If anyone dabble into the other mmo, the one with panda, they will have certain heard about the raging war back and forth between 10 and 25 man raiders.

 

We have the same situation in star wars, but, as far as i can tell, we heve been spare from such ugly state of affair. Might it be because community here is more mature, or because the endgame is not as competitive, or simply because we lack the tools to accuratly follow progression (armory)

 

Nonetheless, this is still a fact that dual raid format exist in SWToR. I advocate for a single format raiding. here's why.

 

- time and ressource spent to balance both format to equal difficulty could be spent into making more or better raid encounter.

- Freedom of design. Today, operation dev must always keep in mind that encounter need to work both as a 8 and 16 man, which limits the things they can do, with a unique format, they do not have to worry and let their creativity take over.

- fair friendly competition between guild, no seggregation of the raiding community.

 

So what format to chose. My idea is ofcourse middle ground between 8 and 16, so the number is 12 man operation. That is 3 groups of 4 people, you'd say 3 is an odd number, will never work, i'll say five is also an odd nuber and blizzard made it work with 5 groups in raid for many years now.

 

Raid composition would be

2/3 tank

2/3 healers

6/8 DPS (with adequate distribution of melee and range)

 

You don't need to rework old raid, keep them as 8/16 man operation, just from this point forward release 12 man operation as a unique format.

 

anyway, just a though, what do you think?

Edited October 25, 2012 by Vankris

sounds interesting, would be a nice change since some times you just miss 2 people for 16 man and don't want to leave 6 man doing nothing... would be more or less still the same, so shouldn't be hard to implement.

While I appreciate the sentiment of reducing development strain in favour of new content, tbh that's not a problem. You see, the slowest pipeline in terms of content production is always the art department. Since both modes use the same content, those are not influenced, meaning that (in theory at least), you should have time to test and develop both modes without much of a problem.

 

The end line is: you risk annoying a lot of people (small guilds that would need to pug more often, hardcore guilds that enjoy the added challenge of 16 man), for quite uncertain benefits.

I personally find it's sort of dumb to have the exact same loot to drop between 8-man and 16-man when 8-man is much easier than 16-man. So it's much easier to just split 16-man into two 8-man groups.

 

In WoW, there were some raids that were actually harder in the 10-man than the 8-man, but I don't know... huge raids make it feel more like a group effort with lots of people. Very unifying. However, huge raids also make you feel less "important" as it's an army fighting a single guy... how do you feel very heroic then?

Coming 5.1 on WoW, they will be testing an old design, that WoW had during WotLK, on Korean servers to see how attractive it becomes.

 

Basically, they will increase the ilvl of 25m loot drops by a small amount, seeing as 25m is harder than 10m raids, and giving incentive to people to do 25m raids.

 

If that is the staple that WoW will be taking going into the future, barring that it becomes successful in Korea then they bring it to the states, I would be happy to play WoW once again.

 

This is something I always wanted to see on SWTOR, but i doubt it will ever happen. 16m raids in SWTOR are very hard compared to 8m raids, not only on the difficulty aspect but also when it comes to having to organize it. Giving incentives to 16m raids will make more people want to do them.

If you look at the progression for 16-TFB HM, there are only a handful of guilds actually doing 16-TFB HM. I wouldn't be surprised if Bioware just scrapped it completely at some point.

 

As stated, the only real incentive for doing 16-Ops is people who prefer larger raids. If you need proof of this just look at all the guilds who run multiple 8-Ops groups even though they have enough people to do 16-Ops. Regardless of the difficulty of the actual content, there is also the difficulty other guilds have of recruiting 8 more people to be able to raid on the same night to do 16-Ops content.

 

Personally, I can't see them going the route of 16-Ops giving better gear. Doing that would benefit such a tiny fraction of the population and alienate the vast majority of players. Giving more loot or social/cosmetic items for 16-Ops I could see but even that has its risks. I suspect it will stay the way it is for the time being but if the population of people doing 16-Ops continues to decline something will change.