Saturday Raid

This is my little guild's raid group for ICC10. It's our only raid, once a week, so we have to really churn it out to get through bosses. Our group is made up of a lot of RL friends, although a couple we've met along the way. I'm so proud of how far this little guild has come. I don't ever want to raid with anyone else.

It raises the question about the difference between 25m and 10m raids. 10 mans always seem easier, more like an alt run, whereas 25 mans are where the "good" players are, the hardcore players, and the better loot. It might be considered by some to be ridiculous that I put up screenshots for a ten man group. I like ten mans more. Each person is 2-3x more important. I like the intimacy, particularly as a GM that likes to really know my guildmates and the people I raid with. (And I always feel like just a number in a 25man.) I don't lead raids, that's Mouse's job. Anything outside the raid is my responsibility, but when we zone in it's up to Mouse.

Recently, Blizzard posted this about Cataclysm's raiding change.

"The first of the refinements being made is that we're combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn't apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.

We're designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we'll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They'll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today."

 I...don't mind this. At all. In a way, I'm going to miss the option to do both raids each week. However, I want 10m groups to have access to the same gear. This will put better, more serious emphasis (I think and hope) on 10 mans.

I know a lot of people are a bit upset about this. What do you think?