10 or 25?
When I joined AT in the summer of -08 and started going to 25-man raid instances regularly with Jools the priest I thought it was wonderful!
The pre-raid preparation, the visual images of 25 people gathering outside Maggy’s Lair or TK or SSC or Mount Hyjal or wherever we were going that night, the working together with my fellow healers to keep all of our raid alive, the in-fight switching around of assigned targets if one of the healers died and the absolutely wonderful feeling when the boss finally kicked the bucket!
So when our Raid Leaders announced that their focus in WotLK would be on 10-man raids, I felt a bit, I don’t know, disappointed? let down? slightly unhappy that the thrill and kick of the 25-mans would be replaced by the dull grind of 10-mans, raiding lite instead of raiding for real?
And WotLK came out, we all lvled to 80 in a month or so and took our first tentative steps into the new raid instances.
Naxxramas, the Obsidian Sanctum, the Vault of Archarvon, I’ve done them all in both normal and heroic versions. (Well, I have a few bosses left in heroic Naxx still to down, but I’ve seen most of it.)
Been there, done that, and to my surprise I found that I actually prefer the 10-man versions!
This was really unexpected to me, I loved the AT 25-man raids so much and had been secretly planning to nudge our RL’s towards switching their stated focus from the 10-mans to the 25-mans, but I simply don’t see any need for that now. Maybe I should start nudging the RL’s back to the 10-mans more instead, since we have actually done a fair share of guild 25-mans and more and more guildies are coming of lvl and wants to join in on the fun on occasion.
But why this turn of opinion? Why are the 10-mans so much better than the 25-mans?
Well, it is because I think the 10-mans offer so much more in terms of challenges and in terms of fun!
Challenging? Am I really saying that the normal raid instances are much harder than the heroic ones and much more challenging?
Yes, I most certainly do. Speaking from my albeit rather limited experience, given the same gear level and the same skill level of the raiders, I really think the 10-mans are much more to handle than the 25-mans.
The challenge in the heroic versions is to get 25 people to understand the fight and move accordingly (I don’t deny that this can sometimes be an insurmountable challenge and make it feel like the heroic is much harder, but once you get people to do the fights a couple of times and understand what is going on, you are basically home free.)
When I go for 25-mans, I have every concievable buff in the world on me. I never run out of mana. If a healer happens to take a brutal hit to the face and go down, there are four other to chip in and help heal her targets. There are druids to battle ress and innervate, there are shamans for heroism, there are warlocks for healthstones and soul stones, spriests, survival hunters or retadins for replenishment.
There is simply too much redundancy in a 25-man raid for it to be a real challenge.
Now, the 10-man variety, on the other hand…
Sure, there are less adds and the bosses hits for less and have less hp themselves, but the fights are basically the same and you will be lacking a lot of buffs and handy abilities when you run with 10 people instead of 25.
For example, mana management is often an issue for Larue the resto shammy in 10-man Naxx because there is so much dispelling to take care of in addition to keeping everyone alive, and usually our group composition is far from ideal, lacking Replenishment or Innervate. I need to think more on when to spend mana and not just heal away, because I might run oom at the end of the fight and wipe the raid.
In normal raids, “only” 10 people need to learn how to move and how to react during the fights, which I admit is easier than getting 25 to do it, but on the other hand if one of the 10 dies it will make a much bigger splash than if one of the 25 do so.
Actually, I can think of one occasion where a normal raid has an advantage over a heroic one, and that is the Inspector Razuvious one, where in the normal version the Inspector thoughtfully has provided any intruding raiders with two crystals close by, extremely handy for mindcontrolling his two understudys and pitting them against him.
You need much more flexibility and versatility of players going to 10-mans, and even if Blizzard do try to hammer home ”bring the player, not the class”, there are still certain class-specific abilities like I listed above, and even you did compose ideal 10-man raid groups to make sure you had every buff and ability available, you still would not have the back-up and redundancy of the 25-mans.
So, in my opinion and experince, the 10-man raids is more demanding of the individual player and more challenging to conquer than the 25-mans.
What about the fun part then? Am I saying that the 10-mans are more fun too?
Yep, I most certainly am!
Have you ever been to a party with 25 man where you managed to keep a conversation going that involved everyone? Didn’t think so. 25 man is simply too big, especially if you don’t want to piss off your raid leader by talking too much when he is trying to assign chores. No matter how prepared you are, there will be some instructions and assignments going out before and during the fights, and the more people around, the more orders there will be, and the bigger the need for silence on vent will be.
I know for sure that in my guild, the chatting on Vent and in /raidchat is much more abundant in 10-mans, and so is the goofing around while playing. We often play the “trash-pull-game” which consists of tanks running chain-pulling packs as fast as they can and us healers tagging along trying to catch up and heal them through it, popping trinkets and potions and totems as they come off cooldowns. It’s fun, it’s fast and there’s no way in hell I’m ever gonna ask for a mana break! Mana breaks are for sissys!
But of course sometimes you mess up and the raid wipes. So you need to run back and buff up and get at it again, inefficient use of raid time!
It’s like you are more relaxed in 10-mans, maybe because if you try to be fun but happen to screw up you will only waste 9 other peoples time and not 24. Or maybe it just has something to do with the fact that there is usually enough waiting time in a 25-mans without having to add more to it by playing fun but foolish games.
