Difficulty hiearchy (PvE)

[MoroMurasaki]

I know all that, but that have nothing to do with the question the original poster presented, as far as I understand.

What I understood from the the original poster is question about the innate difficulty of the content.

Let's add some numbers. If we'll assume that that players have a skill level between 1 and 10 and raid have a difficulty of 5, then a person with a skill level of 5 is neither a dead weight nor a "safety valve". If the average of all players is 5 or more, the party clears.

Now, if we'll assume that every single other player in the party/alliance is at-level for the content, the only variable is the player in question. If the player is even one level below the contents difficulty, the party will fail.

When taking into consideration looking purely at mechanical difficulty, it is not clear-cut whether alliance or raids are more difficult since it varies from one to the other.

What I said is that I believe that some of the alliances are more difficult than some of the raids and vice versa for purely mechanical reasons, requiring from the individual players a higher level of skills to pass it. Whether it is compensated by highly skilled players or not is besides the point.

Using this scaling as a basis I think it sort of further pushes normal raids below Alliance raids.

In a vacuum you have 8 or 24 people sitting at a 5 in terms of skill and it all works out. No dead weight and no outstanding performances. That isn't how the actual world works though.

Since basically none of this content has a hard enrage the requisite skill level for dps is essentially don't die. With 8 party members alive there are no difficult dps checks to make as none of the "burn the add before the gague fills" situations are challenging. For any tank but the MT most fights are "you're a dps with worse numbers and more utility who occasionally grabs an add" so that makes the tank skill floor also rather low.

Healers are subjective but In terms of an actual minimum requirement there isn't much. If you aren't dpsing you're standing there a lot.

Not having players met these "5" benchmarks isn't particularly common but when it happens it sucks... but in an Alliance raid there are that many more people to pick up the slack. If I have 3 awful codps in a normal raid we are going to go really slow. If there are 3 of those same dps in an Alliance raid it's less of an issue.

Tl;dr - you can hide or be carried in alliance better than almost anywhere else especially as a dps. I think this makes alliance overall less difficult though I admit it's splitting hairs.