Raiding in AoC

Hi, I am Tarnish a PVE junkie who loves to Raid. I have Raided in WoW Classic/WOTLK/TBC/Cata/Legion. I also raided in SWOTR and ARK.I have also played a few MMO's, but they never stuck like WoW did.

When it comes to Raiding, I am all about it. I have been leading guilds big and small for 10 years and only recently stepped back because i am not seeing a game i feel passionately enough about raiding in to take the mantle of leading stead hardily. WoW has been slowly falling from grace and i have been sadly watching the game i once loved die in front of me. Hold me Steven.

A friend of mine told me about AoC and i have seen a ton that i found absolutely amazing. However, when it came to Raid content it appears 40 man has been the Raid size chosen. I figured i would post my experiences from leading large guilds with multiple 25m raids and 8-9 different 10m raid teams to the SWTOR raid teams with 2, 8-man raid teams.

Large Raids have a cool aesthetic feel. Leading an army wearing your banner charging in and attacking a boss. There is a different kind of enjoyment when commanding a 40-man raid (especially when they actually listen). However, you find that things tend to be sloppier because it is extremely hard to see specific players and mob mentality is much stronger. Recruitment is more difficult by how large the raid is. Larger the Raid either creates a larger bench or a larger 2nd raid team of the magnitude is yet again a bigger stress on making sure you have a leader who is actually able to lead his own 40 man and creating a process where it is worth it for that 2nd read team to be under your banner and to give players when Core Raid needs members. The Pro to large team size is generally you can run with less and it is not as dire as a smaller Raid team.

How would a 40m raid team feel/look like in open world PVE, even if the raid is like an open world Raid where there is a cave or temple you had to enter. The immediate threat i would have to track is rival guilds. Rivalries are so much fun. My guild almost always had a guild we competed with. This was friendly however we took it seriously. if we lost, we lost and if we won, we gloated/cheered. My guild always had a code of conduct and I can't speak for other servers or guilds. Open world Raiding would be insane. it would turn into PVP more than often and let's be honest there are not friendly Rivalries. I have seen how nasty those can get. Griefing with alts or bribing mercenary guilds to stop a guild and while the other slowly rising to power that can be hard to compete with. This would likely not be fun and be more frustrating. i could see this frustration breaking a lot of guilds and 40-man guilds are not easy to run. This will cause guilds and communities to break and be born at a high rate. PVP could be more beneficial or fun in an environment where it doesn't feel rewarding or too much work than it's worth. Even if this doesn't kill the raiders wanting to raid it will burn out the GM/RL's. Most raiders do not want to lead a raid or guild because it is honestly not worth the stress. Most people come to have fun and want to simply enjoy the community. I think with the current system there will be a lot less raiding and more PVP which is like my experience in SWTOR. I made it work and my guild became successful simply because we were able to raid where most did not touch the highest difficulty. This would be a tragedy in AoC.

What are solutions for 40-man world raiding? well in the current meta we could hope they get flagged and focus on defending ourselves. we could bring a secondary team to defend the main raid. The raid comp would likely require more healers to maintain the raid team in case of a PVP assault. The last option would be to depend on the corruption system. However, that could heavily effect raid times and effectiveness. I think this would be extremely deflating for a raid team who is motivated to tackle a tough boss at high performance level.