I think you feel more a part of a 10-man raid because of its smaller size, you feel closer to your fellow raiders and it’s easier to see how your own actions and playing help the raid to success.
And I think this “relaxedness” or “cosiness” may be a key factor to success in 10-mans too. In a 10-man raid you need to be able to think outside the box, simply because you will not have as many options or tanks or healers around as in a 25-man, and if you are not afraid to do foolish things or join the banter on Vent when clearing trash, perhaps you are not afraid to step out of your defined role when fighting a boss either, to try keep the raid up in the face of doom.
If the fights had been different between 10 and 25-mans I might have had a different opinion, but for me the extra stats on the gear that drops in heroics is simply not worth trading away all the fun we have together in 10-mans.
If you enjoyed this post check out these posts as well!
- Innervate Wasted On Shamans?Sometimes when I ran instances with my resto shaman Larue a kind druid would tell me to yell if I...
- Ruling By CommitteeMy guild, Ascendo Tuum, is a guild of both raiders and not-raiders. We do official raids twice a week and...
- Pug Runs?You know what a pug is, right? Pick-up-group, a group consisting of people not all from the same guild or...
- BuffedVarian Wrynn, King of Stormwind, decided some time ago to graciously lend his strength to all intrepid explorers of the...
From back in BC one of the major pains of 25 man wasnt the fight it was the pre organisation involved in getting the thing off the ground. You had to assign healing assignments, buff assignments, CC assignments and the list was endless. It took me a good hour or so to sort out who was doing what. Don’t even get me started on DKP and loot distribution.
This has become easier in Wrath but I think will come back again in Uldur.
For sociable raids 10 man wins hands down even on progress runs as in 25 mans you really need to have good comms discipline and coversations cannot flow as basically people talk over each other unintentionally.
These are the main reason I prefer 10 man raiding.
Zetter
I hope there will be reasons for you to change your mind when the patch hits the server. Naxx is just silly. The fact that Zetter points towards, that you actually need healing assignments, CC assignments and so on, and hopefully more of it in a 25-man version, is what creates a challenge. Hope to see much more of that in the future. That you find 25-man to easy and not a challenge is rather a design issue than a set relation between 10 vs 25. As you understand I really like to go with a larger number of friends to a raid. The more the merrier! I really hope Blizzard manage to create challenges that really require 25-man just to get going. Like Lady Vashj and Kael’thas Sunstrider (in The Eye). The complexity of having several things going on at the same time is fun and probably requires you to think out of the box at least as much you say you do in Naxx 10-man. To bad you will not promote 25-mans, I would have liked that.
Jacx’s last blog post..Mana regen changes in patch 3.1 (cont. II)
@ Zet, I realise the logistics of raiding scale rather exponentially and not linearly, but still the thrill of going into SSC or TK with the 25 of us was a wonderful feeling! I had such a blast and really loved that raiding, even if we spent half the night wiping.
@ Jacx, you are probably right, it’s not a set relation between 10 vs 25, it’s the use of the same design and basically the same game mechanics for both versions that’s the real issue for me.
Although I like Naxx I feel the 25-man version of it seems a bit like some watered down version of the 10-man, so for me the difference between them is not enough to make up for losing the social part to the exent that you do.
I also think that had there been 10-man raid instances that did not come in 25-man versions and vice versa I might have been trying much harder to promote going to the 25-mans.
Let’s see where we end up when Ulduar goes live :-)
I wont spam you blog to death Tess :) but one last point for me is I am a progress/ lore kind of guy and so far it appears 25 man doesnt differ at all from 10 even in the mechanics. Its just more people i.e. where you had one healer there are on that job ect ect.
The difference I think was in BC if you wanted to see content you had to do 25 mans now you can do it all in 10 with the only difference being the bosses are scaled down in hitpoints and how hard they hit and the loot is not quite as good.
One thing that I always find myself asking is would 25 mans survive if all the loot was the same and the only bonus for doing 25 mans was you got more of it to compensate for the larger number of people involved + the achievments.
Zetter
No worries Zet, comments are always welcome!
And it is an interesting question you ask, how big a part does the loot actually play in people’s decisions to go to 10 or 25-mans? Guess there are many answers on that one :-)
I really love the 25 men raids even if I also think the 10 man’s so far are more challenging.
Just the amount of things going on on the screen makes it more of a “glory” moment.
As an old man I have a hard time being social even in ten mans ;-) and our voice discipline is way better in the 25 men raids , even if I almost turned nuts when someone late yesterday started to whistle into my ears, my head almost cracked after focusing for four hours.
Loot for me is a help to get to see more of the raid instances, better gear on the raid group helps us push further and further and as long as the stats are better on 25 men gear, they will help more even for the 10 man runs.
But I rather see the encounters on 10 man than not see them at all so I am not going to argue about ten/twenty five man raids as long as we do our two nights of raiding I am fine with whatever ;-)
Sick of getting low amounts of useless traffic to your site? Well i want to tell you about a new underground tactic which makes me personally $900 each day on 100% AUTOPILOT. I could truthfully be here all day and going into detail but why dont you merely check their site out? There is really a great video that explains everything. So if your seriously interested in producing quick cash this is the site for you. Auto Traffic Avalanche