While there's so much in Cataclysm that seems so exciting, what I'm most looking forward to is the changes to raiding.

I recently reactivated my account after a year away from game. I canceled for one reason - my guild broke up. It was an old guild, and very well known. It was consistently one of the top guilds on the server, although it rarely got first kills. The members were very respectable, and when I joined not long after WOTLK came out, I was welcomed into the fold, treated as a sister, and, of course, we kicked butt and took names. After the long-time top guild on the server transferred off (a legend in and of itself, as they would spend thousands of dollars in real money to leave, only to have free transfers off the server being offered only two weeks later :P), we found ourselves at #1. We would get the server first 10m 3D Sarth kill, we would get the first "The Immortal", and we would be the first on the server with Black Proto-Drakes (and, if I remember right, we were the only Alliance guild on the server to do so). Despite our guild's mantra, that we didn't have to prove ourselves to anyone, we got a lot of attention, and attracted new people to the guild.

That wouldn't last, however. When Ulduar came out, a bunch of transfers to our server, that had organized a guild and nearly caught up to us in pre-3.1 content, began grinding Ulduar progression eight hours or more a day. My guild, being one full of adults with lives outside the game and could only afford four hours a night, quickly fell behind. The people that we had attracted to the guild via our pre-3.1 successes left, because they only wanted to be a part of "the best". Some older members also became discouraged, and we would see them less and less often as we attempted to push hard modes. The leadership began to run on fumes, and finally, it was over, just under three months after Ulduar was released. We stopped getting enough people to come to 25-man raids, period, never mind hard modes. Our recruitment dried up completely. Our final raid as a guild was a 10-man Glory of the Ulduar Raider run where I and a couple others got our Rusted Proto-Drakes.

The interweaving, for lack of a better term, of 10 and 25 man raids, having them share the same timer and allowing you to switch between the two during one lockout, and the sharing of the loot between 10 and 25 man could have saved the guild. Sure, we'd have still lost our #1 spot - that wasn't a big deal to us. We didn't have to prove ourselves to others, as long as we enjoyed ourselves and gave it everything we had. We would have had enough of a core in the end, however, where we could have focused on getting geared up in 10-man, while rebuilding the guild for 25-man raiding.

In addition, I hope that this will bring more challenging 10-man raids, much like 3-drake Sartharion was in the early days. It was tough, but it was a fun encounter, and once we had it down, it was amazing.