What is my opinion on Raiding in AoC? let's start by looking at WoW who went from 40m to 25m to 10m or 25m to finally 20m Raids in the name of improving the game play experience for raid members. WoW had the most success during Wotlk and Legion. Wotlk had the option of 10m raids or 25M raids. Legion implemented Mythic plus that were 5-man content that got harder every time they completed the key within the time limit. I think 10-man raids are perfect. I think the perfect Raid size is the size of 2 regular groups. So, in WoW that is 10M, in SWTOR it would be 8M. In AoC i think that would be 16. I think 16 is a bit much but i think it would make sense with the way the classes are. I also think having special bosses that require 32 or more players because he's a huge event would be cool. As a base Raid size though i think 2 groups is perfect. it's not too big and not too small. I like the template of 2 Tanks, 2 or 3 healers and 5 or 6 dps. I understand AoC has some cool support classes so 16 might work better with a 2 Tanks, 3 or 4 Healers, 2 or 3 Support, 7 or 8 DPS. This system may work out. I think 40 Man raids are fun and cool for PVP or raiding cities. For PVE it clogs coms and takes away from competitive play which I feel less want to do. Also, time to put a group together will be way shorter. Big quality of life thing for solo players or small groups of friends that do not commit to a community or guild. it will be easier to pug and lead a community if you only need 16 players to do a raid vs 40. If you have 6 friends, you only need to find 10 others vs taking on a responsibility of leading a raid team or pugging for long periods of time to get up to 40 players. Smaller raid sizes just make the game better for everyone. I am cool with a specific world event that a Raid boss of Raid bosses is summoned, and the world's mightiest heroes or foes must band together to defeat the boss. However, in general practice i believe the meta i laid out is the optimal experience. Even if large guilds and communities do flourish, it is always nicer to be able to grab a few people and go do something than requiring a large sum of players to even try.

My last Raiding topic that i think is highly important is reward/glory. Please give people something cool enough to want to strive to be the best. give them shiny cool armor or super rare items that are only achievable from doing that select high end achievement. Even if its a cosmetic or mount that can only be achieved from defeating a difficult encounter. Let us Raiders sit in glory of our past accomplishments. WoW took my glory every patch when they nerfed bosses and pushed lesser raids through content they bluntly did not deserve to down. It watered down and destroyed my glory and pride of killing a difficult boss. Swtor gave me trophies to hang on my wall in my guild flagship. I had trophies and cosmetics only the best guild on the server could provide. It also was pretty great when i walked through a main capital and everyone inspected me in awe. 2 Completely different experiences.

Thank you for taking the time reading my typos, spelling errors, bad grammar, and run on sentences. I am simply a no life Raider who really wants to see this game get "raiding" just as good as they seem to be getting the rest of the game.

-Tarnish

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Warth

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Tarnish

Warth wrote: »

deleted

Hi Warth, I do not expect that to change, however the biggest aspect would likely be the raid size more than world PVE. I think it would be fun to try and figure out a good strategy on raiding in the world. I think ARK actually gives alot of experience with this kind of thing and Classic WoW World bosses where you straight up fight and wipe each other. Its just questionable on how many raiders would be into a experience like that considering so many flake on world bosses in WoW classic. Sounds like this is going to be a very different experience.

Frassle

I've often thought the same things about 40 person raids. To me it really boils down to the experience from a 40 person raid and 20 person raid is very different. From planning and organizing to actually fighting the boss. It's almost completely different content both of which have their place. It seems silly to me to not have both experiences in a game that is so absolutely massive.

I know that Steven has spoken about not scaling content, which I think is great. I also found on the Wiki that content is tailored to groups of 40, 16 and 8 people. I think that maybe what we're both talking about is 16 person size. It also mentions the difficulty increasing based off of previous groups or raids that have beaten it.

Either way I feel like there will be content offered that is the size fit for a raid, but also less than 40 people.

Damokles

I have to agree with you on many points, but I still think that they should keep the 40-man raid size.
I dont know, most likely because I started playing WoW in TBC Black temple, but I really love the feeling of it.
And yes, it was a chore to get all 40 man together and organize them all, at least until you get a full group together for a few weeks in a row to normalize it.

Glory and Rewards is a big part of why I raid, it was something special to run around with two Glaives of Azzinoth or to see a fully equipped tank in Shattrath.

But you have to remember, the raids are not all linear and bosses are supposed to change up their ability sequences. If WoW is a choreographed dance like it is in current days, then Ashes will hopefully be a moshpit.

Debase

Don't take this as an insult, but you have to separate your experiences with WoW from the genre. Other games, many of them, have done open world, larger scale raiding successfully. Yes, there are terrible open world, larger capacity raiding experiences in some games. However, that isn't the rule. Frankly, some of my best raiding experiences have had far more than 40 players involved. Some of my favorite open world PVP experiences were fights with 6+ raids jocking for opportunities to kill a contested raid boss.

