5man instances are overused; people can't fill up their 20mans; the solution is clear

[Biomega]

The world first race is only relevant for the few hundred people who seriously are participating in it. Anyone up in arms over it is just as annoying as sports fans who bitch about their sports team losing

That depends entirely on what you mean by "relevant".

Your sports metaphor is actually great here - because if you said "the Superbowl is only relevant to the two teams competing, anyone else is not worth paying heed to" that'd be a pretty WILD statement to most people. Lots of people care about it, and want it to be a good competition - why isn't that "relevant"?

[TEHPALLYTANK]

That depends entirely on what you mean by "relevant".

Your sports metaphor is actually great here - because if you said "the Superbowl is only relevant to the two teams competing, anyone else is not worth paying heed to" that'd be a pretty WILD statement to most people. Lots of people care about it, and want it to be a good competition - why isn't that "relevant"?

That is kind of the point. Say I play football with my friends in a local league, who wins the Superbowl is entirely irrelevant to whether or not my friends and I win matches at a local level and whether or not I enjoy playing the game.

I do look at the Superbowl the same way, though in that context I can at least understand people who have a financial interest in the outcome of games. But the emotional attachment? It is completely incomprehensible to me, I understand that people do care, but I don't understand why they care. That type of purely emotional investment in something unrelated to oneself just doesn't make any sense to me.

[Biomega]

That is kind of the point. Say I play football with my friends in a local league, who wins the Superbowl is entirely irrelevant to whether or not my friends and I win matches at a local level and whether or not I enjoy playing the game.

That's true, but that doesn't mean the Superbowl isn't relevant to any of you. It's not relevant in THIS SPECIFIC WAY, but you can find plenty of specific ways in which the RWF also isn't relevant to the average player.

I understand that people do care, but I don't understand why they care. That type of purely emotional investment in something unrelated to oneself just doesn't make any sense to me.

That's fine. But that doesn't mean you can apply the same standard to other people. I'm with you - I don't give two shits about the sportsball, in any incarnation. But that doesn't mean I think nobody else should, either, or that people who DO care about it don't have a right to or aren't relevant in considerations about the game. I don't have to personally care about something to recognize that there are other people who do, and that they matter, too.

[gobarj]

And then have people bitching that 20-player guilds are clearing 10 man and it's unfair? I think we're good. Be happy it's not 40, it already scaled to 25 and then to 20. Who knows we'll see 15 at this rate.

[Caprias]

I still think the issue isn't the 20 man roster but the fact that you can't easily get replacements due to no cross server for a long time and the way mythic lockouts work.

90-100% attendance rate that most guilds (that have a shot at CE at least) want is just not possible for me due to work and other obligations, I'm pretty sure many guilds would be more lenient if they could replace someone for an evening with the same xp more easily.

[dragonflight10]

Even when MoP was a shitshow with 10 and 25 man.. It was one of the best raiding we had. We didn't really care about the imbalance, that Garrosh had to be 1 healed on 10 man to have enough damage. That sometimes 10 man was easier than 25. If they care about the race, then make it so if you have 10 and 20 man Mythic modes, if you kill a boss in one you are locked to that mode.

Who are "we" ? ppl did care about imbalance
the fact you are generalized this and stating "if they care about the race" shows you have no idea what you are talking about and just nostalgic

devs care about race, alot of people care about the race
maybe use your head before posting next time

[Rtrain]

Yeah nothing wrong with bringing back 10 man as long as it's clearly understood that 10 man is an easier version of Mythic for people who prefer that.

That means clearly giving it slightly lower ilvl and designing it as a more casual alternative to 20 man Mythic raiding.

Don’t even need to do all that. Just tune them equally, 10m will inevitably be easier at the same tuning because of raid management. 20 man will naturally gear players faster.(even with the same % loot drops)

[mrgreenthump]

Who are "we" ? ppl did care about imbalance
the fact you are generalized this and stating "if they care about the race" shows you have no idea what you are talking about and just nostalgic

devs care about race, alot of people care about the race
maybe use your head before posting next time

Devs themselves said in Dragonflight previews that they focused too much on the race and so did Liquid Max for example. At this point if they wanted a race, it'd be much more suited to be on a tournament realm. Casual guilds seem to suffer greatly on the difficulty being ramped up to 11. Just look at all the nerfs from Sepulcher, because most people simply couldn't execute at the same level as top-end raiders.

About who were "we".. I wasn't raiding at the highest of high-end due to real life engagements but we got ranks 35-75 world in Throne of Thunder for example. And there was a community between many top 100 guilds, we simply didn't care because everyone viewed 10 and 25 as different things. Nobody equated between them.

And would you really care about the 10 man kills if there was a 20 man race at the same time. Especially if the casters and Echo/Liquid streams only focused on 20 mans.

