"Why?", you ask? Well, I was hoping you would.
In condensed form, the changes are this:
10 man raids are sharing a lockout period with 25 man raids.
The bosses will be roughly the same difficulty (both offering heroic modes, of course)
10 man and 25 man raids will be dropping the same item levels of loot. (IMO, this is why the major fuss over the death of 25 mans, but my next point swings the pendelum the other way)
25 man raids will drop more loot, more hero points (the new version of the badge system in place currently), and possibly even more gold.
Now then... If 25 mans are going to drop more loot for the same boss kill, but will share a lockout with 10 man raids, wouldn't you think people would try to spend that extra 20 minutes or so finding 15 more people? Perhaps, perhaps not. Here's the rub though. Blizzard has set this up in an attempt to equalize the progression field between guilds who raid 10 man content (almost) exclusively, and guilds who raid 25 man content (almost) exclusively. Some guilds are only large enough to have a solid 10 man group, and they shouldn't be held back from progression simply because they're a smaller guild.
That is a point I whole heartedly agree with. Not every progression guild has to have 300 members on at any given point in time to be able to.. well.. progress. The backdraft of this, however, falls in the fact that 25 mans, while dropping the same -level- of gear will still drop more gear. "Why exactly is this a problem," you ask? "Surely it would make sense to have 25 mans drop more gear, as there's more players and likely a broader set of classes within the raid.".. Well of course, that's absolutely true, on both points. But again, if they're trying to equalize how quickly a guild groups up, then there's more likelihood that a 25 man group will gear up faster simply because.. well.. more loot drops, and more valor points. More points per kill means you can buy your tiered items faster, letting you get to the next progression path quicker... Right?
So, while I am still reserving final judgement, I am waiting to see what it is that Blizzard does to equalize this problem a bit more. Already, they have stated that there will be a cap on the number of points you can earn from raiding/heroics/whatever in a week. If the cap isn't obscenely high, then this problem might not be as bad as I was expecting... However, if it's too low then people will complain (you KNOW they will) that they can't get their gear fast enough, and can't progress fast enough.
But then... I suppose, for some people, nothing will ever stop the
... Thanks for reading.
I'm not really sure how to feel about it. I think it will change a lot within the current guilds and I can see problems. I guess all we can do is wait, but I'm not sure why they wanted to change it. Imo I thought their current system was fine.
ReplyDelete@antlergirl, I can understand their -reasoning- for changing it. They wanted to make it so smaller guilds who might only be able to field a solid 10 man group could still progress at a decent rate without resorting to pugging 15 others, or merging with another guild.
ReplyDeleteThe reasoning behind it is sound, to me, but their ideas still make me raise my eyebrows quite a bit. I'm hardly an "end-game" or "progression" raider, so it won't have all that much effect on me anyway, but that's beside the point.