8 or 16mans?

[Atoj]

While I do not wish to take away from anyone who is planning to raid with 8-people, and while also saying I alwasy enjoyed 10-man raiding in WoW to 25-mans simply do to how close I was able to get within a smaller group of people rather than being a faceless name in a crowd as I often felt in 25-mans... I will say in WoW 10-man raiding is easier simply because you don't have to rely on so many people to do their job. Now it is a lot easier to be bad in 25-mans than it is to be bad in 10-mans, but you will never be able to get around it is easier to develop a strategy and organize 10 people than it is to do that for 25 people. Likewise it is easier to organize 8 people than 16 people. Do not let that take away from your accomplishments, but also do not be upset when a 16-guild gets more respect than you even if you end up downing the boss first on 8-man. It doesn't mean you are bad, but you certainly didn't complete the same feet that the 16-man guild did.

To be honest, I really wish Bioware didn't have separate sized raids in SWTOR. It must take a great deal of development time balancing a raid twice for two different sized groups as I'm sure it's not just a matter of "double the damage and health of everything". 16 is a good number of raiders imo. Not so big that recruiting becomes difficult, and not so small where you don't even feel like you are raiding. 8-people is only 3 more than WoW's 5-man instance model. Hard to feel overly heroic in a group so small, but that is my opinion.

[ZeroEdgeir]

Actually I was under the impression that they are not equal, with 8 man Operations being easier and dropping loot of a lesser quality. Was that changed at some point? I really hadn't been researching that information very closely but I was certain I heard at some point that 16 mans would be tuned slightly higher.

It never was. There is 2 difficulties for Operations, and 8-man and 16-man reward the same level loot, it's the difficulty that rewards better.

[Strah]

And this is pretty much exactly why 16 man will somehow be considered harder/better.

Because people think this way before even touching the content and assume more people means it's harder, therefore the "real" thing and 8 mans will be lulz easy mode kiddy free loot land.

Not knocking your opinion Strah, just using you as an example.

The thing is, it became that way because of wow. WoW 25 man guilds had 25 man gear, then went into 10 mans with 25 man gear on and smoked the place and then reported to the community that 10 man raids were easy mode. And the fallacy was born.

Well, i played wow since mid-vanilla, so i'm used to 25-man raids. Then there was kara and all that stuff, so 10-man raids were usually casual offdays. That's a habit. It's just the atmosphere that 25-man raids got, there's more people= more jokes=more fun, at least for me. And more space to show off my ego by topping the meters and being an ej.

[ZeroEdgeir]

To be honest, I really wish Bioware didn't have separate sized raids in SWTOR. It must take a great deal of development time balancing a raid twice for two different sized groups as I'm sure it's not just a matter of "double the damage and health of everything". 16 is a good number of raiders imo. Not so big that recruiting becomes difficult, and not so small where you don't even feel like you are raiding. 8-people is only 3 more than WoW's 5-man instance model. Hard to feel overly heroic in a group so small, but that is my opinion.

Yes, but you have to mirror it properly.
WoW 5-man = SWTOR 4-man
WoW 10-man = SWTOR 8-man
WoW 25-man = SWTOR 16-man (This is where it shifts, cause the precise ratio should have been 20-man for SWTOR)

Saying that an 8-man in SWTOR feels too small compared to WoW's 5man, you can use the same logic on the 16-man, cause it is 9 LESS than the WoW 25-man, but only 6 MORE than the 10-man. Which does 16-man feel closer to?

[Encarn]

I think it's just a matter of how large a community you wish to have in your guild versus what logistics you are capable of managing. From my experience, running two 10-man groups was an utter nightmare as one group always tends to do better than the other and people try to migrate or displace people from the other. I am looking for a group of around 20 people with similar interests and age, so rather than try to manage 2 groups of eight, I will manage 1 group of 16 plus some alternates.

[JustintimeSS]

Well, i played wow since mid-vanilla, so i'm used to 25-man raids. Then there was kara and all that stuff, so 10-man raids were usually casual offdays. That's a habit. It's just the atmosphere that 25-man raids got, there's more people= more jokes=more fun, at least for me. And more space to show off my ego by topping the meters and being an ej.