[jeezusisacasual]

Whatever makes more raiding more accessible is what needs to happen. If this means lowering the barrier to entry great, if this means making the fights less dark souls and more WoTLK then by all means. Raiding has been dying and will continue to do so until some drastic steps are taken. I would rather have a more inclusive end game paradigm then one that is exclusionary since people have shown they wont look for better guilds when friends stop playing, they will just quit themselves.

I wont raid because i only want to play in 45 min to 1 hour and a half segments which is perfect for mythic plus with no real commitment required since i pugged KSM every single season this expansion.

[Linkedblade]

You just can't balance 10m v 25m. Twenty-five will always be harder when it comes to space management mechanic, the work around is to have smaller boss rooms on 10m. Ten will be harder because a player makes up a larger portion of the dps/heals. One dps dies that's 1/5 your damage, compared to 1/18 in 25m, a healer is 1/3 compared to 1/5 in 25m. Assuming 2/5/3 and 2/18/5, tank/dps/heals. That's not every encounter, but it gives you a rough idea. There's no real way to work around this.

Edit: I realize we were talking about 10 v 20, but the point stands.

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That is kind of the point. Say I play football with my friends in a local league, who wins the Superbowl is entirely irrelevant to whether or not my friends and I win matches at a local level and whether or not I enjoy playing the game.

I do look at the Superbowl the same way, though in that context I can at least understand people who have a financial interest in the outcome of games. But the emotional attachment? It is completely incomprehensible to me, I understand that people do care, but I don't understand why they care. That type of purely emotional investment in something unrelated to oneself just doesn't make any sense to me.

Fair comparison, but does your local league do 11v11 or a smaller size

[exochaft]

Don’t even need to do all that. Just tune them equally, 10m will inevitably be easier at the same tuning because of raid management. 20 man will naturally gear players faster.(even with the same % loot drops)

Even back in the 10/25man raid days, difficulty could vary based upon size either way. Benefits of a 25man raid were having access to any class/spec for buffs/utility/damage (and a certain amount of stacking) and role proportion flexibility that made certain encounters much easier than 10man, but room size restrictions (i.e. the ability to spread out) and having to coordinate more people would make some encounters much harder than the 10man versions. I did both 10H/25H back during Cata with different guilds and found that some 10man fights were easier than 25man, and vice versa. Nothing wrong with things being like that, it's something you can't really balance/tune around beyond a certain point. Get them roughly equal and call it a day, it doesn't have to be complicated.

I suppose that's really what it comes down to in the end: Blizz has a raging hard-on for constantly amping up the damage and difficulty of the highest difficulty of content, which requires them to fix the raid size as well as spend a lot of time balancing and tuning with this in mind. Essentially, they're making their lives harder and need to spend more time on content that has an increasingly shrinking crowd due to their design philosophy. If they'd ease up on their tuning, their options open up greatly in terms of attracting more people to the content, as well as allowing for more freedom of design.

One aspect of WoW that seems to have been forgotten is that the game was the most casual MMO when it came on the scene, which drew in a lot of existing MMO players that thought the others were too hardcore into WoW. Furthermore, it allowed their potential audience to greatly expand because it was just that more accessible. Fast forward to today: can anyone say with a straight face that WoW is the most casual and accessible MMO out there? Hell no. In fact, I'd go so far is that they try to tune some of their content towards being the most hardercore and restrictive, the complete opposite of what their original goals were. While there's many more direct and indirect ways Blizz designs/philosophizes the game that tie into this point, I think the overall issue is that the current direction of the game is being envisioned by a person or people who are way too niche in their mindset.

Personally, I'd love to see 10man raiding come back again as mythic in parallel with 20man mythic raiding (assuming no other changes to mythic occur, otherwise there's other changes done to mythic in general). The only difference between the two should be their sizes and some adjustments due to raid size differences... other than that, just leave it alone and don't try to balance them to be always equal. Despite all my years clearing every raid in the game on the hardest difficulties at the time, I'd say the introduction of mythic raiding was my least favorite due to how it's designed, balanced, and implemented. 10man has always been my favorite for a variety of reasons, with 40man coming in second, 25man in third. In essence, the order is influenced by how much of a pain in the butt it is to organize the different raids (despite having way more bodies required for 40 and 25, the tuning of these raids is nowhere near as tight as a 20man mythic currently is), but I've always liked the more tight-knit group sizes.

