I can see it, but if the choice is between balance and fun I will always choose fun. A good way to balance it though, would be to create 10 man comp synergies. I.e. magic damage comps, or physical damage comps with a monk, enhancement shaman, warrior, etc.
magic dmg with DH, warlock, mage, shadow priest, and so on.
Also, if content doesn’t scale infinitely and there is no timer, people will not obsess with meta. M+ is only so bad and meta-focused, because of the depletion-mechanic
I find 20man fun, I honestly think it would be a better experience with 25. Yet, I do understand the logistical problems of increasing the number of participants.
Yet, making it 10man raiding, and I raided 10man back in the day - was far from fun. It was a nice break from 25 man raiding at the time, yet the real fun was the big raid. Even in HC, I avoid 10 man raids (2/2/6), it is horrible experience compared to the grand 20 or even 30 man experience.
Of course, that is subjective. Still, I chose to believe and stand by that 20 man will more than likely be more fun for more, than 10man raiding.
I don’t view it as fun to have a server-only 20 ma requirement with guilds that are run like companies on 3rd party sites full of spreadsheets. Seems lame to me. 10 man would certainly lower that type of behaviour and make raiding more familiar.
If your guild is run like a company, you are probably in a bit of a weird guild. Yes, there are structures needed, but also bonds of familarity and friendship. It is still so small that you should be able to at least get a feel of everyone in the 20-28 man raidteam you got going. You will probably click with 5-14 of them, based on my experience.
Of course, some people struggle more than most with socialising on scale. Some simply do not care to try. Yet it is the make or break factor.
Now, organisation is important to keep it efficient. As we are talking mythic raiding, you often have time being the biggest limiting factor of progress. If your goal is to kill all the bosses and get Cutting Edge, time management is key. You might feel signing up, planning and prepping is dull or boring ~ if so, mythic raiding is likely not for you, if you are going for Cutting Edge. Feel free to dip your toes into casual Mythic raiding though, where you kill what you kill. Having a blast and fun on the way as far as it goes! 
(in 10 man, the logistics gets stricter, as if even 1 man is gone, it is getting close to critical - while in a 20 man team, you got two flexes, if not more)
That said, social enviroment is what keeps guild/raidgroups together through good and bad times. Gives that comradery that is so much needed to push through and get it done.
The less spots are there in a group, the more individual, unique class utilities push to the forefront. I personally prefer 10 man raiding over 20 man, but if you want to bring it back you will have to tune some of the specs along with encounters as well.
From a healer standpoint we will go back to a combination of Holy paladin/Disc priest/Restoration shaman because their raid wide damage reduction is more impactful in a small raid group size compared to a 20 man one.
It will be a similar situation with DPS. The group will bring a single warrior instead of having the option to bring more now, and a class like hunter may get excluded even more than they are now.
That is a lot of work to reduce the raid size to 20, and the more classes Blizzard will add, the harder it will be to maintain it without homogenization.
Seems lame to me to have only 10 man raids, having to bench some of your players or put them into another group. Also not sure how 2 tanks 4 healers and 14 dps breaks down to 2 raid groups.
You would need 4 tanks 6 healers and 10 dps most likely so a lot of your freinds would have to reroll to play something they dont want to.
Poor solution.
Most people play specs, not classes and specs are already being left out so it makes no difference. I enjoyed 10 man raiding back in wrath and I also enjoyed actually being able to raid.
I don’t want to abandon my friends I’ve been playing with for 15 years but we’ve been struggling with a roster for years and it feels like the logistical problems of progression raiding outweigh the challenges posed by the gameplay.
There is a problem.
Except a raid with 20 people only need 2 tanks.
One 10-man group needs 2 tanks as well.
good.
its time to rework one of the rogue spec to Evasion tank
yep you read me well.
There are bad players in the Valtan/Biakiss raid on normal/hard difficulty in LA.
These players don’t get to the difficult phases/bosses [kuku-3/Brel 5-6] without buying boosts/help from friends since you’re semi-locked out of the new content if you haven’t done the previous one.
In wow the previous raids are not relevant and you cannot expect players to go from Karazhan/Ulduar [14+ year old content] difficulty to Aberrus HC/Mythic.
Also if lockouts were to change [I don’t like how you can get scammed from a mythic lockout as well] what will happen to mid/low tier CE guilds? [everything below top 300-500?
Why go through the trouble of progressing an instance 2-3-4 nights a week for 5-6+ weeks when you can farm/wowtoken 5 million gold and buy your cutting edge/mount achievement?
I always like to ask who is that aimed for, who is interacting with and are people happy with that ? So it’s aimed at Mythic raiders and only them are interracting with that system but discontent is growing. I’m currently raiding once a week due to summer vactaion, so I could help my friends in lower tier mythic guilds…But I just can’t due to that stupid ID lockout.
This system is clearly outdated and has to be gone. And to be fair, the first 3 bosses can easily be pugged anyways.
In your case its not your ID lockout but your Raid Leader being superstitious. There should no issues arise whatsoever as long as someone keeps the lockout. People did that in the past (and most likely still do) where they did do a reclear for loot and then the following week used the previous lockout they copied over to an alt.
Even if I were raiding on sunday instead of Tues, thurs and sun, then I’d still be gutted to help on wed and tues!
Helping out ye sure. I mean im helping out my other guild on the rogue the following lockout since we are on vacation while otherwise I could only help them out on my warrior on their other 2 raid days now that the tier is on farm.
