Differences between Ulduar 10 and 25

[Gravity]

We're going to be entering 25-man Ulduar this weekend, and I wanted to work out how much changes (not much), so wrote up a table.  FYI.

[Mouse]

You need 15 more people.

[Gravity]

Yeah, kinda sad actually, I had expected a lot more mechanical and strategy differences.
Positioning on some fights like Kologarn I guess might be fiddly but... the lack of differences surprised me.

[Mouse]

Big changes for tanks are mostly: is there a 2nd OT?  Fights where we use 3 tanks are: Razorscale, Kolo, Auriaya, Freya, Mim, Thorim, Yogg (Some could be done with 2, but we have little need to drop one).

All the other fights require 2 or 1, mechanics change very little.  Things do more damage, certain effects are more potent, I dont think we do things different though strategically.

Oh, we aren't on general hardmode yet, so we have 2 tanks.  One is used to generate 2nd aggro in case the tank dies (we had huge problems in the first few weeks with tank deaths).  Now we keep 2 to get ready for hardmode next week when we ll need a tank on the animus.

[Splug]

Black Hole Explosion + Arcane Barrage is easily survivable on 10.  For most classes, it is not on 25.

There are a lot of cases where the difference of +2k damage on nuke is sufficient to push a combination attack from being "heal more" to "find a way to stop this from happening, or stack druids for rebirth."  Similarly, kill-pace timers are much, much tighter.  Yogg-saron is almost always ~30-60 seconds from berserk for us on 25, yet we do 10 with 5+ minutes left.  Steelbreaker comes down to the wire more often than not on 25, yet on 10 we don't even get to the second tank.  Part of it is the gear-balancing, but even with mostly Naxx25 gear the first couple weeks, 10-hard timers were much, much easier to meet.

-Splug

[Faligard]

Oh, we aren't on general hardmode yet, so we have 2 tanks.  One is used to generate 2nd aggro in case the tank dies (we had huge problems in the first few weeks with tank deaths).  Now we keep 2 to get ready for hardmode next week when we ll need a tank on the animus.

Need more Blood spec imo. I was 2nd on healing done this past week for Vezax hard mode and more dps is always a good thing. You're not undergeared, you could solo tank hard mode.

[Mouse]

Blood bores the shit out of me, but we ll see if I need to spec back into it for Hardmodes.

[DarknessEternal]

That's a nice table.

However, once you get past the mechanical differences, 25 man is vastly easier than 10 man, especially given that raid setup you devised.

You have more than double the number of healers of 10 man, but damage isn't anywhere close to doubled.  The end result is that no one is ever in danger of death.  Everyone will be fully healed at all times.  Sure, the tank is always 2 seconds away from death, but realistically, you have 1.5 healers on him in 10 man.  With 7 healers, you can have 3 entire people who never need to heal anyone else, putting that tank squarely out of danger.

As for timers, they are a total joke on 25 man.  If your entire raid consists of people who beat timers on 10 man, they will handily be beating 25 man timers.  Triple the dps guys is actually over 4x the dps with buff stacking.

The only reason at all 25 mans present any kind of extra difficulty is less individual responsibility.  It makes people dumb.  5 dumb guys in 25 still beats the boss.  They don't even have to live that long. 

[Splug]

However, once you get past the mechanical differences, 25 man is vastly easier than 10 man, especially given that raid setup you devised.

You have more than double the number of healers of 10 man, but damage isn't anywhere close to doubled.  The end result is that no one is ever in danger of death.  Everyone will be fully healed at all times.  Sure, the tank is always 2 seconds away from death, but realistically, you have 1.5 healers on him in 10 man.  With 7 healers, you can have 3 entire people who never need to heal anyone else, putting that tank squarely out of danger.

As for timers, they are a total joke on 25 man.  If your entire raid consists of people who beat timers on 10 man, they will handily be beating 25 man timers.  Triple the dps guys is actually over 4x the dps with buff stacking.

The only reason at all 25 mans present any kind of extra difficulty is less individual responsibility.  It makes people dumb.  5 dumb guys in 25 still beats the boss.  They don't even have to live that long. 

This has not been my experience at all.  Most of the health pools for damage constraints are increased by a factor of five (Yogg's 11M->55M, Animus' 2M->12.5M, Steelbreaker's 3M->10M with detonations at double time).  Several encounters cross the threshold where two unrelated raid hits are non-lethal when combined in 10 become lethal in 25 (Freya, Algalon, Thorim), meaning shields must be applied pre-emptively rather than healed reactively, or an otherwise ignored mechanic must be countered to prevent the problem in the first place.  Finally, there are often more sources of damage (3x roots, 3x cosmic smashes) with more targets to watch, resulting in a chance of healers overlapping on one player or group and undershooting another.  It's much simpler to distribute healing between the tank and one random raid member than the tank and three random raid members.

-Splug

[DarknessEternal]

Then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.  25 has always been a breeze from my experience.  Well, that's sort of a lie.  I've been on very few raids with 25 actual people.  But doing 25 Uld with 17-20 people seems reasonably close to 10 man, so I just extrapolated that adding another 8 people would make it trivial.

[Vexill]

I agree with Splug on this one. Though to be honest I can't say I've ever tried 10 man using only 10 man gear, so its possible that we are just ilvl stomping the place at this poine.

10s being easier becomes especially apparent when you start looking at the hard modes, the 25 man just feels like its tuned much more tightly than the 10 man. We've been attempting Freya+3 lately on 25 and finding it fricken hard, it doesn't take many mistakes for your raid to be completely screwed, on 10 man we got it on our 4th attempt. The same is true, to an even greater extent, of Mimiron, who will kick your ass very very hard if anyone stuffs up on 25 (we almost made phase 3 without it being apparent we weren't going to get it once), while on 10s we can consistently get to 10% in phase 4 after only a couple hours of attempts. XT is another example, hes a joke on 10 man to get in hard mode, but on 25 its a pretty tight race to get him before the enrage and if people stuff up your gonna wipe.

I think most of the difficulty in 25's shows up when you get to the point that the fights are tuned to not allow for deaths mid fight and the boss spells are at the point where if players stuff up once the boss just 1 shots them.

[Slust]

It is my feelings that the 10mans are under tuned and 10man Hards bring the difficulty up to a level which actually makes the encounter interesting.  And that 25mans are generally fine, some 25man Hards are challenging and some are just stupidly over tuned, requiring an OCD level of perfection in execution that makes me not want use my time to try and kill.

Also, don't forget you cannot tank the Assault Bots during Mimiron and Snaplasher during Freya, snare kite them.

[Mantor]

Blood bores the shit out of me, but we ll see if I need to spec back into it for Hardmodes.

You need VotW for IC HM, and blood for verax is mandatory. By mandatory, i mean you heal yourself with DS + Runetap for 400-500k during that fight, as much as a normal healer will do. JoL will do a 500k healing too.

[Hive]

You need to have some flexible people. Some fights need 3 tanks, some 1. Most can be done with 6 healers, some need 7 while Yogg only needs 5. Duel spec/gear or having subs available ftw.

[Slust]

You definitely don't need to be Blood to tank Vezax.  You might need 2 paladin healers who don't suck, but you don't need to be Blood.  You can't Death Strike enough heals in 4 seconds to survive two hits without receiving direct healing, so while it may be nice and every little bit helps, it doesn't help enough to make a night and day difference.  Or actually remove any healing burden from your healers.  It's just icing on the cake.