Exisitngs Guilds will suffer from a dramatic changes to high end raiding in the upcoming expansion Burning Crusade. The new instances will be most likely limited to 10 and 25 players only.
„In Burning Crusade, end game raiding (which occupies WoW’s max level players) will be done in groups of 25 or 10. Illidan’s Black Temple, the most challenging raid instance that will appear in Burning Crusade (at release), has a 25-player limit.“ – 1up.com
„I always thought that larger parties enforce more specific roles for the individual. People spam bolts to maximize dps, not because it’s necessarily fun.
The roles have been specific in large groups and now we are just making individual contribution more significant. The fact that you don’t have backup healers stacked 3 or 4 high means your hybrid classes will feel more pressure in various situations. Each player’s efforts are more distinct in a smaller group.
Bottom line, smaller groups make for a more functional game. Everyone gains more opportunity for participation.
And when people get to choose stats through socketed itemization, that aims towards hybrid classes making armor for their play style.
So, to answer the question directly, 5/10/25 player caps helps hybrid functionality and utility a lot. ;)“ – Tseric (Blizzard)
In my eyes this change is not good at all. Existing Guilds will have more arguments and whining on who is going to be able to join the raids. They will be forced to split well working teams in primary and secondary groups (do you want to be in a secondary group?) or to drop members. For this reason I do not really see how I will even be allowed to join for the new instances to „contribute“ with my poor equipped alt Druid while 15 members are envious looking at my spot in a raid. I suppose I will be stuck to play my Rogue forever if I ever want to see this content. Its bad when developpers never play their own high end content in an existing guild and plan these things without realizing what effect this will cause on people.
It has become impossible to join a group to the non raid instances if you are a feral druid already with the limits introduced a while back. Also Rogues and Hunters have a hard time finding groups. I fear that these changes will begin to show same effect on raid instances.
I wonder about the real thought behind of all this. Is the size of a raid reason of the massive lagspikes we recently encountered on our Realms? Too many people at the same time in the same intances for the existing server hardware? Are there too many ct-raidassist messages flooding the servers when playing in large groups? Does Blizzard think with this limit there will eventually be less players or players will be spread around more?
Anyway there is nothing that can be done about this anyhow, but all these coming changes make me feel uneasy about the future of World of Warcraft and I am enjoying to play my Lineage II Spellhowler more and more.