10 vs 25 Cataclysm

[Muu]

Hi guys,
Guess you've already discussed this theme somewhere on this forum, unfortunatelly haven't found anything regarding this.The question is - with all the information we have for now from blizz what will you rate higher 10 or 25 men raiding and why? Its quite important question, at least for me, because if the achievements progress and loot is equal for 10 and 25 ppl raids in Cataclysm I suppose that the choise and preference of top guilds will set the priority for the rest.
Thanks :)

[Anaram]

Hi guys,
Guess you've already discussed this theme somewhere on this forum, unfortunatelly haven't found anything regarding this.The question is - with all the information we have for now from blizz what will you rate higher 10 or 25 men raiding and why? Its quite important question, at least for me, because if the achievements progress and loot is equal for 10 and 25 ppl raids in Cataclysm I suppose that the choise and preference of top guilds will set the priority for the rest.
Thanks :)

Just my opinion but...

If 10 man is equally hard to 25 man then 25 man is harder. Harvesting 25 capable people is harder than picking up 10. Also 25-man videos tend to look better than 10-man videos. The feeling is more epic with a bigger raid.

[zYN]

There hasn't been a single fight that I've found to be harder on 10-man than in 25-man. It hasn't been even close. I've got a lot of faith in the development team, but I just don't see how one can make the 10-mans as challenging as 25-man.

My guess is there'll be significantly more competing 10-man raiding guilds, some will probably be quite good as well. That's a pretty big change from what the 10-mans are now or what the competition is like (non-existant and honestly just not good).


I don't see anything else changing though. Alts will get better gear from 10s, but that's about it.

[Dooby]

I think both will be the same, I don't even really see why 25s are getting more loot per person per boss, and I'll give you my reasoning:

Ok, I understand 25s are harder to organise, requiring a greater number of competent people, but in 10s (new 10s that is, don't come back to me about 10s in WOTLK becuase they are not the same breed) you can't really afford to have anybody die at all. 1 person in a 10man raid dying is 10% of your raids output gone, 1 person in a 25man dying is only 4%.

Not speaking about world class guilds here, who obviously don't have a problem filling 25 spots with amazing players anyway, but for the majority of players/guilds out there, I think 10man is going to be a lot harder than 25man (again I'm talking about NEW 10s, not current 10s), simply because you cannot carry anyone vs a 25man you might be able to carry 2 or 3 crap players. I even recall a blue post shortly after the announcement saying that 10s are technically harder.

This is all assuming ofc that Blizzard get it right and balance the two versions well against each other.

[zYN]

So what if someone dies in a 10-man? The stuff that gets flinged around there does significantly less damage and it's infinitely harder to die. Consider that you're talking to someone who's been pretty much the first to clear any 10-man content whatsoever. Sartharion, Ulduar, ICC and so on.

The amount of slack you can have in 10-mans is amazing. Even the DPS tuning isn't tight - it simply cannot even be, because the encounters weren't designed with having all the buffs available in mind. What happens? You stack melee buffs or caster buffs and you do significantly more damage than what the tuning requires. Or if an encounter is particularly hard, there's going to be a class that absolutely shines on it - getting few of those will make anything a cakewalk.


It's more "fun" maybe, but it's absolutely nowhere near as hard. I can guarantee you that everyone who got, say, the top-10 kills on the 10-man bosses will say the exact same thing.

[arx]

In order to properly balance them, 10s must have tighter throughput requirements than 25s. You will have more people making mistakes in 25s, resulting in more mistakes overall. Also mechanics have generally been easier to handle with fewer people so far, but there are ways for that to change in Cataclysm, though I doubt that'll fully happen. Thus if you balance bosses with some leeway, mistakes must hurt more in 10-mans in order for both to be "as hard", if you believe that to be possible.

This is also assuming that, using your figures, a guild can afford to slack somewhere between 8-10% on bosses, making carrying possible in 25s but not 10s. On really hard encounters that figure is somewhere below 4% - you can't afford to lose anyone even in 25s. Granted, you weren't talking about top class guilds, but the fact remains that for the really challenging stuff, it's the mechanics of the fight between 10s and 25s that need to be evened out. It makes no difference whether you have a 4% or 20% drop in throughput if you can't afford any at all.

ninja edit: Even though I have faith that the dev team knows how to make 10s hard, I have a feeling they don't really want to go there. The hard stuff would have to be brutally tightly tuned, limiting the experience to even fewer people than in 25s. Harder than now - definitely - but I simply don't see a lot of benefit in going all-out, and I doubt they do either.

[Kruf]

Talking about encounter difficulty for non-top guilds in this topic is not very relevant to the discussion in the first place.

