Unpopular opinion: 10 man raids should make a return in Shadowlands.

[Maquegyver]

It's worth noting that the majority of arguments against the 10/25 raiding split are centred on the laziness and ineptitude of Blizzard's developers. Not a great look when this is your big "gotcha".

Yea... basing ones argument on reality isn't a good place to start...

The blizzard team is undeniably shit at their job. One can only imagine the shit show raiding would be if they had to devote further time to balance to accommodate shitty 10 man mythic raiding.

[Relapses]

You reacted that way because you don't have the matury to handle people disagreeing with you. Simple as that. Don't blame it on other people.

I have no problem with people disagreeing with me. I have severe issues with people who are presenting terribly reasoned bad faith arguments.

It's a good thing I never said anything of the sort, did I? What I did say is many people are willing to continue playing the game in spite of changes they hate. For me there are a number of major differences in WoW today v.s. WoW of MoP that make the game drastically worse. Losing 10 man raiding for the highest difficulty is just one of them. I still play the game, though. Some don't, however, and I don't think it's a good development philosophy to push the players with bad changes as far as possible. I don't like this emerging trend of tug-of-war between the playerbase and developers over the direction of the game in these past few expansions.

"I didn't say that, I..."

::proceeds to say exactly what you said you didn't say::

Bold strategy, cotton.

This is an awful fucking argument because you can attribute ANYTHING to the changes that Blizzard made. Maybe it was the introduction of Pathfinding. Maybe it was transmog. Maybe it was World Quests. Maybe it was Titanforging. Who the fuck knows? Who the fuck cares? You can insert anything into the equation and it'd be just as irrelevant as your supposition that the removal of 10M Heroic raiding is somehow correlated to the downward spiral in the quality of WoW expansions. (I'd argue that there hasn't even been a downward spiral in the quality of WoW expansions because the metric people use to qualify whether an expansion was good or is totally fucking subjective and often has little to do with the expansion itself, but I'll save that for another thread.)

This is the kind of back asswards logic players use to support all sorts of really stupid fucking "movements," and applying it to 10M Heroic raiding is no less meaningless.

See above: you're using a strawman argument. I don't think millions of people quit over 10-man raiding. We don't even have millions of players raiding at the highest difficulty so obviously millions of people wouldn't have quit over a change to the highest difficulty. I do think millions of people quit over what they perceived to be the game getting worse due to a number of.. let's say "compromises" Blizzard forced on the playerbase, and for many of them losing 10-man raiding may have been one of those compromises.

As mentioned above, that wasn't a strawman. Games change. Player bases change. People move on. New people come in. The players who play today may not want the same things the players who played 10 years ago wanted. If you actually think that it's a good fucking idea for Blizzard to never change anything because you believe your preferred version of WoW is somehow superior to all other versions of WoW, you're free to do so. (This feeds into the fallacy that WoW would have been even more successful if they'd never changed anything past WotLK. This is also a shitty argument, as I debased in this thread.) But as much as you might dislike some changes Blizzard makes to the game, the fact that it's still receiving updates and expansions 15 years after its release speaks volumes to the right decisions Blizzard has made. The very nature of change means that some people will like certain changes and others won't. There is no universally accepted list of changes that are considered good or bad because if you ask 20 people, you'll get 20 different responses. Blizzard's job is to design the game to have the broadest appeal possible, not to find the community's most accepted version of the game then never change it. (This leads to game design by democracy, another universally shitty idea.)

On top of that, I do think it contributed to many guild collapses and the further imbalance in realm populations. It further incentivised poaching and transfering to popular realms. My original server, Silvermoon-US, had plenty of heroic raiding in MoP even as the server was already a small one. The server took a beating with WoD and the 20-man mythic change to the point where raiding activity on the realm is basically nil at this point. The same thing has happened to all the Oceanic realms where you are seeing all the servers dying as everyone transfers to Barthilas or Frostmourne in the hopes of maintaining a roster, and now even Barthilas is struggling. I doubt you even took a passing consideration to these issues because you're too focused on a) defending Blizzard's laziness and b) forcing your ideal vision of raids on everyone else.

Realm population is its own separate issue which doesn't have a whole lot to do with this discussion. If you're still holding onto a dead realm 6 years after Blizzard made the change to 10M raiding, I don't know what to tell you. At some point that stops being Blizzard's fault since you can fix the issue with a transfer. (And, thanks to WoW tokens, you don't even have to spend real money on it!)

I didn't see where you mentioned Garrosh and I don't really care to check because it's in all likelihood part of a terrible argument given 100% of the rest of your posts being terrible arguments.

If you don't want to read the posts where I address the issues you say I'm not addressing because of my "terrible arguments" then why the fuck are you bothering to respond to me? I mean, I might have hated your post but I at least had the courtesy of reading the damned thing.

Oh, OK. So it's not because of Blizzard being too inept: it's because of Blizzard being unable to make good bosses with the 10/25 split. Totally different things. Good to know!

