore, each member in a raid brings (n+b+u) to that raid, where n is the member him/herself, b is the buffs that aren't already accounted for, and u is their utility outside of standards buffs. We could apply a basic numerical value to these variables and require the raids total to exceed a certain value in order for success, but that gets messy.

In addition, you neglect the constant C, a factor added in by the encounter designers, a different outside variable for each raid designed to bring their difficulty to a similar level.

3)
Your application of the equations is wrong. You're trying to prove that PS_s(or whatever) does not equal PS_s. That is flawed on a basic level. We already know that PS_s does equal PS_s. The most you can prove with these statistics is that the equations for 25 man and 10 man are going to be different, which hasn't been argued by anyone intelligent.