As someone who has led pick-up raids, 25man pugs can be soul-crushing and heartbreaking. It is much easier to get a majority of guildmates for a 10man and fill in one or two pug spots and be successful. In 25man, I’d be lucky to get 10 guildmates which means I have to fill 15 spots from random people from the server that I don’t know. Like Chris said, trying to manage 15 or so people that are not from your guild can be very hard to do.

I think 10mans definitely have a place in end game for people that really just want to play casually and/or don’t want to get into a raiding guild.

An issue that goes along with the scaled down nature of raiding though, is the paradox of difficulty and the balance you mentioned.

When compared with their console counterparts, I don’t think raiding in MMOs is challenging in the actual encounter, so much as managing the people to tackle each encounter. In WoW especially, fights typically come down to “here’s your role and the 3-4 things you need to watch out for,” with healers being the exception. The more people having to be responsible for themselves and others, the better chance there is of failure. So, in this way, 25 mans are definitely more difficult.

However, the input of each player in a 10 man is much more important than in a 25-man. If one person messes up in a 25, you have more people to take up the slack. In that way, 10 mans become more difficult.

So which is the more accessible/difficult path? I would think 10-mans, still. Simply because getting 10 people in one place at one time is easier than 25. Yet, when it comes to guilds where people know and trust the competency of one another, I can’t help but feel that 25-man is better. Maybe the answer lies in creating better tools (like WoW’s new LFG tool) for people to get together, determine competency, and arrange these things.

Raiding is so much about management and individual responsibility, it masks the fact that bosses, which some are more complex than others, aren’t really what decides how hard an encounter is.

I’m probably talking myself into a corner and stating what the rest of the world already knows. I have a habit of doing that. When it comes to raiding though, my noobness tells me it’s never hard so much as it can be frustrating.

In WoW 10 mans are simply much higher calibre than 25s. A 10 man was me, 5-6 excellent players who are mates and 3-4 filler players. A 25 man was me, 5-6 excellent players who are mates and 18-19 filler players. I think most WoW raiders have the same experience unless you play hardcore with a guild that’s full of excellent players (which I did do from time to time).

So no surprise really that people in the middle bracket of raiding achievement are keen on small raids. Big raids only benefit you if you’re playing at such a high level that everyone you raid with is excellent or if you’re so utterly bad that you need to sneak into someone’s raid as filler and hope to get lucky with loot rolls before they realise just how bad you are and blacklist you for ever.

The trick is now to still having a challenging yet fun experience for those players (like myself) who can only play for an hour or so at a time, while still having the large scale time sucking experiences that others want. I think things like the smaller raid groups in WoW, and the skirmishes in LotRO have done alot for these types of players.