Forged Alliance

what the hell? Its not April 1st....

http://www.mmo-champion.com/news-2/cata ... ts-193787/

Two huge items:

# 10-Man and 25-Man raids will share the same lockout.
# 10-Man and 25-Man raids will drop the exact same loot, but 25-man will drop a higher quantity of items.


[Edit]
Also:
# 10-Man and 25-Man raids difficulty will be as close as possible to each other.

Isn't it supposed to be like that anyway?

Dream come true!!!!!!

this is..................AWESOME!!!

It's funny to see the different reactions between FA and Crisis. Over there people are lamenting the end of WoW, over here its a joyous celebration

I like the changes too, and I think they are implementing it the right way. 25mans would still be the preferred method for guilds that could field it due to the higher quantity of items dropped and the extra badges.

Wow, I think this change kinda sucks. Personnaly as frustrating at they can be i like the 25 man raids. When they happen 25s are away for the whole guild to get together instead of fragment into a handfull of 10s. Of couse , i have nvr organized one. That being said I do really enjoy the 10s as well, they do make it easier to plan and dedicate time for. Have to see how this shakes out.

Man, these forums hate me. Maybe I should do my post one sentence at a time.

Blizzard must really be banking on the whole guild experience/binding items/abilities to hold things together.

I think it is a poor decision to make the 10 and 25 man raids drop the exact same loot. I think that Blizzard should have made the loot tables identical (e.g., if you're looking for a caster trinket off boss XYZ, it will be there in both the 10 and 25 man versions), but the iLvl should be different (just like how items nowadays can be plain or heroic version). The logistics tax for organizing a 25 man raid means that just about every 25 man guild will fragment into multiple 10 man raids instead of bothering with the 25.

Why run a 25 man raid which requires a system like DKP to hold things together when you can just split into a 10 man group and loot dictatorship it? I suspect that the loot ratio between 10 and 25 man is going to be something like 3x (e.g., if a 10 man boss drops 2 items, a 25 man boss will drop 6 items). Unless it's something drastically greater than 3x, I don't think that's enough of a carrot to bother with 25 man raiding.

I'm much more concerned about the ramifications to fight mechanics. Already in ICC25, your third tank is sitting on his hands for a good number of the boss fights (I call BS on Blizzard saying that they don't design the encounters around dual spec assumptions; the third tank is DPS for almost every boss fight in ICC25). A good example right now is Lich King 10 man. Your group layout most likely does not include a tranq shot (who on earth rolls a hunter or rogue?). That means that Blizzard has to nerf the first phase horrors to be sustainable with constant enrage. The bad news is that with the nerf in place, there is no way for a rogue or hunter to shine by being pro and using all these extra abilities they were granted. Your DPS meter watching hunter or rogue is actually incentivized to ignore that tranq button because in the back of their mind, "Blizzard said to bring the player not the class and since this fight is tuned under the assumption that my class isn't present, then my specific class abilities aren't needed.". This is a recipe for class homogenization by virtue of fight mechanic homogenization (i.e., each classes' utility abilities are ignored so that everything boils down to tank/DPS/healer roles). Heaven forbid that bosses apply curses, diseases, or magic debuffs -- since you have to assume that your group will be missing the appropriate cleanse (ZOMG, our priest/paladin healing combo can't decurse) the debuff must be nerfed to be sustainable.

I've always liked the notion that a 25 man encounter was the way a fight was meant to be done. With 25 people present and the current overlap of class abilities, you could make any utility ability an integral part of the fight (right now, the only solo utility ability is shaman bloodlust). The 10 man version was a nerfed version so that any reasonable group layout could do it and as such, the loot rewards were slightly less. Now that the loot rewards are identical, interest in 25 man raids will drop --> Blizzard encounter designers will shift focus from 25 man design to 10 man design (i.e., instead of designing the fight around 25 man assumptions and nerfing down to 10, design the fight around 10 man assumptions and just inflate numbers up for 25) --> 10 man raids become the same run of the mill as 5 man heroics.

I'm curious what this means for the reintroduction of crowd control.

-HP

I dunno, I think it's hard to really see the repercussions of this change when looking at it from a WoLK mindset. A lot of players thought 10man heroics dropping the same ilvl as normal 25man loot would kill the reason to do 25mans unless your going to do 25man hard modes. If your toon's raidID becomes more sacred, then people will be afraid to pug. Which means players gotta go back to finding guilds. And with 10s and 25s having the same iLevel, 10mans are going to seem a lot harder to people that are used to doing fights with 25man iLvl gear.

I also have the personal theory that Blizzard is going to ending up overtuning 10mans in trying to prove to the raiding community that 10mans can be hard. And since noone will be able to overgear them with higher ilvls from 25mans, it'll put a lot of pressure on the individual. I wouldn't be surprised if 25mans seem more doable in comparison. (ex: 1 dps dies in 10man, and you hit enrage. 1 dps dies in 25man and you still get loots) Or they might end up just making both faceroll on normal and hard modes are the only challenge left in the game. (Some would say this is already true, lol)

They've also said 25mans will drop "a higher quantity of loot per player" and more badges. This seems to imply gearing your raid faster in 25man so I can see guilds that race for firsts and to get into hard mode asap still needing to be a 25man guild. They also were reluctant to confirm/deny the idea of special mounts and legendaries dropping in 10mans. I think someone gave the best theory on cata: 10man guilds will be fine, guilds that struggle to do 25mans will drop to 10mans, guilds that do alliances to do 25mans will drop to 10mans, guilds with solid 25mans and hardcore guilds will stay at 25mans. And pugs are just screwed in general. But it's really hard to say until we see how the fights work, how much things cost for badges, what loots available, etc.

I didn't think about crowd control and I see where you're coming from but almost every class has some kind of CC (pallies, warriors and DKs are the only ones that don't) and Blizz has said that while they want people to bring the player over the class they aren't trying to take that to the extreme. They've said things before like bringing 7 rogues, 1 warrior and 2 druids to a 10m isn't gunna be viable. (although in some fights I think that would be). So personally I'm not worried about that.

Inori wrote: A good example right now is Lich King 10 man. Your group layout most likely does not include a tranq shot (who on earth rolls a hunter or rogue?). That means that Blizzard has to nerf the first phase horrors to be sustainable with constant enrage. The bad news is that with the nerf in place, there is no way for a rogue or hunter to shine by being pro and using all these extra abilities they were granted. Your DPS meter watching hunter or rogue is actually incentivized to ignore that tranq button because in the back of their mind, "Blizzard said to bring the player not the class and since this fight is tuned under the assumption that my class isn't present, then my specific class abilities aren't needed.". This is a recipe for class homogenization by virtue of fight mechanic homogenization (i.e., each classes' utility abilities are ignored so that everything boils down to tank/DPS/healer roles). Heaven forbid that bosses apply curses, diseases, or magic debuffs -- since you have to assume that your group will be missing the appropriate cleanse (ZOMG, our priest/paladin healing combo can't decurse) the debuff must be nerfed to be sustainable.

I don't know about other hunters and rogues but I really like fights like LK and Saurfang where I actually get to do something rather than spam my shots and maybe move a couple times. I would MUCH rather be just above the tanks on dps and have something interesting to do than be 1st but I just stood there the whole fight. I think most people are like this.