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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsThe missed opportunity of 20-man raiding
by Matthew Rossi 
Dec 1st 2011 at 8:00PM
We had 20-man raids back in classic WoW -- two of them, in fact, Zul'Gurub and Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. Neither exists as a 20-man raid any more, so this may seem odd to players who didn't raid then, but these were considered the small raids. People who had just spent hours raiding in Molten Core, Blackwing Lair or AQ40 would put together these runs on the fly to gear their alts or get a shot at off-spec loot, while other guilds that didn't have the numbers for 40-man raids would spend their time raiding these while trying to build up their numbers.
Why the extra quintet?
20-man raiding gave us some of the most interesting mechanics of classic WoW. We're all familiar with the Corrupted Blood mechanic of the Hakkar fight (it's even spawned sociological studies and inspired pre-expansion events), but fights like Buru and Ossirian were also, for their time, engaging and unique attempts at a new kind of raid fight.
The issue came when 40-man raids were scrapped as we entered The Burning Crusade. This was a decision that I supported at the time. Even though it hurt a few guilds, I believed it was overall good for the game. Where I was confused was in how the raid game in The Burning Crusade was set up. On launch, guilds formed 10-man raid teams to work Karazhan for gear in order to start on Gruul's Lair and Magtheridon's Lair, two 25-man raids with fewer encounters (Gruul's has two, Magtheridon has one). As a result, you ended up with either five fewer people than you needed to run three encounters, or five too many. Even keeping in mind that guilds often had two or three alternates per 10-man raid force, the difficulties of stepping up to 25s (the A vs. B team issues, different tanking requirements, a lot more people to keep track of) were compounded by the numbers game.
I really don't know why it was decided to go 10/25 instead of 10/20 when the 20-man raid was an established and successful type of raiding in original WoW.
As of now, most 25-man raid groups have the same number of tanks as 10s do, two dedicated tanks and an off-tank. This means that 25s bring more proportionate DPS than 10s do, and so 10-man DPS requirements can't be the same because there's a lower ratio of DPS to tanks/healers in 10s than 25s.
With less comes more
It would have been a lot easier to scale up raid forces from Kara to the larger raids if Blizzard had just doubled up on people. There would still have been issues with tank balance (do you want to go from two tanks in 10s to four tanks in 25, or is that too many tanks?), but the playerbase could likely have absorbed it more easily than they have the drastic differences in raid composition we see between the two raid sizes now.
There have been other suggestions for how to alter raid sizes. 15-man raiding has been suggested (effectively, tacking on a third 5-man group to 10-man raids, similar to the way Upper Blackrock Spire was run back in the early days of WoW). Other games cap party size at four and expand upward from there. I personally think for WoW, scaling from five to 10 to 20 makes the most sense and is easiest to implement. What are your thoughts?
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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Raiding, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 3)
ZZTRaider Dec 1st 2011 9:50PM
I spent most of TBC, WotLK, and Cataclysm as an officer in various raid guilds. I focused on 25-mans throughout TBC/WotLK, and 10-mans while I played Cata.
Consistently, I've found that you pretty much need 5 fairly reliable people more than raid cap to be able to field raids without question. Any fewer, and it becomes nearly impossible to have enough people able to fill in for key roles (tanking especially) to deal with absences. Heck, in my experience, you can easily make use of as many as 35 raiders if you're doing 25-man hard modes. You gain some flexibility in composition, and even is 3-4 people can't make it one night (which isn't exactly unlikely, considering that you're dealing with 35 people now), you still have enough people to fill a raid and deal with someone's internet connection failing.
Of course, the downside to all of this is that it's difficult to find 15 (or 35) people that are solid raiders, mesh well together, and can make the same raid schedule consistently.
On top of that, a lot of players seem to have issues with sitting out for even one or two fights per raid week. I've always made an extreme effort to make sure that everyone spends about the same amount of time working on encounters, to the point of even preferring to bench myself or officers. Still, many applicants withdraw immediately when they realize that they won't be in for every single attempt, even though they'll be benched for a fight that offers them no upgrades and they will still valor cap for the week. It's mind-bogging, really -- the whole point is to make sure everyone gets to raid *more* often, because it greatly reduces the risk of having to call a raid because only 9 people could make it, or we couldn't field enough tanks or healers
At any rate, I agree that 25 is probably too many people, and 20 is probably better, but I think it's a bit disingenuous to just assume that it works because 20 is twice as many people as 10 -- a solid, consistent 10 man raid team consists of more than just 10 raiders.
