10-man / 25-man

My concerns about the 10-man / 25-man duplicate system are starting to appear elsewhere in the guild. The ‘early adopters’ – those in the first wave to 80 and with the desire to run everything everywhere – are already getting tired of the Naxx bosses, and we haven’t even completed three wings of it on heroic mode yet. There is a fair group of people who have run Naxx-10 on every timer for the past 4-5 weeks, and the general consensus for this week is that we were kind of bored with it.

The unfortunate side effect of this Naxx lethargy is that these people, many of whom are our best players and have the best gear, are now also kind of bored with Naxx-25 already. This was our first week of Naxx raids, and we’ve cleared the Spider and Plague wings, and everything in the Abom wing short of Thaddius (I will leave that rant for another day!). Tonight is the Military wing. None of these are new encounters, even though they are new to us in 25-man form.

These early adopter people are also generally the folks who crave new adventures and challenges. Is Gothik-25 a new challenge? Not really. In fact, Thaddius aside most of the bosses seem easier in heroic form. Unchallenged core raiders become bored core raiders, and experience has shown that bored core raiders become cranky prima donas. This has happened eventually in the past, and part of my job is to handle it, but it became an issue a lot quicker with this new format.

I know why Blizz made the choice to have identical 10 and 25 man raids, and to be honest I have had an outstanding time on the 10-mans thus far. I wish they had the time and resources to develop totally different raids, though, because the current system just throws a lot more issues at the guild management.