f13.net

My friends and I can't raid as often as the ubers do - but we do raid (BWL etc) - and in the past - being behind on dkp for phat lewts was disappointing.

Increasingly we have noticed on our old server - and new server - that the LFG channel is looking worse and worse for the sheer availiability of groups.  No tanks or healers online - folks either seem to raid or play their lowbie alts.  Whatever the reason - the observation is that outside of raiding - my real life friend group has an advantage since we can put together a 5 man run at the drop of a hat.  Most players - more than ever - seem to not have this option.

We have seen with the BCE expansion that 24 man raids are now the norm - down from 40.  I also notice that in exception for one raid wing (24 man) all 3 remaining wings of Hell Fire citadel are 5 man groups.  I notice in the current game Scholo is doable / encouraged in 5 man groups as is lbrs - when previously more clearing was required and 10 mans seemed more practical.

Prediction:  5 man groups in the expansion will have access to far better loot - for the level - than current 5 man groups do in WoW.

Prediction:  the difference between phat lewts on a 24 man raid and a 5 man raid are going to be much smaller than we might expect.

Because the difficultites of getting groups together seems to remain a challenge for many players - and as Blizzard favours smaller group sizes - I am honestly beginning to think they are going to greatly increase the rewards available to 5 man groups.

Thoughts?

I don't think the item gap will get smaller... raids will STILL drop the uberest gear, with 5-man stuff [even epic 'hard mode' rewards from lv70 instances] being noticably weaker than gear from 25-man raids, and Karazhan probably being equal to the first raid dungeon. It's just that none of the uber raid gear was discovered yet. There'll also be plenty of new uber raids added in, and I doubt we'll see a second Karazhan. The winged dungeons, while numerous, are also small (don't get me wrong, this is a GOOD thing), easily doable in an hour-and-half by a PUG and only having 3 bosses apiece.

... I hope I'm wrong.

[my guild doesn't raid either.. the biggest thing we've done was allying with another guild to do occasional ZG runs and the tier0.5 chain]


-- Z.

From what the guys in the beta in my guild tell me, it will work something like this:

If you currently have BWL / AQ 40 Gear, you will get good mileage out of it untill level 65 pretty easily
If you currently have Naxx gear, you will likely get good mileage out of it untill 68 or maybe 70 (set bonuses are pretty hot)

However, if you currently have MC / AQ 20 / ZG gear, you will likely start upgrading (sometime SIGNIFIGANT upgrades) immediately off of 5 man content.

Once you hit 70, and start doing end game 5 / 10 mans and 5 man harde modes (the equivelent to Scholo / Strath / Ubrs of current WoW), most people's gear will be pretty normalized (old Naxx / BWL, Etc gear will be on par or worse then tope end 5 man / 10 man and hard mode rehash content drops).

Then the gear seperation will start again, probably with Karazan, and go from there in whatever new dungeons they release for true "raid content".  From the sounds of things, Karazan is going to either be the first "ZG / AQ 20 loot equivilent of BC", with other dungeons probably ramping up from there.

Of course, a lot of this is speculation, since there is a good chunk of content / dungeons that are completely unexplored in the Expantion (level cap is currently still 67 as far as i know).

Smaller groups are also only hard to get right now because the folks who wanted to play healers have been 60 for a while now. 

Running Scholo/ Strath/ UBRS with a group of folks dicking around on their 4th 60, or worse, folks just getting their first 60, isn't all that attractive when you have to pay 9g to repair your armor, and the run takes forever due to their equipment status.

   If I break-out the healer.. or hell any character really... to slum in those instances, it's ONLY going to be in a guild group, where I know the folks and know that they know the dungeon and how we - as a group - usually do it.


In the expansion, this will change because everyone (well except the 1337 beta-ers) will be new to the content.

As to the gearing, I hope you're correct.  There's no reason for raids to be such a cock-block to the folks who don't like doing them.  The PvP gear is supposedly being set-up as on-par with the high end stuff.  It makes even less sense to have far-and-away better gear off of raids, then need to go back and readjust the PvP gear so PvPers can actually compete in PvP.

It all comes down to - what will they do with the first new raid dungeon after the expansion.  T5 pieces akin to MC->BWL progression, or more sidegrades like BWL->AQ40?

I expect it to work more like this:

Raid drops will be the best in the game. As always.

But there will be a lot more gear avaliable other ways. Hard more tokens, pvp tokens, arena points, high rep craftable high cost items, etc. that narrow the gap between the two. They'll just take a bit longer to get.

