10 Man Raids Go First Class

as befits a major expansion, blizzard's shaking up all sorts of things for Cataclysm. today's big change is that 10 and 25 man raids are going to use the same lockouts and the same loot tables (read the announcement here). in a nut shell, this means that all of those 10-man raiders out there will finally have access to the same gear that 25-man raiders do. this is a big (and awesome) departure from how raid rewards have been portioned out in the past.

historically, for any given raid tier, the best gear was only available from the biggest (and hardest) raids. the idea was to reward the extra effort required to gather and orchestrate larger raid teams. in the early days of WoW raiding there were only large raids. the burning crusade expansion, in addition to reducing the large raid size from 40 to 25 man, introduced 10 man raids and this is where the loot disparity between large and small raids began. the 10 man raids were meant to be more casual friendly and to require less organization and planning then the larger, more hardcore raids. as such, they dropped lower-quality loot. while the fairness of this policy can be (and has been) debated, it's clear that small raiding guilds were relegated to second class in terms of loot and progression options; the only way to play at the top was to run 25s. come cataclysm, that's all going to change.

personally, I think this is a very positive change and I think blizzard's closed the gap between big and small raids in the best way they could. there are still clear advantages to running 25s over 10s (more drops, including emblems and gold), but everything available in 25s will also be available in 10s. I imagine hardcore raiding guilds will continue to run 25s simply because it's more efficient in terms of gearing up. I also expect they'll complain that raiding is being trivialized because 10 man groups will have access to gear levels that were once exclusive to the 25 man crowd (quite a blow to the ol' epeen, that). on the other hand, I think that 10 mans will finally get some long overdue respect and that raiders will no longer have to sacrifice being in a small guild of close friends just to raid at the highest levels.