[Lolites]

i wonder how "popular" would 10man actualy be, bcs all the guilds i know that are "only" raiding heroic and almost all the pugs in heroic ive ever been to actualy had MORE than 20 people... the few exceptions had 15+, honestly i cant remember when was the last time i was in raid with 10ppl only, yet somehow those few people who want 10man think everybody wants that for mythic...

mythic is 20man, and given we have 12classes and we are getting another in DF i doubt they will decrease that anytime soon, you wanna raid 10man? raid heroic, 10m mythic would be far easier than 20m anyway (unless they would overtune it as hell)

[Relapses]

i wonder how "popular" would 10man actualy be, bcs all the guilds i know that are "only" raiding heroic and almost all the pugs in heroic ive ever been to actualy had MORE than 20 people... the few exceptions had 15+, honestly i cant remember when was the last time i was in raid with 10ppl only, yet somehow those few people who want 10man think everybody wants that for mythic...

mythic is 20man, and given we have 12classes and we are getting another in DF i doubt they will decrease that anytime soon, you wanna raid 10man? raid heroic, 10m mythic would be far easier than 20m anyway (unless they would overtune it as hell)

There's no compromising with the 10M Heroic rose-tinted glasses bunch. It's either wholesale 10M Heroic or nothing. If you mention class balance they hand waive and say that it's Blizzard's job to balance correctly. If you mention homogenization they hand waive it and say that the game was better when all classes could do everything. If you mention the fact that 10M raids are inherently easier they post the Paragon 10M Heroic Garrosh kill. There's no winning the argument. It's just varying degrees of rose-tinted shades arguing for something that'll never come back.

[epigramx]

The irony is palpable though. Since clearly getting 20 people is difficult for you and you want it made easier.

No, because 5man is the easiest to get going and the most overused (between 5man and 20man). The total result would be higher difficulties (at forming groups) would be accommodated better.

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Honestly 10 man raiding is the only thing that would bring me back to WoW longterm. I have enough capable friends to setup a 10 man raiding group and we could just raid for fun. I do not have 19 other skilled friends and being forced to recruit is more effort than it's worth.

But it's never going to happen. Blizzard are hardset on the fact Mythic needs to be 20man, a decision that I feel more than any other is what is leading to the ever reducing amount of subs.

It can happen easily, because as I said they don't have to use the same instances with 20man. They should make unique maps for 10man hard mode just as they make unique ones for 5mans (which is an extremely overused gametype nowadays for little reason).

[Biomega]

Get them roughly equal and call it a day, it doesn't have to be complicated.

I think the trouble lies in the "roughly equal" part, which sounds like such an easy, straightforward thing but really isn't. You're not wrong that difficulty could go either way, but that's a problem, too - because gear is involved. You're creating a differential where gear-to-difficulty scaling gets distorted, and the same gear can be easier or harder to acquire without a consistent system.

Right now, if you want a specific piece of gear at a specific ilvl, you have to kill the same boss everyone else is killing (let's disregard GV for this, though that'll matter in a min). But if you split things, you would be almost guaranteed to create situations where someone is getting gear for less effort than someone else; or vice versa. That's not going to go over well, and people will complain PRECISELY because difficulty can go either way - "omg Blizzard why did THIS boss have to be so much harder on 10m when boss XYZ was easier! It drops my weapons and trinkets and we've been stuck for 3 weeks while my friend killed it ezmode in 20m and has two weapons and a trinket now! I WANT MY MONEY BACK!".

That's drama you don't need.

And of course the GV plays into this, as you may get extra kills on a boss for the next tier of loot on one difficulty, while people on the other difficulty whose boss is harder don't get that. And that's a pretty big difference.

Blizz has a raging hard-on for constantly amping up the damage and difficulty of the highest difficulty of content

Is it Blizz, though, or is there perhaps a certain demographic of players who, you know, enjoy doing difficult content? Sure, both Sanctum and Sepulcher were a bit of a misstep (one too easy, one too hard) but the principle seems sound. In fact it seems unreasonable to think it's Blizzard who wants that, because it's so much extra work for them. They probably wouldn't do this just for kicks, so there's likely to be some kind of benefit to it; i.e. there must be people to whom this appeals, either directly or indirectly. The business people wouldn't just let them "waste" resources for that long without justification, I don't think.

One aspect of WoW that seems to have been forgotten is that the game was the most casual MMO when it came on the scene, which drew in a lot of existing MMO players that thought the others were too hardcore into WoW.

But that was 15 years ago. Things change. You can't apply the same standards now as you did 15 years ago, and expect the same results. Gaming on the whole has changed a lot, as have demographics, demands, and expectations.

Furthermore, it allowed their potential audience to greatly expand because it was just that more accessible. Fast forward to today: can anyone say with a straight face that WoW is the most casual and accessible MMO out there? Hell no.

And is that a bad thing?

In fact, I'd go so far is that they try to tune some of their content towards being the most hardercore and restrictive, the complete opposite of what their original goals were.

