Gearing rate of 10m vs. 25m

[Barth]

Any 10 vs 25 man bull will be auto infracted. This is about gear, not difficulty. Only warning, you post about it, should have read. ~Myrrar



Since there's been a lot of talk lately about 'strict' 10 man raids and how their rate of gear acquisition compares to 25 mans, I wanted to see how exactly they compare. Specifically, the common argument from the 10 man raider side is that loot is more likely to be actually useful for someone in the raid in 25 mans than it is in 10 mans, so 10 man guilds will gear up more slowly even though the loot dropped per player is pretty similar between the two raid sizes.

To do this I simulated loot drops for 10,000 raids in both 10 and 25 man until every player received every piece of loot they needed. Along the way I tracked a couple points of data for comparison: Average, minimum, and maximum number of runs needed to gear up 50%, 75%, and 100% of the raid.

At this point I will say that these simulations did not take into account the actual boss loot tables from Firelands, or any existing raid. The goal here was not to get a perfect picture of how raids can gear up in Firelands. I'm more interested in the general concept that RNG is more noticeable in 10 mans than it is in 25 mans, so I made some assumptions that don't accurately reflect actual boss tables, with the hope that the simulator will still be close enough to get an idea of the difference in RNG. The notable assumptions/simplifications I made were:

1. Only consider the 8 armor slots, meaning helm, shoulders, chest, bracers, gloves, belt, legs, and boots. For now I'm not worrying about weapons, trinkets, jewelery slots, etc. I'll probably go back and add these slots in later, but again I'm not looking for realism, just an idea of how RNG affects 10 mans and 25 mans.

2. Assume that exactly 1 piece of gear for each armor type drops for each slot and is BiS for all specs that use that armor type. Again this isn't how boss loot tables in Firelands actually work. For example, most armor types have only 6 drops in Firelands, with cloth having 7 and leather/mail agility having 5 each. This is also ignoring tier tokens, BiS valor point items, etc. I will probably work tier tokens into the simulator eventually, but the rest I'll probably leave alone since the specifics change from tier to tier.

3. Assume that there are 8 armor types: Cloth, Leather Agility, Leather Intellect, Mail Agility, Mail Intellect, Plate Strength Dps, Plate Strength Tanking, and Plate Intellect. It's a little risky to lump all Cloth into one category, but since there's 0 cloth spirit drops in Firelands this should roughly match how loot is actually distributed in game.

4. Assume 8 bosses in the raid. I'm not sure how changing the number of bosses will affect the outcome and 8 is a pretty reasonable count, so I used it because it makes the math much easier.

5. Assume that drops are determined by 2/6 randomized, independent rolls where each piece of gear has the same chance to drop on each roll. I believe that this is not an exact representation of how loot is dropped in game, but it should be close enough.

6. Assume that class distribution is as close to optimal as possible. This means that 10 mans have 6 armor types covered by 1 player and 2 armor types covered by 2 players. For example, they might have 1 player on each of leather agility, leather intellect, mail agility, mail intellect, plate strength dps, and plate intellect, and 2 players each on cloth and plate strength tanking gear. 25 mans have 7 armor types covered by 3 players and the 8th armor type with 4 players. This is something I want to play around with in the future since another argument of 10 man players is that it's harder for them to run a perfect raid comp.

7. Assume hard mode drop rates, so 2 drops in 10 man and 6 in 25 man.

8. You raid with exactly the same people every week. No 13 man rosters for 10 man raids or 35 man rosters for 25 man raids, you gear up exactly 10/25 people. This is something I'm not likely to change since it seems like a lot of work for little benefit, so just keep it in mind.


With that out of the way, here are the numbers I came up with after 10,000 simulations. On average it took 10 mans 3.75 runs to get 50% loot saturation, 6.78 runs to get 75% loot saturation, and 21.82 runs to get 100% loot saturation. For 25 mans the numbers were 3.00 runs for 50%, 4.12 runs for 75% saturation, and 11.85 runs for 100% saturation. The other notable differences were that the worst case scenario for 75% loot saturation on 10 mans was 10 runs compared to 5 runs for 25 mans, and the worst case for 100% loot saturation was 25 runs for 25 mans and a whopping 52 runs for the 10 mans.

Keep in mind that the numbers only account for 8 slots out of ~16 per class, so in reality you won't gear up this quickly. What's more important is the ratios between the two sizes. You can see that early on the difference is small, since when you don't have much gear there's a good chance that any drops will be useful. It takes about 25% more runs for the 10 mans to reach 50% loot saturation than 25 mans, so keeping in mind that 25 mans drop 20% more loot per player (6/25 compared to 2/10) the RNG factor is almost non-existent. At 75% saturation it took 64% longer for the 10 mans than the 25 mans, so the RNG is pretty noticeable at this point. For a full 100% saturation it took 10 mans 84% longer, almost twice as long, as it did for 25 mans. And the worst case scenario took more than double the number of runs for 10 mans than the worst case scenario for 25 mans, a whole 52 weeks, or in other words a full calendar year.

