The 10-man vs 25-man debate

Some clarifications and opening up the debate.

 

Let me start off by clarifying some things in a serious tone for a second. There's been enough trolling and senseless ramblings (by all parties involved) on various community sites where the "quantity over quality" principle seems to hold significant value. I know I've worn the trollface look a few times, simply because some of the claims are so absurd and senseless that there's no room for logic. While it's often fun and amusing, there's just as many people who lose their temper. And plenty more who ignore facts, skip text and pick on things that have already been addressed. They are just not the grounds for a sensible debate.

 

There's a lot of people on various forums and community sites nitpicking on the fact that our Ragnaros 25-man kill took 500+ wipes (an estimate), and the Ragnaros 10-man kill took 32 wipes. People were asking about it, we gave the numbers. There is nothing more to it. Do not read between the lines. This is nothing more but trivia. If you use it for any other purposes, you're very misguided.

The reason we even did the 10-man heroics was to gauge the difficulty of the encounters. Simply to see if the various forum rants about Firelands being much harder in the 10-man raid setting were true. More specifically, the posts claiming that Ragnaros is "unkillable" and "completely overtuned" in that setting. The usual hyperbole when something is genuinely HARD.

If you know us at all, you know that we do this mostly for the competition. We think it's fun and enjoy it. If that wasn't the case, only very few of us would be playing. We obviously also want to be doing the hardest content available. Taking a step inside the 10-man raids was necessary to see if we were on the right track or not. Everyone from our 10-man heroic team, without a shred of doubt, came to the same uniformal conclusion that indeed we were. And that's quite uncommon within our guild -- our opinions regarding pretty much anything vary a lot and no-one is afraid of speaking out or be left unheard. But this didn't feel as if it was the case of a highly subjective opinion. This was a judgement call based on facts; experience in-game and straight up numbers.

 

We strive to be the best PvE guild there is. We put a lot of effort into making that happen. The change of clumping 10-man raiding and 25-man raiding to the same bracket from Blizzard's end complicates this, especially as they officially consider both of the raid settings to be equally hard and they award the same achievements. Despite the fact that in practice the 10-man guilds and 25-man guilds compete in a completely different bracket, there are a lot of people who believe they are truly the same as it's the official stance. 

This system that clumps together the raids poses a lot of problems to us as a guild when we try to reach for the title of the best PvE guild. Do we go for the 10-man raid? Perhaps the last boss there is harder than in 25s? If it isn't, will it be in the next tier? What if we don't go for it, but the 25-man boss is actually so much harder that we don't have a chance of getting a kill, but some 10-man guild actually does have a good shot at getting it down?

Our only reasonable response is to just focus on the 25-man raids and consider the 10-man bracket as extra. The tuning required to create consistently equally hard boss fights in both brackets would require a ridiculous amount of resources and is very unlikely to happen. So for now, the 10-mans will be something that we can do if we have the time for it after the race in our own bracket. But that's not how everyone views it, simply because of the artificial "10-man = 25-man" decision rewarding the same achievements, same everything and having the official stamp of equal difficulty.

 

Personally, I like the 10-man raids more. I also like the fact that it is no longer the "joke raid" with lower item levels and the likes. The competition in that bracket however is still in its infancy. Thus I draw more overall enjoyment from the 25-man raids. The point of this debate is not to convert anyone to go from 10-man raiding to 25-man or vice versa. If someone else enjoys one of the raid brackets more, then please continue doing so. Anything else would be asinine.

The point here is to create a discussion whether or not the 10-man and 25-man raids truly deserve to be officially clumped into the same bracket.

 

Here you can find our comparison of the 10-man raids vs 25-man raids.

 

For discussion on this topic, head over to the discussion thread on our forums. The comments on this news post will be disabled once the comparison goes up. Senseless posts, trolling and flaming will not be tolerated; the discussion will be heavily moderated to maintain quality.