But as far as your ID lockout issue is concerned its only really your RL thats the issue here. Unless you do something as beep as faction changing past weekly reset you are completely fine.
That’s irrelevant to this topic 
Yeah, I could help if I were playing an alt but I’d rather help with my main!
They must make it flex. It makes no sense otherwise, because logistical challenges to run 10-man raid is actually higher compared to 20-man raid. With 20-man raid it’s actually possible to find people who will rotate on different bosses, because there’s lots of loot. With 10-man, only very few players would agree to be benched and those players usually not worthy to bring in the raid anyway. I was raid leader back in cataclysm, I know it very well.
So it’ll be unbalanced. So be it. I don’t care. Balancing between 8-9-10 brackets is not the same as balancing between 10 and 25 brackets. Of course raid will not be perfectly balanced, just like it’s not perfectly balanced now when it comes to classes. Some raids with 4 augs will kill mythic bosses in 30 seconds. Do you think that’s balanced?
I’d even be fine with 10-man fixed size until top-100 guilds would kill that particular boss. After top-100 guilds killed the boss, well, balance is the last thing anyone would care about. Skill, attendance, gear, class composition will be more important.
For me, it’s important to have raid full of friends, without anyone left behind. I can’t make friends with 20 people. 10 is my limit, it seems. 20-man raids are always full of strangers for me.
They wont. It has a fixed number for balance reasons.
Irrelevant. They have stated that they did it specifically for this.
You already have a massive difference in balance from 8 to 10 or 12. If you want to state otherwise then sorry but you seriously have no clue what youre talking about whatsoever. We have seen this in flex difficulty for years already.
Strawman argument. And the augmentation spec is heavily flamed because of stuff like this.
Nobody gives a rats about the world 100 guilds.
Just means youre bad at finding guilds if anything.
It’s only hard if people are idiots.
If I’m trying to get a character well geared, I generally make a habit of pugging enough mythic bosses for a vault slot to give myself a chance at any BiS items from those bosses and also max ilvl tier. This season, that’s 3 bosses.
Most of the pug groups I’ve joined one-shot the bosses, the whole thing is over in about 30 minutes and we go our separate ways. With good gear, there’s no dps check to speak of, so it’s just a matter of doing mechanics. And the mechanics are simple enough that they don’t require voice comms, just a little bit of ‘which groups go where’ communication before the pull.
Because nobody will assemble a mythic raid pug that might fail. The leaders will at minimum be checking RIO progress, possibly warcraftlogs, to ensure they aren’t picking up people who aren’t likely to handle it.
Which basically means that your sample is biased because it is already drawing from the top few percent of the player base in terms of raid progression.
Now if you took a selection of people who are maybe 8 or 9 of 9 heroic and 440+ geared (i.e. a typical heroic raiding guild), I suspect you’d find that you wouldn’t get many groups who instantly stomped the bosses 
However, ngl, the first three bosses aren’t that hard, relatively speaking. I am put in mind of mythic Ra’den, and what a monster that guy felt like - and the first 3 in Aberrus are just nothing like that.
Amalgamation Chamber in particular stands out because my group keeps reaching a point where it’s taking a while, but nobody is dying and there doesn’t seem to be a mechanic that’s going to wipe us any time soon, so we just whittle it down slowly 
It does seem to ramp up quite hard after this though. Blizz seem to be tossing us a bone with one mythic vault slot per week being accessible, the 2nd and 3rd will be something to fight for.
That isn’t happening. I’ve joined on a 9/9HC alt on the basis of a ‘main’s progress’ note when I forgot that the character that had the progress wasn’t set as my main in RIO.
I’ve also joined with a friend who had no mythic progress by just putting my own progress in the note. (I’ve known people do that in previous tiers to get friends into ‘curved only’ groups for last boss HC, but I wasn’t sure that I’d get away with it for mythic.)
But that’s just an aside, really.
Our ‘typical heroic raiders’ are pretty much all 445+ and have been for a while. I can’t imagine there are many HC raiders who don’t also do M+ and don’t have access to 447 crafted gear. I agree that they wouldn’t instantly stomp the bosses, but it shouldn’t take them too long to get the hang of the new mechanics (Amalgamation Chamber has the most complicated new mechanic and errors there aren’t anything like as punishing as they were when we had it on Anduin at lower difficulties). There will still be no dps check to speak of because they’re well geared.
The issue with the lockout… well, there are two. The issues with the lockout are:
People like me who aren’t raiding with their guild for whatever reason aren’t able to join a ‘first 3 blast’ pug and then join a progress group for one of the later bosses in the same week. We either have to give up on loot or give up on the idea of progress.
Mythic raiding communities (and I’ve even seen some guilds in this situation) that have a core membership and fill with pugs struggle to make any progress beyond the first vault slot because the ‘first 3 blast’ people leave after 3 bosses and it’s impossible to find people to progress further because most people are already on someone else’s lockout.
Are you saving hero for phase 2? I’ve noticed some people using it on phase 1.
Yeah, I agree. I wouldn’t want to do Experiments or Rashok without voice comms. My feeling is that making the earliest bosses accessible, and having them drop a strong piece of loot or two, is intended to encourage people to get into mythic raiding. The trouble is, they just get a taster and not a chance to get really into it because the lockout blocks them from progressing.
Removing the lockout at the same time as realm restrictions are removed would be fair, I think.