Breakfast Topic: The changing face of raid group sizes
by Jeremy Silvernail 
Dec 16th 2010 at 8:00AM
Sweat was beading on my face, and the pain just kept coming; it would not cease. I stood and could only gaze at my friends as they slowly fell one by one. As they dropped, that is when I snapped into action, for I was the harbinger of more repair bills. I was the out-of-combat rezzer.
This is what I imagine my priest felt as I ran him through the Molten Core. I am glad that spot went the way of the dodo. Indeed, there are a lot of things that I do not miss from raiding, and there are a lot that I do. One of the new changes, 10s and 25s sharing raid lockouts, made me think of the changes that we have seen at each expansion. As the game seems to gear itself towards the more casual raider, I find many things much more to my liking. Yet I do remember that feel of fighting a 40-man raid boss, and that is one of the epic feelings I miss.
The problem I have found with casuals, whether we were running 10/20s or alliance-guild 25s/40s: We almost always came up too crowded or short-handed, depending on the week. Either people had to be cut, or people had to be pugged. This also got me thinking, why not 15s? If we had too many for a 25, we could get two 15s; too few, one 15. Then I thought, why not just have instances scale? The more folks, the more gear, the tougher the fights -- from eight to 40 and anything between. It probably is too complicated for the programmers, but fun to think about nonetheless.
What do you miss and what don't you miss about the older raid group sizes? If you could have one WoW raid group size wish come true, what would it be?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Raiding, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
jim Dec 16th 2010 8:12AM
In truth, I don't think it would be that difficult at all by design; it would however take a core revamp of how the instances are currently handled.
But in essence, you could do some fairly simple things when the instance is generated... every instance has a specific, finite number of mobs and mob types. Those could be generated with scaling hit points and values based specifically upon the number of people in the raid, and could even be assigned ability and drop thresholds so that say if 10 people are in the raid, X gear and Y abilities are used, while if 25 people are in, X and Y gear drops with Z and A abilities, and so forth.
The other, fairly simple thing to do would be to set up a "mob group" that is sized based on number of people in the group, so that at each encounter spot, it drops in a scaled number of mobs based on the number of people in the group.
Now, I suppose I say this is "simple" because as a programmer I understand what it would take... but yes, it would take time to implement and test.
You'd also definitely want finite limits... I like your 8 to 40 size...
It's definitely something I've thought about myself in the past, and I would absolutely love to see Blizzard implement it. I'd also say that I'd like to seem them scale better rewards (or at least better impacting rewards) with the more people in a raid, but perhaps I'd cap that at 25-man being max gear type, and of course, the more people in the raid, the larger the number of items each boss would drop.
There's a bunch of things that could be done to make raiding more dynamic, and which could be done to encourage without forcing a larger raid size.
Serr Dec 16th 2010 1:48PM
@Jim -
ehhhh, I think you are making it out to be waaaay simpler than what it would actually be. It's not really just a matter of scaling damage/health pools, but also taking into consideration a certain group/raid make-up, which the 10s and 25s are designed around. For example, running an instance with even one more healer would likely trivialize the content even *with* higher damage because it's not a direct "X more damage, Y more healing." While I don't claim to be privy to the ratio, it;s probably something more along the lines of 3-4x as much damage, 1 more healer (completely made up numbers, just trying to get the concept across). Same with damage, even just increasing health pools of the mobs to account an additional wouldn't scale well because of the same issue. That's why they have so much of an issue with making sure 10/25s scale correctly because it's not a linear relationship. The way that you paint the picture makes it seem like a linear relationship where the addition of one extra slot can be offset by tweaking of health pools and overall damage.
Using your variable system, say that you have a 6 person dungeon, or an 11-person raid where the ability triggered by the number of extra people increases damage, but you have an extra DPS. Now, you have the issue of if it scales the require a new healer, that means that it's significantly more challenging because the content is now designed to have another healer, but you have a DPS, meaning that you either have to have EPIC DPS or an Epic Healer to complete the content appropriately. If it doesn't scale to require a new healer, than you trivialize the content, because you either have an extra healer that doesn't really do much, or an extra DPS that mows through the content but of the extra 10kish DPS.