I played since vanilla release (like before dire maul) and quit two months after clearing cata release raids. I played when it was 40 man. I have been a raid leader since UBRS was a raid. To me, the big raids were fun but it always felt like herding cats. Hell, you had to have class leaders running their classes reporting to the raid leader back in 40 man. Along came 25 man and it was odd for us.

We ended up enjoying it but after Kara came out we just had so much more fun there. For my guild at least, 10 man raiding became the staple raid size. At that point 25 mans were harder. When WotLK came out, 25 man raiders earned their 25 man gear and then went to do 10 man raids. This happened, I know because I did 2 raid groups with 2 toons in WotLK (two different guilds, one a raid leader and one just a raider). My guilds 10 man group had fun and it was challenging and we ended up clearing it all at our own pace and loved it. The other guild would clear 25 man then go into the 10 mans and clear it. When i would go back to my guild I would be like "WHY IS THIS SO MUCH HARDER FFS YOU GUYS SUCKS" and then I realized it wasn't us, but the gear.

And guess what? The other guild constantly bashed 10 man content and raiders saying how it was easymode. I know the difference and I'm not afraid to tell it how it was.

BUT, back on topic, the gear is the same in 8 and 16 man in swtor so we might not be seeing the same outcome. The only thing that could cause such a rift would be residual elitism from wow 10/25 argument.

[TheDred1]

I still have nightmares about my first TBC guild and the dreaded Kara Groups A & B. The amount of drama it caused was epic. So I'm recruiting 21 raiders for 16-man and calling it good.

Yeah I remember that pain well. It was even worse coming from a 40 man raiding guild, getting told we had to break it down to 25 man, and then having to run 10 man groups to progress. It made no sense to me at all. We ended up having 3 teams, with all of the good players in team A and B, and team C being made up of the leftovers, mainly the folks that we had been carrying before TBC. And our Guild leader was too much of a "nice" guy to hand them their hat, so he just benched them until they got the hint and quit on their own. Drama galore.

[Deleted]

Personally im not too fussed about 25 >10, Bwd HC etc was harder on 10 man but then FL hc was faceroll on 10 man, don't know enough about DS yet. i've raided in top guilds on my old server in both formats before i quit and loved them both and they both have a lot of pros and cons to many to list, Maybe i am genralising but i've found most the qq comes from people who can't clear HC content and i also think a fair bit of it is down to jealousy

I think il go with 16 man raiding because it will be small enough to be more personal and big enough to feel a bit more epic

You have to wonder if 16 man raiding will survive because 10 man raiding killed 25 man raiding in wow.

Maybe i am being dumb but the way buffing in swtor works and the raid sizes being 8 man and 16 man wouldn't sw:tor be far easier to balance?

[Khanjin]

I will most likely go 16man, as I always enjoyed 25man most in WoW, though 25man is rather large. I think 16 is probably the sweet spot! Also will be easier to balance between 16 and 8 I imagine, than 10 and 25.

[Atoj]

Yes, but you have to mirror it properly.
WoW 5-man = SWTOR 4-man
WoW 10-man = SWTOR 8-man
WoW 25-man = SWTOR 16-man (This is where it shifts, cause the precise ratio should have been 20-man for SWTOR)

Saying that an 8-man in SWTOR feels too small compared to WoW's 5man, you can use the same logic on the 16-man, cause it is 9 LESS than the WoW 25-man, but only 6 MORE than the 10-man. Which does 16-man feel closer to?

I don't have to mirror it properly at all. Just because the flash point instances are based around 4 people instead of 5, doesn't mean 8 is an acceptable number to call a raid. If flash points were based around 2 people, doesn't mean I'd suddenly feel heroic having 4 people in a raid instance.

