Cataclysm Raid Progression Refinements

[sickrubik]

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/24401856405/cataclysm-raid-progression-refinements/

We're continuing to refine the raid progression paths in Cataclysm, and we'd like to share some of those changes with you today. Please enjoy!

The first of the refinements being made is that we're combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn't apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.

We're designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we'll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They'll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.

Dungeon Difficulty and Rewards
10- and 25-player (normal difficulty) -- Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop the exact same items as each other.
10- and 25-player (Heroic difficulty) -- Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop more powerful versions of the normal-difficulty items.

We of course recognize the logistical realities of organizing larger groups of people, so while the loot quality will not change, 25-player versions will drop a higher quantity of loot per player (items, but also badges, and even gold), making it a more efficient route if you're able to gather the people. The raid designers are designing encounters with these changes in mind, and the class designers are making class changes to help make 10-person groups easier to build. Running 25-player raids will be a bit more lucrative, as should be expected, but if for a week or two you need to do 10s because half the guild is away on vacation, you can do that and not suffer a dramatic loss to your ability to get the items you want.

We recognize that very long raids can be a barrier for some players, but we also want to provide enough encounters for the experience to feel epic. For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid. All of these bosses would drop the same item level gear, but the dungeons themselves being different environments will provide some variety in location and visual style, as well as separate raid lockouts. Think of how you could raid Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep separately, but you might still want to hit both every week.

We do like how gating bosses over time allows the community to focus on individual encounters instead of just racing to the end boss, so we’re likely to keep that design moving forward. We don't plan to impose attempt limitations again though, except maybe in cases of rare optional bosses (like Algalon). Heroic mode may not be open from day one, but will become available after defeating normal mode perhaps as little as once or twice.

In terms of tuning, we want groups to be able to jump into the first raids pretty quickly, but we also don’t want them to overshadow the Heroic 5-player dungeons and more powerful quest rewards. We’ll be designing the first few raid zones assuming that players have accumulated some blue gear from dungeons, crafted equipment, or quest rewards. In general, we want you and your guild members to participate in and enjoy the level up experience.

We design our raids to be accessible to a broad spectrum of players, so we want groups to be able to make the decision about whether to attempt the normal or Heroic versions of raids pretty quickly. The goal with all of these changes is to make it as much of a choice or effect of circumstance whether you raid as a group of 10 or as a group of 25 as possible. Whether you're a big guild or a small guild the choice won't be dependent on what items drop, but instead on what you enjoy the most.

We realize that with any changes to progression pathways there are going to be questions. We're eagerly awaiting any that we may have left unanswered. To the comments!

Interesting changes, and of course there is a vocal upset portion of the player base saying that this is the death knell, or whatever. Personally, I'm optimistic. It is currently a lot more difficult to find a 10 Man, let alone a 25. Hopefully this will break it down to more 10s running, and an increase in opportunity.

[Malakili]

All this is going to do is slow how fast higher tiered raiders are gearing up.  Right now you pretty much need to be running 10s and 25s to stay on top of gearing up, and they probably want to avoid that.  I know main raid team in my guild  (I no longer raid myself), runs 10s for precisely this reason.  Anything to get ahead.

I can't see much effect on the average player who generally probably isn't raiding two separate places a week.  The backlash will be loud, but in the end, all those players who are going to complain are the ones who are so locked into WoW that they aren't going to quit anyway.

[Ingmar]

This looks absolutely perfect for my playstyle, woo!

[Shrike]

Yeah, I'm liking this so far.

In LK, I"ve pretty much gotten the short end of the stick, gear progression-wise, due to my scheduling conflicts with my guild. The 264 crowd has gotten particularly bad recently--so much so that my mostly 251 skinny blue ass has gotten benched while they throw themselves at 10 man Arthas every weekend. Still, a victory for more casual time-constrained play.

I could give a damn about how long gearing up takes. What I've had to do to get as far as I have with what little time I actually can raid makes my shaman about as close to a Cinderella draenei as you can get. Personally, I'd like to see this two year gear/expansion cycle go out to three years. Things move too quickly to really enjoy as it is. Though some of this is my alt-itis talking. They simply can't keep up.

