10 vs 25: The Conundrum

Its fair to say that I have quite an open view on raiding, raid difficultly and whinny little bitches! And usually I would say that if you are struggling with content then its probably been pitched at just the right level (despite public opinion, raiding isn’t supposed to be a cake walk). However the more and more I look at the 25man content for Ulduar, the more and more I think there is a need to do some 10man content first.

From a healing perspective I am fairly confident in what I am doing and fairly confident that collectively we are not struggling to heal through the 25man content. However it is obvious to me that we are struggling to dps the things down! On every encounter thus far we have hit the enrage timer on multiple occasions. It is arguable that we are refining strategies and this will impact upon the time taken to kill something, but we are more often then not 20% away from killing stuff when It enrages!

As a guild we have decided that we are going to focus on the 25man content (for now), although 10man groups are going on each week, and to my knowledge are proving more successful. Given this, I would have thought it more sensible to focus on doing 2x10man raids on the allotted (official) raid nights! More to the point, how many raiding guilds did 10man Naxx first? I know we did! So why is Ulduar different, why do we think we can step straight into 25mans.

To argue this I have looked at the 10man content, and more importantly the rewards (gear) acquired, and I have to say, im not all that impressed! There were maybe one or two items I would currently consider to be upgrades, and I mean maybe! It’s debatable. If we applied that rule across the entire guild you would expect that we have a good level of healing/tanking/dps! So why is it that we struggle so much?

My guess is that we just not quite there yet…. And that a few weeks of further strategy refining is required (hopefully). With Thursday comes another fresh Instance for us to tackle, and hopefully some further progression will be achieved.

So, Ulduar was a (fairly) big jump from Naxx etc… How has you guild faired so far? Did you jump right in to the 25man content or have you been refining your strategies in the 10man (easy) mode?