Mythic/Heroic Historical Raiding Timelines & Availability

[Aerro]

I'm conflicted with raid sizes, as I've always been a fan of the 40-man and 25-man player settings. It was after I joined Vox Immortalis that I truly enjoyed the 10-man raiding scene and wish it hadn't changed. However, due to the 20-man conversion, I have met a lot of awesome people and also now raid with old faces I used to back in the day (Thryll)! There is some give and take, and while its definitely more difficult to maintain a 23-24 man raid roster with a declining player pool, I'm not completely unhappy with the result.

[Boggyb]

Having mandatory classes for some fights sounds fun in theory (ok, it actually doesn't), but that completely ignores the roster issues that causes. Sure, a 20-man guild should have every class, but what happens if your priest/warlock are absent for a week? You're shit out of luck? I doubt Blizzard is going to advocate split runs as I suspect they would consider those detrimental to the game. What happens if you're a guild that tries to be fair about attendance? Do you just always bring that mandatory class and tell everyone else who rotates in and out to fuck off?

[Sennin]

I think/hope the solution is to implement flex sizing on Mythic. Maybe a bit more stringent, like 17-23 or something like that. Maybe incentivise the prime number of 20 through loot or something of that nature. I suppose I am a bit biased here since I am more of a F&F raider, but this model would allow guilds to accommodate raiders like myself to ensure that they don't have off/cancelled raid nights when core players have issues/conflicts/super important magic the gathering things to attend to. If >20 arrive maybe have a way to flag them for no loot and just let them use coins, and earn kills/achieves. I think this would be the best way to balance mechanic design needs and guild ability to fill raid slots.

[Kytae]

Having mandatory classes for some fights sounds fun in theory (ok, it actually doesn't), but that completely ignores the roster issues that causes. Sure, a 20-man guild should have every class, but what happens if your priest/warlock are absent for a week? You're shit out of luck? I doubt Blizzard is going to advocate split runs as I suspect they would consider those detrimental to the game. What happens if you're a guild that tries to be fair about attendance? Do you just always bring that mandatory class and tell everyone else who rotates in and out to fuck off?

That is sadly true… There are 11 classes on WoW, which makes statistically almost impossible to keep at least 2 players of each class in the roster considering the reality of player migrations in and out of guilds. one solution I would like would be to make sure those class-specific abilities (which I personally find really interesting) are shared by at least 2 different classes.

I started raiding in Rift, and I really liked its strategic setting: there were only 4 different classes for 20-man raids, but each class had at least 5-6 different interesting specs (there was a talent tree you could play with, making some interesting hybrid classes). It was quite easy to maintain at least 4 players of each class, and that gave a lot of flexibility to the mechanics involved, sometimes requiring 4 warriors to grab specific mobs, or a cleric tank for a specific boss because he's the only one to be able to tank from range distance. That required the players to master those different specs properly to be efficient in a raid though, which does take some time.

[Sennin]

I started raiding in Rift,

Me too, but Taka made me stop when he saw the energy bar was yellow. True story!

[Takaoni]

I was already having a bad day Sennin and now you've triggered my yellow energy bar PTSD and I'm pretty much in the fetal position.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk 2

[Sennin]

Hey, I switched back...it's ok buddy, I won't let the bad people tempt me away anymore.

[Kytae]

I was already having a bad day Sennin and now you've triggered my yellow energy bar PTSD and I'm pretty much in the fetal position.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk 2

I'm so sorry, I did not know… I'm sorry, so sorry. There there.

[Kulldam]

Gruul - You would still split into 2 groups. No difference at all between 10/20 mans
Oregorger - No difference at all between 10/20mans
Blast Furnace - split into 2 5-mans instead of 2 10-mans. Do you HAVE to have a priest to Mind Control the adds? I didn't think so but not sure.
Hans/Franz - No difference between 10/20 mans
Flamebender - MAYBE 10 mans couldnt handle 4 dogs all focusing a player at once. I'm trying to be lenient towards 20 mans
Kromog - MAYBE 10 mans couldn't handle 3 pillars at once. Again being lenient
Beastlord - No difference at all between 10/20 mans
Thogar - No real difference between 10/20 mans. Less adds probably...again being lenient
Maidens - This is probably the one fight that might be different. There is quite a bit going on in this fight with 1 person soaking the blade dashes, 1 person with ritual, 5 people on the boat, dealing with dispels and penetrating shot, and the sanguine orb thing, etc. BoPs aren't needed but boy do they really help. This is probably the one fight where I would say it might be a lot different with only 10 people as opposed to 20
Blackhand - From what I've seen this fight wouldnt be that much different as a 10 man. Maybe he would have to focus 2 ranged instead of 3.