Edit: removed a little bile 

[Ingmar]

I personally would actually like the cycle to shorten a little, to 3 raid tiers per expansion at the most, and give us these new 5 level leveling periods a little more often. I find I'm pretty tired of Northrend at this point but there's still a long wait for the next expansion. If they tightened up the rotation a bit I'd be happier.

I don't want it to go all EQ with 2 expansions a year or have grindy CoH leveling, but I'd like a little more 'leveling up/doing new quest/outdoor content' in comparison to time spent at level cap gearing up.

[Nonentity]

I am super happy with these changes. If I miss out and don't get an opportunity to go with the big boys on their 25 man run, I can scrape together some alts and do a 10 man, and get a shot at the same gear.

The less time doing things to be competitive, the better. I want time to dick around and do nothing.

[Fordel]

Man, I might actually not be hundreds of spellpower behind the curve now? Blasphemy.



I guess someone finally did the actual math and saw the gap between:

• 10 Man Loot
• 10 Man Heroic Loot
• 25 Man Loot
• 25 Man Heroic Loot

was stupidly large.

[ezrast]

Kind of sucks for people who actually like raiding regardless of loot. Fewer lockouts means you run out of stuff to do in a shorter time each week.

[Fabricated]

Kind of sucks for people who actually like raiding regardless of loot. Fewer lockouts means you run out of stuff to do in a shorter time each week.

Alts. Now you can actually raid with them instead of trying to convince people to do it after you've done 10/25 man, or in back during ToC...normal 10, heroic 10, normal 25, heroic 25.

[Shrike]

Kind of sucks for people who actually like raiding regardless of loot. Fewer lockouts means you run out of stuff to do in a shorter time each week.

Edit: hell, I missed the actual point of the quote.

Mmm, yeah, kinda. However, I do have two alts I really do like playing. They're not even remotely competitively equipped right now (one is getting there in PvP, but...well, raiding...), and no one I know would take them on present day raids. I would like to play them with the guild, however. Time, time, anything but time. Mainly, I want to see this idiotic full tier gear gap disappear between 10s and 25s. It's clownshoes right now. There's a full 26 item levels in T10 gear. That's ridiculous.

[Fordel]

They also finally realized you can't have a difficulty and progression curve for 10 mans if every 10 man raid can just nullify it with 25 man gear.

[Rendakor]

I really like these changes. It always annoyed me that the loot was better in 25 just because you had more people. Putting them on the same lockout doesn't really bother me either.

The other change I like a lot is the focus on a few small raids, rather than 1 massive raid. ToC was about the right size,while Naxx, Ulduar and ICC are all too long to be reasonably cleared in one night until all bosses are on farm. And since I do a lot of PUGing, it's always been a pain to reform a group for the later bosses.

[sickrubik]

Zarhym posted some follow up comments. Bolding is my emphasis.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/24401856405/cataclysm-raid-progression-refinements/

Here are some clarifications to a few common questions we're seeing.

Q u o t e:
Regarding how the raid dungeons will share the same lockout. This means that you cannot do separate instances in the same week. If you defeat an encounter in 10 player normal mode then you are locked to the 10 player mode of that dungeon for that week and can flip between 10 player normal and 10 player heroic on a per boss basis (assuming heroic is available). In this scenario you cannot do the 25 player version. Is this correct?

Correct. There should be no circumstances under which you kill a boss more than once per week on the same character. However, in the same way that you can decide on a per-boss basis whether to try normal vs. hard mode, we might allow you to change between 10 and 25 on a per-encounter basis for additional flexibility. If you started a raid in 25-player mode and then found that you couldn’t get everyone together later in the week, you might be able to downsize the next few bosses to 10-player.

Q u o t e:
Will legendary items be available through 10 player dungeons? How about special mounts like Invincible?

In some of these specific cases, the answer is that we just don’t know yet. We’re going to have to walk a fine line between dropping the same items in both 10- and 25-player modes, versus still offering something extra for the 25s. If we over-reward the 25s, then players who like 10-player raiding will still feel compelled to find more warm bodies. If we don’t provide any extra incentive for 25s, then some players may stop playing with their friends in order to avoid the extra organization required for a large raid.

