If there is one thing that makes me sad as a Raidleader of a newly formed raidgroup in Shadowlands is that Raids are incredibly unfriendly to Raidsizes below 15 players.
Of course 20 Raidmembers is now the gold standard and it seems adding more people only seems to make it easier. Pretty much every successful Raidgroup in Normal and Heroic seems to be running 30 people.
I currently have 11 people in my Raidgroup and we are stretched thin already. We barely get a 2-3-9 Raidcomp together on Raid days, because we are focused on building our Raidgroup so we try to only take german players who are on a similar progress level as we are. That obviously gimps us, but the alternative is taking anyone who is either 0/10 or 10/10 Normal and both would be detrimental to our progress as a group.
Why are 10 man raids no longer a thing? 2/2/6 was perfectly fine but ever since Legion it seems like taking only 10 Raid members pretty much makes raiding impossible, since DPS downtime will be so high because an individual Raidmember gets hit by a movement mechanic every 20 seconds or so. You have only 8 non-Tank members yet there is still 3-4 people being hit by mechanics. It sucks. Boss kills take forever. Any soft enrage mechanics screw over healers all the time.
This wouldnt be an issue in itself, but then I look over to 30 man raids and see that you can simply zerg bosses down because of your sheer “advantage” in numbers. You dont have 15 people getting hit by mechanics, but rather like 6-8, a much smaller percentage than for a smaller raid.