I think it would be appropriate to watch their scheme play out in the context of their game before attempting to apply experiences from WoW, EQ1/2, etc to their game.

My concerns in open world raiding in a PVP context are that they get the fundamentals right. The server architecture has to be able to hand a significant number of concurrent players who are actively fighting a raid boss and other players in the same space. They also need to prevent the cheese mechanics (camping out in the boss room and logging in once the other guild engages the mob... having respawns too close such that the opposing raid can zerg back in after they are killed in PVP multiple times, etc.

Kneczhevo

I like to raid too! Nothing like coordinating many players, and more the merrier, to an event (PvP, pve, GM event, etc.). That's why I play a MMORPGs.

What confusses me, is your "raid party" sizes.

The grouping system is based on standard military doctrain: Individual, squad, platoon, company. In game terms: toon, party, raid, guild.

This breakdown helps for communication and job assignment. Simple.

WoW came along, and people couldn't muster a 40 man raid to kill bosses, so they made smaller raid sizes. But, then people couldn't do content with smaller sizes, so they put in a difficulty level. Then people couldn't do content with those groups, so they added a dungeon finder. Omg!

Now you got me rambling. Hope you get my point, which is; if it works, don't fix it.

unknown

This content has been removed.

wArchAngel

Tarnish wrote: »

i could see this frustration breaking a lot of guilds and 40-man guilds are not easy to run. This will cause guilds and communities to break and be born at a high rate.

i've lost you at this point completely... The games that AoC took inspiration from were ran by clans and communities of 300+ concurent players under the same tag, which were managed through party leaders, which were measured by powerlevel to deliver orders. Some party leaders could take temporary lead over certain amount of people for split up situation and lead the "weaker"-in-comparisson groups into fight. Some of the big world bosses(aka raids) had fights of over 500+ people for them.

Do not compare instanced raid experience to AoC schemes, they are fundamentaly different.

Tarnish

McFrassle wrote: »

I've often thought the same things about 40 person raids. To me it really boils down to the experience from a 40 person raid and 20 person raid is very different. From planning and organizing to actually fighting the boss. It's almost completely different content both of which have their place. It seems silly to me to not have both experiences in a game that is so absolutely massive.

I know that Steven has spoken about not scaling content, which I think is great. I also found on the Wiki that content is tailored to groups of 40, 16 and 8 people. I think that maybe what we're both talking about is 16 person size. It also mentions the difficulty increasing based off of previous groups or raids that have beaten it.

Either way I feel like there will be content offered that is the size fit for a raid, but also less than 40 people.

I hope so, i do think the guild alliance and go to war functions will make this a fun clash if you like PVE and PVP. I just worry about the cons of 40 man raids weighing on the PVE community. i saw this happen with classic which i think was successful but over the long term players and leaders burned out.

Tarnish

Damokles wrote: »

I have to agree with you on many points, but I still think that they should keep the 40-man raid size.
I dont know, most likely because I started playing WoW in TBC Black temple, but I really love the feeling of it.
And yes, it was a chore to get all 40 man together and organize them all, at least until you get a full group together for a few weeks in a row to normalize it.

Glory and Rewards is a big part of why I raid, it was something special to run around with two Glaives of Azzinoth or to see a fully equipped tank in Shattrath.

But you have to remember, the raids are not all linear and bosses are supposed to change up their ability sequences. If WoW is a choreographed dance like it is in current days, then Ashes will hopefully be a moshpit.

Yeah i like a lot of the differences from a typical MMO. i always wished there were more World Bosses in MMOs. BTW Black Temple was 25M lol. The glory is what it is all about dude!

Tarnish

Debase wrote: »

Don't take this as an insult, but you have to separate your experiences with WoW from the genre. Other games, many of them, have done open world, larger scale raiding successfully. Yes, there are terrible open world, larger capacity raiding experiences in some games. However, that isn't the rule. Frankly, some of my best raiding experiences have had far more than 40 players involved. Some of my favorite open world PVP experiences were fights with 6+ raids jocking for opportunities to kill a contested raid boss.