So, when factoring in class choice and not just scaling health/dmg, the equation becomes significantly more complex, not undoable mind you, but probably not worth the design/dev time it would require to make the raids scale for every possible iteration of number of people in a raid/party and every possible role combination for each of one of those those number of people. Framed like that, a sliding scale is just not going to cut it.
Skarn Dec 16th 2010 4:10PM
Serr's got it. It's not just about the number of players, it's what those players represent. When you add that 11th player, what are you adding? Probably a DPS, so you increase the HP of all the mobs to compensate for the extra DPS. You leave the damage they output the same because your tanking and healing hasn't increased. Except it's more complex than that. What about a fight like Queen Lana'thel? Where the entire raid is taking constant AoE damage? Even without changing the damage of Lana'thel's abilities, you now have MORE to heal because there is one extra player!
What about abilities like Sindragosa's Ice Blocks, Festergut's spores, Marrowgar's spikes, Saurfang's beasts, Dreamwalker's adds, the Lich King's Val'kyr and so on? When do you ramp those up? 11 people? 15? 20? At what level of people do you assume there will be an extra tank or healer or two? As you can see, just scaling numbers is easy, but there is an impact to raid design that goes far deeper than numbers.
Designing GOOD scaling instances is going to be quite a challenge. Blizzard could do it very lazily, but then something like 12 members would make the instance extremely easy, while 13 members would make it crazy hard. There's no balance there. Oh, it'd be very cool to see, but easy it is NOT.
jim Dec 16th 2010 9:35PM
@Serr,
I'd have to disagree that it's beyond the value of doing from development time. Yes, class make-up is important, but that remains true in raids as they stand. There's nothing stopping you from walking into ICC with 10 or 25 rogues, mages, or whatever... but it's not a very wise thing to do. By the same token, there'd be nothing stopping you from going in with 34 priests, 14 shamans, or 18 paladins, but it might not be the most effective way to deal with the raid either.
You cannot, simply, program for player choice, but you can programmatically present the challenge. It's up to the players to overcome the challenge as presented, and part of that is simply choosing a well-diversified group.
Whether it's 10s and 25s or a scaling instance from 8 to 40, your choice of party make-up still needs to be effective to face the challenges within. And it's still doable within the framework suggested.
Itanius Dec 16th 2010 8:15AM
I've been hoping for scalable instances for a long time. How cool would it be to run a dungeon with just 3 people? How cool would it be to do a raid with just 6? or 80?
Someday, my friends. Someday.
oli704 Dec 16th 2010 8:18AM
i won't miss that you had to get 40 well geared people and hold them in leash
what i miss is the fact that it was so hard, the guild was literaly a brotherhood!
Drob10 Dec 16th 2010 8:46AM
Another thing I won't miss in those 40-man raids is all the incessant jumping! In the 15-30 minutes it took for everyone to collect, buff, make food, hand out food, etc, people got bored and would just start pounding the space bar. Ugh!
Leetarrows Dec 16th 2010 8:19AM
Even though pre-xpac the consensus was "dude, if people are raiding as a 25man in ICC, they are going to continue to raid as a 25man in Cata", that's not holding up. I even asked the illustrious podcast guys and the answer was similar.
The reality is that the formerly epic larger groups are getting fragmented into 10man clicks ... That's exactly how they now feel - a clicky group of 8-10 people who are either RL friends or have played with each other for a while. So ... I already miss the epic feeling of grinding ICC as a 25man guild because we wanted to have better loot and have that sense of a large(r) adventure.
Neirin Dec 16th 2010 12:53PM
Cliques are certainly not a good thing, but I think you're sounding more jaded than anything else. Once a 10 man group forms if they don't bring in outside people, it's probably not anything personal against outsiders, but they're 1) used to each others' playstyle (tanks that can handle swaps and picking up loose adds, etc w/o need for communication are worth more than you might believe) and 2) don't want to screw over someone who's been putting in the time to progress with the group. Look at it from the perspective of someone who gets sat so the group can bring someone new.
Case and point: when my guild did 10 man H-LK we brought a different paladin than our normal one (who had invested hours into learning the fight, not to mention progressing with us since Naxx) because our normal paladin was having scheduling issues and we were racing for alliance first. When we got LK down the ensuing drama completely spoiled the achievement (at least for me).
