I will never understand why people think 10s are easier because there are less people. There is a reason all the cataclysm world firsts were done in 25 man. And that's because 25s are balanced around having dead weight. But if you're Paragon or Ensidia or whoever, every one of your raiders is a tip top player, so you don't have dead weight, and are thereby overpowered for the content.

The other reason 10s are harder is because of personal responsibility. If you're a healer in 25, you have people to cover for you if you screw up and die. In 10 man, there are 3 healers, each one has a different responsibility, and they cannot cover each other very much at all, because each one is stretched already.

I couldn't agree with you more.

I agree, I always preferred 10-mans, just because it felt like more of a well-oiled machine, with each component doing it's job to the best of its ability, as opposed to a zergfest with some dead weight.

Personally, the only reason I found 25 man harder, was that there were more people to make raid-wiping mistakes.

There is a simple reason why all world firsts are done in 25-man. Top guilds were 25-man in Wrath so they already had the players to do 25 in Cata. If you have 25+ good players that have experience working together you're not going to split them up.

@Tyler

I did not mean to imply that Sarth 3D was the only difficult 10man fight. The two sentences of that rebuttal are intended to be different ideas. My lack of sleep and coffee made that unclear, and I apologize.

The fact of the matter is true: 10mans are harder than 25s because of logistics. When one person drops in a 10man, a full tenth of your raiding output is now tanking the floor. In 25-man, it's 4%. If a DPS dies, he will likely be covered by the remaining DPS. I've been in countless 25-man fights where we had a tank die, and one of the other tanks moved in to cover the gap. It was hard, the healers had to work at keeping them up, but we made it. That would be impossible in most 10man fights.

Neither 10 nor 25 man is easy, but 10-man raids rely much more heavily on personal responsibility and each lost person is a major blow to the raid's chance to get the boss down. I think that makes 10-mans much more difficult than people assume, just because it has smaller numbers.

Naxx 10 was far harder than Naxx 25. A single mistake could wipe your raid and on the fights where it wouldn't, you were trying to perform complex actions that would be made massively easier with more people using just one person.

For most of the rest of the raids, it was about even, provided you weren't overgearing by running 25 mans, coming back to 10's and then proclaiming how easy the raids were.

@cyanea85: Ghostcrawler himself said at start of Cataclysm that the Devs always designed the Wrath 10-man to be easier than 25-man, save for a few raids that were not working as intended (Sartharion + 3 Drakes). I understand that 10-man could be challenging for strict 10-man guilds that had no 25-man gear, but you are fooling yourself if you actually think 10-man were harder than 25-man.

As has happened multiple times in the game, what the developers intend doesn't always work. DKs were intended to be a class with three tank specs. That ended up not working. Paladins were designed at the beginning of Cata to be weaker tank heals in exchange for greater AoE flexibility. It's taking until 4.2 to make most of that happen.

From a strict design standpoint (mechanics and numbers), 10-mans are easier. From a gameplay stand point (you need 10 solid players, not 10-15 with room for slackers; you can't afford to lose people in 10-man while you can in 25, etc), 10-mans are harder.