AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Don't worry, so do I. I'd rather smack some raid boss than some other random players.

Although it IS funny when I deny someone trying to gank me. Pummel>Mage

Having had two days to ponder about the subject. I reject my statement somewhat. I've always been curious about trying to run 2-3 raiding toons. This would give me the opportunity to raid with my warrior, hunter, and shaman, without feeling like I'm neglecting my warrior in order to do so.

EDIT: I wonder exactly how the percentages will break down... what percentage of people doing 10s and those doing 25s. Even without the gear incentive, I still prefer 25s for the stereotypical "more epic" feeling.

I don't think that 25 man raiding will die. Seriously, just look at the number of people who are crying that this will kill 25 raiding. If all the people who are concerned about 25s dying, continue to raid in 25s... well that's certainly enough to make more than a few guilds. Though I definitely suspect the number of 25 guilds is going to decrease.

I think it's the way the blue post is worded. It says 10 man and 25 man raids will be similar in difficulty. So the argument is why bother doing one when you can just do the other?

Then again, once they've actually tested these ideas, changes might occur so we'll have to see.

Also then again, people complain about anything. I'm still amused by all the drama the Celestial Steed caused.

For me, it's pretty straightforward.

Naxx is an excellent example cause it's a 40/25/10 man raid:
Walk into Naxx with 40 people... Wow, this place is cramped!
Walk into Naxx with 25 people... Wow, this place is kinda spacious...
Walk into Naxx with 10 people... Wow, uh... what are we doing here again?

Naxx was designed to "fit" 40 people inside. All the level 60 raids were except ZG and AQ20. Likewise, all the BC raids were designed to "fit" 25 people inside, except for Kara and ZA.

Notice if you put 10 people in the normal BC raids, or 20 people in any of the normal vanilla raids, the place feels empty, like you don't have enough people. But neither Kara, ZA, ZG, or AQ20 suffers from that.

It's an issue of scaling. In WotLK... EoE, OS, VoA, Ulduar, ToC, and IC were all designed to fit 25 people in them. If you go into them with 10 people, the place just feels freaking empty. Not as bad as Naxx did, but still pretty empty.

Some of the fights (any fight that made strategic use of a large room) just felt hilariously goofy in 10 man version. The only 10 man raids that didn't feel goofy when you ran them with 10 people were Kara and ZA, and that's because they were designed for 10 people.

There is one positive thing that I could see coming from the death of 25 mans... The entire raiding scene has felt like crap in WotLK because it tries to make fights and the raid instance compatible with 2 different sized groups. There were a few fights that stood out as working well regardless (Mimi, Yogg, and Hodir come to mind), but even then they felt stupid if you weren't on 25 man... Thus, if 25 man raiding dies in this expansion, it means in the next expansion, we'll only see a single raid size, and FINALLY start seeing raids designed for a specific number of people again, which should drastically improve raiding quality even if it's for a smaller number of people.

I wouldn't complain. I kinda liked the raid design of Kara and ZA, even if I prefer 25 man raiding over 10 man.

I hate 25man raiding, but I lead my first ICC25 with my guild and another guild, first wing yay stuff happened. Until we got the weekly quest, we had to get the blight from the two bosses. we did it. it was funny. Also my friends paladin, who is Ezbakeoven aka Jackn aka Jackadin, I bought him the battered hilt, and a few days later it's replaced with the 25man icc sword

I thought a new advantage (at least for me) of the forced single progression path that dual-lockouts creates.

We already know that the number of 10 man raids is going to increase.

Now everyone knows what the hardest role to get a spot in heroics as, is of course, as a DPS. But do you know what the hardest role to get a spot in raids is, especially in WotLK? The answer my friend is quite simple. A tank. Do you realize what percentage of a raid is tanks? 2 out of 25 players, 8%. And Blizzard made more people than ever want to start becoming tanks with all the tanking changes.

But wait, how many are in 10 man guilds? 20% of the raid.

*gasp* This might actually see tanks desirable and more frequently recruited, enough so that there might even *gasp* Be a demand for tanks. That'd be the first time since Vanilla that tanks were actually in high demand.

Don't you need 3 tanks for a bunch of bosses?

Not since BC.

Some WotLK 25 fights used 3 tanks. But they were all designed where the third tank was not required to be a traditional tank. Every fight I can think if, you could just throw a DPS Death Knight, or a Ret Pally something in front of it, and the person would survive just fine cause either the boss didn't crit, or meleed weakly and did most of his damage in spell damage.

The only fights that didn't use a caster tank (4 horsemen) that is coming to mind was the Iron Assembly. And Stormcaller Brundir basically didn't require a tank cause he melees for like 500 flipping damage before supercharge. On 10 man, you could almost let him sit there un-tanked and ignore him entirely until you managed to kill one of the other 3, as long as he wasn't running up into the middle of your group trying to cast Overload. And for the most part he's pretty pop flyin' to stand their casting lulzy weak Chain Lightnings.