But never mind that doublethink: it's a nonsense point. Are you seriously trying to argue that they never made good encounters for 3 whole expansions? WotLK, Cata, and MoP included some of the most stand-out bosses and raids in WoW's history: the likes of Mimiron, Yogg Saron, Lich King

A few things to unpack here: 1.) WotLK did have some damned good encounters but the 10/25M variants were never designed with gear parity (and thus difficulty of the encounter) in mind. The 10M version of WotLK was intentionally tuned to be easier than its 25M counterpart. And 2.) My concern wasn't with WotLK's raid encounters, it was Cata/MoP's which were marred with pointless comparisons between the two raid sizes. (SoO being the best example of this: Paragons on 25M was way more difficult than it was on 10, while Siegecrafter was easier on 25M than it was on 10. And then 10M Gary was an overtuned cockblock the size of.. well, uh, Garrosh.) It was insufferable because every WF thread was littered with people saying "LOL 10M" and "25M is the only REAL raid difficulty." You can't blame Blizzard for wanting to put an end to that. It also eliminated the need to always have mechanics which were scaleable.

WotLK in particular saw a huge step-up in encounter design over the prior expansion and that's the one that added 10-man raiding (a feature that got a standing ovation when it was announced, by the way).

Jesus dude, aggrandizing much? Holy shit. Talk about a reddit moment. Fuck man, I get it. You like 10s. But you're not doing your argument a whole lot of favors when you pretend like 10M raiding was the holy grail of WoW endgame. It was popular, yes, but it didn't become the most popular method of endgame raiding until after gear parity had already destroyed 25M raiding in Cataclysm.

I, for one, am sick of hearing that Blizzard is suddenly incapable of doing something they did for years because it's just "too hard for them" despite their having more money and resources than ever before. 10-man at the highest difficulty was removed in the same expansion that had no new races or classes, only 2 raid tiers, next to no content outside of raids, a year-long content drought, and an untold amount of cut content including entire story zones and raids. It was a clear cost-cutting measure and here you are shilling for it with fervour. I wonder how much self-loathing you have to have as a consumer to ardently defend this kind of thing.

This is the kind of insane nonsense that I was talking about before. Because I support Blizzard's decision not to fuck around with Mythic raiding, suddenly I support every single fucking decision the company makes. And then to use the bullshit, "BLIZZARD HAS INFINITE MONEY THEY CAN FIX ALL PROBLEMS" fallacy on top of it??! God damn, my dude. There aren't words

LMAO don't even pretend to be sorry about it. You revel in it. Hell, I revel in it. Own that shit. This weasely "oh I would be civil but everyone's being too mean to me sob sob" is utterly unconvincing.

I apologized directly to another poster, not you. Another poster who, while disagreeing with me, isn't being nearly as petulant or narcissistic. Hence, the apology.

This will continue to be a stupid point every time you repeat it. 10-man was a challenge. Beating the raid on 10-man was beating the raid. It was often MORE challenging than 25-man. It was not "accessible mode."

As somebody who extensively raided both 10 and 25M in Cata and MoP, this is simply patently wrong. Nothing about 10M was more difficult. With the exception of a few encounters, everything on 10M was far easier than its 25M counterpart. To quote myself from earlier in the raid, 10M Heroic always felt wheelchair accessible. I get the appeal of "small tight knit groups," because I raided in one. But I never really felt like I was competing in the most difficult content. It was the WNBA of raiding. And yeah, that's, like, my opinion man, but I can't help but think Blizzard shared a bit of this sentiment which is why they introduced the compromise they did (and have stuck with it). It has nothing to do with "laziness" or "ineptitude" and everything to do with the developers seeking to deliver a singular experience for the hardest difficulty content. 10/25M split raiding never fully realized this.

the issues associated with the 10/25 split were far more minor than the issues removing that split caused. Too many guilds and servers died to make it worth it.

Yeah no. Just because you don't think there were problems doesn't mean that Blizzard needs to scorched earth reintroduce a feature you preferred just because it matches your personal preference. 10/25M Heroic raiding was abolished for a reason. They're not going to come back around any time soon and say, "Whoops, we fucked up for four expansions, turns out 10/25M was better this whole time and we're bringing it back!" The most likely scenario is what I've been defending this whole time: Not fixing what isn't broken.

[Bepples]

Yea... basing ones argument on reality isn't a good place to start...

The blizzard team is undeniably shit at their job. One can only imagine the shit show raiding would be if they had to devote further time to balance to accommodate shitty 10 man mythic raiding.

They did it for 3 expansions. Why can't they do it now? I'm sick of compromise after compromise for the sake of developer laziness and ineptitude.

And yes, I know that it's an argument based on reality. I'm not saying they should deny it. What I'm saying is that when you see a situation where a popular feature was removed due to developer ineptitude, you shouldn't be defending the removal of the feature. You should be attacking the ineptitude.

I have no problem with people disagreeing with me. I have severe issues with people who are presenting terribly reasoned bad faith arguments.

Hmm, no, you do actually have a maturity problem which ties into your inability to cope with disagreement. Labelling every single post addressed to you as a "bad faith argument" doesn't change that.

"I didn't say that, I..."

::proceeds to say exactly what you said you didn't say::

Bold strategy, cotton.

Let's recap so your bad reading comprehension can catch up. You insinuated that I thought "millions of players returned and left the game because of this singular feature". I said I did not think that and that "many people are willing to continue playing the game in spite of changes they hate". Presumably because you were seeing red at the thought of someone disagreeing with you online, you took my post to be reaffirming this argument that millions of people left over 10-man at the highest difficulty being removed even though not only did I never say this but I specifically denied it.

So I'll say again, and try to read it carefully this time (if it helps, turn on your accessibility mode on your computer and have it read the words to you in text-to-speech or something): I do think lots of people quit, they all had a list of reasons why they quit (people don't tend to quit over just 1 thing), and for many people the loss of 10 man raiding could have been one of those reasons, directly or indirectly (remember: many guilds and servers died). There was a LOT wrong with WoD and it really wasn't the expansion for Blizzard to be asking for huge compromises from the playerbase like 10-man and flying.

