Wrath of the Lich King raiding

For an online game to retain its customers, it's important that they release frequent content updates to keep the players happy. Otherwise they might get bored, and stop paying the monthly fee. Some of these updates are free in the form of patches to the game. They are usually a bit smaller and only contain minor updates, like a single new raid instance, quest zone or PvP area. Other updates are larger and come in the form of an expansion pack that you pay for. Usually you have to go to your local store and buy a new box. These expansions add a new level cap, new races and/or new classes, a multitude of new zones and new group and raid instances.

World of Warcraft has announced it second expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, a while ago, but so far information has been scarse. We know about the main new additions, such as the new continent Northrend, the new Death Knight class etcetera, but detailed information has been hard to come by. Although we now know the "friends and family alpha" phase has started and unofficial info starts to leak through, one of the few officialy confirmed bits of info, is the fact that Blizzard is planning to make both a 10-person and 25-person version of every raid instance.

At first I thought this was an excellent idea. Everyone pays the same price for the expansion pack, so it would only be fair that as many people as possible get to see all of the content. Getting 25 people together at the same time for an extended period of time and on a frequent basis has always been difficult if not impossible for the casual players, and this way they have a better shot at seeing a lot more of the raiding game.

But a comment a guild mate of mine made, got me thinking. Can 10-person encounters still be as diverse and challenging as the old 25-person raids? Well, this might sound familiar to those of you who were playing WoW when the first bits of information of the current expansion, The Burning Crusade, became known. Back then, the typical raid size was 40 players, and a lot of people were concerned that the boss fights would become a lot more simple. Luckily, I'm happy to say that those fears were unfounded. Raiding in TBC is a lot more challenging and enjoyable than before as far as I'm concerned, although I didn't experience all of the previous raid instances in full.

But will it be workable when the raid size goes down to 10 man? Now, as you may know, Blizzard intends to recycle Naxxramas, an old raid instance from before the first expansion, as the first instance in the new expansion Wrath of the Lich King. Obviously, they'll have to retune some of the fights, both because of the fact that players will be a lot more powerful and have more spells and abilities available to them at level 80 as opposed to level 60 in the old version, and because of the new raid size, down from 40 to 25 players now.

Some of the veterans from WoW before the expansion were already doubting that Naxx would be able to retain its epic feeling, especially the more complex encounters such as 4 Horsemen. Considering that Blizzard stated they'll make a 10-person version of every raid instance, I can only assume that this will be valid for Naxxramas as well. How will this play out when you're tuning that specific encounter for a 10-player raid? Obviously, some of the complexity will have to go. The old version of 4 Horsemen required you to have 8 protection specced warriors in your raid, obviously in this new version for 25 this will not be possible, let alone for 10 raiders.

Hopefully, Blizzard will add special mechanics to the 25-person version of every boss fight. And I think we've had a little preview in patch 2.4, where Blizzard introduced Kael'thas Sunstrider, an old boss from a 25-person raid instance, as the end boss in a 5-person dungeon. Although the encounter was totally dumbed down, lacked pretty much all of the epic atmosphere and was missing the parts of the fight that made the raid version challenging and one of the best fights in the game so far, you can still fight Kael when you're a more casual player.

So my guess is that Blizzard will tune down the raid instances for 10 players, removing abilities and maybe even parts of the fight. If they go the other way, and just add more hitpoints to the bosses and make them hit harder like some other people have suggested, the real raiders will grow bored quite quickly and will be looking for a game that can actually give them a proper challenge before long.