Greetings everyone, this is Maki. In this post I’ll try to expose different points on why bringing 10 man raiding would benefit the game greatly.
Where I come from?
I’ve been raiding at a semihardcore level for a long time, I’ve been a Raid Leader most of the time and also created my own guild. During this time, I’ve been blessed to meet amazing people that I still can call friends. The main problem is that gathering 20 people for mythic raiding is too much so in the end, the guild was not sustainable and we all scattered to different guilds, stopped raiding or even stopped playing the game. After listening to a Tettles video about the subject, it motivated me to write this post to support the motion.
Main problems of 20man mythic
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Getting enough people: As I said before, the main problem is it is super hard to gather 20 people that can fully commit to a schedule for long periods of time, because let’s be real, most guilds do not clear the content in a few weeks, it usually takes 2-3 months if you are lucky to not get disbanded before getting to the end.
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Optimal Raid comps: as of right now, having a somewhat optimal comp is required to clear the later mythic bosses. This makes recruiting harder since you cannot just recruit the best player or person that wants to achieve the same goals and objectives available (this is hard on its own), you also need to take into account the class they play in order to suit your comp. What further difficults this is that people tend to play what is meta for raid or m+ so you get stuck with the same classes and a shortage of the other ones.
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Barely dead guilds: if you take a look at the mythic raid rankings on your server you will notice a lot of guilds in the same situation, they have barely cleared the raid, are in the middle of the progress or literally disbanded. Why? Because at some point it is impossible to get 20 people to show up, for various reasons, like irl stuff, bored with the game, jumped to another guild, etc. This causes a lot of people to jump from guild to guild trying to land in one that can magically form a good enough roster to surpass the difficulty level of the raid. This gets a lot of people to stop trying and stop playing, guilds disbanding, and people avoiding forming bonds with the guild because they can leave and look for another guild in a similar situation very easily, which makes creating a strong enough roster imposible.
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Level disparity: honestly, it is barely impossible to have 20 people share the same level of gameplay. It happens in all the guilds, but specially in those middle of the pack guilds that are forced to bring people that are clearly not good enough just to meet the 20 people requirement. This can lead to frustration to everyone, the people that know that are messing up, the people that sre not messing up and feel they are wasting their time and the raid leader who spends time planning and preparing assignements knowing there is people messing up but cannot replace them.
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Inability to pug: I know mythic raiding is suposed to have good coordination and pugging is basically the opposed of that but again, forming a group with 20 people is too much to control even if you really try. (I won’t talk about mythic lockout since it is a subject on its own).
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Evolution of the industry: right now co-op and multiplayer games require little people to join. Even other MMOs like final fantasy have raids of 8 people, same for Lost Ark with groups from 4-8 people. The jump from there to 20 people is massive and just serves as an example that 20 man is outdated.
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Social aspect: this one may be personal, but my group of friends that share a similar level and goals are not enough to build a 20 man roster. In my case we are a group of roughly 10-12 people so in order to build a roster we need to depend on 10 extra people that also have a similar level and goals, which is practically impossible. This raises many questions like “Why cant I play with my friends?” Or “why we need to lower our goals just to play the game together?”.
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Hard tunning: tunning dps and hps checks for 20 people is super hard, specially taking into account super well prepared teams like rwf guilds will destroy some checks while other guilds will struggle to get past them.
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Fight design: right know, the kind of boss that usually is harder for middle of the pack guilds is not the number checks. Is the boss with multiple pass-fail mechanics that all or most players have to pass in order to defeat the boss. Good example is Painsmith Raznal, where the difficulty of the fight depends on if your 20 raiders can get through the spikes without getting one shot.
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Number of players: the numbers are there, every tier after covid (where people had time to commit to a roster) has had less and less guilds finishing or even entering mythic raid. The reasons have already been numbered and it is a shame that the game with the best raids in the world cannot show how cool it is because people cannot even try it.
How 10 man solves all this problems
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Getting enough people: this is obvious that getting 10 people is easier than 20.
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Optimal Raid comps: i understand why raid buffs exist but at some point they need to relax a little bit about them, maybe go back to stamina, intellect and attack power and just make different classes bring them, like paladin, priest and shaman can bring stamina for example. Let us bring snd recruit the player and not the class pls!
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Barely dead guilds: this will punish guilds with 20 man rosters but help a lot to the rest of the guilds. Something similar happened when we went from 10 man and 25 man to 20 man and i think right now it is a sacrifice in order to make the game playable for everyone. We may lose a few guilds that cannot adapt the roster to 10 man (it is easier to go from 20 to 10 than viceversa) but we will save a lot of guilds that will be able to play the game.
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Level disparity: it is way easier to find people with similar level or even help people improve if you are only 10 people since it is easier to take accountability for mistakes in a reduced group. Also removes the frustration of bringing worse people for the sake of getting some pulls off.
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Inability to pug: this one also has an obvious explanation. It makes way easier to form groups and coordinate with strangers when there’s only 10 people. Will make mythic progression for people that may not be able to commit to a guild easier.
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Evolution of the industry: starting in a new mmo is hard, imagine trying one of wow’s most famous featutes and realizing you cannot even try in an optimal setting because you need 19 more people. It will make it easier for new people to start the game and raid, also it will help them keep the subscription since it will be easier for them to want to keep playing (instead of getting stuck in heroic which can be cleared in 2h after 1 month of the patch).
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Social aspect: it is so much easier to socialize in a reduced group, rather than being in a group of 20 people. Specially if you are new to a guild. Guilds may be smaller or have various raid rosters so it will be easier to feel part of the group.
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Hard tunning: its way easier to tune dps checks and classes if you have only 6-7 dps instead of 14-15.
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Fight Design: the devs will have the ability to design better fights since it will be easier to design mechanics that keep all 10 players engaged instead of just a few. With 20 people you may not be targeted by an ability and maybe will be just hitting the boss for the full durstion. It can happen in Ky’veza as melee for example.
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Number of players: at the end of the day it all comes to money, so i don’t understand why not bringing back 10 man when it will bring a lot of new players and returning players. As i said in the social point, making it easier to find a good group of people to play with will make it more likely that people will keep the subscription.
Thanks for reading all this, and please bring back 10 man, the game and the players need it!