This is an awful fucking argument because you can attribute ANYTHING to the changes that Blizzard made. Maybe it was the introduction of Pathfinding. Maybe it was transmog. Maybe it was World Quests. Maybe it was Titanforging. Who the fuck knows? Who the fuck cares? You can insert anything into the equation and it'd be just as irrelevant as your supposition that the removal of 10M Heroic raiding is somehow correlated to the downward spiral in the quality of WoW expansions. (I'd argue that there hasn't even been a downward spiral in the quality of WoW expansions because the metric people use to qualify whether an expansion was good or is totally fucking subjective and often has little to do with the expansion itself, but I'll save that for another thread.)

Obviously everyone has different tastes, but evidently something was very wrong with WoD considering it lost subscribers at the fastest rate WoW has ever been. The only reason we don't know the full extent, or how later expansions compare, is because Blizzard literally stopped releasing subscriber numbers. Why do you think they did that? The point is it's not a good development practice to pile up grievances on the playerbase because "oh x grievance will only affect y group" and "people always complain anyway". Because when you do it enough then everyone has one or more things to get angry about. When you find yourself treating the playerbase as expendable you need to reconsider your priorities. This goes for both you the poster and the developers at Blizzard. Because over the years they have simply asked for too many compromises and it's showing in the overwhelmingly negative feedback even if they refuse to release subscription counts.

I'll repeat it because no-doubt you've already forgotten/didn't read the previous point: I'm not saying things went badly specifically due to the highest difficulty being fixed to 20-man. What I'm saying is that they took a non-negligible group of the playerbase and made them make a huge sacrifice, and that's something they did in many other instances in WoD and the expansions afterwards. Everyone's going to have varying degrees of tolerance to that sort of thing. I'm still playing but I can assure you most of the people I was guilded with on that little raiding guild on Silvermoon-US back in MoP have since quit: just a part of those ~5 million that left in 2015 for the most part.

As mentioned above, that wasn't a strawman. Games change. Player bases change. People move on. New people come in. The players who play today may not want the same things the players who played 10 years ago wanted. If you actually think that it's a good fucking idea for Blizzard to never change anything because you believe your preferred version of WoW is somehow superior to all other versions of WoW, you're free to do so. (This feeds into the fallacy that WoW would have been even more successful if they'd never changed anything past WotLK. This is also a shitty argument, as I debased in this thread.) But as much as you might dislike some changes Blizzard makes to the game, the fact that it's still receiving updates and expansions 15 years after its release speaks volumes to the right decisions Blizzard has made. The very nature of change means that some people will like certain changes and others won't. There is no universally accepted list of changes that are considered good or bad because if you ask 20 people, you'll get 20 different responses. Blizzard's job is to design the game to have the broadest appeal possible, not to find the community's most accepted version of the game then never change it. (This leads to game design by democracy, another universally shitty idea.)

I shouldn't have to say this because it's common sense but evidently that often eludes you: change is neither automatically good nor bad. This isn't about "I don't like change" or "I demand change". Each change individually has its own merit. I fully agree that "freezing" the game after WotLK or BC or whatever would be a terrible idea and I've used this argument before in those discussions about how Classic is apparently perfect and would have earned 100 million subscribers if it weren't for those pesky expansions. What I don't agree with is change for the sake of change because, again, change is not automatically good (or bad) and each change has its own merit. It's just as shitty an idea s "game design by democracy".

I don't think removing 10 man at the highest difficulty was merited. The issues it caused were far more immediate and tangible than "raids are a bit imbalanced between the two sizes sometimes". We already had working solutions for the real problem with the size split (i.e. 25 man lacking an incentive). It was not a good idea to plan for larger raid size requirements when the game was in a period of subscription decline and I think it put them in a particularly bad spot when the decline got steep. Server populations are an ongoing and worsening problem.

P.S. You'd think if Blizzard were designing the game to have the "broadest possible appeal": they wouldn't be removing popular features just to make development easier on them.

Realm population is its own separate issue which doesn't have a whole lot to do with this discussion. If you're still holding onto a dead realm 6 years after Blizzard made the change to 10M raiding, I don't know what to tell you. At some point that stops being Blizzard's fault since you can fix the issue with a transfer. (And, thanks to WoW tokens, you don't even have to spend real money on it!)

Um, no, it's not a separate issue. If there is a smaller raid size available it helps the raiding scene on smaller servers. With a larger raid size it requires more aggressive roster expansion so you get more poaching and server transferring. No, I didn't hold on to a dead realm. Our guild was forced to transfer to one of the most popular US realms because the Silvermoon-US raiding scene basically died off. Eventually due to real-life circumstances I had to change to an oceanic server. I picked a pretty low-pop one because it still had a raiding scene, but now that server's raiding scene also died off and I once again had to transfer to Barthilas, the most popular Oceanic server for horde. And now THAT server is also dying off as guilds either transfer to Frostmourne to keep their roster alive or have it all poached by other guilds on Frostmourne. Yes, this shit would still happen with 10-man raiding but not nearly to the same extent.

Server population and how it affected raiding was already a problem in MoP (so much so that they added the virtual merge system) and you would have to be spectacularly ignorant to deny that the 20-man requirement didn't exacerbate it. But hey, here you are happily demanding people pay more money to Blizzard in the way of transfers to fix the problem. There's a trend here, by the way.