Caylynn Dec 1st 2011 10:14PM
Yep. In Wrath, once Ulduar hit, I was in a "hard mode" 25 man guild, and some of us were rotated in and out for specific fights, all the time. We had extras of everything - dps, tanks, healers. So you werent guaranteed a spot for every fight. It was a little annoying to have to 'give up' an entire evening, each raid night, in case they got to the fight where youbwould be rotated in. But that was the reality. I left that guild at the end of Wrath, not for that reason, but for the favoritism that was shown to certain individuals, even when their performance was sub-par.
Pyromelter Dec 2nd 2011 4:46AM
Great points ZZ. Maybe it's because I'm a bit older and have a smidge more perspective, but I always preferred to be in a guild that might bench me, because I know at least the guild would raid, versus not having enough people and having to cancel progression bosses, hard modes, or even raid night altogether.
Khirsah Dec 1st 2011 9:59PM
I really related to the part about having to bench several players if you tried to go from 3 10-mans to a 25. In my old guild, during Wrath, I was part of a 10 man team. One day, a couple of players from the other 10 man teams didn't show, so we decided to form a 25. Problem was, there were 27-28 people.
Due to better luck in drops and rolls, another rogue had slightly better gear than me. I was benched, but told I'd be first alternate. A couple 25 man runs later, and the other rogue had way better gear than me. 10 mans were abandoned, and I lost my spot because I did not have as good gear.
20 man would not necessarily solve that problem, but it might make it easier in those types of situations for a guild to move from 3 10's to a 10 and a 20, instead of a 25, and hang 5 people out to dry.
WeWhoEat Dec 1st 2011 10:15PM
Every time blizzard is confronted with this question I can totally tell by their answer that there was an epic backlash to the shrinkage from 40. I didn't see that personally because in my situation we had a complete roster change going in to TBC, but I can just imagine the turmoil.
You have to ask your self what you're trying to solve with this change? Keeping a healthy raid for any length of time in this game is difficult enough without the devs causing heartache.
ecwfrk Dec 2nd 2011 2:52AM
There was epic backlash when they announced it because most guilds had at least 15 people who were just filler and those people suddenly found out their services were no longer required and wouldn't get carried through content anymore. They obviously weren't happy.
And of course there was plenty of the "OMG CHANGE?!?! NOOOOOOOO!!!!" people who complain every time there's a patch.
But in the end a lot more people ended up raiding and overall subs went way up (they hit 8 million right around the launch of TBC and hit 11M before Wrath dropped where it hit it's peak of 12.5 million) so I'm sure Blizz was pretty happy with the results.
As to what it would "fix" is that 10/20 would be mathematically more compatible than 10/25. Things like a guild who has 3 10 man groups who want to try a 25 man end up leaving 5 people unable to raid that week where if they had a 20 man option, the other 10 could still run the 10 man that week. It's also easier to split a 20 man into 2 10 mans or 2 10 man into a 20 man without having to change the guild roster by adding or dropping 5 people.
Pyromelter Dec 2nd 2011 4:50AM
Not 12.5 million. Just over 12 million ec.
source http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png
and
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=2847881
-Your local wowinsider white shirt/black shorts wearing fact checker.
p.s. I completely agree with the points of both posters above me. Cheers!
ecwfrk Dec 1st 2011 10:18PM
I also am a fan of the 20 man raid. In fact, I'd dump 10 man raids and make *all* raids 20 man raids to help streamline tuning as the difficulty in having to tune each new raid 5 different ways has got to slow things down and cause Blizz to make concessions in development.
To me 10 man raiding just doesn't feel like raiding. It's hard to think of something that takes 5 less people than early Scholo and Strat runs did as being epic end game encounters. 10 man raids just feel like overtuned 5 man content. You slap 2 groups together and handle it.
40 man content was just too big though. Half the reason Alliance was so popular in Vanilla was that with Gnomes and Dwarves you could sometimes actually see what you were fighting. Plus, there were so many people that individually you didn't matter much unless you were the MT, or the tranq shot hunter or had some other crucial role in the fight while everyone else just taped down a spell key and went and made a sandwich.
But ZG and AQ20 were perfect. Big enough to feel like an epic encounter but small enough to not be a logistical nightmare. It also tends to match proportionally to the player base's play styles. A 20 man raid would be 2-3 tanks, 4-6 healers and 12-14 DPS which is right around the proportion you find within the player base so it wasn't very hard to fill roles.
Pyromelter Dec 2nd 2011 4:53AM
"10 man raids just feel like overtuned 5 man content. You slap 2 groups together and handle it. "
I'm pretty sure originally this was intended. That's why the gear that dropped from 10mans was of lesser ilevel and quality.
