Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
When you worked on WoW, did you prefer 10 man raiding or 25 man? Do you think they will ever lower 20 mythic down to 10 as the population of the game declines? (I personally much prefer 10 and have been out of the hardcore raiding scene since they removed it.)
For me, they are just different experiences, though I enjoyed both. If I had to choose, I’d say the larger raids.
I started raiding (and tanking!) in WoW on Molten Core, so I will always have a lot of nostalgia for those 40 person raids, though I can’t imagine now how we ever managed to raid 2-3 nights a week. The logistics of it all seem impossible now!
The large raids feel epic. The bosses feel powerful when a few people can die without it being a wipe. It was great to see an army (an army!) assembled against those elementals and dragons. I had never encountered anything like that in gaming. The closest was something like capture the flag with my Boy Scout troop, where we had maybe 20 kids on each team.
But I enjoyed out 10-player forays into Karazhan and ZA as well. We could cut out all the riff raff and just run with a tight group of friends (who were mostly my colleagues from Ensemble). We would progress very quickly without a bunch of drama. But these felt a lot more like dungeon runs than MC and BWL did. I never wanted my guild to move exclusively to 10s. It was more of a palate cleanser.
I have no idea if they will continue to iterate on raid size. I am too out of the loop. While I was there, I tried to do what I could to make sure 25 player raiding felt viable, because the convenience of 10s was always going to push groups in that direction in the absence of any reason to stay large. (
Ghostcrawler)