The Return of 40 Man Raiding

[wych]

No, it's a massive clusterfuck.

It'd either be incredibly difficult to balance as well

[Deleted]

40 men raiding was never glorious and will thankfully never come back again....

[zorkuus]

No they did not .....

They didn't move away from 40 man raids just to piss off people.

[eldaveo]

25 is alright. It's kind of in the middle, where there's far too much personal responsibility (IMO,) in 10, where if you screw up and die, suddenly there's a big problem, but not so little that you can have several people afk and autofollowing someone and still expect to down a boss.

Also, I remember back in BWL, in the Suppression Room, there was so much AoE and stuff going around that I had to look directly at the floor to get a decent framerate. Not to mention that the AoE spell effects were so concentrated that it made seeing anything impossible even if you WERE getting decent framerate!

[Deleted]

Wildstar will have 40 man raids, so we'll see very soon how good they can be.

[Alvito]

Most servers can't get enough people for 1 25 man that can even clear SoO in normal. No way 40 mans would work on more then a few servers if any. Why in the world would anybody that was running one choose to do them. 15 to 20 more ppl to recruit, lag, accountability for 40 ppl. Sorry, but the only ppl that want 40 mans didn't do them and want to join the club or never had anything to do with leading them or recruiting for them.

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Wildstar will have 40 man raids, so we'll see very soon how good they can be.

A game nothing like WoW that will come and go before this thread stops being bumped.

[Duravian]

These days it would require a 40 man LFR.......and we all know how that would go over.

oh god... 40 lfr players.. in one raid....

[Deleted]

i don't get the lagfest argument, i have a normal gaming pc, 3 years old actually. and earlier today i was playing GW2 and we had a 60vs60 ( counted not just guessing ) PVP battle, and i didn't have any lag. So why would an older and '' different'' looking game not be able to handle 40 people and a boss on its screen.

40 man fights would actually get me back in the game, as i grew bored with the amount of 10 man guilds that just raided and lost every form of social interaction, group events and whatnot.

Having a guild of around 60 maybe even a 100 active players that just raided as there were people available instead of the same 10 people every single week. i think that is alot more fun, and difficulty wise, the smaller group content could still excist for hardcore min/max players, and the 40 man for the grand scale battles and events that we see more and more in games around us.

[sbaybevett]

Only lag 40 man raids had back in the day was maybe in BWL in the surpression room, otherwise a player with a single core, 200-400 mhz processor, did just fine. Introducing the fancy spell effects, HD resolution and whatnot added to the lag issues ( not to mention now cross realm or multiple realms now being hosted on a single server blade ) The real reason blizzard did away with 40 man raids was because raid instances pretty much were exclusive to the "elitists" who managed to get into the 40 man raiding guilds. Plus, unlike today, it took weeks, not days, for those top guilds to actually clear a raid instance to the final boss. Otherwise, the majority of players never got to see content in MC, BWL, AQ40 or Naxx 40. In a way, I miss those days, because there was a certain awe and respect to be had wearing a purple, where as nowadays purples have become an "entitlement", purples for everyone !

[zorkuus]

i don't get the lagfest argument, i have a normal gaming pc, 3 years old actually. and earlier today i was playing GW2 and we had a 60vs60 ( counted not just guessing ) PVP battle, and i didn't have any lag. So why would an older and '' different'' looking game not be able to handle 40 people and a boss on its screen.

Because the engine is old.

[rogueMatthias]

out of your usual 40man raidgrp, 15 were afk and 10 were buff bots, so it dosnt really change a thing except adding lag ^^

This

40 men raiding was never glorious and will thankfully never come back again....

and this.

Most people seem to have massive rose tinted glasses on when talking about Vanilla.. or never played it but have heard a lot about it so like to think they played then.

40 player was BULLSHIT.

So you're in a 25 raid team, there's likely a couple of scrubs there already holding you back. Now imagine if there were another 15 people all WORSE than those players. Finding 40 players who all know their class well enough and have gear enough is near impossible.

[Ielenia]

I would completely ignore it. There is nothing 'epic' on having to assemble 39 other guildies, when, nowadays, just getting 24 seems to be a hassle, already. The logistics of having to coordinate 40 people, yourself included, is a nightmare, and the rewards, compared to 10 and 25, are simply just not worth it.

