MMOs - A Raid Bench.

[Fayvren]

Clearly tuning for 25 and allowing 40 to actually fight the boss doesnt work in making raid zones last longer than a week.

The reason 25 mans are harder to manage is the number of people combined with enrage timers or ridiculous aoe dmg. If you hvae 12 DPS classes in a fight, subbing out 2 healer for 2 more DPS is a 16% increase in your raids DPS. Bringing in multiple tanks for fights where only 1 tank is necessary is doable if all your best players are on but for most guilds thats simply not going to be the case for most people out there.

Horse nails it on the head in that 25 man raids are miles better for hardcore super guilds that can get 95-99% attendance from its top members. You get 30ish players that show up every day and you're good.

Amagzingly however for a guild that even has 85% attendance, the musical chairs aspect of trying to eek out 1% - 2% more dps is irritating beyond belief. Having more than 25+ guys on but for some reason missing 1-2 of the guys you want / need and not being able to raid is just demoralizing when you try to manage a guild.

[Horse]

Originally Posted by Goliath

Bad for a WoW environment where there are plenty of people to go around. You won't have 8 zerg guilds like you did on Veeshan or Tunare, you'll have 25.

Although, they can add the mechanics that EQ did later in its life where mobs got progressively harder with more people.

Why is it bad for more people to be in a successful raid? It's fucking instanced. Is the argument that it would hurt the 2 or 3 25 man raid's feelings on a server in spite of the 25 50 man raids? Let me type the numbers on my calculator...

[Fayvren]

Why is it bad for more people to be in a successful raid? It's fucking instanced. Is the argument that it would hurt the 2 or 3 25 man raid's feelings on a server in spite of the 25 50 man raids? Let me type the numbers on my calculator...

Well the idea being that if you can zerg it or ezmode an encounter people will. Including even the top guilds. They might not bring 50 but they'll continue to keep adding players until they can kill a boss rather than getting better at the encounter with a lean crew. This combined with the "competitive" world first aspect of raiding would make people angry.

[Horse]

They'd still have "world first non-pussy guild who looted the legendary that only drops if you bring 25 people." What else do they have anyway? And who cares besides them?

[Twobit Whore]

Blizzard cares. SWP would have been cleared on day 1 with 40 people. Personally I don't care for these timelocked gates and would rather people have to beat the encounters to progress, not beat the encounters then sit at a door for 2 weeks.

[Zehn - Vhex]

The current system is fine. The job system would allow them to implement more 'requires stacked raid fights.'

You people just need to suck less. That's all.

[Zehn - Vhex]

I mean fuck, if we're going to allow 40 people on encounters tuned for 25, why don't we just ask Blizzad to implement cheat codes? "Okay guys, this boss is tough so everyone type in "Makataisafaggot" and turn on your infinite life."

Go play on an emu server. Rickshaw this piece of shit.

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Horse

They'd still have "world first non-pussy guild who looted the legendary that only drops if you bring 25 people." What else do they have anyway? And who cares besides them?

Anyone who wants even a small sense of integrity in their game design? And I'm currently wasting my fucking time on a server where the "best" guild can't even break the top 1000 on wowjutsu, so I'm certainly not one of "them".

[Pinski]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

The current system is fine. The job system would allow them to implement more 'requires stacked raid fights.'

You people just need to suck less. That's all.

I'm all for that idea. Need another healer instead of DPS? Have somebody change jobs and hope they have gear to manage it!

[Izuldan]

Originally Posted by Pinski

I'm all for that idea. Need another healer instead of DPS? Have somebody change jobs and hope they have gear to manage it!

You can already do that. It's called changing specs, instead of jobs. You can have your feral druid go resto, your ret pally go holy, your shadow priest go holy, etc...

The problem is it costs gold, and it's a pain in the ass to gear for more than 1 spec.

Really it's a half-assed way to have multiple roles compared to the FFXI job system. The limitations are readily obvious if you have played both games.

[James]

But then you move into a system where everyone is basically required to have every job available. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and would making talent specs/gearing up less of an issue than it is now really help anything? You'd have to move the raid game into basically requiring multiple gearsets per character, which means increasing loot drops, which means devaluing each piece of loot. It's a slippery slope I'd rather not see the game go down, personally, and can only get worse the longer you let it happen.

Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather see the game move towards a more...defined ruleset. Versatile characters are great, but when you go from a Shaman that has three specs that are competitive in virtually every area of the game to a Warrior that has a spec that's only useful inside of raids and maybe a few nearly exploitative situations otherwise, you kind of start to wonder what the fuck their plans are for character design. I'm more on the side of things that everyone should have one spec that does PvE great, one spec that does PvP great, and one spec that adds some fairly fantastic utility. Or something along those lines. Make it obvious which spec should shine in which situation. It would solve a lot of things, I think, especially if done correctly.

[Draegan]

I'd rather have have defined rolls. Warrior should be a tank. Three talent trees with 3 different types of tanking styles. Then make tanking in PVP and solo more viable.

[Kreugen]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I hate talents. You take a class that has xyz abilities, and turns it into a class that can only do x, y, or z. I think changing roles should be as simple as being out of combat and swapping a stance and gear, period. Fuck the warrior already has it dating back to pre-talent WoW, and that's how the shit should have stayed.

For these reasons I changed to a class whose best raid spec is the same as its group/solo spec and is passable in PVP. I've been much happier since. The only place a rogue suffers is the goddamn infuriating weapon spec nonsense. Sorry, these other dozen 100 dps weapons are trash, its gotta be a sword. I could melt down all of these rotting fucking daggers and make a sword bigger than any faggoty anime retardation, yet I'm pimping out SSC and ZA weapons. Bleh.

Anyway, back to the topic. If you're going to have such small raid sizes, your classes need to be less specialized. That way encounter #1 doesn't need exactly x of y spec class z, and then half of them have to run off and change their shit for encounter #2. Maybe you have four tanks, which is fine for encounter #3, but sucks ass in everything else - so they swap to DPS mode without having to fly to a fucking trainer or swap in the two DPS that are jerking off outside the zone.

So, yeah, allow faster talent swapping and you won't need five people sitting in reserve to swap around fight to fight.

[Fayvren]

But then you move into a system where everyone is basically required to have every job available. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and would making talent specs/gearing up less of an issue than it is now really help anything? You'd have to move the raid game into basically requiring multiple gearsets per character, which means increasing loot drops, which means devaluing each piece of loot. It's a slippery slope I'd rather not see the game go down, personally, and can only get worse the longer you let it happen.

Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather see the game move towards a more...defined ruleset. Versatile characters are great, but when you go from a Shaman that has three specs that are competitive in virtually every area of the game to a Warrior that has a spec that's only useful inside of raids and maybe a few nearly exploitative situations otherwise, you kind of start to wonder what the fuck their plans are for character design. I'm more on the side of things that everyone should have one spec that does PvE great, one spec that does PvP great, and one spec that adds some fairly fantastic utility. Or something along those lines. Make it obvious which spec should shine in which situation. It would solve a lot of things, I think, especially if done correctly.

I think all the issues brought up in this thread is really the sum of all the decisions made along the way in regards to character development. Talents and gear set differentiation might just have TOO much of an effect on what type of character you are. I would imagine that talents initially were made so you could differentiate and customize your character based on how you specced, you could make your guy unique. But at this point is there really any uniqueness to the whole thing? Pretty much all good raiding mages spec 1 way, pvp mages spec another way. Same with every "sub class" in wow. Cookie cutter subtypes. They've basically subdivided each class into 2-3 classes that are templates anyway.

Goind forward I wonder if games should explore systems where your talents / specs gave you spells / abilities that slightly improve your play in certain areas. Lightwell, circle of healing, piercing howl etc. Blessing of sanctuary etc. Abilities that aren't game breaking but would be useful to groups / raids in different situations. Instead right now, because of all the multipliers involved speccing one way makes you 50-75% a better healer/dpser or tank.

Same can be said for gear. Tank gear is awesome for tanking, but pretty much worhtless for dps. Healing gear vs dps gear the same. Characters are already defined by their class and the abilities they have, it would be nice to just have all general purpose gear for warriors that allows them to tank and dps or priests to heal / dps according to where they should be on the heirarchy. There basically arent any real hybrids in this game. Youre a tank/dps/healer until you respec, regear up and if you're lucky still viable at what you do.

EDIT: Kreugen beat me to it... talents are just a pain in the ass.

[Twobit Whore]

As unpopular as it would be, I think they should restrict respeccing instead of making it easier. It should be limited to a few points a week or month instead of total respeccing. You need to allow enough that someone can correct a misplaced point but not enough that a feral druid can go full resto for 5g. If you want people to be unique then make them unique, not just a current spec that can be changed on a whim.