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Is Raiding in incredibly large groups still the focus of this game?  I ask because I don't particularly like the 40 man raid thing where you have to kill X boss using Y strategy or you get pwn'd.  Its why I left World of Warcraft in disgust after realizing I wouldn't see most of the nongrinding portions of the game.  Have they changed this or is it still basically an end game 40 man raiders dream?

Thanks in advance

40+ has been gone. It's now 10 or 25 man.

That said, raiding is still a large portion of the content. Just not the ONLY capped content anymore.

Wow, really how much is 25 man and how much is 10?  I ask because I really liked the 10 man raids quite a bit and I was in guilds that could easily get 10 each day.  Could you also expand on what you mean by capped content?

Thanks

For PvE, all the raid content (I believe) has two versions: a normal 10-man version, and a "Heroic" 25-man version with tougher enemies and better loot.

Negative.  That's the way it was through WOTLK.   In Cataclysim 10 and 25 mans are going to drop the exact same loot and be tuned to be of similar difficulty. (We can give examples if you want to know how the same fight is more difficult with 15 more people than it is with only 10.)  But yes, all raids will have a 10 and 25 version, unlike Karazan vs SSC/ TK.

The primary difference between the two will be the quantity not the quality of the loot.  25 man will give something like 2.5x the loot of a 10man, so your raid will gear up quicker.   The possibility of 25s being the only way to complete Legendary item quests was discussed a few times, but no concrete answer has been given there.

Ed: By capped content, I believe Kildorn means content availaible to do once you hit the level cap.  Raiding is your primary PvE content, but you can also PvP for loot if PvP is your thing.  There are 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 "Deathmach" Arenas, or coming in with Cataclysm, rated Battlegrounds where you put together a team and fight other premade teams according to the BG rules.  (10, 15, 25, 40, Depending on the Battleground in question.)

Wow, I think that will get me reup'ing my subscription again.  Thanks for the heads up

Yeah, by capped content I mean "once you hit the level cap"

There's the raid game (the primary pve outlet), pvp (rated BGs, random BGs, what have you), and there's also the newish point/badger system (since you're referencing 40 man raiding, you've been gone a while) where doing heroic 5 man instances will let you "buy" gear equivalent to the last raid tier. That may be changing as well. It used to be when tier 10 comes out, tier 9 is up for point purchase. Not sure if it's going to be the current tier up for points in the future.

First you ask if 40 man content is still in, then you say you liked 10 man raid content. Did you mean raiding Scholomance?

The only 2 "small" raids before they cut the raid size from 8 groups (40) to 5 (25) were both 20-man, 4 group things: Zul'Gurub and Ruins of Ahn'Quiraj.

WoW has now had a max of 25 players in their raids for far longer than they had 40 man raids, though having 10 man versions of the same fights is relatively new thing (WotLK).

Actually UBRS was 10 person content still til the end of vanilla.

Regardless, 40 man raiding hasn't been relevant since like Jan 2007.

I was an EQ casual (1-2 per week) raider and a WoW Vanilla/BC casual (2-3/week) raider.  I didn't get the opportunity to raid much in WotLK, but I still managed to do a whole heck of a lot at the level cap.  Heroics were accessible and with badges (now justice points) we can get decent gear with a bit of effort.  Also, the raid weekly quest gets you into a PUG raid for the first boss or two, usually.

Now it's hard to say if they'll carry over the casual-friendly atmosphere into the new xpac, but I sure hope so.  I expect it to be more difficult, but hoping its not gated.

I preferred raid sizes of 10 and UBRS was one of the funnest experiences I had in WoW.  Honestly for the guilds that I was in, the 40 man and even the 20 man was way too big.  I preferred to know the people I was raiding with and to have the family aspect of smaller guilds.  At the time when I left WoW the game seemed to be way too focused on the 40 man raids and at that time equipment was king.  The rest that was left to people like me was extremely inferior and made worse by the fact that most of the content that came in expansions I could never access with my guild.  

If what is being said is true and if now I will be able to experience the content in a 10 man raid and will still get access to the best equipment through smaller communities then this sounds like a wonderful change.  Again, please understand I am not saying people shouldn't be able to raid as 20 mans.  If that floats your boat then great.  What I am saying was it wasn't for me and there really in my opinion and from my perspective was no point in playing a game or paying for expansions that you could not ever experience other than watching youtube clips.  

