Having done the 72 and more recently 54 person raids in EQ as well as 10,20 in Rift and 40, 25,10 in WoW. I would rather see smaller raids, i like the 10 and 25 man raid sizes from WoW (it's all academic anyway unless there is instanced raiding). One thing about DAoC i liked was they had alliances; guilds could join an alliance and it would have its own dedicated alliance chat channel and you could see who was online in the alliance. While i don't think alliances should dictate raid size, a feature like this would make it easier for smaller guilds to come together for raiding.
Im not sure. I have experienced both (98 people to kill Avatar of War), then they limited it to 72, then I did 24 man raids.
All seem to have its ups and downs. I think what I learned was, how class dependent are raids going to be?
For example, you dont necessarily NEED said class to win encounter, but said class would make it EXTREMELY easier to deal with component of fight. If those things are not present, I would be satisfied with any raid size really.
Of course this is assuming the lag.... is not an issue :)
72 person raids are fine when you have very healthy servers, but it encourages upper guilds to continually gut lower guilds for members to keep an active raid force. This is a niche game, and while i would love to see 2,000 people on at prime time per server/shard, i don't expect it. If they plan on a single megaserver or allow people to move back and forth between servers/shards then 72 will work, but for long term health, they should start lower; there is a reason every game with instanced raiding since has started that way or lowered it for non-open world raiding.
Thunndar said: Maybe they could offer a hard mode for the elite wanting a bigger raid force. I dunno. Just a thought.
Instanced Hard 72 man raids, medium 24+, and lower 6 + achievement based if they go that way would be ok with me. Gear drops on the other hand would depend on the size then?? better gear on the 72 man raid etc...
Thunndar said: I understand people wanting huge raids but I would like all aspects of the game available to people with smaller guilds.
Just playing devils advocate here. Please dont take offense. This "everyone should be able to do everything" is like a solo player saying they should be able to kill what a group does. I believe this is what is wrong in the MMO world today. The Devs I'm sure have a plan to handle the smaller guilds as well as the bigger guilds. I think in your OP you answered this. If they have large raid numbers you can join an alliance.
Again I dont mean any disrespect at all. Just throwing out the other end of the conversation.
Pyde Pyper
Pyde said:I am on the opposite end of the stick. Raid alliances build guild to guild relationships. This is the player interaction Pantheon is striving for. I believe raids should take a large force.
Pyde Pyper
Agreed. I'm hoping we will be able to see large raid forces in Pantheon work.
Having done 24 up tp 72 I really liked the 24 man raid. 6 man groups 4 groups per raid. It wasnt hard to fill a raid and was big enough to require a good raid leader but not big enough to were you were lost in the clutter. Also it made getting gear better as you didnt have 71 othewr asshats to bid against.
Big supporter of the 72 player raids provided there's healthy population. Tons of fun. Sometimes if you want to be on the winning team you need to make the jump -- take your friends with you, or make even more friends.
Anyway, if 72 can't be done, whatever the biggest can be done is what I'd like to see.
I personally think raid content should be designed for anywhere from 25-100 people, I don't see why we need to use socially destructive formulas like WoW did where every raid requires and restricts players to a certain number. As always, I take my lessons from EQ, there was content designed to be killed by just about every number of people you could think of all the way up to 100 for Avatar of War.
If you'd like to restrict the raid UI size, that's fine, but there should be nothing stopping players from bringing a 2nd raid if they wish. As always, if you're worried about zerging, consider the fact that if a mob drops 3 items when you kill it, and can be killed with 25, but you bring 100, that means you have 3 items to feed 100 mouths, and if post-apocalyptic TV shows have taught us anything, when people go hungry, things get nasty and they will usually fracture over it.
As far as trivializing the content with more players, I have nothing against mobs being designed in such a way that bringing more people doesn't make fights easier, it may make them harder, but I do not want to see lockout timers, or instances, or any restrictions whatsoever.
I did classic EQ, 72-Man raid window, 40 Man WoW raids, Vanguard raids, 25 and 10 man WoW raids and honestly none of them felt any "harder" than the rest. 72 Man raids are fun but you do start to feel like a number at some point. That's the only issue I have with them. When I'm Ranger number 3 out of 7 do I really feel impactful or influential?
In my opinion, if groups are 6 players large, then raids should be around 36 people.
I think a lot depends on group size, I read 6-8. I would like to see the larger group sizes as well as raid sizes. I did so much 24 man raiding in EQ2 I am personally sick what I can do with 4 groups of 6. That being said small raids like this do not leave much room for a lot of people. We had to leave lots of people behind every night. 24 man raids means only your very best players get in raid and everyone else quits the game eventually. 12 man raid (x2 as they were) did not provide upgrades for our guild really so it was stuff we did on off nights to say we did it and for fun. Which also alienated the rest of the guild because now on off nights your best 12 players are doing their own thing. We need more opportunities to play together not less.
The other thing I find hard to understand is why there are so many small guilds. Why not join larger organized guilds? What is the point of a guild if you can't do anything together? Just to have a tag?
Jamie said:I think a lot depends on group size, I read 6-8. I would like to see the larger group sizes as well as raid sizes. I did so much 24 man raiding in EQ2 I am personally sick what I can do with 4 groups of 6. That being said small raids like this do not leave much room for a lot of people. We had to leave lots of people behind every night. 24 man raids means only your very best players get in raid and everyone else quits the game eventually. 12 man raid (x2 as they were) did not provide upgrades for our guild really so it was stuff we did on off nights to say we did it and for fun. Which also alienated the rest of the guild because now on off nights your best 12 players are doing their own thing. We need more opportunities to play together not less.
The other thing I find hard to understand is why there are so many small guilds. Why not join larger organized guilds? What is the point of a guild if you can't do anything together? Just to have a tag?
In order to maintain a 72 person raids my guild (top on the server) had to have somewhere around 85-90 active members and with 54 person raids we had to maintain 60-65ish active members to make sure we had enough of the right classes, both of which left people sitting out. Smaller raid requirements at least allow for multiple raid teams. Before instances, we had up to 100+ active members so we could have enough people on to compete for raid spawns earlier. There are pros and cons to both ways.
I lean more to the smaller size. Something along the lines of 3-4 groups. Much more than that (and I have done extremely large raid content) and its no longer fun. To me its just not fun and you dont feel that your efforts matter. Sure a 72 man raid looks more epic, but it definitely doesnt feel more epic (to me). The phrase "cog in the wheel" frequently comes to mind. Im just saying that in a smaller raid my actions have more weight. The larger the raid size the more zergy it tends to feel as well.
On a slightly different note, however many people to a raid, I do believe in an upper limit to keep zergs from happeneing and not have the challenge mitigated. I know that some people want to take however many people they want but if it destroys the challenge intended by the devs then to me this is no better than cheatings little brother. Brad did mention maybe a mechanic that would increase adds more and more the more people you bring to a raid or similar things. But to me that would probably work out either 1 of 2 ways: 1. It would be ineffective. or 2. It would be effective and just might as well have caps. You cant make broken mechanics just because of immersion or community. Those 2 things are very important but shouldnt be a license to make poor game mechanics or worse destroy game play.