Cataclysm Raid Changes (blue post)Follow

You confuse me. You say you like the shared lockouts, because it will let you gear up on 10 mans before doing 25 man raids.

But they'll be balanced to be equally difficult, so why would you be happy about this? You won't be able to use them as stepping stones anymore. You might as well just start with the 25m raids.

But then you say that you wouldn't want to bother with them at all?

I think that at the individual level 10 mans are more challenging than 25 mans. In a 25 man you can get away with 1,2,3,4, even 5 dps under performing. You can have one or two healers who suck. And one of your tanks can be a little slow. In 10 man losing one healer in a 2 healer setup can be crippling (esp. if your group doesn't have a druid or the one who died WAS the druid).

Scheduling and administratively 25 man is a beast to put together. I've put on a few pugs and it was just a nightmare. You either have to play dictator and slave driver or nothing works. I remember walking away from 25 mans just totally spent. I'd sign off and go do something having nothing to do with the computer for a few hours.

I think that no penalization for running it in 10 man is fair. I don't have a problem with this because I really think that the only real challenge to 25 mans is getting 25 people to not be AFK or show up.


I don't like the raid lock out though. Its going to be downright hell I think for most. "I don't want to run 25 man because my guild needs me in 10" and vice versa. The separate lockouts between 10 and 25 is how it should be.


All-in-all I like the change. I like not being a second-class citizen because I don't have 25 guildies on at the same time even though we're still spending hours and hours and hours of effort clearing 10 man content. I like not having to hunt for Pugs just so I can get "the real" gear.

For any serious raider, it does.
Purely due to this:

If you're serious about raiding you want to gear up as quickly as possible so you can beat bosses quicker which means you need to do those 4 raids each week on each character you take seriously.
It's a ******* pain in the *** and combined with how **** ToC is anyway made it the worst raid aside from Naxx.


And since I HATE repetition, I consider the change to lockouts to be ******* awesome.
Run a raid once a week, and make a conscious decision as to what you do instead of just doing them all.
The only thing they need to do now is make Hardmodes something for occasional bosses where it works (Like Sarth or FL and not it hits harder now hardmodes) and make the last boss of each raid equal to hardmodes, always.
You have to work for that last boss. Make it a real achievement, as in a feeling of accomplishment not silly points, to kill a final boss.
Which brings me to another thing, I don't think final bosses should drop the super leet weapons or higher ilevel gear.
They should drop something cool that allows you to show off that you killed the boss but which doesn't give you an in game advantage (Be it title, tabard, mount, non combat pet or whatever). Because once you've killed the boss you don't need more gear until the next tier of content, and I think letting that last boss hold all the superweapons places too much importance on that one boss.
I also think that the bosses aside from the one final boss should have a bit more involvement in the lore, so it feels like you're killing something/someone important and not just some random lackey of the final boss.

Ok.. I got a little distracted by my thought about how Blizzard wants players to not just focus the final boss in a raid..

Lmfao so true, so very true.

This right here. After a while, killing the same boss 2 or 4 times each week gets mind numbingly boring. I am all for these changes.

Yes, the items you can get are equivalent, but the drop rate will be higher, per person.

I guess they will tune the drop rates until some folks are doing 10-man and some 25-man.

So if no one is doing 25-man they will up the droprate in 25-mans until some people can be bothered to do so.

My biggest problem with this is that it appears to be moving toward more strict lockouts. Assuming that at any given time there are two tiers of raid content - (ICC & TOC or TOC & Uld or Uld & Naxx)... Then I currently have 4 possible options for my Guild raids and personal (PuG) time. *ICC might be the current tier, but I think most people reasonably can step back 1 tier to TOC. However I don't think it's reasonable to say that Naxx is a current option - it's literally 4 tiers behind...

With this change - And assuming we have 2 "Current" tiers of raids - I only get the option of attempting 2 raids in a given week. I think that I will be less likely to join a PuG. I mean if I hop into an ICC 10 man pug I know that I'm actually burning my 25 man 'save'.


IMO - this is the opposite of what they've done in the past. Think of the change to the 2Hr potions. They saw that 2hrs was just too long an inefficent. So they made you get Two Pots - for 1 hr....

Man I been looking over some old FOH posts like: ******************************************************************************************************************************************* I can't imagine the he ll of doing 80+ person raids. reading though a lot of old posts it seem like people weren't having fun doing it. I remember my own experince of raiding in FFXI and 25+ Wow and yea it was a pita to get things goin with high number of people.

Plus, in a 10 man environment, you are far less likely to have repeat class+spec combos. So class-specific drops are less contested.

So, when the Resto Shaman gets ALL the Resto Shaman gear, it's rather nice. Even if the item is 50% more likely to drop in 25 man, if you have another Resto Shaman in the raid, your chances of actually getting that item in a specific are lower than in the 10 man.

So, in your world, people are only allowed to like one type of thing?

We're saying people won't do 25 mans because they take more effort for no additional reward. When they actually had higher rewards for the invested effort, this wasn't a problem. But now that you can do the comparably "easier" 10 man (slightly easier due to balancing for buffs, with the added ease of being way simpler to organize) for those same rewards.

You might love 25 man raids. You probably will still end up doing 10 man ones, and just organizing 25s for Achieve runs.

I really think the only difficulty between 10 and 25 is the administrative aspect of arranging and finding 25 good players as opposed to 10. When you compare the individual difficulty between 10 and 25 you find that a single individual in 10 man content is expected to perform more flawlessly than a single player in 25 man content.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to run 25. I'm saying guilds shouldn't be rewarded for having 25 people. But I feel the current system is disproportionate to the effort of the individual.

Finding 10 good players may be easier than finding 25. But from the individuals perspective, if you're not the raid leader, 10 man requires more of you than 25 man. This is of course not considering hard-modes. I've never done hard modes either way so I couldn't comment. But I do no that going from healing 10 man to 25 man, 25 is far more relaxed.

I totally agree - why would anyone bother organizing a 25 man run if there's no additional reward for it? The process of even sending out the invites wouldn't be worth it. The loot changes will effectively remove 25s from the game, which, IMO, is disgusting. WTF is "epic" about a 10 man run?

Just another change to make the game "more available" to the lowest common denominator.

Cue the ratedowns.