So raiders will still have some advantage, but I think it wont be that notable.

And I can tell you right now if the new 5 mans, hard more, and 10 mans get a good reaction we wont just see Raids added in in content patches.

And there's a easy way to upgrade PvP rewards if they up the rewards in new raids:

Just have new PvP rewards for new arena "seasons".

The old argument used to be: grouping is hard - raiding is harder.  Thus the rewards in the latter were far better.

I buy that it makes sense - in the past - but in the present in WoW...

Since simple grouping by WoW standards has become increasingly challenging to get together (good tank or healer invariably missing) there is precedent to award 5 man groups more.

(it is not just the scarcity of healers - I now play a 60 tank and folks are screaming for tanks as often has priests)

Hell lets take this further:  for many people in my raiding guild (past, present) - these guys can attend full raids more easily than they can get a competent 5 man group together.

If that experience holds - it would really make sense to award 5 man encounters much more credit.

I honestly think it will probably go the other way.  It wouldn't suprise me if the gap between raider and non raider gets even larger or at least stays the same.  The current non raider will probably have access to resonable epics with this expansion however I'm going to guess the raider will probably have access to significantly upgraded epics.

If we look to the past developments within the game we see only a worsening of differences between raider and non raider currently.   We also see a worsening of the gear gap, a blue geared play atm is rediculously less powerful when compared to their raiding counterpart.  At the beggining the difference was noticable but it wasn't near the staggering level it is currently.  Right now you can tell the difference in pvp easily between a raider and a non raider, a frostbolt from a blue geared player will hit me for 500-600 damage while raiders easily double that.

Each new dungeon that has come out has been significantly harder and more consumable heavy then the last. We haven't really seen any easing up in the difficulty of the dungeons with the possibile exception of the first four bosses in Aq40.  I think that at least for the raiding dungeons this trend will likely to continue on with TBC.  Naxxramas is the current end game and has rediculous requirements in terms of time investment and gold investment needed to run it.  I think we'll likely only see a continuation of this with the expansion.  Things will likely start off easier with content in the zg-mc level and I think quickly ramp up in difficulty towards Naxx difficultly.  It wouldn't be suprising to me if Karazan is naxx level difficulty and consumables for 10 people.

I think the best we'll get is a two-three month evening out of the playing field before the raider starts to pull away again. I mean right now with gear as it stands my warrior can kill a non raiding warrior and maybe loose 20% of his health and it's only been getting worse.

add that post to the fact that one of Blizzard's major philosophies is, "pvp is a cornerstone of our games", and you end up with the gap between raiders and non-raiders narrowing.  I think they get that the larger part of their audience cannot or will not spend hours and hours raiding.

They want the pvp experience to be fun.  For it to be fun, there has to be a decent parity of power between contestants.  There also has to be a decent chance that you will get a "parity" match in a reasonable amount of time.  Simply matching contestants for gear/ability is not enough if the "top/most vocal" 15% of your audience is massively more powerful then everyone else as they end up either not getting many matches, or getting matches with folks who end up not having fun.

The sanest approach is to keep the high-end items within 5-10% of the pvp power of the 5 man/crafted/grind equipment.  I wouldn't be surprised to see them begin to add more "fluff" abilities to the high-end items (shape-shifting, auras, tp-effects, etc) as compensation for them not being massively more powerful then mid-tier items.

... course, I thought CoX would reduce the grind, so what do I know.

Did you play when MC wasn't in the game?

The reason there is a difference between Raiders and other players now is because progression goes 5-man -> Raids -> more raids.

If the current gear disparity continues in TBC it will be soley due to:

Hard man rewards aren't as good as the 25 man raids.
Rep and pvp rewards aren't as good as the 25 man raids.
Only 25 man raids are added as future content.

This last point is the one we're all guessing about. I would assume with the direction of TBC, more 5 man friendly and low raid sizes, that we are more likely to see more 5 man friendly additions than we were in the original game. There's no point saying it will remain the same because that's how the game is currently. We all know how it is currently. The point is that the expansion is probably going to change things.

Given change, I think it's far more likely to change to being more 5 man friendly then being even more raid friendly. Far far far more likely.

(there ARE numbers for all this, I just cbf'd looking them up again, so you'll have to work without them :P)

All indications point to the casual and raider gap being narrower in the expansion. Currently the jump from blues to MC epics is pretty huge barring a few class sets and crappy items. Not only do you jump from blue->purple which gives its own boost, but you also jump quite a few ilvls. Combined they bring about a huge difference. You will note that when BWL came out guilds decided the upgrades weren't worth it. Looking at it today it doesn't make sense, but for people who just went blue->MC epics the tier 2 upgrades looked very small in comparison to that change in gear.

