Discuss the title. and tell me if im just crazy or if im right.

I am glad you brought this up.

 

16 man is definitely alot harder than 8 man on the same diffculty setting. Since they drop the same loot, it is hard to justify not splitting up to do two 8 man instead. You will waste less time this way and actually get identical amount of loot, if not more, from it.

 

This is really disappointing actually, 16 man raids are just more epic but there is currently very little incentive to do 16 man raids other than for bragging rights.

This has been brought up several times,

 

The answer is the same = 16man is alot harder than 8man as a whole, the damage and health scaling of the bosses abilities.

Funny, this situation reminds me a lot the one in some other MMO...

16-man is definitely harder than 8, but with no real advantage in terms of loot.

 

If you're not looking for 16-man progression bragging rights, two 8-man teams is the smarter move. That said, 16-man gives you more flexibility in your raid comp, so logistically it might be easier, even if the content execution itself is harder.

 

We're almost done with 8-man Nightmare content and we're currently mulling over whether we want to do two 8-mans or a 16-man for our guild, now that the other half of our raid group is getting geared up.

Edited January 21, 2012 by Ascendant

A 16 man raid is always harder then an 8 man group pve instance.

 

And a 40 ppl raid will always be harder then a 16 or 25man raid.

 

More ppl, more sources for potentional failures, more to organize, etc.

 

Should be obvious.

Has anyone tried a 16 man since the patch? Are there any changes to this? We've been doing 3 8 man raids in my guild and want to try a 16 man just to keep it interesting.

Has anyone tried a 16 man since the patch? Are there any changes to this? We've been doing 3 8 man raids in my guild and want to try a 16 man just to keep it interesting.

 

Ya we run it after patch, still not worth it. The trash is pretty deadly a waste of time. especially when your OP bugs out and you have to reset and clear all of them again...

16 man is harder in every way imaginable.

 

16 man normal is harder than 8 man hard mode.

 

But the only thing you get for doing it currently is bragging righs, as it's more gear for running 2 8 mans.

 

We had a few people couldn't make our hard mode 16 progression night this week so we ran an 8 man for hm soa and all of karagga's on hard. Pathetically easy. One shot almost every boss without ever worrying about an enrage, 3 shot hm soa and 3 shot karagga.

A 16 man raid is always harder then an 8 man group pve instance.

 

And a 40 ppl raid will always be harder then a 16 or 25man raid.

 

More ppl, more sources for potentional failures, more to organize, etc.

 

Should be obvious.

 

Your refering to co-ordination. That is not the issue. The bosses aren't harder because of co-ordination. They are are harder in proportion to 8 mans.

 

As my guild has done both 16 and 8 normal modes I can give you prime examples of the problems.

 

Let's take the first boss of EV as an example.

 

The damage output is more or less double. But there are double the people! Well the issue is that the output is simply too high to save people from spike damage. The drastically higher spike damage is the problem in this fight. Co-ordination is not even remotley an issue. No where in this fight can the mistake of 1 person cause a wipe.

 

Trash is another killer. The trash is so brutally over-tuned in 16 it's downright criminal. 8 man doesn't need marking targets or even tanks for that matter. 16 needs perfect execution just to concider downing it. The amount of time needed to clear the 16 man trash is more than 3X as long.

 

I really like how raid bosses in this game are more about execution than other mmos. But the 16 man execution isn't just harder, it's harder in a lazy way. It's almost as if devs just doubled the numbers and walked away.

 

Say a boss does 1k a hit. In 16 man it's 2k. But you have twice as many healers! Problem is that it's 4 healers dealing with what you might need 6 for. You can't take that many though. For example. The tank taking twice as much damage needs 2 healers rather than 1. The raid taking twice as much damage means you need 3-4 healers often. Since the enrage timers are similar, it's a real issue.

 

This is from personal experience not speculation. I wanted to switch to 16 man for the guild because we have so many 50s. When we tried it was so brutal we had to split up to 8 man. Which of coarse we face rolled every single boss in the amount of time it took to just down the first boss in 16.

 

The issue seems to be the devs just doubling numbers and wakling away. Not co-ordination by any means. Gear is also not even remotly an issue at all. We over gear the content by a pretty wide margin. How you ask? Champ gear is only slightly worse than the gear you get in EV and KP. Full champ gear = over geared for normal.

 

Those are my anicdotal findings. I have many other guildies who will confirm these opinions as well. We are also not a bunch of noobs. Many of us including myself we're hard mode WoW raiders.

A 16 man raid is always harder then an 8 man group pve instance.

 

And a 40 ppl raid will always be harder then a 16 or 25man raid.

 

More ppl, more sources for potentional failures, more to organize, etc.

 

Should be obvious.

 

25 man raid was easier than 10 man raid in WoW. 40 people raids back in vanilla were pathetically easy to execute but a pain in the *** to gather enough people for it. Your logic is wrong.

 

With 25 man, more room for errors. With 10 man, EVERYONE has to be at the top of their game - one mistake and your group wipes.

It is bad design when boss skills go from "hard hitting but survivable" in 8man NM to "lol oneshot while shielded and topped off" in 16man NM.

 

For example, the initial double damage on the marked target of the Droid in EV.

They just slapped a 2x multiplier on the dmg value and called it a day, because hey it's double the people - too bad players don't get magically double the HP in a 16man raid.

I'd put the Twin Bounty Hunters' snipe ability in the same category, although overall it looks more reasonable than the Droid ever was.

 

Seems one way around this is either stacking endurance on gear+endurance stim or relying on borderline OP CDs like the 90% accuracy debuff (which laughably works on bosses) or the 20% damage absorb for the whole raid.

 

Don't have enough of those classes in your raid?

Well, tough ****!

We are doing 16 man on principle, because we want to raid as a big group. It's a good thing too, because there's no reason otherwise. you can't even say "do what you want, all other things being equal" because as the game stands right now you're punished in 16 man. Take the adds on pylon. You double your raid dps (maybe a little bit more than double) going from 8 to 16, yet the mobs health goes up by 6x. It's not even in the same universe in terms of difficulty.

25 man raid was easier than 10 man raid in WoW. 40 people raids back in vanilla were pathetically easy to execute but a pain in the *** to gather enough people for it. Your logic is wrong.

 

With 25 man, more room for errors. With 10 man, EVERYONE has to be at the top of their game - one mistake and your group wipes.

 

With 25 man, environmental issues are exacerbated because you're working in the same area of space with over twice as many people, so fights with large AOE or things of that nature make it far easier to make mistakes on 25 man, meaning they need to be more recoverable. An example would be Defile from the Lich King fight. Same amount of space, more than 2x the people, more chances that someone stands in a defile too long.

 

Some fights are harder on 10, some are easier. The organizational aspects of 10 man are far far easier assuming good class balance in PvE. Raid stacking is something that I don't consider as that's a luxury usually only available to top tier guilds regardless of their chosen raid size (hard to get willing bench warmers if you're not at the extreme cutting edge of progression).

The devs really need to take a look at 16 man raids and fix them to be more in line with the 8 man counter part. Or if they want to leave them as is give them better loot. there is NO REASON AT ALL to do 16 man over 8 right now.