If you don't want to read the posts where I address the issues you say I'm not addressing because of my "terrible arguments" then why the fuck are you bothering to respond to me? I mean, I might have hated your post but I at least had the courtesy of reading the damned thing.

I'm not going through your post history because I don't care enough about you to do that. Link the post to me or GTFO.

A few things to unpack here: 1.) WotLK did have some damned good encounters but the 10/25M variants were never designed with gear parity (and thus difficulty of the encounter) in mind. The 10M version of WotLK was intentionally tuned to be easier than its 25M counterpart. And 2.) My concern wasn't with WotLK's raid encounters, it was Cata/MoP's which were marred with pointless comparisons between the two raid sizes. (SoO being the best example of this: Paragons on 25M was way more difficult than it was on 10, while Siegecrafter was easier on 25M than it was on 10. And then 10M Gary was an overtuned cockblock the size of.. well, uh, Garrosh.) It was insufferable because every WF thread was littered with people saying "LOL 10M" and "25M is the only REAL raid difficulty." You can't blame Blizzard for wanting to put an end to that. It also eliminated the need to always have mechanics which were scaleable.

Forgive me for thinking that forum bickering about which one was harder was the least of anyone's issues, including Blizzard. Again, look at the negative effects of removing the 10-man option. They're just a bit more tangible than some people ranting on a forum.

Jesus dude, aggrandizing much? Holy shit. Talk about a reddit moment. Fuck man, I get it. You like 10s. But you're not doing your argument a whole lot of favors when you pretend like 10M raiding was the holy grail of WoW endgame. It was popular, yes, but it didn't become the most popular method of endgame raiding until after gear parity had already destroyed 25M raiding in Cataclysm.

Not sure what there is to argue about here since we both agree it was popular. They should not be removing popular features just to make things easier on their own developers. They specifically hired a lot more developers in MoP and WoD to help handle the content delivery requirements. Yes, I will continue to bring that up.

This is the kind of insane nonsense that I was talking about before. Because I support Blizzard's decision not to fuck around with Mythic raiding, suddenly I support every single fucking decision the company makes. And then to use the bullshit, "BLIZZARD HAS INFINITE MONEY THEY CAN FIX ALL PROBLEMS" fallacy on top of it??! God damn, my dude. There aren't words

It's not a fallacy. It's unreasonable to expect people to accept the loss of features because "Blizzard can't handle it" when a) they were handling it just fine before and b) they have more resources now than they did before. They got a bigger and more-supported development team and somehow that means we LOSE features because they can't handle them any more? Maybe you should have just a little higher standards for companies.

I apologized directly to another poster, not you. Another poster who, while disagreeing with me, isn't being nearly as petulant or narcissistic. Hence, the apology.

Doesn't change the fact that it's not a genuine apology in the slightest.

As somebody who extensively raided both 10 and 25M in Cata and MoP, this is simply patently wrong. Nothing about 10M was more difficult. With the exception of a few encounters, everything on 10M was far easier than its 25M counterpart. To quote myself from earlier in the raid, 10M Heroic always felt wheelchair accessible. I get the appeal of "small tight knit groups," because I raided in one. But I never really felt like I was competing in the most difficult content. It was the WNBA of raiding. And yeah, that's, like, my opinion man, but I can't help but think Blizzard shared a bit of this sentiment which is why they introduced the compromise they did (and have stuck with it). It has nothing to do with "laziness" or "ineptitude" and everything to do with the developers seeking to deliver a singular experience for the hardest difficulty content. 10/25M split raiding never fully realized this.

You're literally contradicting yourself between sentences here. Not only were there many bosses that were unequivocally more difficult on 10 man but there were aspects of 10 man raiding that gave it drawbacks v.s. 25 man raiding. Most prominently: it matters a whole lot more if 1/10 of your raid is dead/screws up than 1/25. There is greater personal responsibility. You can't cheese fights as easily with class stacking. You don't get as much loot. In MoP you didn't get nearly as much warforged loot. 25 man had other drawbacks, e.g. you didn't have as much space and, of course, you had to maintain a larger roster. It's just flat-out incorrect to say that 10-man was the easy accessibility mode. The only aspect in which that was true was that you didn't need to recruit as much, and that's a logistical challenge outside of the raid more than a challenge within the raid itself. I don't care about your extensive raiding experience. Your memory is faulty just like your grasp of basic logic and common sense.

I will keep attributing the removal of 10-man at max difficulty to Blizzard's ineptitude and laziness because people defending the removal keep attributing it to those things, too. The only difference is they see it as a cue to defend Blizzard while I see it as a cue to criticise them.

Yeah no. Just because you don't think there were problems doesn't mean that Blizzard needs to scorched earth reintroduce a feature you preferred just because it matches your personal preference. 10/25M Heroic raiding was abolished for a reason. They're not going to come back around any time soon and say, "Whoops, we fucked up for four expansions, turns out 10/25M was better this whole time and we're bringing it back!" The most likely scenario is what I've been defending this whole time: Not fixing what isn't broken.

"Not fixing what isn't broken" would mean not removing 10-man in the first place. And I don't believe in leaving a mistake unfixed forever just because it would be too hard to fix it.

[Relapses]

This is getting pointlessly long so I'm going to trim some of the fat here and simply respond to the last thing you said:

Not fixing what isn't broken" would mean not removing 10-man in the first place. And I don't believe in leaving a mistake unfixed forever just because it would be too hard to fix it.