I think it would be appropriate to watch their scheme play out in the context of their game before attempting to apply experiences from WoW, EQ1/2, etc to their game.

My concerns in open world raiding in a PVP context are that they get the fundamentals right. The server architecture has to be able to hand a significant number of concurrent players who are actively fighting a raid boss and other players in the same space. They also need to prevent the cheese mechanics (camping out in the boss room and logging in once the other guild engages the mob... having respawns too close such that the opposing raid can zerg back in after they are killed in PVP multiple times, etc.

no insult taken, I do understand what youre saying. however as you mentioned PVP effecting PVE. SO we have to be prepared to do both. I dont see a problem with that. I also dont mind a new experience. I used WoW simply because its the most successful MMO thus far. I have played a few MMOs and i would have to say there are always things that are overlooked and have a bigger impact than people think. This impact can sometimes ruin everyone's experience and ruin the hype train and players who would have tried it dont.

Imagine a classic guild joins, they have some knowledge but not all. They grind and finally get to the point they are going for a World Boss. A 16 man Group decided to engage on them and target healers. lets say this group is very average players and the gankers are good players. The gankers cause alot of frustration. lets be optimistic and say the average raid still kills the boss. they may feel the experience was too tough. Risk or time spent is not worth the time. Then WoW releases a new patch and brings out something new that people have positive thoughts about. WoW will be this games biggest take. just my thoughts and seeing WoW killers come and go. I personally would like something new to replace WoW and make WoW take a serious look at itself to fix itself.

Either way, thanks for the feedback/comment. everyone's thoughts and input is appreciated as i battle within my head about these topics.

Tarnish

Kneczhevo wrote: »

I like to raid too! Nothing like coordinating many players, and more the merrier, to an event (PvP, pve, GM event, etc.). That's why I play a MMORPGs.

What confusses me, is your "raid party" sizes.

The grouping system is based on standard military doctrain: Individual, squad, platoon, company. In game terms: toon, party, raid, guild.

This breakdown helps for communication and job assignment. Simple.

WoW came along, and people couldn't muster a 40 man raid to kill bosses, so they made smaller raid sizes. But, then people couldn't do content with smaller sizes, so they put in a difficulty level. Then people couldn't do content with those groups, so they added a dungeon finder. Omg!

Now you got me rambling. Hope you get my point, which is; if it works, don't fix it.

I agree if it works do not fix it, i do like seeing developers take risks. However i feel pretty confident that 40 man raids did not work very well. I think there is a alot of reasons they chose 20M for their current content and why expansions with smaller raids or content did the best. When blizzard cut the raid size to 25 the amount of raiding increased alot, the amount of communities increased alot. This cause TBC to be extremely successful and a clear better game than the Vanilla counterpart.

Tarnish

wArchAngel wrote: »

Tarnish wrote: »

i could see this frustration breaking a lot of guilds and 40-man guilds are not easy to run. This will cause guilds and communities to break and be born at a high rate.

i've lost you at this point completely... The games that AoC took inspiration from were ran by clans and communities of 300+ concurent players under the same tag, which were managed through party leaders, which were measured by powerlevel to deliver orders. Some party leaders could take temporary lead over certain amount of people for split up situation and lead the "weaker"-in-comparisson groups into fight. Some of the big world bosses(aka raids) had fights of over 500+ people for them.

Do not compare instanced raid experience to AoC schemes, they are fundamentaly different.