As I said, 8-man will be absolutely fine for people who do it, but don't act like you are undertaking the same level of difficulty as a 16-man team, even if the game is balanced to make them similar. Organizing 16 people will always be harder than organizing 8 people. Doesn't make you a baddie to raid in a 8-man team, and downing nightmare content even in 8-man is sure to be a difficult feat that no one will be able to take away from you regardless of your raid size, but 16-man should be the metric you strive for and justifiably so will be the raiding guilds that get the most accolades.

[Herrenos]

2 tanks in 8 man. 2 tanks in 16 man.

2-3 healers in 8 man, 3-4 healers in 16 man.

16 man certainly SEEMS better for the playerbase, if the dps to tank/heal ratio holds true in SWTOR as it has in other games.

[Atoj]

2 tanks in 8 man. 2 tanks in 16 man.

2-3 healers in 8 man, 3-4 healers in 16 man.

16 man certainly SEEMS better for the playerbase, if the dps to tank/heal ratio holds true in SWTOR as it has in other games.

Most fights don't even require 2 tanks in 16-man.

[JustintimeSS]

If the content is equally difficult and rewards the same level of gear.... what constitutes one being better than the other? More people present? Because you have to rely on more people there to be cohesive? Is this all it boils down to?

Shoddy example -

5 people on a basketball team kicking ass isn't any less amazing than 11 football players kicking ass. I know it's two different sports but the size is the important part. 5 are working perfectly to succeed just as hard as 11 are and if content difficulty and gear are not an important element, then it comes down to the number of people playing perfectly.

[Atoj]

Shoddy example -

5 people on a basketball team kicking ass isn't any less amazing than 11 football players kicking ass. I know it's two different sports but the size is the important part. 5 are working perfectly to succeed just as hard as 11 are and if content difficulty and gear are not an important element, then it comes down to the number of people playing perfectly.

It's two different sports... 11 people working on a football team is certainly more impressive than the 3-man football teams you organize in your backyard when you are 12. Where you suddenly have to dumb things down with rules like "You can't blitz the quarterback for 4 seconds".

[Deleted]

If the content is equally difficult and rewards the same level of gear.... what constitutes one being better than the other? More people present? Because you have to rely on more people there to be cohesive? Is this all it boils down to?

I find people have a strange mentality when it comes to the sizes of raids almost a spitefulness/jealous attitude, "you use less people you can't be better than me" kind of thing, it's hard to explain it seems common though, just trying to strip someones achievments in a game for the sake of it.

I think a big part of it is caused by wows development but most people don't realise there are many cases where 10 man was harder than 25

[Atoj]

I'm not trying to take away from anyone's successes, but you can't get away from the fact that most high-quality 16-man raid teams can trim away their 8 worst players and suddenly improve themselves dramatically. That alone should highlight that 16-mans and 8-mans are not on equal footing.

[JustintimeSS]

It's two different sports...

I know it's two different sports but the size is the important part.

I made my point.

[Atoj]

So you agree your example was terribly thought out? No one is going to fault a 5-man basketball team for being a terrible football team, you can fault a 5-man football team for being a terrible football team though.

[JustintimeSS]

So you agree your example was terribly thought out?

No. I'll use the same sport since you want to nitpick and not see the forest for the trees.

11 people in NFL kicking ass are not any better as a team than 8 people in arena football kicking ass.

Better?

[iggie]

I think a lot will come down to overall difficulty. By the sounds of the OP, he just wants to be as famous as possible and actually cares about server firsts. What is this TBC? Should I expect Muruu in my warzones?

Back to the OP: Typically organizing 16 is more difficult. Unless 8 mans are much more difficult you should probably prepare yourself for the fact people won't see that as the end all.

Well its just hard finding 16 DEDICATED players. We could easily fill a 16man. Would it be successful? Maybe a little... but it wouldn't be nearly as successful as our 8man core group that we have. I think I'll just tell the idiots who put us down for being an 8man to actually raid (since those types are generally the ones who don't raid).

Whatever, we'll just try for server firsts and try to set the '8man is okay' standard.

Bolded the part where you say the key of why 16 mans are always considered the end all. I will gladly call anyone who cares about server firsts a moron. It's probably your guilds attitudes that will get you the most flak. Good luck.