Kaphik Dec 16th 2010 8:21AM
Attendance problems aren't only caused by casuals. Your hardcore raiders tend to stop showing up for farm bosses quite often in 25s.
sephirah Dec 16th 2010 8:46AM
But at least with hardcore you know *exactly* since when they'll stop.
"Hey, dklolpwns should get his legendary next week, we should organize a farewell party!"
Masalar Dec 16th 2010 8:27AM
I like the idea, but I don't think it would be easy at all. Ignoring the hardcore players who would of course find that magic number of raiders to best plow through content, it can't be a linear scale. If you need 2 tanks and 2 healers, minimum, then you'd start with 4 dps. Then 5, then 6 etc. But one of those times you'd need a healer. If the hp was scaling on the idea that a dps was added, adding a healer would make the encounter too hard. But if the damage done is scaling then adding a dps would be fatal. If both scale then there'd be a lot of kicking and dropping as you try and figure out what this particular amount of players needs composition wise.
I'd say they should just add a 15 man. Then you could run a 10, a 15, 2 10s, a 25, 3 10s or 2 15s, 3 15s etc. depending on how many people show up. No more than 4 people would ever be sat, unless you were lacking key roles, which would still be a problem even with method described in the post.
Serr Dec 16th 2010 1:50PM
oops - sorry didn't see you post. I responded to jim above saying essentially the same thing.
great minds, yadda yadda
jim Dec 16th 2010 9:40PM
But then, here's the beauty of WoW... maybe you make the choice to bring a couple of people who are on hybrid classes or whose talent specs are such that if you feel in one encounter you need a healer and the next a dps, it's an easy switch-up. It's not as if WoW's the same beast it was 6 years ago... we have the tools at our hands to make intelligent decisions in raid make-up. Sure, would people make bad choices? Absolutely. But... they do that right now with fixed raids. That won't change. What changes is the dynamic ability to run with variable groups.
Ln Dec 16th 2010 8:51AM
I haven't played since they introduced it, to be honest, but doesn't LoTRO have a scaling skirmish system? AFAIK they implemented it as follows: you can scale your instance based on group size, and then on top of that you can also change the difficulty level of the instance too.
It wouldn't necessarily work with WoW's dungeon philosophies (and even in LoTRO it's only used for dynamic, randomly generated instances and not their static raids), but it's an interesting way of looking at things, I thought.
Further info here: http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Skirmish#Skirmish_Sizes_and_Scaling
Kayrbayr Dec 16th 2010 9:01AM
Sometimes I long for the EQ days of 72 man raids.
Fel Dec 16th 2010 9:06AM
Anyone remember Diablo 2? The whole darn world was scalable. Three people joined your game? Everything gets 3x harder. It wasn't a perfect system at all, but Blizzard has definitely dabbled in scalability in the past, and I don't see WoW instances being much harder.
I think this will be something they consider far down the road though, as it would change the way the game is played, just like the addition of the Dungeon Finder.
yunkndatwunk Dec 16th 2010 9:10AM
CoX was able to do it years ago, Borderlands does it, there's no reason Blizzard can't. Sure they'd need a wider range of loot to drop, with maybe the same name but slightly different iLevels of gear for every few people added. But it's certainly doable.
Praezin Dec 16th 2010 9:32AM
I remember the old 15man raid..."UBRS anyone? I have the key!"
Antonia Dec 16th 2010 10:24AM
Honestly 10mans feel a bit more epic to me. 10 people instead of a legion of people fighting things bigger then them has a much more dire feel to it for me.
I don't miss 40mans at all. I don't miss waiting for 2 hours to get 40 people together. I don't miss waiting for 40 people to get back to the instance when we'd wipe -and I really don't miss those people who wouldn't get back and would only wait for the rez. I don't miss spending 3 hours on trash alone. I don't miss losing out on loot because 6 or more other people wanted it too. I don't know, I don't miss anything about it at all.
As for the "why can't the instances just scale?" do you even know how impossible it'd be for them to code that let alone balance that? Its easier to make the individual scale then it is to make the instance do it.