EQ would benefit a lot from scaling down the player requirement on their content. It makes little sense to create and tune raids for a force of 54 people when most guilds cannot field that. The community has mostly adapted to this by boxing. However raids that require smaller numbers could be made much more engaging with more skill checks rather than stat checks. In addition small raids create more interesting gameplay experience for players as raids have to make more meaningful and strategic choices as their pool of abilities is much lower. On top of this with fewer players in the zone there is the potential for less lag. It would also give much more freedom in the area of open/pickup raids. Raids the require less players could be run more impulsively like pick up groups and could open up a lot of community engagement. Is there any down side to having raids scaled and cap to a say 24 man limit?
The only thing this would do is make half the classes obsolete causing them to quit EQ and cause like half the raiders to also quit EQ
It should be possible to limit raid forces for some experimental bonus content and to reflect the feedback from raiders. It is a dogma that raids do get attuned to 54 players. There are more possibilities.
Were you around for the PoP to GoD Raiding Guild downsizing? Shrinking raids has the knock on effect of shrinking guilds, unless having 1 or 2 27-player raid events are what you go for (so guilds can run 2 raids concurrently) and even then many guilds only have 1 raid leader at all, finding multiple raid leaders can be a huge hill to climb, I lost count of how many guilds literally collapsed after losing their one raid leader. This game has been minimalised to hell already (6-7 zones per expansion, zero class-development, zero class-balancing) the last thing it needs is yet more shrinkflation.
This question has been brought up a couple times in the past. Having smaller raids would be great in the short term but would make it harder in the long run. Short term: Guilds that have 50+ members would have to start doing split raids. Guilds would split. People would compline and quit. Long term: Assuming the same raiding population you would expect there to be roughly twice as many guilds with half the population Each raid force now has 1/2 the margin for error and you're likely to be only one person deep in certain key classes like enchanters. What do you do when your raid requires lots of mez'ing and your one enchanter calls in sick ? The same concept applies to low value classes. Because there is less margin for error you're more likely to cut that berserker, monk, and wizard and replace them with the DPS flavor of the day. The same idea applies with people who get carried along on raids.
All true right now, but that's a good argument that could get completely tipped on its head by the Personas feature.
Your typical raid generally contains 2-3 tank groups and 6-7 DPS groups. For this illustration, let's say 6 DPS groups. Each group normally has one healer and one support class (bard, enchanter). That makes 24 raid spots for a DPS class- necro, magician, wizard, monk, rogue, berserker, beastlord, ranger Now make a 24 person raid. If you roll with one tank group, that leaves 3 DPS groups. 12 DPS spots. A guild currently wanting to maximize raid DPS will want necromancers and magicians to fill those 12 spots. Maybe have one melee group with ranger and beastlord and rogue. What happens to wizards, monks, berserkers? Would a guild rather have shaman as the DPS group healer instead of a druid? No, 24 person raids are a bad idea. Recruitment is a better idea, but recruitment takes effort and work. Which for some players they don't want to do that.
That has nothing to do with raid size and everything to do with class balance If there is no reason to run wiz monk and zerkers in a 24 man raid why run them in a 54?
Recommend: Making the default raids tuned for ~30 moderately skilled and geared players, with easy mechanics where an additional body count will make the raids substantially easier (Specifically, no harsh death penalty mechanics) Creating "hard mode" versions of all the raids that are tuned for ~48 moderately skilled and geared players, with more punishing mechanics
I do not think "Personas" will not change anything with respect to raid class make up. Wither that "alt" is a persona, another character on the same account, or another character on a different account, its all the same. You'd end up having to move someone who stilled in the "main" roll and hope they are as skilled raiding on the "alt".
I'm out of the loop, what's the level of force multiplication this provides? In terms of general lethality, does it turn a 30 person raid into a 32 person raid, 36 person, or?
In a true min/max top end guild, you wouldn't. At least with a 54 man raid force you have more wiggle room to get by with sub optimal classes ( and players )
I am not sure the exact math on this, someone who crunches numbers like Sancus would probably be able to break this down. The only thing I can say is that we can go in a group or two short and still come out on top without too much difficulty (assuming those there are paying attention to emotes and whatnot). I would probably be safe in saying that a well oiled team of top raiders could probably go in with less than that and still do the content using the superior standard.
Because you have a lot more open slots and a lot more flexibility with how to fill them when you have 54 slots versus 24. Sure some raids would go without those classes if they could but that is harder to do with a larger raid size.
