As a strictly 10-man raider, I have no problem with 25-man raids rewarding more points per boss, just not better gear. IIRC, when Blizzard announced that 10s and 25s would have the same loot, they said that 25s would reward more loot per player, so this is keeping with that goal.
Also, you’ll still be capped; iirc, a full clear on 25man will give you all the points you can get for the week, while a full clear on 10man will mean you’ll have to do some daily Heroics.
JM1
1683
Loot, yes, because otherwise you’d have a lower chance to get an item with more people rolling on it. However you don’t share Justice Points.
OK, that seems reasonable.
markv
1684
25m is far more work to manage than 10, and as such should be given some sort of reward above and beyond what 10m does, and I think this is a really excellent solution. It just means you will be able to purchase gear at a bit of a faster rate, but not a ridiculously faster rate.
Honestly though this isn’t enough incentive for me to want to keep doing 25m raiding and our guild is going to be cutting back to 10m raids for Cata. Managing 25 is just annoying more than anything else.
Andrew
1685
Yes, I’m skeptical about how well 25 mans will survive in Cataclysm outside of the very top bleeding edge guilds (who will pay any cost for a slight advantage). My guild is still planning to have a run, but we’ll see if it actually comes together.
It’s really hard to make the case for a 25-man raid, unless you’re in one of the rare top end guilds who can realistically quickly get to the 25-man heroic content.
Otherwise, a 10-man will almost always be preferable:
– For a pug, it’s always easier to fill up and manage a 10-man than 25-man raid.
– For a static raid, most people will have a better chance of getting to the heroic version in a 10-man raid than 25-man.
Since the best gear is from the heroic versions, and is identical on 10 and 25-man versions… that’s really it’s at. After the first month or so, being able to get a little more Justice Points or the possibility of extra normal drops from a 25-man raid won’t mean anything. The drops from heroic versions will be where it’s at, for people who care about such things.
Andrew
1687
A perhaps subtle advantage of 25 mans is that it is easier to cover all of the armor types (spirit cloth, hit cloth, spell leather, agi leather, spell mail, agi mail, dps plate, tank plate, spell plate). That’s 9 different types of armor to cover. Maybe making sure you have all the types of armor will be the new making sure you have all the types of buffs.
Actually, you’ve made a distinction between healing and DPS for cloth, but failed to make the same distinction for leather and mail. From what I understand, spirit will be something needed by all healers, not just priests and druids.
But, I expect reforging will mean that a lot of pieces that would otherwise be sharded will be used as temporary upgrades.
Gedd
1689
Yep, they’ve said all along that there would be loot quantity incentive, just not necessarily what it was. There was some mention of there possibly being more loot per person in the 25, but I think they might just go with the higher point gain, and leave the loot dropped per person number alone.
I know there was, at a time, mention of a weekly cap on points, but I wonder if they’re still planning that with the overall cap in place. I haven’t seen any hard numbers on weekly point gain caps yet, while we have the hard overall cap at 4,000 for both point types.
IIRC, the reasoning behind having a weekly cap is so players wouldn’t feel obligated to play an obscene amount to earn every last possible badge. It wasn’t at all uncommon for some WoW players to run full clears every week of ICC25, ICC10, seven daily heroic dungeons, and the weekly raid boss (and any other source of Emblems of Frost I might be forgetting). That’s an unhealthy amount of playing, and it’s no surprise that many people were getting burned out. So with that in mind, I hope they follow through and implement the weekly cap in Cata.
Athryn
1691
Semi off topic, but I didn’t think this necessarily rated it’s own thread, so I’ll put it here:
Blizzard announced 12 million worldwide subs.
It’s been a few years since Wow was at 10 million, so it’s still growing but at a slower rate.
Jag
1692
I don’t normally link wow.com, but this gallery of mini-pets complete with a matching outfit for each pet is worth seeing.
Drrum’s incredible collections
I can’t imagine the effort that went into this.
Heh, before clicking the link I was thinking that WotLK finally launched in China and that probably pushed them over the 12 million number and the second sentence of the press release basically says just that.
Anyone know what the average level for player characters is? One thing I noticed in EQ2 is with so few character slots (7 total) the majority of characters skews toward the level cap. Since WoW allows 10 per server and 50 total, I’d guess it’s a lot more spread out. Cataclysm will no doubt expand on that more with people making lowbies to try the new races and see the new/changed old world content.
Imryll
1694
As I recall, that was also the reason the cost of badge gear had to be so high. With a weekly limit they could lower the cost and still not have folks gearing faster than they want them to.
Speaking of pets, I decided my WoW Doldrums project would be to try farming up a Hyacinth Macaw. The drop rate seems to average somewhere around 1 in 9,000 kills, so this might take a while. I went down to the Bloodsail ships near Booty Bay & started killing pirates. On my third clear of a ship, about kill number 30, it dropped. Guess I’m back to mount farming.
I’m really hoping they slow down the gear race. Once you hit 80 you could poopsock your way to a 4k gear score in a week or so. That thens started the elitist comments when people quickly forgot what it was like to hit 80 for the first time and got into the “UR GS IS TOO LOW AND UR DPS IS LOW U SUCK” mode.
A friend of mine ran her first heroic at 80 and the treatment she got damn near made her quit the game.
JM1
1697
A week? You could do that in a few days - the normal ICC 5 man instances and ToC are loot festivals.
Yeah, I think they hit 11.5 back when Lich King released:
So you could say “nearly two years to go from 11.5 to 12?” but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Lich King just launched in China less than two months ago, so uptake from that is probably still ongoing. Cataclysm “anticipation” is responsible for a lot less growth than Cataclysm “on sale” will be.
But most of all, this is a six-year-old MMO that is still growing. <Tom Chick>“Oh good lord”</Tom Chick>
People are probably sick of me flogging this particular horse, but this represents a fundamental flaw in the way current endgame is structured. In order to ensure healthy populations for the LFD BLizzard created a big incentive for high-end players (both in terms of gear and skill) to group with fresh 80s (and whoever else is using the LFD tool), and this is pretty much the inevitable result. Frankly, newly level capped players shouldn’t even be in heroic dungeons – at least in the abstract – they should be cutting their teeth doing normal dungeons, but the LK normal dungeons are pretty much worthless in an endgame sense and always have been. Cataclysm is sort of trying to solve this by making heroics more difficult and creating the expectation that newly capped players will need to do normal dungeons first, but after Cata has been out 6 or 9 months we may well just end up where we are now again. It’s a dumb system.
JM1
1700
They were on roughly the right track with the gear requirements for the ICC dungeons when using the random dungeon finder, though.