Some things to keep in mind about the assumptions made earlier:

1. Any BiS gear that is obtained outside of raids, such as casters using Darkmoon Card: Volcano, items such as relics or wands bought with VP, BiS crafted items, etc. will reduce the gap between the raid sizes. This is because there's no difference in gearing rate outside of raids between 10 man and 25 man raiders.

2. When the raid is fully/mostly decked out in drops it's much easier to gear up a fresh recruit in 25 mans than in 10 mans.

3. 10 man raids have much less granularity when it comes to raid composition. Consider a raid with a mage, warlock, shadow priest, disc priest, rogue, boomkin, hunter, holy paladin, prot paladin, and prot warrior. This is a completely reasonable raid comp that covers most raid buffs and only overlaps 2 classes with 2 players, but the gear distribution is much worse. You have 2 armor types with no users and cloth with 4 users. A 25 man almost has to purposely try to build a raid with a loot distribution that unbalanced.

So, what does this all mean? Well, early in a new tier raids of both sizes are likely to put most of their new drops to use. As the raid continues to farm gear it's more likely that players in the 10 man will be left with empty slots while 25 mans can reasonably expect to have all of their players close to BiS. So when the new raid comes out the 10 man will probably have a slightly lower average gear level going in than the 25 man, with the gap quickly shrinking for the first few weeks and then growing again as the raid is farmed over and over, until the next raid comes out and the process repeats.






Edit: Alright, finally got it working with a much more realistic setup. The simulator was improved in a couple ways:

1. All item slots are now covered, including tier pieces. For tier slots I assumed that every player would want 4 piece + 1 off-set. The off-set piece is randomized for each player.

2. Raids are now randomly generated. All raids must conform to a set of guidelines, such as 2 tanks, 2-3 healers, etc.

3. I now assume 10 bosses per raid that have 13 unique pieces of loot, plus tier tokens on 5 of the bosses.


The results, as an average of the number of runs needed for the given level of loot saturation:

50% loot saturation
10 man: 7.10 runs
25 man: 4.87 runs

75% loot saturation
10 man: 13.26 runs
25 man: 8.48 runs

95% loot saturation
10 man: 30.33 runs
25 man: 17.65 runs


Numbers are up across the board of course since there are a lot more gear slots to fill out. The ratio between the time to gear up starts higher but doesn't grow as quickly compared to my first simulation. The 10 mans now take 46% longer to reach 50% saturation, 56% longer to reach 75% saturation, and 72% longer to reach 95% saturation. The first sim showed the 10 man taking 84% longer to reach full saturation, so the story looks a little better for 10 mans now.

[Paskgotsheal]

Good read, sounds about right.

[Maldobar]

10man raiding is bollocks. Blizzard should have never made both raids drop same ilvl gear.

User was infracted for this post.

[cleotaurus]

This is what I have been saying all along. And all I would get is responses from retards "durp, 25 can i have rng too!, i disenchanted a loot once too!." Glad someone finally did the math to prove it.

Looking at the gearscore rankings of players on my server, its all the 25m guilds saturating the top 100 ranks, despite them being on par or lower progression than the 10m guilds. Not only can 25m funnel gear towards their highest achievers, they also are that much less likely to have loot go to waste.

I thought the heroic VP token upgrade drops was a step in the direction for balancing the gear disparity between tiers but so far it doesn't seem to be the case, with non-existent drop rates that seem to be higher in 25m as well.

[Mudkiper]

Your assuming that both 10 and 25 man's clear the instances at the same rate, which according to some high progress guild's.. 10 man's would clear faster.

Plus, the whole selling point of 25 man raiding is, more people, more effort, more gear.

[Deleted]

25 mans yield more loot, but there is more competition obviously. However, you are most likely to end up with the gear you want anyways.

10 mans yield less loot, but there is less competition. However you can kill the same boss for a whole patch without your item ever dropping.

This can ofcourse happend in 25 mans too, but it is by FAR less likely.

10 mans sucks the cawk if you're in it for the gear.

[Illana]

Except in most cases especially in the firelands: 10man raiding is harder.

[mtawney1313]

Except in most cases especially in the firelands: 10man raiding is harder.

No, 10 man is significantly easier.

[Mudkiper]

Except in most cases especially in the firelands: 10man raiding is harder.

Well, the only top end raiding guild to have tried both and reported on it, have pretty much clearly stated that 10 man is easier on most boss's due to less 'things' to avoid, more lenient DPS requirement's allowing for more healers and an easier kill, etc.

http://www.paragon.fi/articles/10-vs-25-comparison

[knpkra]

inb4 10vs25man
oh wait....

