Not my cup of tea (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Friday, August 22, 2014, 14:06 (3546 days ago) @ Xenos

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think the major difference we're going to see between WoW raids in their original state and Destiny raids at launch is that originally didn't raids need a lot more than 5 other people? I recall people talking about taking up to 40 people with them on a raid. There's a HUGE difference in finding 5 people to raid with and finding even 10 people to raid with.

Yeah, they did… but the game also launched with functional chat and guild systems :) It's a lot easier to organise a raid with people in-game if you can chat to them, even if they're not in your guild. Also, it's a lot easier to recruit people to your guild if you can chat with them, etc. etc.

40 member raids are definitely a relic of the past* — they moved to 10 and 25 member raids in the first expansion, then in the last expansion they introduced a ‘Flexible’ raid which could scale the difficulty based on how many people were in your group, which could be anywhere between 10 and 25. From the next expansion it'll be 10-25 flexible in both the raidfinder (now referred to as ‘Normal’ difficulty) and Heroic (previously ‘Normal’ difficulty), plus there will also be a hardest difficulty which is 20 person, now called ‘Mythic’ (previously ‘Heroic’).

There's a detailed series of articles on the changes to the raiding system in WoW over the years over on the Battle.net blog which I highly recommend as reading material regardless of your interest in WoW or MMOs, as it gives some real insight into the lessons they learned and how the game evolved to better suit players.

*This year is the 10th anniversary of WoW though, so they're going to re-release the classic Molten Core raid as a 40-man raid to try and relive some of the old days… that's going to be interesting!