empe wrote:You should read earlier pages. Progressive guilds, doing progressive content, can't afford to carry anyone on DPS checks.
Sorry, saw this was in the section "bitch & complain" so I did just that.
Anyway, in more detail:
What you say is probably true, but only for the top notch progression raiders (top10, maybe top 20).
The top guild on my server (world rank 86) is what would probably be called a "mid-range" progression guild, meaning they have cleared the 2 first raids in heroic at this point in time (probably only because they have been raiding every day since mop released, but that is not the discussion point).
The problem arises when you start seeing these people play in 10 man, you can just put a Benny Hill soundtrack on and literally shit yourself with laughter, healers going oom halfway through a normal mode encounter, chain wiping on alt runs, inventing new strategies half way between normal mode and heroic mode, just for the sake of telling the one and only pug guy that they know the heroic strategy...
I hope this is a "one in a million" thing and only happens on my server but somehow I really doubt it.
Anyway, what I see is that people used to playing 25 man, and especially the healers, seem to need a lot more hand holding in 10 man when they can't rely on multiple rez, multiple raid cooldowns, multiple mana cooldowns, multiple people to follow so you don't look too much like an idiot when you don't know what to do, etc etc etc.
Obviously this is not true of the top notch raiding guilds, or they wouldn't be a top notch raiding guild in the first place, the problem I see is those guilds trying to follow in the footsteps of the top ones.
And then there's little details about enrage timers that, in my view, bias towards 25 man: a warrior doing a shattering blow in 10 man has little significance unless you've got a melee oriented raid, whereas a shattering blow in 25man will always be a dps increase (unless of course you've got 0 melee).
The amount of healers in 25man allows, say, a disc priest to use more smite if enrage is really a problem.
The amount of raid cooldowns in 25 man allows the use of less healers (going from 5 to 4 healers is easy, going from 2 to 1 healers in 10 man is not really that feasible).
25 man allows more leniency in raid comp, 10 man demands better synergy if you want to get all the buffs, forcing some players to play other specs/classes for optimization, etc.
Anyway, it just seems to me that 25 man raiding is easier to organize (on a technical level if not on a social level) and allows for far more personal errors than 10 man does.
And to me, the clincher between 10man and 25man: conviviality.