It sounds like to me Cataclysm makes WoW relevant to me again, and I can't wait to experience this new content.

The history of these changes is pretty interesting, at every step there was of course a vocal minority who very loudly complained that allowing mere plebians to experience the content they'd paid for made the game too easy or devalued their incredible accomplishments. In retrospect pretty much everyone agrees that these changes have been for the better.

Well, that vocal minority still exists and wants to re-fight the same and/or similar wars.  It's just that they're still paying either way :awesome_for_real:.

The other thing that's happening in Cataclysm is that instead of large, 3 hour raids the design has shifted towards splitting those into multiple smaller wings.

It's been more than possible to PUG places like ICC for some time now but it still potentially meant 3+ hours in there. Cata raids are supposed to be much shorter but more numerous, which should make them even more accessible.

For the sake of completeness: the latest tier of gear will only be purchaseable with Valor Points from the latest raid. The next-to-latest tier will require Justice Points, which come from all older raids as well as heroics. Being able to buy everything with JP is just a temporary pre-expansion quirk.

I could have sworn that UBRS was 15 man for the bulk of Vanilla.

You're right SurfD; IIRC it was changed to 10m around the time Naxx launched.

My point was that it wasn't *5* person content, and constituted the only actual 'small raid', not the 20 person stuff.

I must be fuzzy on this but I seem to remember hitting Scholo as a 10 man raid in 2005? Pretty sure it was my first ever raid and I mistakenly clicked an orb that provided a skin of shadow (?) I then found out what BoP actually meant  :awesome_for_real:

If you go back to the very very beginning, Strat and Scholo were 10 (maybe even 15?) person content and I believe UBRS allowed as many as 20 - but back then you could even take 10 people to places like Uldaman and such. There was a patch fairly early on that standardized instances at 5 people while also pruning a bunch of trash from most of them as I recall.

According to wowwiki, Strath and Scholo were made into 5 mans in 1.10, which was March of 06; the same patch that put in the Tier 0.5 sets.

Yeah apparently I am combining a few different patches in my memory - 1.3 capped most of the dungeons at 10 people (lawl) and BRS at 15, then they came along again later and lowered them mostly to 5 in 1.10 (and BRS to 10).

That's the thing. You cannot make a game that fits what the "hardcore" wants and make it have legs. Those people will play whatever is there anyway, and WoW is proof of that. If anything, the hardcores benefited more from the easing of dick-eating meatgrinder requirements to raid more than those who never had raided before. But they seem to think that every new game should be their McQuadian dreamland.

That's not entirely correct. Strath and Scholo were always 5 player content, it was just that you *could* do them with larger numbers. You had to be in a 5 player group to complete the quests for the zone though. Originally you could use any number of players in the zone, but very quickly they capped it to 10 (and 15 for UBRS). You could get round the quest restriction by dropping from the group, doing the quest quickly then rejoining, but those instances were always intended as 5 player jaunts.

Scholo pre-nerfs was such a god damn horrendous trash slog. It was still bad even after they turned it into a true hard capped 5 man.

Oh, I'm not saying it was easy - or that much fun for that matter. But that was the intent... :)

I was in the first group on my server to do all of strath in a 5 player group and complete the quests, and it took us 3+ hours from memory. Whilst they *could* be done 5 player, they certainly weren't fun until they did the major pass in patch 1.1 or 1.2 that at least removed a ton of the bugs and toned them down somewhat.

It was terrible for so many reasons. Tons of trash, a shitload of "boss" encounters with a 5% chance to drop a green set piece, 360 degree cleaving hall of LOLrogues, a boss that was only accessible at the end of some irritating quest line..

Right now, it's actually kinda nice. The trash packs were cut down a lot, and while there is still a "boss" gauntlet that rarely drops any actual loot, it at least doesn't take days to run it.

Is it bad that I look back at that Scholo as the "good" scholo?  I remember after they nerfed it how easily my guild mates and I farmed the place -_-.  Then again, I played way too much back then.

It was as bad as ZG for risk/reward ratio. It was difficult, time consuming, and handed out shittier loot than any alternative. It could be considered "good" if your idea of fun is "heavily challenging", but from an objective view even favoring very challenging content, the reward just wasn't there and the majority of it just took too damned long.