[Arcrin]

Well, the only top end raiding guild to have tried both and reported on it, have pretty much clearly stated that 10 man is easier on most boss's due to less 'things' to avoid, more lenient DPS requirement's allowing for more healers and an easier kill, etc.

http://www.paragon.fi/articles/10-vs-25-comparison

but a very hard thing about 10m is setup. alysrazor requires 2 interrupters cause tanks cant do the job. im my guild we are struggling to get it down because of that. and tomorrow we only have 1 shaman and me as holy paladin. ofc we got like hunter and mage interupts but thats 30sec cd. and that sucks tbh from a 10m pve point of view

me as a holypaladin the interrupt part is not hard at all. the hard part is being in range of my assigned tank to heal him. the room is fucking huge

[arden714]

My only issue with the two raids and their difference in loot is that 25 mans get multiple rolls towards the same item. We for instance had been clearing BWD since week 1 on 10 man, eventually doing them on hard mode, and never once saw the symbiotic worm trinket drop. That covers about 7 months or over 30 clears. While 25 mans could see potentially up to 2-3 of the same trinket drop and have many more chances of seeing said item drop.

Now before you think I'm QQ'ing, I do see the benefit of 25 mans getting a SMALL edge due to the extra effort involved. To be very honest, our switch from 25 to 10 man hasn't really changed a thing. We have the same officers, same problems and now we're penalized for it. Not only is our content finer tuned, requires incredible class balance but it's going to take us twice as long to acquire the gear to defeat said encounters. Any top end 25 man can tell you it's not hard to run with good officers and raiders that are not immature brats.

However, at least limit 10 man drops to only armor types represented in the raid. We saw more mail gear drop than any other armor type, for some more than double. And for a class that is so poorly represented in raids right now, I don't think I ever want to see another piece of mail spirit gear drop ever again. I really think Blizzard needs to combine armor types to just the basics: cloth, leather, mail and plate. Each class can draw it's beneficial stats from their core stats. Lower hit and expertise caps or allow them to be 100% reforged into things like spirit or haste and be done with it. I'd be much happier with smaller loot tables. Perhaps the biggest issue with firelands is trying to cram all that loot into half as many bosses... very very frustrating.

[Raphtheone]

This actually made me curious to do the calculations properly. Question is, what does the average 10-man and 25-man raid look like?

[Deleted]

inb4 10vs25man
oh wait....

^ This. Some people will just never learn though.

And OP this is pretty much right about the statistical part of it, things are as they should be imo. Arguments of difficulty aside nobody can doubt that 25 is harder to organize logistically, which was the whole idea behind why Blizzard decided to put slightly more loot into 25s. If there is an imperfection in the system it's that the gap gets too big near the end of the farming process, mechanics like the Crystallized Firestone are pretty nice at alleviating this though. I hope we see more things like that.

I'm curious to see the math on the class tokens as well since those are often such a huge pain for 10m. When your raid runs 3 pally, 2 priest and a Warlock and all you get Vanq it's kinda shitty.

[Barth]

This actually made me curious to do the calculations properly. Question is, what does the average 10-man and 25-man raid look like?

That's really the biggest hurdle to doing a more realistic simulation. It should be relatively pain-free to add things like weapons, trinkets, tier tokens, etc., but nailing down an "average" raid comp, for either 10 or 25 man, is a challenge. I'm thinking of randomizing raid comps with certain parameters, such as "0-4 cloth wearers, 0-2 leather agi wearers, 0-2 leather int wearers, etc."

[Harsesis]

Your numbers make sense but are not accurate to how live servers are. You cannot make a statistical analysis and make so many assumptions like that.

[MarizzaDraenor]

Nice maths.

"Lets assume 10 mans raid with 10 people and 25 mans with 25 people"

Try it again a bit more realistically even if its to much work.

10 mans raids 11-13 people
25 man guilds 31-35 people

You will be surprised. Our alts have way more fireland gear then our mains atm with 1/3 of the raiding. Only exception are the tanks.

[beingmused]

One important issue that this doesn't take into account: you're spreading that loot over amongst all of the raiders you have, and you are likely going to need more "backups" in 25s than you do in 10s. Most of the 10man guilds I know about tend to have between 11-13 raiders total. But my 25 guild has 36 raiders - there are people out due to RL issues every single day, and we have to be able to have sufficient backup tanks and healers in order to make up for the potential missing of any 3-4 people. If a 10 guild has a catastrophic day where they just can't go, it is relatively far easier for them to reschedule than it is for a 25guild to reschedule, so the larger guild HAS to carry far more redundancy.

[Myrrar]

Any 10 vs 25 man bull will be auto infracted. This is about gear, not difficulty. Only warning, you post about it, should have read. Adding to the OP so no excuse.

[Stevoman]

7. Assume hard mode drop rates, so 2 drops in 10 man and 6 in 25 man.

Wait, whaaaat? 25m gets 6 drops on heroic?

Also, how did your algorithm account for tier tokens? I ask because a lot of the 10m grief over tier tokens I read on this board is self-inflicted from group imbalance. (E.g.: Groups whining about Conqueror Tokens, then upon questioning find that they don't have a single Warrior, Hunter, or Shaman in their group.)