Back in pre-WoD patch, when Blizzard introduced 20m mythic as the new Heroic, Wow had a much higher population and, from my experience, many guilds who used to have heroic 10m groups tried to recruit e adapt to 20m. Most of them didn’t last until the end of WoD, either the players started quitting raiding because it wasn’t enjoyable anymore or the guilds I knew tried merging and it turned out to be more conflictual than helpful. (Can’t really say if 25m guilds had a hard time adapting to 20m, because I barely knew people who used to raid heroic 25m). Despite the numerous arguments, the fact is that the server used to have far more than double the amount of 10m groups in MoP than the amount of 20m groups in WoD. It’s almost like the roster boss wiped more groups than any boss in any raid since 20m mythic raiding is a thing.
Raid buffs/debuffs, race to world first, boss’ mechanics that demands a specific class (they never really implemented that, right?), balancing… None of those arguments seems to be a hindrance to changing the enforced 20m raiding.
Not sure what the best option would be: 8m, 10m, 12m, 15m? I see many request for 10m raiding every now and then. Honestly, me included, I believe people would be happy with just the option, even if it had different achievement, or even loot (like in WotLK), to play what mythic difficulty is today, but in a smaller group. After all, smaller groups are easier to form/find, easier to get along with everyone else and players have a bigger sense of importance when they are more than 1/20th of the group.
From a balancing standpoint 20 players is the most ideal number with how many specs we have. For a raid leader getting 20 people to show up consistently is a hassle and it’s rare you’ll have the same roster for more than 6 months.
Mythic raids are far-far more complex than during the time of 10-man raids. There’s a competitive race to get to the world first that garners a lot of media + player attention.
It’s just simply hard to implement a mythic flex-raid system or smaller mythic raids without making things worse for the game. If you had 10 slots than those 10 slots would be slotted for literally the most powerful classes at the current tier.
We have the ‘flex’ raiding for LFR/Normal/Heroic. The reason why you don’t have it for Mythic is that the challenge is tuned much tighter, and with the expectation you have a more balanced roster overall. 10 man raiding was always easier than 25 and 20 by virtue of having less variables in player amounts and the scaled mechanics. Additionally, it’s easier to herd 9 other cats than 24 other cats. Historically, players have tried exploiting certain amounts of players to make things easier–which has worked in a few cases.
The reality is that balance right now is some of the best it’s ever been for PvE, but we’ve gained classes and specs over the years. I’ve seen guilds clear CE with 2 Feral druids, or 1 boomkin this tier, and both of those situations are far, far from ideal for a raid comp. Now, if you reduce the raid size for the highest difficulty, you have to retune it, and the only way to make it viable is to lower the difficulty so much that all of the otherwise-non-viable raid comps can work, which would push the ideal ones to trivializing the raid. It’s tuned to 20, so that the raid configuration can’t trivialize it.
i think 20 is a good number. but i haven’t really raided mythic in a while so i won’t argue it too hard… it’s fair to observe that it doesn’t impact me anyway
Limit max did a video on this topic a while ago, I’d link it but I’m at work right now so you’ll have to look it up.
I think he summed it up pretty well in that video, smaller raid sizes would be better overall but with the way the game is designed right now it wouldn’t be feasable to do.
Oops, after reading back a decade it looks like both me and the person I quoted were mistaken. In Cata anyway, 10 man fights were generally harder than the 25s. Al’Akir was one of the exceptions, which is why that stuck in my brain.
My memory of the 10 man heroic fights in Lich King was that it was unforgiving. I remember it as 2 tanks, 2-3 healers and 5-6 dps. If you lost even one person early to middle of the fight it was a wipe because you couldn’t meet the dps check.
Most of that “10 man was harder than 25 man” in Cataclysm thing came from Blizz just forgetting to take off 25 man values off certain mechanics and mobs, making them just stupidly overpowered to do on 10 man, rather than any inherent difficulty of the amount of players being 10. Then they didn’t fix it for months for some reason.
I think 20 players is still probably ‘ideal’. Gives you enough granularity with tank/heal/dps comp to have control. Enough players to allow for interesting mechanics without the issue of no one being able to dps. Enough players to design mechanics around the fact that most raids will have most classes. It also gives room for teams where not every spec is the exact meta spec needed.
That said, I think they should be open to the idea of flexing that a little bit. Would it really be so bad if mythic allowed, say, 16-20 people instead of exactly 20?
However I do firmly believe that 10 mans are too limiting in today’s version of the game.
WOTLK 10-man also dropped lower iLvl than the regular raid. You had to do the same dungeons on hard-mode to get the same iLvl drops from regular 25-man ICC.
I usually go with Thok from SoO as an example of how imbalanced some of the fights were between 10 and 25 mans during Cata & MoP.
I mean a fight where the longer you spend in phase 1 would be easier on the player size that allows you to pool in more healers. Spreading out healing cds more effectively.
During wrath 10 man raids dropped lower ilvl and different gear rewards since 10 man was intentionally scaled to be easier than 25 man. It is why mounts like Mimirons Head and Invincible dropped only on 25 man 0 keepers and 25 man heroic respectively.
It was in Cata and MoP that blizzard made it so that 10 and 25 mans dropped the same items and the same ilvl. This in turn forced them to design and balance fights that can be done with 10 or 25 people. While expecting a similar difficulty curve. It did not work out. Which is why we have 20 man mythic now for the elite pve players.
The funny thing is, while see fights that are flexible, the mechanics are designed with a reasonably large group size. Tectis from Uldir is a prime example. Whether you had 10 or 30 people you still got 3 infections. Meaning that you could spread out the stacking nature damage debuff across more people, putting less pressure on healers. Meanwhile if you had 10 people, your healers better be good at continuous spot healing.
One would think the amount of infections you got would scale according to group size. Where if you were between certain thresholds, you had a random chance of getting an additional one. Which the chance converging to one as you approach the next threshold. Like 10 people would get you 1, 11 would get you 1 and a 20% chance to get a second one etc etc. They did something like this in MoP to address players only taking up to 14 people for flex SoO when 5.4 launched. As 15 or people would give you extra amount of debuffs etc to deal with.
I’m not a very informed person so I can’t say anything about how the balancing would work out, I just know that gathering 10 people to raid vs 20 is significantly easier and less stressful
It is less stressful on the leader but puts more stress on each individual person. Even more so than what mythic does now. If we were to get a 10 man mythic mode, expect more individual reasonability mechanics and less group responsibility mechanics.