Your "mistake" existed in the game half as long as the current solution. You've yet to provide a compelling argument in favor 10M other than "I liked it and I'm sure other people liked it, therefore it should return." Guess what? There are likely new players who came to the game post-WoD who never experienced 10M Heroic and may feel the same way about 20M Mythic that you feel about your precious 10s. Is it fair to these players to remove something they like simply because you feel like your opinion means more than theirs?

Also, out of simple curiosity... tell me about your experience with 25M Heroic raiding in Cata/MoP. All none of it.

[Dommie530]

This is getting pointlessly long so I'm going to trim some of the fat here and simply respond to the last thing you said:



Your "mistake" existed in the game half as long as the current solution. You've yet to provide a compelling argument in favor 10M other than "I liked it and I'm sure other people liked it, therefore it should return." Guess what? There are likely new players who came to the game post-WoD who never experienced 10M Heroic and may feel the same way about 20M Mythic that you feel about your precious 10s. Is it fair to these players to remove something they like simply because you feel like your opinion means more than theirs?

Also, out of simple curiosity... tell me about your experience with 25M Heroic raiding in Cata/MoP. All none of it.

Why can’t 10 and 20 man co exist?
In my opinion and expierence 20/25 man raiding is pretty awfull and boring, feels more like a chore rather then a bunch of friend tackling down a bunch of mythic bosses(have several cuttig edges under my belt) i’d trade all that for having 10 mans back, i felt more connected to the group and the people i played with, had lots of more fun, but thats me!

i don’t see a reason not to bring 10 man back as an option for those who want it?

[kaminaris]

This is getting pointlessly long so I'm going to trim some of the fat here and simply respond to the last thing you said:



Your "mistake" existed in the game half as long as the current solution. You've yet to provide a compelling argument in favor 10M other than "I liked it and I'm sure other people liked it, therefore it should return." Guess what? There are likely new players who came to the game post-WoD who never experienced 10M Heroic and may feel the same way about 20M Mythic that you feel about your precious 10s. Is it fair to these players to remove something they like simply because you feel like your opinion means more than theirs?

Also, out of simple curiosity... tell me about your experience with 25M Heroic raiding in Cata/MoP. All none of it.

Mistake exists right now. Every other difficulty is flex except for mythic which is artificial gating and being lazy.
And the new retardation only exists 3 expansions now, similar to how long 10/25 man went.

[Relapses]

Why can’t 10 and 20 man co exist?

Because they didn't coexist in MoP/Cata. The playerbase was actively antagonistic towards each other. (Please, feel free to peruse the SoO WF thread for proof.) The raid encounters all had to be designed around both 10 and 25M versions of the encounter existing and generally led to situations where one encounter felt very different in one raid size than the other. More than anything, the split failed to deliver a cohesive raid experience. As somebody who raided both raid sizes (and had no particular attachment to either), I can say fairly equivocally that the raid encounter design post-MoP was far, far more interesting.

In my opinion and expierence 20/25 man raiding is pretty awfull and boring, feels more like a chore rather then a bunch of friend tackling down a bunch of mythic bosses(have several cuttig edges under my belt) i’d trade all that for having 10 mans back, i felt more connected to the group and the people i played with, had lots of more fun, but thats me!

i don’t see a reason not to bring 10 man back as an option for those who want it?

It would destroy the current raid community because as much as pro-10M players like to pretend that having both wouldn't impact the larger raid sizes, history tells a different story. As I've mentioned throughout this thread, the switch to gear parity between 10 and 25M almost entirely destroyed large raiding guilds in Cataclysm and I see no reason why the same exact thing wouldn't happen again.

Additionally, it would hamstring encounter design because Blizzard would once again be forced to deliver two separate versions of every raid encounter and would not be able to add mechanics that aren't scaleable between the two raid sizes. To quote Ghostcrawler, it'd cost us a raid tier.

The current system has been around longer and the current Mythic raiding scene is more than sufficiently active. You're free to have your opinion about the importance of these negative impacts but I simply don't see the value in dismantling a system that isn't broken in favor of one that has already proven to be less interesting in the past.

[Dommie530]

Because they didn't coexist in MoP/Cata. The playerbase was actively antagonistic towards each other. (Please, feel free to peruse the SoO WF thread for proof.) The raid encounters all had to be designed around both 10 and 25M versions of the encounter existing and generally led to situations where one encounter felt very different in one raid size than the other. More than anything, the split failed to deliver a cohesive raid experience. As somebody who raided both raid sizes (and had no particular attachment to either), I can say fairly equivocally that the raid encounter design post-MoP was far, far more interesting.



It would destroy the current raid community because as much as pro-10M players like to pretend that having both wouldn't impact the larger raid sizes, history tells a different story. As I've mentioned throughout this thread, the switch to gear parity between 10 and 25M almost entirely destroyed large raiding guilds in Cataclysm and I see no reason why the same exact thing wouldn't happen again.

Additionally, it would hamstring encounter design because Blizzard would once again be forced to deliver two separate versions of every raid encounter and would not be able to add mechanics that aren't scaleable between the two raid sizes. To quote Ghostcrawler, it'd cost us a raid tier.

The current system has been around longer and the current Mythic raiding scene is more than sufficiently active. You're free to have your opinion about the importance of these negative impacts but I simply don't see the value in dismantling a system that isn't broken in favor of one that has already proven to be less interesting in the past.