I am actually comparing the raid sizes vs my experience managing raid sizes, I am sure it is possible to have other MMOS but most of my experience comes from WoW and SWTOR where i raided at the highest possible levels. (still do). It definitely makes sense if that is what AoC is modeled after. However i wonder how successful those games were in the long term considering WoW is still on top despite making horrible decisions. People appear to be opting for a older version of WoW than these MMOs with 500 player raids. My point is kinda simple. I think the issue with larger raids is that you NEED more people. So if the populations are not as high as we hope and there are fewer servers. This is gonna put a massive strain on the smaller player base. I hope its a hit and everyone likes it and WoW dies. However in the situation where you have a smaller than anticipated population. This could really hurt the game and prevent some the coolest things i have seen in a MMO never get realized. In Classic WoW there is world bosses and i definately took that experience into account when i wrote this. For PVE players who want to down content, i see a bit of a problem with it as i noticed 80 to 90% of the population give up on world bosses because of the 5 to 6 hour battle to even get a attempt on the boss. Then if they kill the boss whats the chance they get the item they wanted. The risk vs reward deterred the population.

It is possible that AoC is not for everybody. However that would be really sad for those who don't mind taking part in the bigger raids but prefer moderate content. I know they mentioned having alot of different sized content. I tend to go for the top end and a 40 man raid is a pain to manage at the top end. I would must rather taking a couple friends and running something small and elite.

wArchAngel

The thing i once told in another similar thread but with different topic, is that the raid size doesnt really play a big role in the end, if they go with their plan, as even a labeled "40-man-raid" will be downed by 8 players given the time, unless there are strict mechanics that actually require you to have more people than that, or the entry system forces you to create a "40 man squad". The biggest challenge will be the world boss contest, not the boss him self, and it is definitelly not a "pug" friendly zone, as you wont just be able to gather a squad of 40 hypothetical people and go take down a mob that has valuable loots, since those will be times, camped and fought over by any significant guilds. And thats where the experience of the clan/guild leaders from pvp games with 300+ people clans come from, they are used to those situations, they played most of their mmo career with those rules. So skewing those bosses to "the masses", aka randomly formed squads in the cities wont make any difference by the end of the day, as strictly "pve oriented" players probably wont have any chance anyway if they are not prepared to fight for it for hours upon hours.
And if the loot wont be 'that' valuable, then it wont really matter what kind of group you bring, since it wont be contested and you will be able to just throw bodies at it until it dies with random people and groups joining in and out to the fight because you know, its not instanced, and everyone will want to "smack the dragon".
Lets take lineage for example, a popular game in its time, that took a few wrong turns in its developement, which led to its inevitable decline. However the private servers of the "old days" with the old chronicles that force you to fight over those bosses still gather between 2-5k people per server per opening. I am not advocating for private servers, nor do i support them, i just want to show something that was very popular like 10 years ago. The bosses that people were fighting over could've been taken down by 1 geared group, even the strongest ones, however to get to those bosses you had to fight, and some times the fight could take a few good hours, with 3-4 clans of 150+ people each, shifting the control over the boss from one to another, wipe after wipe. From personal experience i was participating in a boss fight that took well over 10+ hours and i had to go off to sleep, and shifted my character to another person to keep going, and as i was told the fight went on for 4 more hours, with 250+ people from each side.

So those were, and still are popular and atractive scenarios, its just that the gaming industry support those kind of scenarios less and less, show me any other game that will force you to fight for hours in a 250vs250 for 1 ring, that most likely you wont even get to sniff. Its the sensation of the fight, the thrill of the battle and the sweet nectar of victory at the end... The loot is just a nice bonus...

I hope my wall of text delivered my process of thoughts, i just fully support the visions of AoC in its current state, i would not want to "simplify" content or "scale it down" to make it easier for the masses. Hope i didnt venture off the topic too much, i just love those kind of discussions, and get carried away some times.

Khronus

@Tarnish I ran my guild in WOW from Vanilla until raids became 25 or 10 player raids and I can definitely tell you it wasn't to improve gameplay experience. Blizzard was bought out by activision and then immediately began catering to the laziest players who spend the most on microtransactions. They literally destroyed the social aspect of wow by implementing "easier" ways to raid, dumbing down difficulty and making the game so you can do everything from one location. They could not keep the raid group size of 40 because they never supported guilds or the community.

I 100% disagree that 40 players have bad coms. I come from a time where 40-50 people in Ventrilo was actual ear cancer (before I decided to run my own guilds). Play Escape from Tarkov with a group of 5 and you will learn proper coms real fast haha. If coms are bad, the raid leader is bad. Plain and simple. Remove and recruit the right people, earn the respect of your group and this is a non issue.

