Firelands Raid 10 vs 25 Comparison, BlizzCon Site, European Bnet Invitational, Comics

[MestHoop]

Every now and then I catch the drivel coming out of a world-first guild like Paragon. It's so far removed from my reality of WoW (I was in a guild full of doctors and grad students who killed Lich King 10M normal in August of 2010 after working on it for 5 months), that I have to read their post a few times just to understand what they are trying to say.

"Unfortunate..."
"Hand you've been dealt..."
"Too easy..."

Basically from down here in our perspective, we would have to ruin our lives as we know them, and our guild, just to approach a level of mediocrity that a world-first guild feels kind of sorry for. That might even sound offensive or demeaning, except that it's so far removed from our reality that it's totally irrelevant.

It's like I play football, and Paragon/Dream plays football on flying unicorns, and periodically report on their experiences.

Hmmm, I wouldn't get to picky on his choice of words. I'm from Europe myself and consider my English to be above average, and I very often see people choose their words because that is the only way they can express them in a correct sentence, not so much the underlying thought about choosing those words over others.

Then there's the cultural aspect. Many Scandinavians use harsher (or more direct) language in day to day conversation than people from other cultures. Once literally translated to English, this may convey a harsher message than was intended.
Not saying Arx' English is bad, but I wouldn't look too much into his use of condescending words.

[xdragus]

I really enjoy their 3-4 druid compositions to spam innervate.

[Mizpah]

I thought they were quite equal, if anything, 10m was slightly easier, however you could argue that we had shredded some "scrubs" from our 25 man roster when we did the 10 man version, so could just be that we had better players, but we got "Can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am" on our first 10 man pull ever, after killing it in 25 a few times though.

And while sinestra could possible have been a SMALL jump in difficulty ( personally I think they were on par. ), Chimaeron, Atramedes, Chimaeron, Omnitron, Maloriak, Cho'Gall, Al'Akir, Magmaw, Nefarian and Twins were all a jump down in difficulty, especially after the fixes. The only boss that I can actually give creds for being a step up would be conclave of winds, since it required a little special setup in 10 man.

Chimaron = harder 10 man, atramedes is a joke so why even bring it up, omnotron harder 25m, maloriak....at least even, cho'gall even, magmaw harder 10m until the nerfs, twins harder 10m until the nerfs. 10 and 25 sinestra has the exact same amount of orbs, same amount of wrack to deal with, except on 25m you can have an extra healer dedicated to wrack, where 10 man post shadow priest nerf you had to solo heal it with mass dispels, while 2/8 of you people dodging orbs, and if your healer has to dodge orbs in a clutch part guaranteed wipe. Nowhere near harder on 25m.

[Argroth]

Paragon has finally shown some use.World firsts are meaningless/useless accomplishments but at least with thier fame they can lay some truth on all the self righteous idiotic elitists that think 10 man is undeniably harder.25 man is harder always has been always will be, your just sad that you don't have 25 good players in your guilds and can't organize, live with it. In order to dispel any thoughts that I'm an elitist by saying these things; I'm not very good, I don't even play anymore but I know many people who still do and I still see them raid occasionally.

[zearrow]

I really enjoy their 3-4 druid compositions to spam innervate.

innervate has been nerfed to the face when you cast it on others

[Mithsploit]

If you are used to running 10 or 25 you will output the exact same dps in 10 as in 25, there's no correlation here. The only reason why you'd even say that is that you think you shouldn't be as good as a player in 10 as in 25; otherwise your post makes no sense.

Unless of course in 10 man you're missing a buff/debuff or two, an important role is assigned to you because there's less people to perform those roles, or you're targeted more often with abilities that require you to interrupt your dps because there's less people to be targeted by those abilities.

/blinders

[Notos]

Paragon has finally shown some use.World firsts are meaningless/useless accomplishments but at least with thier fame they can lay some truth on all the self righteous idiotic elitists that think 10 man is undeniably harder.25 man is harder always has been always will be, your just sad that you don't have 25 good players in your guilds and can't organize, live with it. In order to dispel any thoughts that I'm an elitist by saying these things; I'm not very good, I don't even play anymore but I know many people who still do and I still see them raid occasionally.

So you don't play anymore and so probably haven't actually done any of the content, but you still want to say that 25man is harder than 10man? Cool, whatever. By the way, everyone knows that 10man t11 stuff was overtuned and that 25man was the easier option for raiding for that particular tier for a good while.

My guild runs both 10 and 25, and I personally have found the 25man to be somewhat easier, though that's primarily because our comp for 10 is sub optimal and we're always missing a few buffs/debuffs. I would agree with Paragon's assessment that if you have the perfect comp for each fight, 10man is easier, but a lot of the time you don't, so the situation sort of balances itself out.

[Gilian]

Nice report from Paragon. But this discussion will never end. You can already see the whining on their discussion thread while they VERY CLEARLY stated what their intentions were. People get butt hurt when someone says 25 man is harder and just ignore all the facts and start whining.