Overall, our goal is that you make the decision between whether to raid with 10 players or 25 players based on what you find fun and not because of the reward structure.

For perspective, it might help to look back at how we changed lockouts and hard modes on every single raid tier of Wrath of the Lich King to see what felt right and try to fix problems that arose from previous tiers. After seeing the first tier of Cataclysm raiding, we may decide to adjust our design for the next tier.

Q u o t e:
How many pieces of loot will drop for 10 and 25 player modes respectively?

When we say “25 should drop more loot,” we’re just sharing a philosophy. You shouldn’t assume that this means that 10-player modes will drop 1 item or that 25-player modes will drop 6 items, or whatever. We haven’t finalized how much loot will drop, but our general goal is that 25s should drop more to help make up for some of the logistical cost.

Q u o t e:
Will achievements be broken down by 10/25 modes? Will realm first achievements/titles be only for 25s? Will meta-achievement mounts be available for both versions still?

There will just be raid achievements, not 10- vs. 25-player versions in most cases. The achievement won’t care if you complete it in 10s or 25s. If we do meta-achievement mounts, it’s possible we’d still have different colors of mounts, or maybe even different mounts; but for some players that might mean that 25s feels mandatory again, which would be a potential problem. This is the kind of thing we’re going to have to consider carefully, and again, we might try a few different implementations before sticking with something we like.

We’re also not sure about realm first achievements or titles. We don’t want to encourage, say, 25-player focused guilds to run a 10-player raid instead because they think that will get them the ream first title faster. One potential solution is you can earn a realm first title in 10 or 25, but not both. These types of achievements also serve as great content for guild achievements.

[Fordel]

The Tears in the official thread are delicious.

[Merusk]

Kind of sucks for people who actually like raiding regardless of loot. Fewer lockouts means you run out of stuff to do in a shorter time each week.

Actually it just sucks for those of us who like bigger raids.  As folks have said we'll have a lot more alt runs, but I can see this being the death-knell for 25-man focused raids.  Often times later in the week you'll have enough to run 2 10s, but if everyone's locked out to a 25 that can't happen.  So you either don't raid, or start running alts so much that you decide it's better off to just focus on 10-mans.

The loot changes don't bother me. It's easy enough to tune the raids to an equivalent difficulty (and sometimes in 10 it's just fucking harder because you have fewer resources/ tighter class balance to work with.)  It's the possible death of the 25-man, which I really enjoyed, that does.

[Ingmar]

It sounds like the better badges/money/more drops per person thing (so you gear up faster in general) will leave people with incentive to do 25s still. I assume they'll still have separate achievements as well, but maybe not.

[Fordel]

Read Zam's second quotation post.

[Ingmar]

Oh rite.

[Merusk]

Nope, per the clarification above there will be just raid achieves, not 10 vs 25, and possibly not even quest/ meta items that are 25 only.

The quantity of item difference between the two will be meaningless unless it's so significant that you feel compelled to raid 25s, which isn't their intent.  Even if it's double the items, the chances are you'll only be 2-3 weeks behind getting 'fully geared' in 10 vs 25, due to the randomness of loot drops.   Also, as anyone who's only running the daily+weekly can tell you, badges get insignificant after a short duration as well..


Damn spammers replying so quick.

[Paelos]

I'm damn tired of doing 25's personally, so this works out well. Actually, I wouldn't mind 25s if they could be done in 2-3 hours, but that only happpens long, long after you've got them on farm, and sometimes not even then. Also, I want to reference something from the past:

In my mind, grouping shouldn't be a necessity at all. I think everyone from the soloer to the large scale group should have a shot at the big score, but I think time should play a factor. I believe that the best solution to the problem would be to make encounters scalable based on the amount of people involved.