I do agree that GM's and raid leaders will get burnt out. That is great for leaders like myself that will not get burnt out and allow me to recruit quality players who want to enjoy consistent end game content under proper leadership.

I understand your entire post but I feel keeping the raid number at 40 just makes sense. Every single thing I am hearing from IS revolves around building and growing a community within the game. Social aspect is critical. My guild will be successful because I see this as an opportunity to truly grow the community back to what I once had.....the difference this time is that it will be supported by content that makes sense for me to grow further. I hope that AoC will utterly destroy the small guild aspect that exists in many mmos. guilds under 20 people, who can "kind of" experience content simply ruin servers and guild growth.

Tarnish

wArchAngel wrote: »

The thing i once told in another similar thread but with different topic, is that the raid size doesnt really play a big role in the end, if they go with their plan, as even a labeled "40-man-raid" will be downed by 8 players given the time, unless there are strict mechanics that actually require you to have more people than that, or the entry system forces you to create a "40 man squad". The biggest challenge will be the world boss contest, not the boss him self, and it is definitelly not a "pug" friendly zone, as you wont just be able to gather a squad of 40 hypothetical people and go take down a mob that has valuable loots, since those will be times, camped and fought over by any significant guilds. And thats where the experience of the clan/guild leaders from pvp games with 300+ people clans come from, they are used to those situations, they played most of their mmo career with those rules. So skewing those bosses to "the masses", aka randomly formed squads in the cities wont make any difference by the end of the day, as strictly "pve oriented" players probably wont have any chance anyway if they are not prepared to fight for it for hours upon hours.
And if the loot wont be 'that' valuable, then it wont really matter what kind of group you bring, since it wont be contested and you will be able to just throw bodies at it until it dies with random people and groups joining in and out to the fight because you know, its not instanced, and everyone will want to "smack the dragon".
Lets take lineage for example, a popular game in its time, that took a few wrong turns in its developement, which led to its inevitable decline. However the private servers of the "old days" with the old chronicles that force you to fight over those bosses still gather between 2-5k people per server per opening. I am not advocating for private servers, nor do i support them, i just want to show something that was very popular like 10 years ago. The bosses that people were fighting over could've been taken down by 1 geared group, even the strongest ones, however to get to those bosses you had to fight, and some times the fight could take a few good hours, with 3-4 clans of 150+ people each, shifting the control over the boss from one to another, wipe after wipe. From personal experience i was participating in a boss fight that took well over 10+ hours and i had to go off to sleep, and shifted my character to another person to keep going, and as i was told the fight went on for 4 more hours, with 250+ people from each side.

So those were, and still are popular and atractive scenarios, its just that the gaming industry support those kind of scenarios less and less, show me any other game that will force you to fight for hours in a 250vs250 for 1 ring, that most likely you wont even get to sniff. Its the sensation of the fight, the thrill of the battle and the sweet nectar of victory at the end... The loot is just a nice bonus...

I hope my wall of text delivered my process of thoughts, i just fully support the visions of AoC in its current state, i would not want to "simplify" content or "scale it down" to make it easier for the masses. Hope i didnt venture off the topic too much, i just love those kind of discussions, and get carried away some times.

Thanks for replying, this is exactly what i am looking for. i just want to know what the community is wanting to see if this is the kind of game for Raiders like myself or if its going to be a PVP battle ground with a easy raid boss if you can win the battle. This obviously would push the raids to be simple with PVP being at the core of the game and pushing any only PVE players out. I like taking my gear and smashing people with it. I do see a problem as i do not know if there is a population in MMO community to support game play like this over all, I was hoping for a smaller raid size requirement so i could take my friends and recruit a few other like minded people to go smoke the content on the hardest difficulty level or atleast die trying. Sounds like PVP will be the biggest challenge and the loot may not be worth the attempt at a world boss anyhow which will likely disolve PVE players all together. This takes all want in raiding away. lol

Tarnish

KHRONUS wrote: »

@Tarnish I ran my guild in WOW from Vanilla until raids became 25 or 10 player raids and I can definitely tell you it wasn't to improve gameplay experience. Blizzard was bought out by activision and then immediately began catering to the laziest players who spend the most on microtransactions. They literally destroyed the social aspect of wow by implementing "easier" ways to raid, dumbing down difficulty and making the game so you can do everything from one location. They could not keep the raid group size of 40 because they never supported guilds or the community.