Besides all the coordination, logistics and organisation 25 man raids have it's now clear that T12 IS actually harder on 25 man (tuned-wize).

And now I would like to say: I told you so! Before Cataclysm was released I already said that shared achievements (realm first kills especially) and loot was stupid because 10 man would never be tuned good enough to be equal to 25 man raids. Same rewards for less effort = bad.

Are there actually still 25 man raid pugs or are they only pugging 10's now?

[MestHoop]

Nice report from Paragon. But this discussion will never end. You can already see the whining on their discussion thread while they VERY CLEARLY stated what their intentions were. People get butt hurt when someone says 25 man is harder and just ignore all the facts and start whining.

Besides all the coordination, logistics and organisation 25 man raids have it's now clear that T12 IS actually harder on 25 man (tuned-wize).

And now I would like to say: I told you so! Before Cataclysm was released I already said that shared achievements (realm first kills especially) and loot was stupid because 10 man would never be tuned good enough to be equal to 25 man raids. Same rewards for less effort = bad.

Are there actually still 25 man raid pugs or are they only pugging 10's now?

They are, but that's just because people think they get more loot that way :P

Anyway, I just wanted to say that even though I do agree with what you're saying here, it is kind of 1 sided.
The major issue 10 mans have in comparison to 25 mans is class balance. Most 10 man guilds are 10 man guilds because they're only a small group of people, they can't get 25 people together. The fights that were scaled down in comparison to 25 man were done so because not every 10 man guild can bring all the beneficial buffs to their group. Most 25 man guilds don't have this problem.

The problem here lies, that if you CAN make a group that has all the buffs it needs (mostly caster based groups, so no need for all those stupid melee buffs, for example) the fights are just easier than their 25 man counterparts.

I switched to 10 man raiding from 25 man raiding when cata launched due to only having a small steady group of people to play with, so we have had problems with certain fights due to lacking a certain class or spec, however this is very guild to guild specific.
Then again, the room you have to make crazy strats (both positioning wise and getting specific people to do specific tasks, which both take forever in 25 mans) makes up for it on other fights.

[Sangrael]

This is coming from someone who has played since vanilla, but never raided regularly after BC's release...but personally, I share the sentiment but for entirely different reasons. Something most players nowadays have never experienced, or conveniently forgotten, is that nearly all endgame content prior to the onslaught of 20+ player raids in response to the complaints of a very vocal 3-5% of players came in the form of 5- to 10-mans that could be PuG'ed by a group of competent players in greens.

I shortened your quote for the sake of brevity, but its in reply to the entirety. I've also been playing since vanilla, I came over during the beta from EQ and got hooked. I'm not sure we played the same game. Upon release we had 2 40 man raids and 1 10 man raid. UBRS wasn't exactly "end-game content", especially considering attunement to Ony required completion of it first, and UBRS required attunement from LBRS, making a simple measure to determine progression of content. I can't recall anyone ever, at any point, claiming that UBRS was the pinnacle of raiding. I'm quite curious as to your definition of "endgame content". If you define it as the place with the best loot, then that would be Ony and MC at launch. If you define it as the hardest content, again, Ony and MC. If you just use the very literal definition of the words, the end of the game, then again, that can't possibly be UBRS, because the linear path of attunement goes LBRS->UBRS->Ony. So in reality you're complaining about how people used to be able to pug mid level content, taken up in today's game by heroics. At least on my current realm people still commonly pug heroics, and Korial is pretty horrible when it comes to performance.

And then you suggest that vanilla was somehow more accessible to the "average" player. Apparently you slept during vanilla or the heights of your raiding career was, in fact, UBRS. To raid in vanilla was to give up a large majority of your playtime to farming. You farmed rep, you farmed resist gear, you farmed consumables. I and the other raiders I knew of all spent more time farming in preparation for raiding than we usually got to spend actually raiding. And the attunement/resist requirements were a huge discouragement from new players wanting to experience raids. The only reason most people complain today is because they were never around then.

Obviously the system still has faults, but what system doesn't. At the end of the day, assuming you're not one of the professional raiders, and the vast majority of us aren't, all you can care about is your own personal enjoyment. I love 10s because they let me raid with people who are only my friends. Throughout my history of raiding during WoW there was always at least 2-3 people that positively noone liked, but you had to raid with them, because that's the nature of a large group. 10 man lets me raid with only the people I want to at a time that suits me.

And one thing to bear in mind regarding all of the 10 vs 25 debates. 25 man guilds can go to 10 man only at literally any point. They may choose not to due to friendships or whatnot, but the option exists. For people that play at the very cusp of the game, people who have a proven track record of using any possible advantage to acquire firsts, assuming they wouldn't run in 10s when that's a definitive way to get to first is just naive. Apparently you are of the belief that top guilds will class stack, realm/faction change, and exploit, but they're not willing to bench 15 people to get to be number 1.