So ask yourself: what could be a reason behind this? Perhaps it's an entrenched player base that has had 15 years to get better at the game, so they want a game that challenges them. Perhaps it's the fact that WoW's engine is an antique now, and so doesn't appeal as much to contemporary casuals that are looking for visual fidelity and modern, dynamic engines, while hardcore players tend to be more focused on mechanics? Perhaps it's that WoW longevity has led to a high degree of polish and streamlining, which allows it to create high-end content of much higher quality than newer games that are still making mistakes that turn away people who are most prone to object to problems, i.e. hardcore players?

There's many possibilities, and it's not just Blizzard going "we want to be a hardcore game" - if they're even saying that at all. It seems more likely this is a result of WoW's age than an active business goal.

Personally, I'd love to see 10man raiding come back again as mythic in parallel with 20man mythic raiding

In an ideal world, so would I. I loved 10-man raiding. I want a close-knit group of people working together, where every individual matters a lot more. That'd be awesome.

But I also recognize that it's likely to remain a pipe dream for so, so many reasons.

[epigramx]

So rather than trying to incentivize 20M content your solution is to ensure everybody is equally miserable with 10M content?

Sorry friend, take off the Cata/MoP nostalgia goggles. 10M Heroic raiding is not coming back and it is not the savior of raiding you're implying here.

You are off topic; nobody is telling you to go back to the 10man+25man days because everyone was infighting about which one of the two had the most prestigious kill at hard mode. It's strictly about unique new maps for 10man.

Also your conservativism supports the extremism of the overuse of 5man which is extremely easier to form groups than 20man and there's no reason to not balance it with a bigger gametype than 5man.

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This thread in a nutshell "I want x raid size because that's how many friends I have, therefore that is best and what we have sucks".

That's a strawman argument. It can also make it harder than it is now to form groups because 5man is extremely easy to form and it's extremely overused nowadays.
It's about better balance.

[Orwell7]

Food for thought:
6-man groups, some MDI M+ could require 2tanks or 2 heals
-> 12 man and 24 man mythic raiding. You can delete the 24 man tho, maybe make it 12-18 flex.

Oh, and don't make it HARD hard. Give us weekly nerfs ala ICC or something and make the last 2-3-4 bosses hard.
OH AND LOTS of new bosses, NON-LINEAR instances! Maybe spread 15 bosses in 2-4 raids.

[epigramx]

Yeah nothing wrong with bringing back 10 man as long as it's clearly understood that 10 man is an easier version of Mythic for people who prefer that.

That means clearly giving it slightly lower ilvl and designing it as a more casual alternative to 20 man Mythic raiding.

I guess nobody read the OP text. This is not about 10man in the way that it was when it co-existed with 25man.
It's about unique maps for it at hard mode which is the best of all worlds since it would protect the 20man race.

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Imo M+ would've been proper + if it scaled with more players too. It could've been some cool 10man content and bridged the gap between 5man dungeons and big raid instances like the old 10man raids used to do.

You can't scale/flex anything at hard mode gametypes, because it would be impossible to balance and nobody would know who was best and everyone would be infighting about it (which is exactly what happened when 10man and 25man shared the same maps).
I'm practically sure that's the main reason they killed 10man hard mode but there's a solution (give them their own unique maps (5man is overused at that front anyway)).

[TrollHunter3000]

Introduce 10man hard mode again but: in its own unique instances; that way the numbers would be balanced a lot; not everyone will be shoved into the tiny 5man gametype and the only alternative wouldn't be the hard-to-find-people-for 20man.

You can't flex it or re-use 20man or 5man instances for it, because we'd have the same problem we had when 10man and 25man were coexisting, constant flamewars in this forum too about what difficulty is the hardest or the coolest.

As a bonus advantage, the strict metas of a handful of combinations of classes/specs of 5man would open up to more complex combinations of 10man, which doesn't solve it entirely (even 20man has metas) but it's an alleviation.

All this does is make it even more difficult for those who want to do the 20 man content have an even harder time finding people because they have another option. Just splitting the player base for no good reason.

[Relapses]

You are off topic; nobody is telling you to go back to the 10man+25man days because everyone was infighting about which one of the two had the most prestigious kill at hard mode. It's strictly about unique new maps for 10man.

Also your conservativism supports the extremism of the overuse of 5man which is extremely easier to form groups than 20man and there's no reason to not balance it with a bigger gametype than 5man.

Again, all you're doing is making it that much more difficult for 20M content to exist. It's the reason 25M raiding was obliterated by 10M raiding in Cata, why exactly wouldn't the same fucking thing happen again?

Just drop this fascination with 10M Heroic raiding you have. It's never coming back. If you want small group raid content there are other MMOs that can do that for you.