I totally agree with your assessment, just thought I'd add my own input on analyzing BRF fights from a 10- vs. 20-man perspective.

For Blast Furnace, yes you do need one Priest (for Mythic anyway) for Phase 2, but given that was the ONLY hard requirement they came up with in the last 17 encounters across this recent tier, and then they preceded to nerf the requirement severely after the fact (presumably due to the complaints, though I have no idea what the real reason is), it seems clear as you said that they aren't very devoted to going down that path of "designing around certain [class] tools."

And as Boggy points out (which I also totally agree with), what exactly is "fun" or is interesting design about mandatory classes (or, heaven forbid, specs)? If we really try to analyze it from a design perspective, I think the only logical argument for the benefit of class-/spec-specific design is that it is "fun for the individual(s) with those class/spec abilities." Ignoring for a moment that some (many?) people that "enjoy raiding" don't enjoy responsibility like that and thus wouldn't like being put in that position, I fail to see how a specific, one-off ability requirement in an encounter is good design or makes for fun gameplay for the raid group as a whole.

If we break down the concept into the most basic parts possible, we can think of each class (and/or spec, but we'll stick to class only for now for simpler discussion) as having access to a variety of letters (i.e. unique tools/abilities). So for most intents and purposes each class is effectively just an acronym; Warriors are SRIT where S is Spell Reflection, I is Intervene, R is Rend, and T is Shattering Throw. Monks might be CXRT with C as Crackling Jade Lightning, X as Xuen, R as Roll, and T as Touch of Death.

And so on and so forth. The point is, from a design perspective, each class is just effectively boiled down to a small handful of letters and then when you create a new encounter you say, "We want X boss ability to be countered by the letter T from a Monk." Why Monk-T and not Warrior-T? For no good reason that's why. Because it was decided that Monks should be given the critical requirement/role in this encounter instead of Warriors, but for no other reason. That just doesn't seem like good design to me, and it's certainly not engaging for the raid group.

I also understand that ultimately, boiling down abilities used by everyone in the raid is effectively just cross-contamination of these class-specific letters. When I press my fast heal (Monk-S), I am essentially performing the same purpose as Shaman-H or Druid-R. The vast majority of mechanics -- and thus reactive abilities used to counter said mechanics -- are handled by one of a number of similar yet slightly different tools/abilities. However, what is critical here is that there is a vast difference between optimizing a choice vs. a complete lack of choice.

One aspect of raiding that is enjoyable for groups is looking at a mechanic and determining which letters among the variety available are best suited to handle something. When taking on Valiona and Theralion in Bastion of Twilight, it was incredibly beneficial to have a Rogue in the raid for dealing with the shadow realm. However, if your raid group didn't have one (like ours at the time), it just presented a different encounter and made us think outside the box for how to accomplish it, which we did and it was great.

Examples are seen like this today even, with Rogues for Smash in Blackhand being incredibly effective yet not a strict requirement. So what would happen if Blizzard had decided for that encounter, "Smash must hit at least 1+ Rogue or the cooldown is reset"? The fight doesn't become more interesting in anyway from what we have currently and how most people approach the encounter, it simply becomes a binary check of annoyance before the raid even begins. "Do you have a Rogue? You can raid. No Rogue? Time to do achievements in Highmaul you sluts!"

There's absolutely nothing wrong with designing around specific abilities, but it should be done in such a way that there are options, some of which are better and some which are worse.

If I would have to guess, the decision to consolidate raiding into uniform team sizes likely came down to cutting the costs of balancing the encounters twice. In return they promised more engaging and better balanced encounters.