The current system is as broken as it was when their were 2 raid sizes for reals, its not dismantling a system, its simply adding a new one to give people a choose. Isnt that what matters?

And our current raid difficulties do not even share the same mechanics, thhe higher you go, the more mechanics are involved, nobody seems to bothr, they can make it work if they wanted to.

[iinverse]

Unpopular?!
Heck, just give back 10-ppl mythic aind I will back to mythic raiding!

[Speedlance]

Pros for 10 mans

Every member matter more then in 20 man group.
You can be more picky about who you want to raid with since you require less of that class.
More consistant groups.
Easier to recruit.
Increase the number of guilds overall.
Easier to make 2 day raiding and weekend raiding guilds.

[Relapses]

The current system is as broken as it was when their were 2 raid sizes for reals, its not dismantling a system, its simply adding a new one to give people a choose. Isnt that what matters?

Please enlighten me how the current system which has one single fixed raid size is somehow comparable to a system which required Blizzard to design two versions of every encounter. Did you even play in Cata/MoP?

[Dommie530]

Please enlighten me how the current system which has one single fixed raid size is somehow comparable to a system which required Blizzard to design two versions of every encounter. Did you even play in Cata/MoP?

People claimed the quality of the raids back then was bad, but how are they better now?

Was highmaul good? Emerald nightmare? Tomb of sargas? Argus? Nyalotha, let me tel you, no they werent. So if they make bad raids with terrible game mechanics which was the sole purpose of removing 10 man, why not bring them back if they cant make quality raids anyway, atleast people have choose then.

Played since 2007, so well yup

[Elodeon]

I would really, really, really like the Mythic raid format to be flexible at least +- 2 players.

It doesn't have to scale 10-25. But please, don't make us sit a person for no reason, and don't make us pug or cancel raid because 1-2 folks did not show up.

Make it scale at least 18-22. Or 17-23. Please.

[Relapses]

People claimed the quality of the raids back then was bad, but how are they better now?

Was highmaul good? Emerald nightmare? Tomb of sargas? Argus? Nyalotha, let me tel you, no they werent. So if they make bad raids with terrible game mechanics which was the sole purpose of removing 10 man, why not bring them back if they cant make quality raids anyway, atleast people have choose then.

Played since 2007, so well yup

"Bad raids," huh? Is the universal opinion of every Mythic raider or just your own? Obviously not every encounter is going to be a winner but we've seen some pretty unique mechanics introduced post-MoP. (Blast Furnace MC comes to mind as something that they'd never be able to do in 10M. M Gorefiend in HFC was one of the best designed raid encounters Blizzard ever made.) Cata/MoP had some interesting encounters, too, but I can't help but wonder if they'd have been even better if Blizzard wasn't trying to juggle balance between two raid sizes.

Regardless, any response to this will be largely based on opinion. If you're of the opinion that the best times you had in the game were in a 10M, then you're naturally going to gravitate preference towards those encounters. I try to look at it through a pragmatic lens though I understand any response that doesn't fully support the return of 10M Heroic will be interpreted as a detraction by most people in this thread.

[Dommie530]

"Bad raids," huh? Is the universal opinion of every Mythic raider or just your own? Obviously not every encounter is going to be a winner but we've seen some pretty unique mechanics introduced post-MoP. (Blast Furnace MC comes to mind as something that they'd never be able to do in 10M. M Gorefiend in HFC was one of the best designed raid encounters Blizzard ever made.) Cata/MoP had some interesting encounters, too, but I can't help but wonder if they'd have been even better if Blizzard wasn't trying to juggle balance between two raid sizes.

Regardless, any response to this will be largely based on opinion. If you're of the opinion that the best times you had in the game were in a 10M, then you're naturally going to gravitate preference towards those encounters. I try to look at it through a pragmatic lens though I understand any response that doesn't fully support the return of 10M Heroic will be interpreted as a detraction by most people in this thread.

Damn, i left those raids out for a purpose, because i agree. Blackrock foundry was amazing, nighthold was amazing, hellfire citadel was amazing. But just like any 10 man raids, not every 20 man raids turns to gold. Why cant that be said? 20 man has it flaws, just like 10 man. All im asking is for a choose. Dont twist me words pretty please:

karazhan was amazing, so was 10 man ulduar. Even icc was universally liked on both difficulties.

But people shouldnt dismiss that even 20 man raids can be terrible. Thats all my man!
So the big question would be, is it realy the size that kills a raid? I dont think so. Its the design.
Keep 20 man. I dont want it to be removed if thats what you think im trying to say.

[Mystikal]

I'm really surprised at how this thread constantly brings up how some fights were "near impossible" on 10 man or atleast extremely difficult, but no one has mentioned in the other direction how much of a joke most other fights were for 10 man grps. Every end tier boss I remember doing was a fraction of the difficulty on 10 man compared to 25. I remember needing to squeeze in a H Alakir kill our first week we just used 10 people after our normal raid hours were done to get the loot. Now the counter argument will be "you were just trimming the fat and brought in the best of the 25 man grp."

While with that particular boss you might be right I also played with a 2 day 10 man exclusive guild in cata. These players were flat out worse than my 25m guild but when we hit H Rag in firelands we killed it in 30% of the pulls compared to the 25man guild. Deathwing I honestly cant remember but that fight was disappointing on both raid sizes. Going onto MoP 10 man was also a push over on most fights by comparison because any raid dmg mechanic could solo'd by a disc priest with spirit shell (stacking abosrbs that only needed to be cast on 2 grps compared to 5). Lei Shen was an amazing fight on 25h but the first time I did it on 10h I was disappointed with how easy it was. Little things like 2-3 orb catches per corner meant the scramble to coordinate who went where... was a joke.

