Blizzard aren't going to make anything in WoW harder than it already is, that's one thing for absolute certain. Whether they continue to make things even easier in terms of progression and completion is where the debate lies.

Focusing again solely on numbers - current 25man bosses drop 3 pieces of loot. If you double that, you halve the time in which that group is fully geared.

It can be argued that people running 10 and 25 simultaneously gear even faster, but focus on the "Best in Slot" phenomenon. Under the current system that will 95% be 25man gear (accounting for the rare 10man item with better itemization, such as occasional trinkets). The 10man gear is stop-gap until the BiS 25 is received. So end result is the same - double 25 loot means half the time to gear your raid at the top end.

This potentially means a shorter cycle within the patch. Patches remain on the same fairly steady schedule (not released faster or slower). The top-end guild will rapidly demolish the instance once artificial wing-closed-come-back-later barriers are removed. They will gear in record time and have longer windows of inactivity. Even the average 25 guild would be able to "overgear" the later/harder bosses in the instance more rapidly (under the assumption that bosses are tuned to be killable in gear from the previous gear and grow easier as you gain that tier's gear).

So there's the worry that this carrot could damage other aspects of the WoW lifecycle. And some have proposed as many as 9 drops in 25man, which would be triple the current level.


@Mearwen
That works for a guild. How about non-guild. I join one of your day 2 10man raids. Kill a few bosses. Day 3 you merge, my raidID vanishes (I'm no longer locked at all?) or is deprecated. Day 4 you split to new IDs - I cannot join, your new IDs do not match my deprecated ID.

If they want a per-boss lockout, the best method is winged instances (like Hellfire Citadel, TK, etc) - where each separate wing/instance holds a single boss. This still creates difficulties other difficulties - gating: how do you prevent access to specific bosses in the week, gearing: boss A doesn't drop any tank loot (or all your tanks have it), why do tanks want to go to that instance, organization: player X did boss A with the core raid, late/benched player Y did boss B in a PuG, and so on.

There's just no magic bullet solution. Just look at the current raidID situation - it's not ideal or we wouldn't even be discussing other methods.

Interesting to see the 'gearinflation' card being brought up relatively often.

Why is it that everyone assumes that there has to be 2 or more drops in 10 man? It could just as easily be 1 drop n 10 and 3 in 25. That would make 25s look considerably more interesting since it would remain the same and 10s would suffer a loss compared to now. That wouldn't be too bad since 10s are gaining a huge buff overall.
The psychology of a 1-3 system is a lot more static than the proposed 2-6. People would gear up about as fast as now (which seems appropriate), and the 25 raiders would feel that the 10s pay a price to get up there. Meanwhile the 10 raiders would still feel better since now they aren't being discounted compared to 25 loot.

It seems to me that Blizzard don't really want to change the raidingscene more than absolutely neccesary, likely keeping the overall setup as it is in regards to numbers. After all it has proven to be a success so far. But they want to cut down on time spent so people can get SC2 and Diablo3 on top of WoW. Too much gearinflation would be counterproductive to that.

To pick up on the reiterated thesis of "if 25 raids need carrots , they are not inherently fun, and should die".
Keep in mind that Blizzard designing 25 and 10 raids to be "equally" challenging means the are forgoing a lot of theoretical encounter designs, which can only be a loss to every WoW player. Consider the drop of council boss designs in WotLK ("iron council" is just a mere shadow of council designs of former days, and even though "blood princes" are only 3 it does show the limits of this encounter type in 10 man raids). As someone else mentioned already: how can you design a Vashj encounter as a 10 man raid, and would have the wave design of the Hyjal trash worked with 10 people splitting in pairs or three from the "main" raid? While one could argue that this has been a process long in the making, it can only get worse with the paradigm shift from 25 to 10 as the main attraction.