In the beta they don't currently have access to the raids, but they do have access to the arena rewards stats which are supposed to be equivalent. They also have the level 70 epic pvp rewards to look at, and they are assumed to be close to the gear you might expect from the lower raids. By all reports the ilvl difference between blues and these epics is much much smaller than in live. Not to mention you can reportably get epics from level 70 instances on hard mode. Plus epic honor rewards are now achievable by the casual players and you should be seeing a much smaller gap in the expansion.

Great post Calantus - I liked this point in particular.

To sum up as others have repeated - we know that with 24 man raids replacing 40 man raids - the expansion is downsizing groups.  How far does this go?  You can't get smaller than a 5 man - but the implication is that the 5 mans are getting a big boost and will be much closer to raid drops than is currently the case ingame.

I stand by my prediction, the game won't see a drastic change and won't become significantly more non raid friendly.  They've had what almost two years and the only 5 man dungeon has been dm way back near release?  Along with 4 40 mans and 2 20 mans.  If they were going to start adding more casually friendly content I think we would have seen signs of that before now but instead we've seen raids more raids and harder raids.  It's all speculation though as all the raid level dungeons aren't out yet.  Right now talking about the difference between epics and blue's is like saying krol blade isn't that much better than sword of zeal, sword of zeal is a pretty standard high end blue but krol is nowhere near anything dropping in raid instances.  We probably know roughly where the level of blues are but we're completely speculating as to what will happen with epics.  As to the hard mode epics they looked about on par with kelthuzad drops maybe minor upgrades, but I wasn't paying close attention, if this is correct, it doesn't bode well for the arguement that casuals will have access to high end epics from hard mode dungeons.  Only thing I've seen that gave me any hope was the new craftable items and no idea how the mats for them will turn out.

Fortunately Blizzard has admitted in the past that the raid-after-raid we've seen was a mistake. Basically they screwed themselves because of their trademark delays and shipped with less raid instances than they expected. They also pushed out DM too quickly. Right now the raids and 5mans are roughly balanced in number, but of course the raids are the only ones that have seen multiple tiers of progression. Had we been given BWL/MC/Ony as raids, then say scholo/lbrs/ubrs as the smaller instances they could have then done a DM/AQ release and then a Naxx/Strath release with progression on both fronts. But they fucked it up and they know it. Multiple winged dungeons with varying number requirements should hopefully keep them on track to progress both playstyles. Not to mention they'll want to put a few really nice goodies in the 5mans to make sure raiders throw some time into them (like they did with ZG/AQ20), goodies casuals would then be able to access.

I think people sometimes lose focus of what Blizzard does as a company. They may have certain hardcore bents (like how they insist on non-consensual PVP in Diablo 2), but at the core they're about making AAA games that have WIDE appeal and sell a shitload of copies. They aren't a company that makes games to make a point or niche games and the market be damned, thats for sure. They may fuck up their fair share with WoW, but most of that is inexperience with the genre. When they said they didn't expect the honor system to be so soul destroying every MMOG vet just slapped their forehead because of COURSE people will destroy their lives to get the competitive shiney and anyone not willing to do so might as well not try. In the end though, they know where the dollars are and will persue the casual market as much as they can without gutting the hardcore game.

Any beta testers here have a chance to try one of the 5 man wings of Hell Fire Citadel?

I've been through Hellfire Ramparts a few times.  It is very fast.  3 bosses.  Good loot.  Felt like doing the Armory of Scarlet Monastery.

Totally untrue from my viewpoint. Anyway, that is not the essential argument for superior raiding rewards. It has nothing to do with the organizational challenge of getting a raid together, raiding guilds are built around doing just that and for them its no particular difficulty. The essential argument is that Blizzard has to date utterly failed to create any  5 10 or 20 man content that even remotely approached the challenge of the latest 40 mans. ZG, AQ20 and DM were all blown through the very first day they came out by top raiding guilds, Naxx took 3 solid months of effort. Show me group or small raid content that isn't a joke and you'll have an argument that they deserve equal rewards. Personally, I'll believe it when I see it.

Have you done the tier0.5 questline [with the expected gear level, ie. blues]? It's definitely not a 'joke', there's a reason you don't see many people running around with 8/8 tier0.5 (some of the sets also suck, but that's neither here or there).

