Blizzard released a few notes today concerning the future of raiding in Cataclysm. First a few quotes from the announcement that grabbed my attention.
-10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout
-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.
-…we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player…
-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.
-In terms of tuning, we want groups to be able to jump into the first raids pretty quickly
The story it tells…
Well the first thing you get from this is that effectively the way to go for raiding will become 10 mans. With the same lockout , gear and difficulty the only upside to 25 mans is that you gear up faster since there’s proportionally more loot dropping. However since it’s a lot less of a headache to put a 10 man together than a 25 man(I did both), every serious raid leader out there will say screw it and go with 10 mans. The extra loot is not worth the hassle of doing a 25 man. Hell, I think that even with the extra loot 25 mans will be slower since you lose so much more time getting everything organized.
For what it’s worth I approve of this because the less organisation I have to deal with the happier I am.
The really interesting part is the last two comments, especially the part about identifying specific gear pieces/bosses and jumping early into raids.
The return of showing off the epics!
First of all Blizzard wants even more people to raid earlier. They specified in the announcement that they expect people in blues to be able to pull of the first raids. Read in this that they are going to make the first raids super easy so everyone can get to taste the excitement of completing a raid. They allude to a tiered progression wich looks like the one from Burning Crusade, once again a good thing in my opinion so there’s hope if they get it right.
Then I see the part where they speak about identifying bosses with specific loot and I realize this is the real goal. Blizzard is not dumb and knows full well that what drives a vast majority of players is showing off the shinies. In Wotlk this got lost a bit in regards to gear because the models were reused all the times and could be obtained from multiple sources. With a few exceptions, you couldn’t really tell where a player had been just by looking at him.
So by giving “exclusive” gear to bosses in raid they probably hope to motivate people to raid in order to show off that special shield or sword or armor set. I can’t shake the feeling this is the true goal of the raiding game in the expansion. Make raid easier so everyone can get a chance to grab an exclusive piece of gear and be a special snowflake.