I would say with the addition of hardmodes though, that it definitely does feel like raiding in some of the more challenging hard modes, as well as some hardmodes being more difficult on 10mans then on 25man. I believe Halfus early in cataclysm had that type of dynamic.
I will say I agree with you that 20man raids feel just right. It's a nice sweet spot.
logan Dec 1st 2011 10:22PM
If you were sitting out an entire night, I'd say they were doing it wrong, honestly. Maybe I'm just an idealist, though.
Not to say it wasn't a complete pain in the ass for me and the other officers, but we did everything we could to make sure that no individual sat out for more than one or two fights per night, and two or three fights per week.
This broke down a bit for progression fights (let's face it, some fights just end up easier with some compositions for the first kill, and every raider has his or her strengths and weaknesses with certain fight mechanics), but we always tried to let people know in advance if they weren't directly next in line if someone's internet died.
logan Dec 1st 2011 10:23PM
Bah, this was intended as a reply to Caylynn's post.
Schadenfreude Dec 1st 2011 10:32PM
I'm in a pretty small guild, so sometimes it would be nice to have an 8-man raid. ;) I really wish it wasn't too technologically difficult to do a scaling raid so you could go with 11 or 12 people or whatever.
kuri Dec 2nd 2011 1:27AM
I think the 25-man came about when they looked at their raid sizes and player distribution. It When you look at a 10-man, 50-60% of the raid is DPS. When you look at a 25-man, 65-75% of the raid is DPS.
They were probably looking at raid comps and player numbers and saw more DPSers in the game than any other role. So, recognizing this majority and avoiding squeezing out healers or tanks, they made more slots to accommodate the larger DPS player base.
With 25's, guilds are able to fit in a few more DPSers and more people in the game get to raid. If you cut those 5 raiders out of each comp, I guarantee you it'd probably be 4 DPS / 1 Healer or 5 DPS.
And those roles do not a raid make.
Pyromelter Dec 2nd 2011 4:57AM
"If you cut those 5 raiders out of each comp, I guarantee you it'd probably be 4 DPS / 1 Healer or 5 DPS."
I bet you 100k gold that 90% of guilds that run 25mans would love to cut out their bottom 5 dps or bottom 4 dps + bottom healer, and they wouldn't have any problem with it what-so-ever. (meaning that it's likely that the dps squads are carrying their bottom 4 and healing squads are carrying at least 1 healer.)
Besides, cutting 5 people out of a raid isn't really hard, attrition will usually do that within a few months at most, especially as a patch or expansion gets long in the tooth.
shirtntie Dec 2nd 2011 2:04AM
You're right Rossi. 20 is a good number, its interesting that they didn't go with that.
mazca13 Dec 2nd 2011 4:11AM
As a medium-sized casual guild, I actually like having the 25 man. We don't have any real level of raid attendance required, so the number of people showing up can vary quite a lot. We often aim for running a 25-man raid on Sundays, but exactly how many people show up is quite variable - so it's nice to have the option of running two 10-mans, or a 25-man. We have enough dual-spec tanks that we can usually make either work.
Pyromelter Dec 2nd 2011 4:59AM
Well think of it this way... what if you have 29, 30, or 31 people show up? Wouldn't it be easier to run one 20 man raid, and a 10man? As opposed to running a 25 and benching 5 people.
Then again if you get 25-28 people you're kinda hosed in that situation.
Anyway Just food for thought :)
DarkWalker Dec 2nd 2011 7:12AM
Sincerely, what makes more sense for me - specially for easier difficulty raids - is scaling the content with the raid group size. Raids might have a minimum size, but let the maximum size open and scale the encounter based on how many players show up.
This would basically mean no bench at all. And is what CoH currently does, and GW2 plans to do. This - coupled with individual raid loot, similar to WoW's goodie bags from seasonal bosses - is one of the strongest reasons I plan to jump ship to GW2; raiding without loot drama or benching.
For hard modes, though, having a fixed group size can make sense, since it allows the devs to fine-tune the encounter harder without making them outright impossible.
Skyrei Dec 2nd 2011 7:41AM
I would not be surprised if Blizzard dumped 10/25 raiding for 20 man only at some point with the way they are streamlining things. Needing only 10 people for guild group credit.
Nina Katarina Dec 2nd 2011 8:04AM
With my computer, running at Good graphics setting in 10-man raids I have absolutely no issues (well, maybe the occasional random disconnect but I don't think that's always my computer). 25-man raids... I have to crank my graphics down to the lowest setting, turn off all spell effects, restart the machine and run it without any browsers in the background, and I still get slideshow effects when the bosses were lit up and a DK pops army.
Obviously 20-man would be slightly better than 25, but I'd love the ability to go up to 15 and see if that made my modem cry.