I've heard this line of argument before and it still makes no logical sense given the quantity of content we're talking about here. Moreover, as Blynks pointed out above and as most of us know from experience in either or even both raid settings, the difference in "balancing" two different raid sizes is hardly a cost prohibitive activity. We know from Blizzard's own mouth(s) that they design with one raid size in mind then tweak/balance for the others, so the vast majority of effort and cost is already guaranteed in the initial process (lore, layout, architecture, art, mechanical design, etc). We have little insight into the man hours necessary for designing a new raid zone/encounter from scratch, but we can logically deduce that the "balance process" would invariably come near the very end and regardless for raid size, is mostly about number tuning (damage dealt, healing required, internal cooldowns, etc). It's incredibly difficult to imagine that this tweaking process from a 25-man encounter to balance it for 10-man (or vice versa) is extremely costly or time-consuming, given everything else that was involved prior.

I think they were well aware that making that sort of decision would cause a stir in the current raiding structure , and I can't fault them in picking the 20 person size. It would have a less severe impact than, say, picking 10. If Blizzard chose 10 over 20, most of the then-existing 25m teams would have had to split, necessiting twice the raid leaders to keep the same amount of people raiding. The impact of that would have been more profound.

This would (arguably) be true if the vast majority of raid groups/raiders, when given the choice, were involved in 25-man teams instead of 10-man (or if the numbers were roughly equivalent to a 2.5:1 ratio given the raid sizes), but that was never remotely the case; 10-mans were far and away the more popular avenue.

I might suggest reading through some of the points I made on the topic in this blog post from a while back, but even now we can look back at historical data to see just how drastic the difference was between the populations doing 25- vs. 10-man raiding last expansion:

There were approximately 1796 25-man guilds (1624 West and 172 Asia) doing Heroics at the start of the previous expansion. By comparison, there were approximately 18340 10-man guilds (16790 West and 1550 Asia) doing the same Heroics as well. Obviously these are very rough numbers and there will be overlapping players from both sides, but we're only focused on the averages and overall numbers not the fine details.

Obviously 18.3k 10-man guilds is well over 10 times the number of "groups" than those 1.8k 25-mans, but even the player counts show a dramatic 10-man majority: 18340 * 10 = 183,400 10-man raiders vs. 1796 * 25 = 44,900 25-man raiders.

This puts the population of raiders doing 10-man at roughly four times that as 25-man when given the equal opportunity to do so. Therefore, it is absolutely false to suggest that a change to a single 10-man raid size instead of the 20-man we have now would have been a "more profound" impact.

The vast majority of raiders preferred that smaller raid size, and by opting for the 20-man size instead, Blizzard effectively forced roughly half of all 10-man guilds to disband entirely and disperse their players among the remaining 10-man groups. Even with the conservative numbers seen above, we can assume this forced roughly 40% of the raiding population to relocate: 183,400 * 0.5 / (183,400 10-man raiders + 44,900 25-man raiders) = 40.16% of all raiders

For me personally, it was well worth it. I think they delivered in their promises, and I think Blackrock Foundry is, overall, the best raid they've done. That said, I'm sure finding and managing the extra 10-12 people is probably quite stressful for raid leaders. I think 1-2 years from now that will be an afterthought.

While I don't think it's the best raid they've ever done by any stretch, I absolutely agree that Blackrock Foundry is a great raid zone and I enjoy it. However, I don't agree that Blizzard "delivered on their promises," since as discussed above and by others, there is virtually no reason that we need to be strictly stuck to a 20-man raid size in the content we've thus far experienced.

[Boggyb]

I grabbed some more accurate completion data for the first 2 tiers of Cata. I might look at MoP later, but flipping through page after page to find how many guilds killed the first boss of a raid tier before the start of the next tier is crazy boring.

Blackwing Decent (prior to 6/28)
Normal Magmaw kills: 61,875
Heroic Nefarian kills: 2484
Completion Percentage: 4%

Throne of the Four Winds
Normal Conclave kills: 48423
Heroic Al'akir kills: 1763
Completion Percentage: 3.64%

Bastion of Twilight:
Normal Halfus kills: 63,350
Heroic Sinestra kills: 1125
Completion Percentage: 1.78%

Firelands (prior to 11/29)
Normal Shannox kills: 52,333
Heroic Rag kills: 1740
Completion Percentage: 3.32%

Obviously the completion percentages are lower than reality as wowprogress only tracks guilds and I'm sure there were a number of pug kills of early bosses in some of these raids.