More specifically, the
- 45 minute baron run (if you approach this like any other instance run, you will fail, repeatedly)
- minibosses (these aren't THAT hard, but they wipe pugs easily)
- BRD event (completely unlike any other boss fight in the game currently, and IMO the best designed fight atm)
- Valthalak boss fight (easily harder than at least half of the ZG and MC bosses, if not more... everyone needs to pay 100% attention, a single slip up WILL wipe the raid.. I'd put this on par with Jin'do, is he an easy boss?)

In my opinion, some of this stuff was MUCH MUCH harder than most stuff in MC and ZG, with vastly inferior rewards. And I've done ZG and MC plenty of times myself, so I have a basis for comparison and whatnot.


-- Z.

You bring up a good point in comparing long since trivialized raid content to the newer instance content. BWL was hard a year ago, it isn't now, or at least not really any more difficult than the revamped instance content. I don't think anyone really disputes the fact that blizzard needs to do more to bring up the latest instance content (and its rewards) in line with what the old 40 man raid zones drop. I was comparing the top 40 man content to top 5 10 20 content when released, there there is and has been no comparison.

I think Zetor makes a good point - in many senses some 5 man fights can be harder than many raid encounters.

Beta testers - is it true there will be adjustable difficulty sliders on 5 man content in the expansion?

The top raiding guilds blew through the new content because they were already epicced right up the ass, surely.

If I understand it correctly, they basically break the Outlands 5-man instances into two groups.  Non-70, and 70.  If you bump up the difficulty on the non-70, 5-man, it becomes level 70 difficulty, and yields a better selection of loot, better blues. 

If you bump up the difficulty on a level 70 5-man instance, there will be epic loot.

ZG and AQ20 were good for what they were for - ie, providing a new raiding guild with a halfstep between UBRS and the "real" 40-person raids.  There is nothing specific to 20-person raids that makes them more trivial.  If Naxx had been designed for 24 or whatever, it would be just as hard.

Or 5 man.

I think this is new thinking though.  Previously as I understood the rational for raids having better loot was the difficulty in getting that many people to cooperate to get together to do a kill - secondary was how hard the fight in question actually was.

Considering how many people raid now - getting the folks together is not the issue - so the justification for better loots on raids may be revisited.  I know I am repeating myself - but I think this is more poignant when we consider how challenging getting a competent 5 man group together is vs. attending a raid.


That is exciting.  I far prefer grouping with my mates than an impersonal raid.

Getting a 5 man competent group together is only difficult because your average PUG member is stupid, greedy, stubborn and cannot type in complete sentences. PUGs end in two outcomes: tears and blood.

In a competent, organized guild you do not have a hard time getting a quality 5 man group.  Guilds at this time do not form as frequently for running 5 man content because it is not as difficult (outside exceptions noted, but those are not the common way the 5 man content is done) and not as rewarding.  Raiding offers progressive difficulty as well as showing a direct route to the shiny.

The reward level of hardmode dungeons may yield more focused small guilds.  However, if Blizzard does not make progressive content for this target, it will just be a passing fad.  People will hit the equipment wall and go back to chasing the shiny.

I dont know.  What you might end up seeing is something along the lines of your more focused small guilds hitting that wall, and then merging with others of their kind to form more intelligent and focused larger guilds, which can compete on an even, or maybe slightly behind footing with the established older large guilds in the new high end content.

From that perspective, using harder more challenging 5 man content as a steppingstone, the proliferation of larger guilds which arent filled with asshats that dont know how to play their class, or expect to be carried on the shoulders of their more competent guildmates, may become a viable option at the endgame.  Rather then all the guilds you see spring up with the cries of "going to tackle BWL / MC soon" etc, only to come crashing down due to lack of stayingpower.

Complately incorrect.

Think for a stupid second.

Did Ony take people a while to learn?

How does ony compare to Naxx insofar as 'sophistication'?

The fact is Uber raid guilds Blew through ZG etc because those places were designed to be hard for those with much crappier gear, as well as being simpler in design.

The only reason Naxx etc is harder than other stuff now is because of two things:

1: Gear progression.
2: DM and the other instances oyu mention were NEVER designed as epic challenges. Naxx was.

There is nothing inherent in Raids that says the are harder than 5, 10, and 20 mans. It's simply due to the progression and instance design Blizzard has done SO FAR.

There is normal and Hard mode for many 5 man wings.

Hard mode in some Wings, designed for 70+, has already been beaten by groups of level 67s.

Hard mode will need to be upped a lot.