It's possible to balance so long as you take into account the difference in difficulty area between the formats.Originally Posted by kilgreth
In tens you are resource limited.
In 25s you are logistically limited.
If they differ the mechanics from 10 to 25 to take these into account then balance is possible.
Take Saurfang for example: in 25's you have no room to maneuver. This makes the blood novas the mechanic to focus on for 25's if you want to make life difficult. In tens however, spreading out for blood nova is trivial leaving the blood beast management as the mechanic that can be tuned to most easily make life difficult.
So how do we do this then?
25: Blood Boil comes at regular intervals allowing "spread out" phases to be timed by your boss mod. Additionally, targets for blood boil will be selected by a slightly different set of AI rules from tens and DBS will favor the targets his blood beasts are aggroed to if any are still alive. Because of the inherent danger the blood beasts represent, this means that his blood boil target will most usually be a moving target, increasing the likely number of targets hit by any one blood boil unless the raid is reaction to the beasts' present positions and the positions of their kiters. The difficulty becomes the logistics of the situation. You have to manage where everyone is. Do that and the fight becomes trivial/farm-able assuming enough DPS to kill the boss before marks become a problem.
10: Blood Boil comes at random intervals and is assumed to be mostly avoided because spreading out is trivial with 15 less people. Targeting is completely random except for the caveat that the target is not in melee range. The difficulty that gets pumped here is the part a 10-man raid will have problems with: The blood beasts. Each one now has a more HP for the DPS capacity of the raid, and a mechanic to test your raid's situational awareness: Blood Beasts will drop threat if they have been unable to attack their current aggro target for at least Z seconds (where Z = X + Y; X is a constant and Y is a random integer within reason) and automatically generate a certain level of threat on a random target in the raid favoring targets in melee range and targeting any non-tank if the raid is actually doing its job.
The tactics for each format remain the same: DPS the boss when no blood beasts are up and stay spread out. When blood beasts spawn kite and kill them before going back to the boss. 10's need to stay spread out at all times and pay attention to who has aggro from what while, depending on a timer, a 25-man raid can group up as needed to keep their distance from specific people without having their numbers necessarily be the thing that hurts them unless they screw up.
And all of this is assuming you don't consider increasing the size of the blood boils on 10 and decreasing them on 25 to be a valid option. I think the only reason we haven't seen the devs do something like that already is because they were trying to balance the encounters based on gear ilvl through boss/add HP totals and damage out. With both formats dropping the same gear, they will have to change how they balance encounters. It wouldn't surprise me to see them try a number of different balancing techniques over the course of Cataclysm to see what they feel works best.
Dropping the same gear in each format is alleviating a number of different problems. It's not to screw 25 man raiders over.I have also seen several people that are most interested in 10m achievements and server first titles being taken away by 25m guilds that over gear. With that being said, why not just go with the following approach. Use a similar model to what was used to the Tribute to Dedicated Insanity achievement from the Crusader Coliseum.
Basically do not allow anyone with any 25 man gear equipped to be able to do the 10m achievements. Better yet, you can't zone in unless you are under the gear score limit for the 10m version of the content.
Seems like that still lets both sides flex their epeens while at the same time not murdering 25m raiding. It also sets up 10m with it's own progression path a bit better. Not to mention you could also keep the raid lockouts separate this way giving hard core players more to do.
Also, while they could simply limit 10's to people with the appropriate gear level, that would be an artificial restriction that would do nothing but piss people off. How do you tell people that they can't go into a 10m because the gear they got from running the exact same content on 25 is invalid this week because somebody couldn't make it this week? How do you handle people who like running both that they now have to maintain two different sets of gear per spec?
Far easier to just have everything drop the same gear. It solves so many problems while cutting their workload by quite a bit on the development side.