In the example of WoW, it would be to scale the monster levels in higher instances appropriately based on if you were alone, or if you had 40 people. You could also scale the drop rates as well based on the difficulty. Ideally, I would love to choose difficulty in an instance. Say anywhere from Super-easy (solo), Easy (five man), Hard (ten man), Very Hard (twenty man), and Insane (40 man). If you gave the people the option going into the instances, the scaling is easy. Just adjust the drop rates, spawns, and levels accordingly. However, DON'T regulate certain drops to the higher levels. Just make them easier to attain with more people. That way all sized guilds and groups could game at their own pace, for uber rewards, and the ubers could get them way before everybody else still.

I wrote that post in 2006, back when we were running MC. What they are suggesting is a small version of that very concept, so I'm fucking thrilled at this point 4 years later.

[Ingmar]

Nope, per the clarification above there will be just raid achieves, not 10 vs 25, and possibly not even quest/ meta items that are 25 only.

The quantity of item difference between the two will be meaningless unless it's so significant that you feel compelled to raid 25s, which isn't their intent.  Even if it's double the items, the chances are you'll only be 2-3 weeks behind getting 'fully geared' in 10 vs 25, due to the randomness of loot drops.   Also, as anyone who's only running the daily+weekly can tell you, badges get insignificant after a short duration as well..


Damn spammers replying so quick.

I don't see how it necessarily follows that a guild that already has a working group of people that do 25s together would suddenly throw that all out the window and drop down to 10s, though. I guess it *does* open the door for more I QUIT AND START MY OWN GUILD drama since the super loot whore types will have less incentive to stay with a group that is enabling them to get better gear - but wouldn't you want those people to leave anyway, really?

[SurfD]

Personally, I am inclined to be optimistic about this change, if only because it means i dont have to worry about a complete disconnect in itemization between my 10 and 25 man raids anymore.  As a druid who is into the whole feral tank thing, it always pissed me off to no end that literally something like 80% of the good feral tank gear in icecrown is only available from the 25 man, which usually meant I never get a shot at it (due to an inability to find a decent 25 man group).

[Sjofn]

I am mostly happy about this because now I won't have to listen to assholes in gear far better than mine because they roll around with more warm bodies than I do tell me the latest 10 man is SUPER RIDICULOUSLY EASY YOU NOOB when they overgear the fucking encounter. Now the reason we're not completing raids as fast as other guilds will COMPLETELY be because my guild rides the failboat, instead of just PARTIALLY the reason. 

[K9]

I fucking hate 25 mans; I'm just sad that I probably won't be playing in Cataclysm to see this.

Still, great and long-overdue changes. Fuck it, while they are at it they should add in 40-man versions to appease the nutters too.

[Tuncal]

A fantastic, fantastic change. No more waiting for 3-5 warm bodies to log on so we can actually raid.

[Merusk]

I don't see how it necessarily follows that a guild that already has a working group of people that do 25s together would suddenly throw that all out the window and drop down to 10s, though. I guess it *does* open the door for more I QUIT AND START MY OWN GUILD drama since the super loot whore types will have less incentive to stay with a group that is enabling them to get better gear - but wouldn't you want those people to leave anyway, really?

The super loot whore types will continue to run whatever they can, wherever they can.  It's their nature and wouldn't change if you suddenly said they could only do so at 11pm local time every Sunday for 3 hours.  You turn them out, tolerate them until they leave or boot them as your various guild culture dictates.

No, what this will do is destroy those guilds toeing the line of Hardcore/Casual.  It will force them one way or the other, with the other being 10-man focused.  

Picture this. Your guild is currently struggling to get a 25 man raid 3-4 nights a week.  You can get Tuesday and Wednesday just fine, but Thursday and Friday/ Saturday/ Sunday (depending on your guild's schedule)  Right now you can say "ok, we've only got 19 folks online, find a pug and we can run 2 10-mans instead."

However, in Cata you're now locked to one raid a week.  Either all 19 of you are locked to a 25 man, or the majority of you are.  You will have have two choices at this point.  1)  Don't run a raid, which will force player attrition as raid guilds that don't raid don't maintain raiders. 2) Run an alt raid, which gets folks wondering why they're in a 25-man focused guild instead of a smaller, undeniably tighter, guild if all they're doing is running 10s half the time for the exact same loot.