I 100% disagree that 40 players have bad coms. I come from a time where 40-50 people in Ventrilo was actual ear cancer (before I decided to run my own guilds). Play Escape from Tarkov with a group of 5 and you will learn proper coms real fast haha. If coms are bad, the raid leader is bad. Plain and simple. Remove and recruit the right people, earn the respect of your group and this is a non issue.

I do agree that GM's and raid leaders will get burnt out. That is great for leaders like myself that will not get burnt out and allow me to recruit quality players who want to enjoy consistent end game content under proper leadership.

I understand your entire post but I feel keeping the raid number at 40 just makes sense. Every single thing I am hearing from IS revolves around building and growing a community within the game. Social aspect is critical. My guild will be successful because I see this as an opportunity to truly grow the community back to what I once had.....the difference this time is that it will be supported by content that makes sense for me to grow further. I hope that AoC will utterly destroy the small guild aspect that exists in many mmos. guilds under 20 people, who can "kind of" experience content simply ruin servers and guild growth.

I was speaking from experience of leading raids of all sorts of sizes. sounds like you're a old soul from Vanilla. How things have changed. Going from memory and raiding in classic has shown me how different the player base is. i agree with a lot of what you said about WoW and its issues. However, TBC and WOTLK had alot of success and we cant discount that. there is a real true problem with large raids in our present day. As much fun as i am having in Classic, it is not the same as Vanilla and coms and the community as a entirety is much different. I would urge you to try and lead a guild in Classic and let me know you're thoughts. as for community i understand perfectly well as a community leader for 10+ years and am one of the rarest communities where i still have players from Wotlk sticking around and popping in from time to time to say hi since a lot of the generation does not still play MMOs. The question is there enough people still willing to put together and lead these big raiding teams in the present? ill tell you there are very few. Alot of the leaders i know in classic are counting the days for TBC. I can tell you alot of the guilds have lost so many players over the phases of classic and even leadership has changed. I am sure there other games that might fit the bill better, however i think the smaller raid sizes with more difficult raid content is the way to go. hopefully with loot that fits the bill as well. I definitely do not want easier content and as for Retail WoW, those raids are pretty insane mechanically and performance wise. My issue with retail is community, gear, glory aspects have been hollowed out.

Yuyukoyay

It will probably be borderline impossible since they will be open world. Depending on the power dynamic of the server you could have 6 different guilds killing each other for weeks before an actual boss fight is attempted. The ability to just gank while doing bosses should be looked into.

More so that it's impossible to actually do bosses uninterrupted. Things just won't get done. I don't mind PvP being used to take control of a dungeon, but you shouldn't be able to just run over a boss attempt.

It's going to be one of the biggest problems if left as is. It takes a lot from the PvE experience if you can't fight bosses from 100% to 0% uninterrupted because that is the fun of doing raids.

It really depends on their loot drops and how bosses are balanced. They probably shouldn't drop the best gear if you can just steal boss kills as a reliable strategy. So hopefully crafting can circumvent the issue somehow. Still the materials will probably be only obtainable in raids making the system even worse.

It's how it played out in WoW when they had the exact same systems. It just doesn't work that well having open raid/dungeon PvP with interruptible boss battles.

The question isn't so much are raids going to be good, but rather will it even be possible to do them?

CaptnChuck

Constant PvPing, while trying to raid or clear dungeons, can get tiring real quick. I don't know how they're going to balance it though.

Damokles

@cleansingtotem @Tarnish
Holy sh*t you are right xD
I somehow thought that Naxx belonged to TBC for SOME reason....
Maybe it is because it is already ~14 years in the past xD

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