10 vs 25 man raiding.
I’m going to try to edit a few blue posts into this when I’m not posting from my phone. =P
Recently Bluzzard has posted about Ulduar, specifically 10 man server first achievements. The essence of what was said is that it is not Blizzard’s intentions for guilds to raid 10 and 25 man raid concurrently. Seperate progression paths is what is intended.
I agree with this in theory, however I feel it’s implementation is extremely difficult. As the leader of a new guild, I am busy recruiting, trying to keep my guild happy, and give us something to do. By that, I mean that we’ve completely smashe most of the current raid content out there. Most every raider has all the gear they can obtain from our raids, so they look for where the next upgrade comes from: 25 man raids.
This leaves me with a problem. I’ve got a bunch of bored raiders on my hands, itching to get into raids we just don’t have the numbers to fill. Way to go Blizzard, this definately seems like a seperate progression path.
I blame this partially on the ease of content at the moment. Guilds have blown through the content so fast that it’s been farmed to death. Hopefully Ulduar will bring a new challenge, and maybe a few more recruits.
Although I still think that Blizzard’s idea that heroic raids are somehow harder to complete (maybe on the raid leader), and deserve better loot is a complete failure (at least with Naxxaramas). The two fights where this is true are Thaddius and Kel’thuzad, and this is only the case because they are proximity/coordination fights. Most of the fights, and achievements are vastly easier with 25 man. Sarth+drakes and Four Horsemen are examples of this.
In my opinion Blizzard shouldn’t award better loot, just more of it, to fit the raid size. This will keep them truely seperate progression paths, as there is no benefit to either path.
Blizzard’s folly
In WotLK, Blizzard changed their design philosophy regarding gear progression. Items dripping in 5 man heroics, are of equal “quality” as items dropped from ten man raids.
Now granted I see the design conflicts with the way they have set up the Emblems. If heroics and 10 man raids (referred to simply as raids further in this post) dropped differbt quality gear but the same Emblems, one would devaule the other. Either heroics would yield “over budget” Emblems, able to obtain raid quality gear at heroic level of effort, or raids your drop undervalued tokens that would be a waste of time.
However making them both drop equal gear and equal Emblems has it’s own issues. With heroic reset timers being 1 day and raid timers being 7 days, you can start to get a picture of what a new 80 is going to be doing more. Once the heroic gear is obtained, and (under the BC mantra) they are now “raid ready”, they are quickly let down that the raid gear is either a small upgrade at all or simply a side-grade (if at all). This leads to player boredom (I’ll touch on that subject in my already foreshadowed post regarding raid motivations). Once the bosses are killed once or twice the content stagnates and tension arises. Raid live off of progression (mostly).
My solutions to the problem are either:
1) increasing EoH item costs, and additionally rewarding better loot in raids/EoH, while also increasing the number of EoH dropped from raid bosses.
2) implementing a seperate Emblem for heroic content. This option would be more time consuming and isn’t really worth the effort.
To explore option 1 some more. Blizzard is introducing a new Emblem for new tiers of content. This will mostly settle the issue of 10 man raid rewards not competing with existing player gear. While I do think this is a good idea, I do not like having to live through 6 months of a single tier of content with people as frustrated and bored as they are.