As a previous poster stated: if 10man is "more fun, more socialising, less work and being played by more players than the 25 raids", why stop this argument at 10 and not extrapolate to 5? It's not as if 10 was the holy number of optimal "fun" in the game. While 10 may be the same number as classes, WoW has got 30 different specs, 3 different roles and 2 different factions. Each of the above statements (fun, socialising, work) holds true for 5 vs 10 as well. Why stop at 10 man raids and not make the 5 mans the premiere focus of the game? You would just give up some more encounter designs and class inhomogenities.

I acknowledge that many people, who can only raid 10 man because of time constraints, technical aspects or friends might rejoice because they see no harm done. But realize that at the end of the day it is Blizzard offering less options to their customers. Not more. 25 man raids will severely suffer because of this change (I'm not arguing that point here. Time will tell.), and one aspect of game play may be irreversible harmed if Blizzard makes even the slightest mistake. This is a risk I'd rather not take. While WoW might get more "personal" again, it is in danger to lose the "massively" title of its genre.

My argument remains the same at 3:1 as at 6:2, and Blizzard stated explicitly that 25 man would drop more loot *per raider* than 10 man, so barring something strange like 8:3, 3:1(or a multiple thereof) seems the most likely result.

If Blizzard plays word lawyer, expect the same public reaction. Their quote, indeed, is "25-player versions will drop a higher quantity of loot per player" - which implies more for 25, not less for 10. Implication is not The Truth, of course, but it matters for public relations.

It also is more a disincentive for 10, not an incentive for 25. 25man doesn't have gain a carrot, 10man gains a stick.

They didn't mention any such thing. They just said that there will be more loot per raider in 25 mans than in 10 mans, not more loot than now. Even given that, 10 mans will get better loot than they get today, and the amount of drops in 10 mans is too high as it is (1/5 per raider, compared to 1/8.(3) in 25 man). Giving out 6 pieces of loot in 25 mans would bring that ratio even higher (1/4.1(6) per raider) which would be even worse in the long run, since people would lose the loot incentive of an instance way faster.

That's not true. They just remove the extra carrots from 10 man.

That won't work and I'm highly skeptical that any function that lets you split and scale to and from the different raid sizes will work because:

Day 5: The next boss drops in 25man drops a trinket that many people want so you split the raid to get more chances at the drop.

Let's move past the whole "10 man has less people, less loot dropping and less people who might roll on said loot while 25 man has more people, more loot dropping and more people who might want to roll said loot" argument. That horse is dead and beaten already.

Not to say we can't discuss the differences, thoughts on what this might mean to raid comps, etc. Just stop pointing out that 10 < 25 and one drops more loot than the other.

One thing I have not seen discussed much here is the news of multiple raid instances and how it would apply to the lockouts.

“For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid.”

This sounds similar to ICC being split into 2-3 instances. It’s the same amount of development time but gives players more options.
This might ease up a lot of the problems we have been discussing so far. A guild with 25 pushes into one of the instances and hits a roadblock. They spend whatever time during the week pushing that boss. The rest of the time, guild members locked into that instance can form a 10man in one of the other raid instances.
Right now raiding consists of 2 raid instances; ICC 25 and ICC 10. In the future we will still have the same thing only it will be UBR 25 and PWN 10.

This seems contrary to their stated intent to reduce the time “required to raid” that is the current norm, as raiders will still feel the need to run all the instances available to them. However, what it would do is loosen up some of the restrictions of organizing a weekly raid.
If you have people that have to sit on Tuesday and on Thursday you have a lot of different people who are available that night, you can enter the second instance instead.

How do you figure?

Right now you can spend 100% of your 25-man raid time in ICC-12. If you decide to spend 100% of your time on ICC-6A, and not do any 25-man raid time in ICC-6B, then yes, some raiders may decide to do that in 10 man. But your 25 man could also have decided to do the first few bosses of ICC-6B with some of their time.

When we were learning SSC and TK, we were doing 3/4 TK before we killed Vashj.

Splitting them up does allow you to spend more time on bosses without having all of it be on one roadblock boss, and that certainly increase the total time you could spend on 25 - but you're only encouraged to go into 10 mans if your guild in fact doesn't do it in 25 man - you're not doing the same content twice.