Raid Size at level 60Recently a hot topic of debate is the raid size at level 60 and we’ve been watching the commentary on this closely. To help quell confusion, here’s a look at exactly what to expect in the net few phases in terms of raid size:
- The yet-to-be-announced level 50 raid will be a 20 player experience
- Molten Core will also be a 20 player experience in Season of Discovery
Past that, we are still discussing exactly what raiding in the later tiers of Season of Discovery will look like in terms of raid size.For a bit of background, when we first concepted Season of Discovery we felt that it was perfectly natural for a version of Original World of Warcraft to have 40 player raids. This is partially because the development time needed to scale them was not planned within the scope of what we set out to accomplish on the aggressive schedule we have, but mostly because 40 player raids felt like such a defining characteristic of Original WoW and are utterly unique to this version of the game. It wasn’t really even in consideration to eschew them entirely.When we set out to create our level-up raids however, we did feel that asking people to field 40 players would be a tall ask at level 25. We wanted these first few raids to be somewhat easy to form pick-up groups for as well. As a result, we decided on 10-player experiences instead for the first two level-up raids. As we’ve played the game ourselves and watched how players approach community building, we’ve realized that we’ve set some communities up to potentially struggle a bit by asking them to recruit up from one or two 10-player raid groups to a full 40, should they choose to. As a result, we wanted make it clear now what our plans are to start “bridging” from 10 player raids to higher raid sizes.While overhauling all 40 player raids down to 20 would be theoretically possible, this may be prohibitively difficult and detract significantly from the other features and content we have planned to implement in a post-60 Season of Discovery.
We are doing some investigation now to help us understand what would be needed and what the framework of the Original WoW data can support in this regard. There are some features that just cannot currently exist in Original WoW as well, such as Flex Raiding, so we are constrained in exactly what we are able to do here. Molten Core is definitely unique here in that it is simple enough mechanically and under the hood that it would be relatively easy to pare down to a 20 player experience.
