I thought the old ways were better. I think all the raid instances should be progressive numbers. 5 -> 10 -> 20 -> 40 was good. You had numbers that all added from any stage to combine properly into a non-dramatic number. Going from 5-mans to ZG? No sweat! Two teams of ZG? Lets do MC now!

Now, in Bizzaro Expansion world, you go from 5 -> 10 -> 25? Where do you get the extra 5 people? What have those 5 been doing? If you had 30 for 3 Kara runs, what happens to 5 of your people? Do guilds really have the members to handle this in a non-dramatic fashion? No, most of them don't. At least not on my server. There are 2-3 solid guilds, and the rest are a rotation of member poaching, drama, breakups, regroupings and all sorts of other crap that doesn't need to be in the game, and the precipitating factor... is raid size and composition.

So, I think raid sizes should be further reduced to 20. Guilds were doing okay with the progression from ZG to MC before, and they'd do much better at the transition from Kara to whatever if they didn't have to either trim down or beef up. I'd also like more instances to be 10-man content rather than 20-man content, and have it released more frequently. It's awesome that we've got 4 huge 25-man raids right now... that the majority of the playerbase isn't going to finish. However, most of them probably will be able to clear kara at some point right?

Ideally, I think it would have been great to have all the tier 4/5 be 10-man content, (kara, gruul, mag, tk, ssc), with hyjal and black temple being 20-man raids. The majority of the playerbase still wouldn't make it into the Black Temple and vanquish Illidan, but more would be able to at least feel they were making a solid contribution on a regular basis.

Everyone loves Karazhan. It's pug'able, the loot isn't bad and the encounters are fun. You don't have to have a huge guild and recruit and poach and trim and otherwise "maintain" a guild if you can just get 12-15 people who want to win the content. It's been for the most part the ideal raid instance, and the standard I think the game should use when designing new stuff.

But, previous comments by the raid team seems to indicate that they'd still like to be in the everquest raids of old, rather than the stuff that the majority of players like. Blizzard will keep making content for the smallest subset of hardcore raiders rather than run the risk of pissing them off and sending them to another game. Blah.

Reply