Even if you can downsize to a 10-man, you're still fucking over 15 other players who are on the same raid ID and now can't finish up the instance they started earlier.  A few weeks of that and you're going to decide to not sign up and get locked out of something, in favor of finding a group more suited to your times.  Again, probably a smaller one.

In all, I can't argue these are bad things.  They open the game up more and let folks see content. I've always been in favor of this.  It does, however, lead me to think that 25s are soon to be a thing of the past.

[SurfD]

The only thing that would make 25 man raids better then 10 man raids would be the spread of "how much" loot drops per boss.  Obviously, if you have 2.5 x as many people, the boss had better drop at least 2.5x as much loot, or it wont be worth it from a risk / reward perspective.   Why run a 25 man raid if there is the potential to get less loot overall vs 2 (and a half) 10 mans.

[Ingmar]

The lockout issue will perhaps be alleviated by what they're saying about having multiple shorter raids instead of one big giant raid, so you'd be less likely to not get through an entire run in one session (except early on when learning fights or whatever, presumably.)

But yeah I can see that. I would expect to see *some* guilds drop 25s entirely in favor of 10s, but I wouldn't think they'd be completely dead.

A thought I just have - if 25s and 10s have the exact same loot tables, and 25s drop more items per person, then it would seem to follow that for those 'must have' trinkets that occassionally pop up (Illustration of the Dragon Soul/Dragonspine Trophy type stuff) you'll have a better chance over time at getting one via 25 person content. Same thing for signature weapons, etc. That alone will probably keep some guilds running 25s instead.

Fake edit: SurfD, the implication is that 25s will drop not just more loot total, but actually more loot per person - if 10s are dropping 2 epics, 25s would drop 6 or 7, that sort of thing. They went out of their way to say that they haven't settled on what those numbers would be though.

[Merusk]

Given their stance being one of "we don't want people to feel forced to run 25s" the amount of loot will be equal to or slightly less than 10's on a per-person basis.  I'm leaning towards the less, somewhere around 2x the loot instead of 2.5x.

[Lantyssa]

So, if you start the raid in 25, but they allow the resizing and a group of 10 of those decide to finish it, are the other 15 out of luck?

[Ingmar]

So, if you start the raid in 25, but they allow the resizing and a group of 10 of those decide to finish it, are the other 15 out of luck?

They should have showed up for day 2!

EDIT: To be more serious, they're out of luck either way, if you found 15 different people to finish the raid with, they'd still be out the 2nd half of the raid.

[Lantyssa]

Yes, but it's a little harder to find a bunch of people to lock a 25-man raid out than to get several random people to fill a 10-man.  I doubt it'll be a huge issue for us, but I can see logistical nightmares for some guilds.

I can see worse ones, too, but considering my experience with raids is one wing of Naxx, I don't know if they're even possible.

[Ragnoros]

Why don't they just institute the stupidly easy fix of simply making raid lockouts work on a player, per boss, basis not group basis?

It would be as simple as saving whether you have killed a boss in a given week and if you have you can't fight it again.

Would fix all the "Someone else did my raid!" problems.

[Paelos]

Yes, but it's a little harder to find a bunch of people to lock a 25-man raid out than to get several random people to fill a 10-man.  I doubt it'll be a huge issue for us, but I can see logistical nightmares for some guilds.

I can see worse ones, too, but considering my experience with raids is one wing of Naxx, I don't know if they're even possible.

If they make 25 mans 2.5x the loot, they will fail. There's too much extra bullshit to put up with to not give players a bigger payout than 1-1 odds when they can just play smallball. My guess would be 4x as an enticing factor to deal with the drama.

[Rendakor]

Why don't they just institute the stupidly easy fix of simply making raid lockouts work on a player, per boss, basis not group basis?

It would be as simple as saving whether you have killed a boss in a given week and if you have you can't fight it again.

Would fix all the "Someone else did my raid!" problems.

Why not take it one further: let players kill bosses as many times as they want, but they're only eligible for loot the first time they kill it in a week.