Has WOW changed your optimal raid size

[Neppy]

I used to think that 40 person raids were going to seem "smaller" and less coglike than 72 man everquest raids. I found that 40 people still seemed very much like any given person contributed very little and still very strongly supported the "drone syndrome" of a large portion of the players simply needing to follow very simplistic directions.

What size raids should Vanguard support for endgame content? I find myself drifting more and more towards prefering raids in the 15-20 player range. Is Zul gurub type content the future of raiding in MMOGs, rather than anything large scale? Is WOW shooting itself in the foot by alternating between 20 and 40 man rather than just focusing on one? It certainly seems to be biting them in the ass as far as having logical item progression goes.

[DisgruntledOrangatang]

Same...I like 20 AND making sure the raid content utilizing all these people. A few 40 man encounters do this (domo), but most do not. I mean fuck you could most likely kill geddeon with 3 ranged DPS 1 warrior and 6 healers. We need encounters that constantly utilize every person. Even if it just means contributing DPS...because then if they don't you won't be able to finish off the mob(s) before their abilities do you in. ZG seems to have it perfect.

[Phoenix]

Its all about content design. Just look at the 10th ring war in EQ. it could very easily support 300+ people. Thats what WoW needs some sort of. Quests or raids where you assault a castle or something similair.

[Zehn - Vhex]

I'd like a semi-dynamic system, whereby you are limited to something like 20 or 30 or whatever on your first attempts, but after that you can bring up to 40~50 people once you "conquer" a zone.

The problem with raid caps is it sucks to log on and be one of the people "not needed" that night. Sucked in EQ during LDoN being one of three active necro's. Never needed more then one, so we usually ended up /randoming to see who got to go.

Need some miracle designer to come up with a way to not leave out a few excess people, yet not make encounters zergable. Maybe have the raid cap increase by a few people after you beat a zone so that farming it becomes less tedious and any 'extra's' may actually have something to do.

[Metranon]

i think one of the lessons of WoW and EQ is that INSTANCED raiding content is best limited to 15-20 people maximum

massive world raid events can be pretty fun, especially when you throw PvP in the mix. However, current server technology is evidently unable to support events of this scale (see Azuregos on PvP servers)

[ex-genj]

I would say 30 max. 40 is WAY too much. Its funny how it took us until ZG to really find out who is coasting and picking up free epix, and who actually knows how to play the game.

[Froofy-D]

However, current server technology is evidently unable to support events of this scale (see Azuregos on PvP servers)

I play my friend's priest occasionally for a Kel'Thuzad raid guild. Dealing with a raid mob and at the same time fighting an entire alliance guild is certainly a hell of a lot of fun. But yeah the lag is horrible. Insta casts become 3-5 seconds. 80+ people in an outdoor zone just doesnt work too well.

I think 40 is a good number. No more should be in an MMOG raid than you can comfortably fit health bars on your screen for. So ~40 IMHO.

[Mimirswell]

In a non instanced environment, I'd like to see a system designed primarily for 25 approx. man raids. In addition to this though, I'd like to see a well crafted alliance system for occasional raids that are 50man, 100man, 200man? raids. Something that rewards people that compete for content (at the 25 man level) yet stay respectful enough to be able to pull off large scale alliance for big events.

[Clericnon2boxed]

Maybe siege weapons are going to improve on the everyones needed aspect.

If you need 2 people for one catapult, and 3 for a tank, you suddenly have only 8 units for the battle and it will seem more dense and involved. It will be more clearly visible which tank or catapultteam performs well.

So yea split up those 40 people into smaller units that need to function and the drone feeling might go away.

[Qhue]

Hell I think even 20 is too many for enjoyment these days. My guild is made up of (mostly) decent players and the mean age of the players is somewhere in the late 20s...even still we have a hard time with the Red Light Green Light (RLGL) content in WoW.

By RLGL content I mean the few events where you need absolutely EVERYONE paying attention. These are the places where the thing you need to do is very minor but all you need is one seemingly illiterate yahoo to ruin the event for everyone. I mean we have huge bells-n-whistles UI AddOns for the sole purpose of getting people to notice they have Living Bomb or Burning Adrenaline on them. They could easily just see the flashing icon on their screen, but experience tells us otherwise.

Perfect example of RLGL is the Hakkar fight in ZG. Here we have an event where more than half the raid has only ONE function to perform and that is to stand in the green glowy cloud every so often.

That's it.

Just look for the pretty green cloud and go stand in it.

Yet midway through the event you see raidchat full of people yelling, screaming, begging, bargaining with the devil himself to just get soandso and bumblefuck to walk their asses 5 feet over to the cloud.

Retarded chimpanzees could accomplish this task, hell Duke my Nintendog could manage it if I had a stylus in hand and could click on the green cloud and then pat him on the head while he shivvered with poison a few times.

RLGL stuff makes me weep because it proves how very very little some people are paying any sort of attention to the game unless it is in their immediate best interest. I'd much rather just raid with a much smaller group of competant and present individuals.

