10 man raid progression

#0 - April 17, 2009, 6:20 a.m.

I'm getting very confused about the progression paths in WoW now. The way GC said it was

Q u o t e:

We consider 10 and 25 separate progression paths. Here are different ways to raid:

A) Heroic 5 player -> 10 player Naxx -> 10 player Ulduar -> 10 player Ulduar hard
B) Heroic 5 player -> 25 player Naxx -> 25 player Ulduar -> 25 player Ulduar hard
C) Hybrid. You focus on A but sometimes pug B, or focus on B but run A on off nights. The one possible exception could be that if you are just stuck on 25 Ulduar hard, you can get upgrades by running 10 Ulduar hard if you are up to the challenge.

If we made a mistake in LK, it was that path B was too easy. That meant that A felt like a waste to some players because the loot was inferior. We think it will work better in Ulduar.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14637425299&sid=1&pageNo=6#107

I'm in a 10 man raiding guild, we only stick with the option A, sure we did Sarth 25 with only 10 but it was because we were wanting a challenge. We wanted a small group with no drama, you know the stuff you usually get in 25man raiding guilds.
Anyway We were all very excited when 3.1 came out. and we could head into Ulduar. We beat FL without any real problems. We all had some 213 gear from Maly and the 25man Sarth we did, but mostly we are in 10 man naxx gear. But mostly that fight seems about execution, not gear.

So we moved on to the next 3 bosses, Ignis the Furnace Master, Razorscale. After about 2 hours of wipes we decided to call it and come back Tonight. Well we found out the trash on Ignis is tuned a little high for 10 man, which explains why we had so much trouble getting by it, and Razorscale had a bug where he would just nuke people down. Which we expirenced 1st hand. So tonight we moved on to XT-002.
After about 3 wipes where we got him to 50% and he enraged I had a very familiar felling. It was that feeling of we are way under geared for this place. It was the same feeling I got when we were trying to do SSC before we even had all of Kara on farm back in the day.

Here is what the raid Progression feels like
Heroic 5 player -->Naxx 10man -->Naxx 25man-->Ulduar 10man
So what do we do now? We are a 10 man guild, we have no desire to move into 25 man content, but we don't have the gear to move forward, and now no place to move backwards to.

Ghostcrawler

#13 - April 17, 2009, 6:57 p.m.

You should be able to do 10-player Ulduar with 10-player Naxx gear. You will most likely find it more challenging than Naxx however.

The encounter team has been making dozens of tweaks to the content when they find something bugged or over or under-tuned. It's a little hard to tell at this stage if players who are struggling are running into bugs or overtuned encounters or if they just haven't mastered the mechanics yet. There are no tank and spank boss encounters in Ulduar.

While a few guilds have cleared 25-player Ulduar, those are very skilled, very dedicated guilds. This should not be interpreted as 25-Ulduar being srs bzns. What I mean is that both 10 and 25 are challenging.

Ghostcrawler

#35 - April 18, 2009, 3:12 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Has anyone taken into account that balancing 25-mans when people have 25-man gear is okay, but balancing a 10-man around those people with 25-man gear is not okay and is a very likely scenario with what actually happened?

No, it was not.

I think some of you are assuming that since you aren't rolling over the 10-player version that the 25 version must somehow be easier. It's not. Yes it is being cleared, but so far by guilds like Ensidia, Vodka and Premonition. Those are some of the best of the best, and none of them managed it in a three hour run. They will however get to the point where they can farm it, and so will you.

Hard modes are a different story.

And again, in those cases where something is overtuned or bugged, the designers are getting fixes turned around really quickly. Give it a few more tries before you declare it too challenging.