[Olmeck]

And one thing to bear in mind regarding all of the 10 vs 25 debates. 25 man guilds can go to 10 man only at literally any point. They may choose not to due to friendships or whatnot, but the option exists. For people that play at the very cusp of the game, people who have a proven track record of using any possible advantage to acquire firsts, assuming they wouldn't run in 10s when that's a definitive way to get to first is just naive. Apparently you are of the belief that top guilds will class stack, realm/faction change, and exploit, but they're not willing to bench 15 people to get to be number 1.

Hadn't thought about that but so true. Cheers.

[Nobleshield]

Can we whine because they don't use a Protection Warrior? That seems to be the thing to do these days. Obviously that means Prot Warriors are worthless as tanks, because an ultra-competitive guild who has to eke out every tiny bit of performance to make world first kills as soon as possible, without the assumed gear that the fights expect you to have, chose to use a Bear and Pally on all the kills? Obviously Bears/Pallys are the ideal tanking combination because Paragon uses them, right? Should I just go back to my Pally?

[Araella]

Every now and then I catch the drivel coming out of a world-first guild like Paragon. It's so far removed from my reality of WoW (I was in a guild full of doctors and grad students who killed Lich King 10M normal in August of 2010 after working on it for 5 months), that I have to read their post a few times just to understand what they are trying to say.

"Unfortunate..."
"Hand you've been dealt..."
"Too easy..."

Basically from down here in our perspective, we would have to ruin our lives as we know them, and our guild, just to approach a level of mediocrity that a world-first guild feels kind of sorry for. That might even sound offensive or demeaning, except that it's so far removed from our reality that it's totally irrelevant.

It's like I play football, and Paragon/Dream plays football on flying unicorns, and periodically report on their experiences.

I don't think it's entirely valid to directly compare US and EU guild progress, as the conditions under which people play are quite different.

US internet infrastructure is....well...business (what's the best that it needs to perform in order to max profit/reduce costs? and that under near monopoly conditions...). People are also far more likely to be near the server location in EU countries (since they are geographically much smaller than the US).

If your average ping is under 20ms, you are going to perform far better than if your ping is 300+, that's just a given. So while their comments may seem to be over trivializing the encounter to such an extent that it's offensive to some people, it could also be the case that the encounters are in fact far less demanding for them due to factors that have nothing at all to do with raid experience, composition, or strategy. On the other end of the spectrum, I'm not trying to downplay their success either (after all no other EU guild has killed everything yet either), I'm just saying that people aren't looking at the whole picture if they pretend that connection/server quality differences don't exist either.

[roboscorcher]

On a different note, anyone notice Kerrigan on the Blizzcon website background? I'm so pumped for HotS, even though I suck at multiplayer!

[Clockwork Pinkie]

Before people read into the "10 MAN IZ EZ MOAD", DREAM Paragon made it a point to say that it was only easy if a 10-man raid has the player resources to switch out players for optimal specs/classes for certain fights. Hence why you'll find people on 10-man stuck on Beth'tilac because they have 2 paladin healers.

Some specs are just outright disadvantaged when it comes to a role in some of these fights, and some can just breeze through it, and a lot of 10-man raiding guilds simply do not have the people to switch out an Arcane Mage for a Hunter, or a Holy Paladin for a resto Druid. Hence, probably why there is a percieved lenient DPS curve for 10-man.

Quote for truth, been trying to tell this to my group every time we breeze through Shannox and get stuck on Beth for a day because of the set up we're running with. They just don't understand this concept >.<

[keLston]

Don't worry guys, if you have full 391 gear from 25m and a 30 man bench and the strats already known, you too can wipe 33 times on a boss you've already killed and then declare 10 man is easier.

[ijeff]

Don't worry guys, if you have full 391 gear from 25m and a 30 man bench and the strats already known, you too can wipe 33 times on a boss you've already killed and then declare 10 man is easier.

They're doing it in mostly T11 Heroic gear with a few T12 pieces. Top geared in the world (not Paragon) are only at around 384 ilevel.

[Deleted]

interesting... not a single shaman in these compositions.. wtf.. why dont they take shamans with them? Why are we rejected?

[Demoncrash]

interesting... not a single shaman in these compositions.. wtf.. why don't they take shamans with them? Why are we rejected?

1 guild in the world not bringing a shammy does not mean every shammy in the world now has to re-roll. They were aiming for a world first kill(which is usually done with gear from the previous tier)so they took a comp that suited them the most.

[keLston]

They're doing it in mostly T11 Heroic gear with a few T12 pieces. Top geared in the world (not Paragon) are only at around 384 ilevel.

No they're not. Did you even armory the people they use? They average 380-384. So basically if you are at or above the gear level that the bosses are tuned to (for example H Baleroc 10 is tuned for ilvl 380), the boss becomes easier than when you were doing it undergeared when they were trying Heroic 25s.

And then they have the audacity to cry that 10 mans are easier?

Surprise! When you are geared for and have the strats for a boss, the boss becomes easier than when you are reconning him undergeared. Holy smokes man, alert the media.