Which do you feel is more difficult and why? Or do you feel they are the same difficulty? Everyone has their opinion and I'd like to see a consensus form.

Also make sure you add what sort of raiding you've done and preferably your current progression as well.

Progress in 8man: EV HM 4/5, EV N 5/5, KP N 5/5

16 man: 1 Hour tries on first boss in EV, had issues with debuffs on tanks, and our healers couldnt keep up, as they were undergeared that day, as this was in early stages of our raiding, so we swaped to 2x8mans, and cleared everything.

I would have prefered that we raided 16man, but as we have abundance of tanks, and debuffs arnt showing correctly in 16man, i dont want to waste our time in 16man until Bioware start sorting out the game.

Yes i heard first boss in EV 16man, is the 'harder' one, than the rest, still why should we waste time on content that needs an overhaul of adjustments, when 8mans are smooth sailing.

I'll throw my impression in as well.

My guild is 16-man with all content cleared on nightmare as a 16-man team.

I am not going to say that 16-man content is "hard" because it really isn't. My guild raids only 9 hours a week, as most of us manage busy schedules outside the game. Many of us have families to tend to, while others are grad students, but it's a dedicated 9 hours where we work hard to get results. We only started raiding officially January 16th, and after three and a half weeks we manged to finish everything. I wouldn't call that difficult content.

With that said, previous to our running 16-mans some of us formed an 8-man group just to get some experience in the raids. Our first night raiding we brought along 3 people who freshly dinged 50 that very day, one of them who dinged 50 literally seconds before joining and was mostly in Voss greens with a few Corelia greens. We cleared EV in less than 2 hours on normal mode. It was so faceroll that I couldn't even believe it. No one read strats to the fights as there wasn't a lot of info out there at the time. We just went in, figured out what we had to do, and I don't think a single kill took more than 2 attempts. The very next week we had 4 of the 5 hardmodes down on 8.

Fastforward a few weeks and 16 man content was suddenly kicking our ***. We were entering 16-man content with a much higher average ilvl than we were doing 8-mans and were getting punished for mistakes that 8-man content was very forgiving of. Annihilator droid literally annihilated people with missile shots that slammed you for 20k, so unless it was cast on a tank or someone else capable of mitigating the damage the person was as good as dead. Which illustrates why I feel the difficulty of 16-man is so much higher than 8-man. On 16-man all Bioware seemed to change was how hard things hit for. Under their logic, "You have twice as many healers, so we'll dish out twice as much damage" which would be fine if all that damage wasn't against a single person as a time resulting in huge spikes whenever you were targeted by something. It doesn't matter how many healers you have if the things that can kill you can do it quicker than a GCD. Thankfully some of the more serious ones (like Annihilator droid's missile attack) have already been curved some to make the fights less face-smashingly bad.

It's not just that though, the adds that spawn in Pylon hit much harder than two times as hard in 16 compared to 8-man, while also having 4 times the health. Hardly seems to be appropriately scaled. It's not unmanageable because at least Bioware didn't do something as asinine as make them un-ccable on 16-man like they did with ALL the trash. And OMG the trash. The warden droids in EV or even worse the entire 2nd half of Karagga's palace has trash harder than most boss fights. Most of it would be managable if they would at least CC it, but those gunners in the last stretch just before Karagga himself shoot blasts that do 18k damage to anyone they hit. The droids just before that make you choose between burning two adds that heal, one add that aoe burns the entire raids health in one move, or another add that summons additional adds. You can't CC anything so it basically becomes a pull and pray scenario where you hope nothing kills any of your kickers less things spiral into a wipe fast. The trash in Karagga's palace is destined to be thing we will struggle most against in completing the instance in under 2 hours for the title simply because it is so much more overtuned in 16 than on 8.

With all that said, there are two fights in particular that I feel are much easier on 16 than on 8 and those are Fabricator Droid and Soa, and the latter only if your raid is disciplined enough to handle the increased number of lightning orbs properly. These fights remove a certain number of people from the raid at any given time and thanks to the larger number of people in 16s it isn't as noticeable as on 8s. In 16 man we have 3 people on the terminals constantly solving the Towers of Hanoi in seconds. I would think it much more difficultto do the same strategy on 8-man and still down the boss before the enrage. However, I do not feel that the difficulty gap on these two fights comes anywhere close to the difficulty jump of Jarg and Sorno (if you think he one shots you on 8-man, try dealing with twice the damage on 16-man) or Karagga (standing anywhere near the front of the boss and not a tank? lol you is dead). It all comes down to the forgiving nature of many of the damage mechanics on 8-man. If a move is selected on you and takes you down a third of your health, you would need to be selected to receive that damage two more times without a heal before you are going to die. That same mechanic on 16-man hits you for two thirds of your health, and even if the healers heal half the damage that was done to you, if you are selected again you are still going to die. Having more healers to heal the damage doesn't really matter when they are given next to no time to react to that damage and fights become more and more rng based than anything.

I've talked to other 16-man guilds who all say the same thing. The content is much less forgiving on 16-man. There is a definite difficulty jump that shouldn't exist, but just because it doesn't exist doesn't mean I will ignore that it does. I'm sure many guilds running 8-mans are fully capable of performing well on 16-mans as well, but I think those guilds who do try the crossover will discover the same conclusions that I have come to. Namely that 16-man content (at this time) offers a higher degree of challenge than 8-man, but I want to know what you all think.

Mechintel,

I've been raiding in a guild for three weeks now who have all the content on farm for HM/NMM. I think we only have 2 bosses that are not on farm for NMM because we never bothered doing them that way for one reason or another (Bonethrasher for example).

For a while we split into 2 8 mans doing HM raids because we believed the drops in 16 man were not enough. We fixed this by using free for all loot.

In any case, right now, from what I can tell from the raid/guild leaders 16 man is by and large easier. We can afford to lose some people and still beat enrage timers, etc. A while ago someone posted videos of SOA on 16 and 8 man. In 16 man the mindtraps had the same amount of hp, and the balls did the same amount of damage.

My conclusion, at this point, is that 16 man is indeed easier than 8 man. We haven't had anything hit "harder" or act considerably differently in 16 man. Yet we can afford to lose 2-3 dps and beat the enrage timers.

I gave you Soa and Fabricator as being undertuned on 16-man. I stated that those fights are definitely easier on 16. The other 8 are all much more difficult on 16 than on 8 from my experience. Also funny enough, Bonethrasher is another fight that I feel is MUCH more difficult on 16 man than he is on 8. Not only do you have him doing twice as much damage per swipe, but it's also usually hitting twice (if not more) as many people than on 8 due to the chaotic nature of the fight. This leads to 4 times as much damage going out on 16-man when you only have twice as many healers. I'd like to know which other NM you didn't do? Was it Jarg and Sorno which is widely accepted as the hardest fight on NM 16 at this current time.

Also there are more balls on 16-man than on 8-man Soa. Until recently, it used to be MANY more balls on 16-man, but it got nerfed, but that is really how the fight should be designed to make it balanced. Instead of making things hit twice as hard (which would DEFINITELY one shot people if they did), they should hit twice as many people at once. That allows for your twice as many healers to react to the damage without it being absurdly spiky. So if anything, outside of the mindtraps having the same health (which I agree they shouldn't, 16 man mindtraps should have twice the health of 8-man to be balanced), the fight is behaving the same way on 16-man as it is on 8-man. The same can't be said about many of the other encounters.