On 25 man, where his chain lightning hits harder, you could just throw daisies near any class with interrupts on him, and still leave him untanked. What's he going to do? Melee Crit a rogue for 2000 damage?

You need 3 tanks for some fight in ICC, Putricide is an example, Marrowgar, maybe Lady Deathwhisper. We bring 3 actual tanks and have one dps on fights where they arent needed, sometimes they stay in tank gear/spec just in case one tank dies.

Also I don't know what its like on your server Karilyn but tanks were in high demand at the beginning of WotLK. Why do you think they made DKs able to tank? There was a shortage, have you ever noticed that the time for a tank to wait in the random dungeon finder is near instant while everyone else is like 10-15 mins?

Tanks were NEVER in demand on my server. EVER. In Heroics sure, but NEVER in raids. DKs were made because Blizzard is fucking retarded and thought "Oh hey, DKs will be able to tank as DPSers! They will DPS in raids and tank in heroics the same way they DPS, and that solves the heroic tank shortage!"

I haven't heard, on any server, of tanks being in demand for raiding, even in BC. I remember the Warrior forum was full of countless geared and competent tanks frustrated for their inability to find any raiding guild that was recruiting a tank, even keeping an open mind to transferring between servers to find a guild. The only time, in the history of WoW, where there was a raid tank shortage, was for the original Four Horseman in Naxx40, and that's because it needed 8 tanks in maintank quality gear.

My server was particularly terrible though. It never had more than 3 simultaneous raiding guilds (and they keep cannibalizing and restructuring every 6 months or so because there aren't enough raiders on the server). At most, that's like 9 tanks. It is ABSURDLY competitive getting into those guilds. Each of the raiding guilds was full of tanks who were DPSing or Healing just so they could raid. I know my guild had two pallies, a druid, and two death knights, who all wanted to tank but weren't allowed to, AND we had not only 2 main tanks (thank god I was one of them), but also 2 other backup tanks.

Count that. Out of 20 raiders (because near the end of WotLK we started having recruitment issues and our numbers fell to low to raid without pugging), we had 9 tanks. 7 tanks who were forced to not tank in order to be able to raid.

It was just as bad in the other raiding guild. There were only two stable guilds at that time; unfortunately my guild was next to be cannibalized due to it's inability to field 25 raiders anymore.

EDIT: I'm probably going to transfer to Proudmoore when I resubscribe for Cataclysm. WoW's GBLT singularity server yay.

Why Proudmoore?

I'm a lesbian in case you forgot (how could you? )

Proudmoore, partially because of it's name, partially because of Taint, has become *drumroll please* THE GBLT SERVER in WoW *cheering and flashing lights and all that jazz*. It already had that title only a few months after retail. But over the years, it's managed to get like 50-80% of it's server population (possibly even higher) as GBLT, on both Horde and Alliance side. And it's not exactly a low pop server.

It's also a pretty highly ranked server for raiding. It's not the best US server... Blackrock and Mal'Ganis hold that title, pushing somewhere between 50-70 competent Horde raiding guilds. But unlike those two servers, Proudmoore doesn't have as bad of queue times, and it still fields a fair number of raiding guilds. Albeit only 18 on Horde Side. It has like 50 Alliance guilds, but I don't really wanna faction change to Alliance. I like being a Tauren.

Female Tauren Warrior = THE BEST

Ive been in a good guild whos used me as a tank so I never experienced a raiding problem, it was most prevalent in random heroics and pugs as most of the tanks already were in established guilds and did not want to do stuff outside of them. If anything we had a healer shortage, only had 1 holy pally, 2-3 druids and 2-3 priests for the longest time, no shammies.

Yup. Sounds about right. I was in a good guild 3 times throughout BC and WotLK. But they got cannibalized before long (seriously, I don't think there's ever been a guild on my server that lasted a year).

There was always a healer shortage in raiding. Never a tanking shortage though. But in a way, the real shortage was in skilled DPSers.

If you check what guilds are recruiting... Like, below 40,000 guilds tend to be looking for tanks (cause most tanks won't have anything to do with guilds that spends all night wiping on Anub'Rekhan). Guilds below 6,000, tend to have solid tanks, and are generally short a few healers, and generally clear most non-hardmode content with some difficulty.

Guilds above about 6,000 tend to be looking for DPSers, because they have a solid tanking/healing core. So you'll see like guild recruitment listing a long list of DPSers. That's in part because those guilds are working on hard mode, and since they have a solid core, they have the flexibility to boot bad players, and cleaning up their group by adding better DPSers one by one.

If you're a good DPSer who doesn't stand in fire, finding a serious raiding guild is surprisingly easy. Your only real challenge is picking which guild raids at the time and day you want.

EDIT: Rough guild rankings of course. There's always that nice little blurred line of a few thousand ranks where the three categories overlap somewhat.

After googleing GBLT, I see