This brings me to my next point, fight responsibilities. The side of this whole thing that says 10 man was harder than 25 man often brings up this point about how responsibilities were super individualized so if anyone didn't do their job the pull was a wipe compared to 25 man. Now this is a mixed bag, while its true that if an interrupt got whiffed on 10 man it was much less likely to have a back up for it other mechanics such as adds were often a joke and would fall over as soon as a dps looked at them. In 25 man flexible teams of people could be assigned to roles to get them done but in 10 man to avoid mandatory classes that were best at said mechanic, things that were a strict dps window in 25man were suddenly a HUGE joke on 10 man if you had the right class for it. But wait that means this 1 player dealing with the mechanic has more responsibility right? So its harder right? Yes, he has the sole responsibility of dealing with the mechanic but because the balance team can't assume you have an optimal class for every job. So that add doesn't have 40-50% of the hp it does on 25man instead it had 20-30%.

So whats left. Oh right the balancing issues that occur between raid sizes. Going with this tier since its most fresh in everyone's mind lets talk about how raid size can greatly impact the fights and possible changes that would need to be made around it in 10 man.
Wrathion:
Problems: Scale phase - (1)is it fair to force 30% of your raid to run scales compared to 12%? Probably not especially since it cant be expected you have 3+ mobile classes to proc the debuff on the spires quickly. (2) Spire HP too high to kill in time.
Solutions: 2 Scales instead of 3 and/or longer lasting debuff to make sure slower classes can still safely reach all the spires in time. Nerf spire HP to the ground to make sure an average 10 man grp can still kill them.
Outcomes: There would be a gross QoL difference in the raids that had the mobile classes to handle scales compared to those who didn't. Grps with slower scale runners would be hard pressed to activate and kill all the spires in time. As I explained above the HP of the spires would have to be reduced an insane amount because not only do you have to commit a larger % of your raid to running scales(probably for longer as well) but since blizzard cant assume you have a lock/moonkin/dh in your grp they need to obliterate the hp pool of the spires to ~25% that of 20man. This means many signature aoe spells like Anima of death and focusing iris completely 1 shot the spires which kinda beats the point and trivializes the whole phase.

Skitra:
Problem: CC'ing the wall of adds.
Solutions: Wall is killable faster and/or moves slower and/or has natural holes in it for the raid to move through.
Outcomes: Either the mechanic is trivial because it can be effectively ignored until its killed or the fight is insanely hard for 10 man grps that need to coordinate movements through short stuns/cc's because only a 'unlucky' grp of the raid could interact with the wall.

Maut: Nothing really here probably just need to scale # of pools dropping.

Xanesh:
Problem: Soccer phase. Interrupts and soccer debuff.
Solutions: Add cast times significantly lengthened, probably doubled to 11-12s. Debuff from playing soccer needs to be reduced cause some early kills required a 4th grp and obviously 10 man doesnt have 12 people.
Outcomes: kinda beats the point of 'everyone can only do this once' when grps can go multiple times. Interrupts get sooo trivial when they get this long. Suddenly having a grp with a reasonable number of melee trivializes the whole mechanic. Or a shaman could solo kick and add.... zzzzz have you seen the interrupt plans for guilds progressing this? it can be extremely complicated.

(gonna start getting lazy but i hope you see my point that most fights have significant balance adjustments needed)
Vexiona: add hp trivialized and the mythic add pulling in 3 people is probably too much. Tank damage would probably need to be reduced due to it being very hard to 3 tank in 10 man or you just pray for TD procs to solo entire add grps (cause it damn near would)

HM:no real issues just add hp super nerfed(darters in particular) again trivializing the mechanic for the grps with good classes like destro warlocks and/or blood dks to grp them better.

Ra'den: The fight already requires 10 people (min) to do the mechanics at once. So you would need to drop the number of times the mechanics "bounce" or suffer from impossible situations where some one has collapsing void but needs to deal with vita/nightmare mechanics at the same time. BUT reducing the number of bounces also shortens the time spent dealing with the mechanic which quickly turns the fight into 90% patchwerk because the by time the next orbs come. Nobody has debuffs anymore.

Shad: feeding the dog would have to change either letting people feed multiple times or needing to feed him less often. Being able to feed him multiple times per person beats the point of the "you can only do this once" mechanic and doing it less often just lets you pick and choose the better classes to feed, again causing huge disparities in good comps vs bad. Another problem being able to deal with the "root" when targeted by an add. Would this fight just feel impossible for comps without paladins/warlocks to help immobile classes that can't break the 99% slow? Or would you just make the aoe do way less dmg so the raid can just face tank it and heal through it?

Dres: No real problems but some tentacles would get trivial amounts of hp. Maws would die to melee because getting mc'd same reason as every add listed above.

Ilgy: This fight is all about space management and when you cut the raid in half IT KINDA TRIVIALIZES IT. MCs would be 1-2 at a time but with more space than you know what to do with kiting would be a joke. Solution to make the circles bigger suddenly makes the organ phase a fucking nightmare if you have more than 2 melee so you cant really expand those more than ~25%(guess).

