Invincible

This was going to be a short and relatively straightforward post about how stupid it is that Invincible is not available to 10-player raiders. It still is going to be that, but the thread in question has had its stupidity factor multiplied by several magnitudes.

But we'll start from the core:

If [Invincible] were available in the 10-person encounter as well, it may become too prolific and lose some of its initial unique qualities.

The way this reads, to me, is Crygil trying to protect 10-man raiders from themselves. "We could give you this, but you won't like it!" Oh, will we not? So, in order to save us from "devaluing" our own reward, your solution is just not to give us that reward at all? Gee, thanks. I feel so much better.

One of the flaws behind this issue is that Blizzard assumes we care whether 25-man raiders farm our stuff when what is at stake is a mount, and nothing else. Y'know what? If they have enough hours in the week to clear both 25-man and 10-man versions of ICC, which is a massive instance, and if they do the latter solely for the purpose of an extra mount, let them. They've earned it, frankly. The only thing that changes if you allow Invincible to drop 100% of the time from Arthas-10-H is that one or two 25-man guilds per server will get a full guild's worth of mounts in half the time. Once they've killed Arthas-25-H once, they're going to kill him 25 times anyway. All you do by allowing them to farm 10-man content is reduce the amount of time it takes for the inevitable to occur. And if they want the mount badly enough, but run out of time for everyone to get one before Cataclysm gets launched, they'll find a spare day to go back and farm it again when they're level 85. This isn't Al'ar we're talking about here: This thing has a 100% drop chance.

Besides which, how would this hypothetical situation -- 25-man raiders get the mount quicker than 10-man raiders -- be any different to the fact that they gear up faster than us? Bosses in 25-man drop more pieces of loot because Blizzard has to account for the fact that there are more people in a 25-man raid that need to gear up. It's balanced. So why is it not balanced in the case of a mount that only a small, finite number of 25-man raiders per server are going to have access to in the first place?

But let's look at it from the other side of the fence: What if 25-man hardcore raiders complain that "their" reward is getting handed to 10-man-H raiders? What if it is devalued from their side of the fence? Well ... it's not, frankly. Sorry. I know I bang on about this, and it's something I'll come onto again shortly, but there is no reason for 25-man raiders to get any additional benefit simply for having more people than 10-man raiders. The inflated item levels on their gear is enough -- and is reasonable, because it is a point of design and of concession (If they weren't more powerful, people would just raid 10s). But as I say, we'll come onto that in a little while.

But even if either of these things is a concern, there is a solution to appease both parties: Put Herald/Insanity conditions on the 10-Player Invincible. This solves Blizzard's irrational fear of servers being swamped by Invincibles, and ensures that only people who raid 25-H or 10-H can get the mount: 25-N wouldn't be able to, because the only 264 gear permitted would be 10-H gear -- 10-H raiders would have to work equally hard as 25-H raiders in order to qualify for the mount. The reward in both circumstances would be appropriate for the conditions under which it was sought. But it seems like Blizzard has forgotten all about those conditions since ToC: There's no such achievement in the ICC list.

That's the main issue. Now, we delve into the realm of "Looking at blue post comments and ripping them to shreds", since as I continued to scroll down that thread I found myself getting increasingly annoyed at what I read.

You would think, reading things like ...

The 10-person heroic raid dungeons are tuned in such a way that players do not need to rely on gear from the 25-person normal mode equivalents.

And

It's as simple as logistics. When in a 25-person instance, you are using 25 peoples time. This makes accumulating that number of players more difficult to achieve.

And

The more people you have, the more difficult (numerically) you can make the encounters.

Might make me tempted to say "I told you so" ... But, unfortunately, I can't say such a thing, because Blizzard is being irritatingly cryptic. One the one hand, they claim that 25-mans are scaled up just on the number of players and the numerical increase in damage, but on the other hand they say things like ...

We also scale the difficulty of the encounters up in the larger group of players. Thus, because of added difficulty, they achieve slightly better rewards.

And

We will continue watching upcoming content in the future to make certain that we are able to adjust these encounters and keep them aligned with our goals.

Does the first one mean they are scaled up purely because there are more people, or because the increase in people allows for better synergy? Is it "simple logistics" or not? What exactly are Blizzard's "Goals" related to the 10-/25-player dichotomy? None of this tells us anything -- it's all just vagueness that points in different directions.

You then get conflicting philosophies. In response to a request that 10- and 25-player versions of every raid be on a shared lockout (i.e., you're only able to participate in either the 10- or 25-player version of a raid each week), Crygil said this:

The matter is more complex than that. It's not a good thing to take away content from players, be it 10-person or 25-person.

Are we expected to buy that line, when the whole of the rest of the thread is about Blizzard's decision to take away a piece of content from 10-man raiders? How can we take that philosophy seriously when it runs in direct contravention to Blizzard's choice in this matter?

Then, there is our old favourite:

I've PuG'ed my way to Putricide in 25-person content.

And how many times in that PuG did you wipe, Crygil? Did you actually kill Putricide? "To", once more, is ambiguous. How out-of-touch are you that you suggest 10-player raiders want to be doing 25-man content? Yes, it is true that 10-manners do pug 25-man content. Does that mean they want to? Hell no. I sure as hell don't want to pug ICC25 -- the times that I do, I do so for the sake of gold (through a GDKP run), or Emblems (Only when I miss out on said Emblems in 10-player owing to missing a raid). I don't even want to pug ToC25 in order to get a respectable second trinket -- that's your fault, too, y'know: not giving 10-manners two well-itemised ones at endgame level.

On the aforementioned GDKP runs, I have the potential to get Dislodged Foreign Object -- I have enough (26k gold) to outbid any other competitor. Would I, though? Probably not. I'd bid up to 16k to jack up the price, but I wouldn't bid to win. I don't want to feel like I have to go into potentially disastrous PuGs just for the sake of not wearing a trinket which is three tiers of content below the content I'm supposed to be raiding. Pugging is not an acceptable alternative. Congratulations to you for being on a server capable of doing it, but absolutely nothing compares to the environment of an organised, guilded raid group -- and I don't want to do anything besides organised, guilded raid groups if I can at all help it.

Aside from the issue of the pugging environment, there is the time element to be considered. I'm (un)fortunate in that I have a lot of time on my hands at the moment with which I can potentially pug. What about the people in my raid group who can only set aside 1 hour a day for the random daily and a couple of daily quests/profession cooldowns, plus 3 extra hours on Mondays and Wednesdays in order to clear Icecrown? One of the benefits of 10-man raiding over 25-man is, once more, in the logistics: Fewer people to organise means less time spent waiting for everyone to come online, etc. etc. One player dying in 25-man raids might not be a lot, but 24 people waiting for player number 25 to come online so that they can start is one of the most irritating things imaginable.

Now, though, I've run out of steam. In short, Invincible is the 25-H equivalent of a Legendary: Available to a 25-man playerbase for no discernable reason. We can only hope that what we do get from Arthas-10-H is more of an incentive to kill him than that silly tentacle trinket for YS10+0.