Burning Crusade 10-Man SSC and TK

[DARTHOBI]

I have already talked to many players about this topic and since I have received a lot of support, I would like to share my idea here in the hope that a GM will also take notice.
As everyone can see, the player base is decreasing from week to week and a big part of this is, that for casual players in smaller guilds with their friends, for pve there is nothing to do except Kara and Zul'Aman, which gets boring over time and they quit. Many guilds fail because they can't gather enough players to do the T5 content 25-man raids after T4 content. And on the other hand, it's difficult to find a guild that will accept new players for T5 content now, since they have their own raid core.
The idea would therefore be to turn the 25-man raids like SSC and TK into 10-man or 15-man raids, so that casual players who were able to clear the T4 content can continue with their guild. But this change would also open the door for random groups. For 25 man raids its almost impossible to form a good group via LFM.
I know it would be a huge task, but since there is already talk of making the server TBC+, you could implement 10-man raid TK/SSC like the split of ZA/SWP in normal and heroic mode. TK/SSC normal with less loot would be for 10 players and TK/SSC heroic as it is now.
It would definitely be a welcome variety from Karazhan and Zul'Aman and all players could enjoy every Raid.

 

[ICritMyKilt]

What we need is a good LFG/LFR addon that could communicate via hidden chat channels and work similar to the LFG/LFR system that came in later expansions.  Obviously it couldn't teleport you when 5/10/25/40 people are found, but it could auto-invite players.  You queue for level appropriate dungeons and the addon puts into the hidden chat channel a message that the addon of other players can decipher.  A player could enter queue and mark themselves as tank, heal or dps or two of the three and whether they wanted to be leader or just join a group.  The addons could communicate in the channel and determine a group leader to start the group and auto-invite.  Once a group is started the leader could invite manually or let the addon continue to find and invite people who are LFG and of an appropriate spec.  You could take all this a step further and allow for settings, so if I'm group leader then I could specify that I need a lock, a shaman and a mage for the dps spots if I'm trying to get a particular group make up or specify item level requirements or something to make sure I don't get a bunch of greenies auto-invited to my BT group.  The caveat would be that the stricter you make your group cookie cutter, the longer you will sit in queue waiting for the right people, but if you do get a group you'll know it is the right people and without having to keep spamming world and reading whispers looking for people and then having to gear check them at the front door or A'dal.  Actually, the addon could send their inspect data so you could verify their gear/spec before you get everyone summoned.  Maybe even a browser to view all the potential players and hand pick your favorites based on gear/spec/class/level.

I'll probably never have time to develop it and it would require a significant number of people to actually use the addon, but a guy can dream, right?

As to your request for 10/15-man raids, I like the idea, but I wonder if the work to scale down the encounters and add options for changing between 10/15/25-man for those raids would be too much and make the devs mothball the idea.  That is one thing I do like about these servers, they take the time to try to do things right and there has definitely been some time spent trying to fine tune encounters to get the difficulty dialed-in.  I do think the gear should scale based on the size and difficulty of the raid.  I think if you do heroic BT then there should be a version of the gear that has "Heroic 25-man" in the tooltip and the stats should be better than if you did it on normal.  I also think there should be a difference in gear between "Normal 10-man" and "Normal 25-man".  Scaled-up heroic and 25-man versions of Karazhan would also be cool.  More incentive to do heroic and the 25-man version instead of just grabbing 9-14 more and going in and doing a quick smash and grab on the raid.  You get a flex in the tooltips of all your gear and better stats if you put in the extra effort you get a better reward.  All of this would require lots of work to get right though.