Just to make the 40-man raids 'worth it', they'd have to get a greater reward than in comparison with 10 and 25s, which in turn would make the majority of the playerbase, the ones in guilds that cannot or have trouble filling 25-man groups, to feel excluded.

And if you come to me and say 'Hey, I was in a 40-man guild in vanilla and we had no issues getting our raid together!', to thee I reply: "Congratulations, you were in the 10% back then." Besides, back then, fights were, like, a hundred times simpler than today. And the spells/abilities weren't as flashy as they are today (I could be wrong on the 'flashy' thing, don't quite recall now), and so having 39 other people unloading their 'flashiest' spells on the boss, would certainly have some players' computers begging for water, so to speak.

[Deleted]

I don't know about now, but in 2005 I was constantly raiding in a 40 man raid with not lag what so ever. But in vanilla every class had only around 3-4 buttons to hit. And don't forget the mere eight debuff slots each mob had.

[Jilor]

This



and this.

Most people seem to have massive rose tinted glasses on when talking about Vanilla.. or never played it but have heard a lot about it so like to think they played then.

40 player was BULLSHIT.

So you're in a 25 raid team, there's likely a couple of scrubs there already holding you back. Now imagine if there were another 15 people all WORSE than those players. Finding 40 players who all know their class well enough and have gear enough is near impossible.

Most servers can't get enough people for 1 25 man that can even clear SoO in normal. No way 40 mans would work on more then a few servers if any. Why in the world would anybody that was running one choose to do them. 15 to 20 more ppl to recruit, lag, accountability for 40 ppl. Sorry, but the only ppl that want 40 mans didn't do them and want to join the club or never had anything to do with leading them or recruiting for them.

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A game nothing like WoW that will come and go before this thread stops being bumped.

I don't agree with either of these quotes (including the quotes they quoted). I'd argue especially the second one is even more wrong. I'd argue that you clearly never did a serious 40 man raid. Some of us cleared Naxx in Vanilla and I experienced none of these issues. Recruiting, lag, logistics...Look, I personally know 40 mans are never coming back, that's fine, I got over that in TBC. That being said, it's ridiculous how off base these quotes are. Like saying 15 people were afk.

Yeah, let's see any guild kill Loatheb, Thaddius or Sapph with 15 afk people back in Vanilla (hell, when most guilds hit Thaddius, two dead people meant a wipe because of the dps loss from charges). As for logistics? It was simple actually, you had class channels (or healing channels for the healers). I never once had an issue understanding my role or with any major confusion. Did people make mistakes occasionally? Sure. But it was generally fixed the next pull. 40 mans were a ton of fun. Most people just never got to experience a real guild that was capable of high end raiding back in Vanilla. And this is why 40 mans were removed.

[TheWindWalker]

These days it would require a 40 man LFR.......and we all know how that would go over.

Funny as that sounds... no it wouldn't. They're already adding flex LFR to let the game adjust hp and mechanics around. They'd just take that 40 man boss (Cause let's face it, the only way we'd get a 40-man raid is if it's a one-boss-wonder raid.) and have it be 25m for LFR.

[Meillquei]

I didn't raid back when there were 40 man raids, but I know without a doubt that I would hate it. WOW is already straining enough for my old computer as is, I think 40 man raids would make it explode...

Not to mention the headache that follows after trying to manage of group of 40 people.

[Ssateneth]

Blizzard said they might be exploring flexible raid sizes up to 30 people.

[Razecog]

God forbid 40 mans. 25 man is bad enough.

[Kurgosh]

I bet most people couldn't name 10 guild leaders on their server anymore.

I couldn't tell you the name of the guild leaders of the other hardcore raiding guilds on my server. And there aren't that many of them.

[Nihth]

Dont understand why so many people didnt like the 40 mans, thats the most fun I have had in WoW ever. Yes ofcourse it had downsides, but being able to progress and down a new boss, or get a new piece of gear by far outweigthed that IMO.
Being 40 people on TS or Ventrilo was not that bad as people here say it was. At least we had rules about who were aloud to speak, the voice chat was mostly used by the officers to give orders or explain tactics, with occasional chit chat during trash or after a boss kill.
Finding enough people for a raid was solved by having way more than 40 people in a guild, and a raid signup callendar. People who signed up too late were reserves for when other people had to go.
The lag might be a problem now, but was not that bad before, since WoW was way less flashy. The WoW client is way more bloated now than it was.

The old raids had their downsides, but at least for me it was the best experience I have had in a game ever.