Carapace: Adds would have to be effectively 1shottable. TD procs from tanks would hilariously cheese the fight. Not having a warlock for gateway or windrush/roars in p3 make that phase a nightmare. Solutions including making the bad zone grow slower to let people run out of it in time or have it do way less dmg which complicated breaking the shield on people. Unleashed nightmare rings would need to be greatly expanded cause you know space management is really important in p3 . Lots of 25 man guilds needed to make fucking charts for this to plan people's positioning.

N'zoth: this entire fight would pretty much need to be redesigned on mythic. Paranoia circles would need to be expanded to serve the same purpose on mythic. Kicks would have to be lessened in both phases. Sanity drain values adjusted, neck sanity returns changed since they are grp wide on mythic. Extra phase reworked because less people to use necks. P2 adds need to drain even less sanity per player due to lack of immunities. Evoke anguish pools on mythic trivialized or need to expand much faster to serve same purpose.

Yep, looks like some easy balancing between 10 and 20m mythic. I'm sure we could make them both just as difficult to warrant dropping the same gear /s

I know that this is a huge wall of text, but I wanted to quote it for visibility. Those who honestly think that balancing a flex mythic raid encounter is 'so easy' either have very selective memories, or never actually raided Flex when it was around. I remember a Blizz post from back then, talking about how they were trying to balance the "targets X players" type of mechanics for intermediate group sizes, by having a Y% chance of an extra player being targetted if it wasn't a multiple of Z (e.g. if it targets 2 players in 10-man and 5 in 25-man, then an 11 player group will always get 2 players targetted, with a 20% chance of a 3rd player getting it). Unfortunately, this didn't work either, because it introduced natural optimal group sizes where you just played the odds to never get the extra target and essentially benefitted from a load of free dps.

Flex Mythic would only work if we had really bland, boring raid encounters if they were to be perfectly balanced.

[Laughingjack]

"Bad raids," huh? Is the universal opinion of every Mythic raider or just your own? Obviously not every encounter is going to be a winner but we've seen some pretty unique mechanics introduced post-MoP. (Blast Furnace MC comes to mind as something that they'd never be able to do in 10M. M Gorefiend in HFC was one of the best designed raid encounters Blizzard ever made.) Cata/MoP had some interesting encounters, too, but I can't help but wonder if they'd have been even better if Blizzard wasn't trying to juggle balance between two raid sizes.

Regardless, any response to this will be largely based on opinion. If you're of the opinion that the best times you had in the game were in a 10M, then you're naturally going to gravitate preference towards those encounters. I try to look at it through a pragmatic lens though I understand any response that doesn't fully support the return of 10M Heroic will be interpreted as a detraction by most people in this thread.

The balance was terrible. I did ten man raiding hard in mop for most of the expansion. It was so badly tuned that the third boss in SoO was essentially removed after the first week in heroic (the highest difficulty then).

The sixth boss had an utterly insane dps check compared to 25 as well and spoils fight relied on cheesing it with a dps tank until you greatly outgeared the instance.

This stands out as for the rest of the expansion 10 was far easier then its 25 man counter part with a few choice exceptions. The idea of a ten man beyond on par with 20 isn't something the game can manage. I don't even want to touch on how strict comps where for 10 mans back then (no disc priest no progression).

I get you want 10 mans back and I can see where your coming from but it is best they stick to it being flex.

[Dudenoso]

How serious the FFXIV raiding scene is tho? Does it have their min-maxers, number crunchers, class nerds with their discord caves, "clever use of game mechanicsers"/guilds that are on esport level, esport part as a thing, addon writers, damage meters, raiding addons like dbm, rotations like snapshotting was? Does it have the culture to be that serious?

Have no idea since I don't give a crap about a game's scene. Wager it's dead as the design is supposed to be clear all there is to clear -> take break -> return when new content hits.

Just how hard is the highest difficulty compared to wow's hardest difficulty (mechanics, coordination, execution, healing/dps/position requirements)?

13 min tutorial to current raid last encounter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztvibz-uWj0

The actually highest difficulty would be ultimate. There are two of them and those aren't part of what you could call regular raiding (not finding short guides on that one so have yourself a clear): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLoko-TILLk

[gblSweet]

The balance was terrible. I did ten man raiding hard in mop for most of the expansion. It was so badly tuned that the third boss in SoO was essentially removed after the first week in heroic (the highest difficulty then).

The sixth boss had an utterly insane dps check compared to 25 as well and spoils fight relied on cheesing it with a dps tank until you greatly outgeared the instance.

This stands out as for the rest of the expansion 10 was far easier then its 25 man counter part with a few choice exceptions. The idea of a ten man beyond on par with 20 isn't something the game can manage. I don't even want to touch on how strict comps where for 10 mans back then (no disc priest no progression).

I get you want 10 mans back and I can see where your coming from but it is best they stick to it being flex.

You mean mythic flex?

I get your argument about past troubles and I won't deny it (had my fair share of tuning problems in Cata as well). But, supposing blizzard actually wants to create 10-man mythic, don't you think they would at least attend to not make the same mistakes?

[Laughingjack]

You mean mythic flex?

I get your argument about past troubles and I won't deny it (had my fair share of tuning problems in Cata as well). But, supposing blizzard actually wants to create 10-man mythic, don't you think they would at least attend to not make the same mistakes?

They could make a ten man mythic that is balanced well but it would have to be a raid that is only a 10 man. They can't recycle 10 and 20 man content with the same rooms and mechanics it just doesn't work.