The Raid Observer: A New Year with a new line-up

After a holiday break, the Raid Observer is back with some midstream observations about how things went over Christmas and new years and how things are looking in the race in general.

So I'm back! I hope everyone had a nice holiday period and ate too much. While I was not making updates, I did keep half an eye on the progress rankings and I saw a few interesting trends, which I'll highlight below.

25-man race

Of course since I last posted, quite a few more guilds have reached the 8/8 mark, 13 in total. That represents the majority of guilds at the 8/8 stage (only four 10-man raiding guilds have cleared the content, but more on that later). Something interesting that was pointed out to me was the fact that there is only one 25-man guild (as of today) at the 7/8 stage, leaving sixty six guilds at the 6/8 stage.

This might reinforce the fact that the Spine encounter is the hardest encounter in Dragon Soul. That was already suggested by the time it took for the first guild to go from 6/8 to 7/8 as compared to 7/8 to 8/8, but this additional piece of information seems to validate that assertion.

10-man race

The interesting thing about the 10-man race is how lean it looks at the top. We only have 5 guilds as of this writing that have cleared the full heroic content. This seems to suggest that Madness is a harder encounter on 10-man versus 25-man, particularly when you consider that 4 guilds represent 1.1% out of the 30-odd thousand guilds working through the 10-man content. Similar to the Firelands race, there is a significant proportion of Korean raiding guilds dominating the top 10, but we've had a better success rate of EU server guilds in 10-man raiding as compared to Firelands.

One guild I have to point out in the 10-man race, though, is the Korean server guild named Overtake, which just literally overtook (!) a lot of other guilds to become the 18th guild to reach 8/8. The interesting part--despite their fun name--is the fact that they cleared 6/8 on 25-man mode, and did the final two bosses on 10-man. This could be due to a number of factors (a numbers problem, perception of difficulty, guild choice/preference) but it's always hard to know exactly where to put a guild when they clear content on both 10 and 25-man levels, though my general rule of thumb uses the end bosses in an instance as my guiding light. So, if the guild clears the last bosses on 10-man mode, I'd say that puts them in the 10-man category. Although maybe we need a kind of "hybrid/mix-match" race category for guilds that want/need/opt to clear the bosses in different sizes. Buuuut... let's not get into a 10- vs. 25- discussion as we know it'll get us nowhere. Either which way, we've got far fewer guilds clearing the content on 10-man levels despite the huge numbers of guilds making their way through the 10-man content.

Overall race analysis

The race appears to have slowed down a little at this point, with only about 100 more guilds joining the overall 25-man race and about 1900 joining the 10-man race; this represents a 3% growth in the overall raiding numbers and suggests a plateauing of the race. It's always hard to say if this is attributable to the holiday season or just a sign of the race reaching a natural state, but the tier 12 race had almost 50,000 guilds engaged in Firelands and over 70,000 moving through the Tier 11 content. This, of course, could be explained by a lot of factors like the casual-ness of raiding guilds, the length of time that raiding instances have been available, the appearance and death of raiding guilds, and even the new LFR feature. It's possible that the most casual of guilds may prefer to let its members sort themselves out by joining the LFR rather than pre-arranging their own raiding guilds, thus naturally decreasing the overall numbers. I won't have anything certain to suggest until the race is far more developed and as we're currently at the approximate equivalent of the first couple hours of a marathon, we have only the elite race to really comment on and even that's still being completed.