I raid lead in cata. It was per-fight. Notably, heroic rag was notorious for being rediculous on 10m (and hard enough on 25).
Since 25m had 3x battle rez and 10m had 1, fights with risks to individual deaths were generally harder. Also, 25m was way better at doing spread out soak mechanics, since the room size was the same.
heroic rag was being farmed in 10man by guilds who died to first hammer in 25man.
even my guild was farming heroic rag 10man. and we were garbagio.
Was probably nerfed, then. They did a lot of per difficulty tuning back then. I was playing in a top guild so I got there early.
then tell us about Alâakir before nerfs.
because i remember this video.
This was my observation as well. Some fights were harder with more people, some werenât. It depended on the fight and the mechanic, but also your guild.
In a 25-man you can (and often did, if you were a casual guild), carry a lot of dead weight. In a 10-man you couldnât really do that⌠individual responsibility is more important. Thatâs also why a lot of people think 10-man is easier⌠because you tended to run with the people you knew could do the job, then went into a 25-man wipe fest because it took 2-10 wipes for each individual person outside that core group to learn that you probably shouldnât stand in fire.
I think thatâs often over-looked. I canât speak to any examples though, itâs all tended to blur over time. The only one that jumps out at me right now is in BFAâs first tier, Vectis. He was just harder with a smaller raid group because you got more debuff per player in a small group than you did in a large group, so your healers had to work a lot harder. I think there was a DPS check that was also harder in a small group.
Anyway, all this to say, definitely varied per fight. I donât think thereâs any universal rule that says 10-man is harder than 25-man, or vice versa. Iâd personally lean more towards 10-man being generally more difficult due to the personal responsibility thing, but thatâs just my own perspective from raiding in casual guilds that do Normal/Heroic only.
I think your memory is off. Heroic Rag was the complete opposite of what you describe, he was significantly harder for 25-man.
Some fights that were actually harder on 10-man were stuff like Twilight Dragons, either Yorâsahj or Zonâozz, Shekâzeer, etc.
For any of the actually significant fights, on Heroic mode, 25-man didnât really have room for dead weight at all. Not only could any mistake probably wipe you, the raw requirements (e.g. DPS) were generally made significantly higher. In theory, more reliably loot from 25-mans was supposed to offset that, but obviously that mark was overshot quite a few times, like on Spine 25-H.
Generally speaking, the 10 vs 25 came down to how mechanics got scaled/adjusted between sizes. At their initial foray into Bastion of Twilight/Blackwing Descent, they had abilities that basically did the same damage on both 25-man and 10-man, and I think sometimes even targeted the same number of people. Obviously, that didnât scale very well, and needed fixing fairly fast. It also completely screwed over raids if a mechanic just wasnât handled well by a certain class, e.g. while all healers had raid cooldowns, Thok essentially rendered Tranquility useless because of how he worked. Spirit Link Totem would just explode the raid if used on certain fights.
On a different angle, some fights were all about space management. If you had a fight in a room where the available space was being eaten up over the fight, it tended to be harder on 25-man. Whereas if you had a different fight where the raid had to cover for events happening across the entire space (e.g. soaking random swirlies), it tended to be harder on 10-man.
I loved 10 man heroic raiding back in Wrath, Cata and MoP. Most fun Iâve ever had in the game.
It will NEVER come back though. The 10 man vs 25 man arguments decreased humanityâs collective IQ by an order of magnitude.