[Hermanni]

Here's my two cents that have nothing to do with how encounters are tuned.

In 10-man it's often much easier to maneuver around than in 25-man, think of any boss that requires players to be reasonably spread around the given area or boss-specific mechanics like Defile, Fiery Combustion and so on. With more people (and often mobs) on the playfield it's bound to get messier.

In 25-man you still often can't afford to lose anyone or have anyone make critical errors, and with more people it gets more likely someone will do it wrong. Let's take a mathy approach at this. Imagine you have a boss mechanic that requires your whole raid to be able to perform correctly or it will very likely wipe you (something like Defile, Frostmourne or Halion debuffs.) Then imagine each player in your guild can perform correctly 19 times out of 20. With these assumptions, you could expect to wipe due to personal errors ((1-0.95^10)x100%) =~40% of the time in 10-man and ((1-0.95^25)x100%) =~ 72% of the time in 25-man. Change the numbers however you want to, but with more people there will be more mistakes, small ones like errors in DPS rotations or major ones like inability to avoid beams of laser.

And I personally find it very unlikely these two are going to be changed by developers.

[Dooby]

So what if someone dies in a 10-man? The stuff that gets flinged around there does significantly less damage and it's infinitely harder to die. Consider that you're talking to someone who's been pretty much the first to clear any 10-man content whatsoever. Sartharion, Ulduar, ICC and so on.

The amount of slack you can have in 10-mans is amazing. Even the DPS tuning isn't tight - it simply cannot even be, because the encounters weren't designed with having all the buffs available in mind. What happens? You stack melee buffs or caster buffs and you do significantly more damage than what the tuning requires. Or if an encounter is particularly hard, there's going to be a class that absolutely shines on it - getting few of those will make anything a cakewalk.


It's more "fun" maybe, but it's absolutely nowhere near as hard. I can guarantee you that everyone who got, say, the top-10 kills on the 10-man bosses will say the exact same thing.

I'm sure I totally said twice not to come back at me with current 10s stats, since they are a different beast. I know 10s atm are easy, they are supposed to be. The difficulty of the encounters in cata should be roughly the same in both, so it is your choice which one you go for. If they are not the same then Bliz have majorly messed up.

Didn't really need to come at me all guns blazing, I was simply stating my point, not attacking your integrity as a guild. You will do what you always do best, nothing Bliz does is going to change that, but it makes a HUGE difference to the guilds that are not at your level.

[urimé]

So what if someone dies in a 10-man? The stuff that gets flinged around there does significantly less damage and it's infinitely harder to die. Consider that you're talking to someone who's been pretty much the first to clear any 10-man content whatsoever. Sartharion, Ulduar, ICC and so on.

The amount of slack you can have in 10-mans is amazing. Even the DPS tuning isn't tight - it simply cannot even be, because the encounters weren't designed with having all the buffs available in mind. What happens? You stack melee buffs or caster buffs and you do significantly more damage than what the tuning requires. Or if an encounter is particularly hard, there's going to be a class that absolutely shines on it - getting few of those will make anything a cakewalk.


It's more "fun" maybe, but it's absolutely nowhere near as hard. I can guarantee you that everyone who got, say, the top-10 kills on the 10-man bosses will say the exact same thing.

I'm sure I totally said twice not to come back at me with current 10s stats, since they are a different beast. I know 10s atm are easy, they are supposed to be. The difficulty of the encounters in cata should be roughly the same in both, so it is your choice which one you go for. If they are not the same then Bliz have majorly messed up.

Didn't really need to come at me all guns blazing, I was simply stating my point, not attacking your integrity as a guild. You will do what you always do best, nothing Bliz does is going to change that, but it makes a HUGE difference to the guilds that are not at your level.

I think you are very wrong dooby, u have to realise one thing, wow has since the start of TBV been trying to show casual players all the content aswell. They will keep on trying to do that in cataclysm believe me, because all the casual players got the epixfever now. Imagine they could make 10s equally hard as 25s al lot of those casual players wouldn't be able to see the content, and that would result in whines.

What I think will happen is that 10s will always stay easier then 25s simply because the possibilty to maneuvre 25 ppl will always stay harder then 10s.
If they wanted to equal this out, a solution could be ... imagine a "defilelike" spell where u have 1 sec to move out of in 10s (ur priests would have to use there "PULL"-spell that they'll get in cata) and you would have 5 secs in 25s... wich then would make 25s absurd and everyone would be doing 25s

As has been stated on these forums before, I aswell have lots of faith in the dev team, but I think equalizing 10s and 25s will be too much for them to handle ... I just can't see it happen