It's like holding up BRD and the Lyceum as a pinnacle of instance design.

I don't think it was even that challenging, it was just a slog.

Pre initial cleave changes, the bone golem stairwell was murderous to melee based groups.

Beyond that and the explod-a-zombie room early on, it was mostly long. But those two parts murdered melees.

This.

Of course, I have found that most "hardcore" types seem to equate slogging through ridiculous things to challenge.

Oh yeah, scholo. Whenever that place is mentioned, I get this sudden urge to stab someone... even though I haven't actually run the bloody instance in ~5 years now. :why_so_serious:

It had trash and more trash, useless loot (until the revamp which made it semi-decent... though eclipsed by much easier dire maul gear), magic-immune mobs, physical-immune mobs, fast-respawning mobs (not in a gauntlet, mind), and 360' Cleavefest 2004. Then after the 2-3hour slog, Gandling would not deign to drop my dreadmist helm. Over 90 runs. RAEG!

Um, ZG was fantatsic for time versus reward when it was released. The blues from ZG were better than epics from molten core, and the epics from Hakkar were amazing. (Best trinket for caster dps in the game outside Neltharions Tear). There was a reason so many 40 player guilds raided it constantly when it was released, and it wasn't because we were starved of troll content. You could pick up some really good items there that were intelligently put together for a lot less time and effort than a 40 player raid force.

The blues were fine but they were not massive upgrades for the most part, we're talking ~8 ilvls higher than regular blues. The drop rate on the actual epics was fairly awful - and we're talking about 3ish drops per boss for 20 people, too, which is pretty bad by later standards. But hey, you could go twice a week I guess.

Yes, they were in some cases, mostly due to better allocation of points, no weapons were. Now, it would help if they were on par with BWL, which was released the prior patch :P

ZG was supposed to be smaller raid group alternate progression. But the problem was that the AWESOME epics (they were!) had something along the line of a 5% drop rate, and usually you got okay blues.

Most raiding guilds I knew who ran it constantly were either doing it because with BWL gear it was trivial to farm (so who cares about the drop rate, you can do it in an hour or so), or because they were chain wiping on BWL.

But difficulty of the fights compared to the gear that was likely to drop? Terrible, terrible instance. It would have been like Ragnaros having a 50% chance to drop UBRS gear.

edit: ilvls, all from the final boss:

MC Epics: ilvl 77

ZG Epics: ilvl 68

BWL Epics: ilvl 81

ZG had some decent trinkets though, and some superlative artwork for that stage in the game.

You have to look at Z'G from the perspective of September 2006, not December 2010 though.

It was a big step forward in accessibility of good quality items. The bracers and belt from the quest sets were pretty good for most classes, and the items off Hakkar and the two staffs off Jin'do and Panther bitch were all late MC quality as far as usefulness in game went. And the blue ring sets were all really good items and dropped like candy.

The big problems with the zone (mobs stopping giving rep after honored, way too much fucking trash, lvl 30 crafted armor making panther bitch a cheese fest, Hakkar being snoozefest 2006) were all adjusted relatively early to make the zone more player friendly.

On the iLvL thing, ZG blues were iLvL 68-71 and Epic were 68, and most of the loot in MC was nowhere near iLvL 77, that was just items off of Ragnaros who was a tier2 boss.

Also, corrupted blood (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAEhyHiNdrA)

Non hakkar epics were ilvl 65, non Rag epics were ilvl 66.

ZG was unquestionably harder than MC by any metric, and tended to drop blues that only won a few slots because MC was itemized for shit.

Compared to the loot available in game, ZG was pretty trash. If you could get 40 people to go raiding, you could easily get better stuff than ZG.

It was a handout along the lines of Karazan versus every other raid available on TBC release. If you can't find enough friends, go here. But we're not even going to pretend you're getting anything but 3 patch old gear.

Vendorstrike.

Nobody will ever know why they added a weapon a few ilvls lower than the rest of that instance in there, with a shitty proc and terrible speed :(

The ugliest part of the Scholo slog was that any of the bosses that had a chance to drop anything remotely decent were at the end of the damn instance after you've slogged through and wiped several times (assuming the group didn't break up first).  At least Strat and UBRS had multiple bosses placed in sequence rather than all at the end.

I'm sort of surprised there hasn't been a grey item with that name yet.