[Warrian]

Originally Posted by ex-genj

I would say 30 max. 40 is WAY too much. Its funny how it took us until ZG to really find out who is coasting and picking up free epix, and who actually knows how to play the game.

I'm in 100% agreement. It really blew my mind to find out how some of these people in my guild are clueless regarding aggro ranges.

[frott]

15-20 is a good number.

ABasin shows how one dickhead on guard duty afking to take care of baby can blow the entire match.

ZGurub can show how one idiot who, say, goes for max mana versus any semblance of mana regen via potion, X/5 items can fuck up an encounter.

The issue with both is, unfortunately, where do the wacky off the wall classes fit in? The feral druids and shadowpriests?

[Fammaden]

I pretty much posted my thoughts on this in the ZG thread. As I have mentioned a million times, I went to FFXI for a year between EQ and WoW. WoW didn't change my opinion of raid sizes and neither did FFXI really. I knew from EQ that 40 was too big and nothing more than a few groups would ever be acceptable to me again barring some dramatic innovation in technology or game play. FFXI just hammered the point home. "Raids" in that game were three groups or 18 people IIRC. Of course the dynamis zones required something more akin to what we would consider a raid size force. I didn't like dynamis as much for that reason but they were still pretty cool encounters.

One problem was that everyone on my server pretty much formed alliances to do the dynamis since most linkshells were built for smaller sized expeditions. Sort of the opposite of the issue ZG raises in WoW where most standing raid guilds stacked their roster around the 40 man raid. Anyway, coming from FFXI's 18 man raids, of course 40 seemed as bloated as a post revolutionary Orwellian pig. I think that larger sized PvE raiding inevitably turns into an exercise that is as equally defined by number crunching and bureaucratic adminsistration as it is by player cooperation and execution. I think most of us have seen at some point or another how much smoother raids can be with minimal numbers. The more players you add to a group, the sloppier that group will become since there are more people to take up the slack for each others' sloppiness.

I think that VG could take a page from FFXI by making their "golden mobs" that only your group can engage the standard in the raid game. I don't like the community killer aspect of making every encounter from the newbie yard up lock-on-engage but for bosses it makes sense. Especially for contested mobs, but even if the boss is spawned from a quest then encounter locking is a good way of ensuring that only the appointed raid size can take it on. If you can only engage Gornaire with a maximum of 18 people and she is spawned by a quest rather than a first-to-tag-wins mob, then no one is going to gimp the shit out with 120 zerglings. This is the kind of direction I would hope to see VG go with for raiding. Locking the boss mob to a capped raid of hopefully no more than 30 members and ideally 20-24 depending on how group sizes work. A mix of contested spawns and quest-spawned bosses with that kind of system is as much as I would expect from a good raid MMO given the history and current limitations of the genre.

[Hardcore Cracka]

I like 40 man raids because I can afk to take a shit if need be (excluding boss fights...yeah right who am I kidding, I'm a fucking paladin). Screw having to pay attention for hours at a time. While it is more fun in shorter intervals, it gets exhausting after maybe 3 hours.

I'm fully in favor of more encounters like Domo where you have to pay attention for a smaller portion of time, because that's more fun. But on Garr/Shazzrah/Geddon (and most MC trash) I'm literally standing around doing nothing because I contribute nothing, except sometimes decursive until my finger bleeds. But I don't think that has anything to do with raid size as much as poor encounter design.

Now that I think about it, BWL is pretty much what I described. You have minimal trash, coupled with several encounters where you have to pay attention (Razorgore, Vael, Chromaggus, Nef) and a few where you can download your porno and eat your pizza (drakes + ezmode Broodlord). Damn. If that zone wasn't released totally unfinished and bugged out the ass with half decent drops, it would be pretty sweet.

[Surlok TP]

Originally Posted by ex-genj

I would say 30 max. 40 is WAY too much. Its funny how it took us until ZG to really find out who is coasting and picking up free epix, and who actually knows how to play the game.

In EQ you could tell who was or wasn't simply by grouping with them.Probably half our guild sat in the don't group with them category,and many of them knew it even.Numbers were needed however and even the simplest of minds was capable of understanding stand here and press this button every X seconds.

It's always been my understanding that everyone in Raid guilds knew this,that it never took more than maybe 5 people to actaully beat an encounter in EQ the rest of the Raid were basically just BOT's capable of taking simple commands.You would actually probably find more success in having 5 people and 67 NPC bots in EQ as the bots weren't likely to get up and get a pizza pop mid CoH rot.

The thing that set guilds apart was typically whether or not the people taking instructions were capable of acting outside of them in case shit hit the fan,and how well they played off each other in such instances.This wasn't something even specific to high end EQ,even someone in a one day a week raid guild could recognize the behaviour.

It's sprising to me that it would take something like ZG for the playerbase to realize this,I thought it was a pretty commonly accepted thing,that everyone knew and just didn't talk about,for fear of one of their less than capable guildies reading it.