#101 - Jan. 29, 2010, 3:29 a.m.
Q u o t e:
Every guild I've been in recently has been a 10 man raiding guild. They made raiding accessible so people would want to do it. Getting ten people together to raid is definitely easier, and thus there are plenty of ten man raiding guilds. The few guilds I've been in who had 25 man raids going on regularly had really strict rules about getting in, and only had around 28 people who even got to raid with them. Getting into that group would not really be possible.
Crygil, the problem is not so much that people feel inadequately equipped to handle the 10 mans with only 10 man gear, it's that outside of the raids, people look at your gear for more than just how pretty it is. They look at item levels, and stats. People also use the gear to run older content, like heroics, or to PvP. It's perfectly fine confined to the raiding scene. My ten man gear is as good in relation to ten man content as my twentyfive man gear is for twentyfive. The problem stems outside of that, when we both exit our respective instance and suddenly they're wearing gear as good as the stuff I will get for being a top of the line ten man raider, simply for doing the dungeon the same way I did. Now they're stronger in PvP, they do better in heroics, have more health, more dodge, more damage, simply because they had more friends go with them. The problem is that in the end, gear is gear, but it's also a status symbol, and their status symbol is top of the line whilst ours, which is supposedly an equal alternative option, is in fact only a tiny step up from their last tier of gear.
For illustrative purposes...
(link removed) is the Bastion of Resolve. A caster shield from Trial of the Crusader 25.
(link removed) Now here is Lost Pravise of the Blue Flight, a caster shield from Icecrown Citadel 10. Notice how if I were to wear the ICC item over the TotC item, I'd gain about 180 armor, 5 each of intellect and stamina, 3 haste, and 5 spellpower? Yeah.
This means that I could just go run the old raid from months ago, and get an item which is only about 50 hp, 75 mana, and maybe 50 point higher heals which cast 0.01 seconds faster, than the new content shield. Why should anybody even bother with ICC10 when it's more or less equal to TotC25 gear? Heck, If I wanted to go the extra little distance, which wouldn't be all that hard now with the badge gear, and run TotGC25, and gain items even BETTER than the ICC10 ones.
The fact is, that 10 mans are a joke. You guys continue to pump them out, and I understand why. In the end I'd rather do the content with no drops than not get to see it at all, but it'd still be nice if I was able to run 10 mans and actually feel like I'd accomplished something beyond making myself better equipped to do the real raid if I ever find myself in a position to actually get to join one.
It's as simple as logistics. When in a 25-person instance, you are using 25 peoples time. This makes accumulating that number of players more difficult to achieve. This alone does not entitle them to gear that is slightly better than that achieved in 10-person raiding. We also scale the difficulty of the encounters up in the larger group of players. Thus, because of added difficulty, they achieve slightly better rewards. The ease of assembly in the 10-person environment and the reduced difficulty (in non-Heroic) have to be taken into account with the level of reward given out.
That said, the rewards are still outstanding and generally a step up from previous content.
On a side note, why do people throw around the word "Fact" when it's attached to a wholly subjective interpretation? It isn't a fact... it's an opinion. In order to help correct this trend of erroneous fact-citing, I've included the definition of a the word"Fact" below.
Main Entry: fact
Pronunciation: \ˈfakt\
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin factum, from neuter of factus, past participle of facere
Date: 15th century
1 : a thing done: as a obsolete : feat b : crime <accessory after the fact> c archaic : action
2 archaic : performance, doing
3 : the quality of being actual
4 a : something that has actual existence <space exploration is now a fact> b : an actual occurrence <prove the fact of damage>
5 : a piece of information presented as having objective reality