Hi,
we did 25s in TBC and may I just say, those were some of the best times I've had in WoW ever
This is true for me as well, but the thing to remember is that, in those days, guilds and raid crews naturally converged to those sizes. Today, they naturally converge to the 10-man crew. This is a natural thing, and its root is pretty much where Fury said it was: for the same content and the same rewards*, a 10-man raid is easier to put together and easier to pull off than a 25-man one.
What this means is that we
didn't need big recruitment drives during TBC. Modest efforts that would bring in one or two extra raiders, plus a more agressive promotion of raid events within our own community base, that is all it took to regularly build a solid 25-man crew.
In Wrath, the field began to turn. While the differential iLevel rewards between 10- and 25-man versions of the raids was still sufficient to keep some pressure towards having a large crew, not everyone raids for iLevel. Those that raid for content proper quickly found that the content itself was pretty much the same for both versions and were only too glad to settle into a 10-man crew. Thus, while we could still field a full 25-man crew in Wrath (and we did, a few times), the
ongoing recruitment effort we had to go through was of a higher order of magnitude altogether.
The thing that you have to keep in mind is that, no matter how stable a raid crew is, it is essentially a rotating door arrangement. You have to have a continuous replacement mechanism, just to deal with the attrition that always occurs in what is essentially a voluntary activity.
In TBC, given the pressure to converge into a 25-man crew, our attrition was fairly low. Still, it was there, and I remember many a night where we simply did not have the numbers to tackle Maggy and Gruul and had to settle for a 2x10 Kara run.
In Wrath, during the times when we were a large crew, our attrition was so heavy, we never did field a 25-man crew for two weeks in a row. The best we could hope for was one 25-man run a month.
In Cata, the attrition would be so heavy, it would require us to recruit
at least two people a week, just to make sure we even have a 25-man crew.
Now, all this just sounds like an explanation for why it's hard, not an explanation for why I don't want it. You're right. My problem is not that it's hard. My problem is not that it might not work. On the contrary, my problem is that it
might work. Are you ready? Here it is:
When you run a heavy recruitment drive, the more successful you are, the more you dilute the community.
It takes time to integrate a person. Some people fall naturally into place in a group such as ours. (Xylak comes to mind.
) Others never really come to fit in and end up quitting (or worse, getting thrown out...) But in either case, if you have an influx of two new people per week, after two to three months, your community is so diluted, it's hard to even tell it's there.
To be sure, community dilution has happened to The Haven before, and we've always bounced back, to the point where, today, we are again at one of our strongest moments, community wise. But it's still not something we want to take for granted.
And it's definitely not something I'd want to see put in check just because the achievements for 25-man are different!
So, yes, even though 25-man raiding in TBC was awesome, I have to say that, unless Blizzard changes the game again, it's a thing of the past, and there's no point in wallowing in the good old glory days. It's a different game, it's a different guild, and it's not going to happen.
Still, it was a good thing to put the idea forth for discussion.
Cheers,
J.
(*) They're not exactly the same rewards. A 10-man boss will drop one tier token, a 1:10 ratio, whereas a 25-man boss will drop three, a 3:25 ratio, roughly 1:8, which means that 25-man groups get proper tier gear
slightly faster than 10-man groups. But the difference is very small, and what's more, this is an indirect reasoning, not at all automatic to the average raider, and thus not germane to the discussion.
