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.

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Kara!

Z finally got his kara key saturday and we had a chance to go play in KZ last night with our old guild. it was a last minute "hey, we think we're going to raid tonight. wanna come?" kinda thing, so it was a little rough around the edges. we made a mad dash to the AH on the way to the meeting stone to stock up on consumables and realized that we'd never really thought about caster consumables before. ended up buying some [Elixir Major Mageblood] (which was a mistake, but Harl can use 'em later), the [Schematic: Mana Potion Injector] for Harl (finally!), some [Superior Wizard Oil] (thought about going for [Superior Mana Oil] instead, but thought we'd try it without first and see what the mana situation was like) and a couple old-school [Flask of Supreme Power]s (they were way cheap compared with [Flash of Pure Death] and it's only a 10 point difference in spell damage). once we were fully raid buffed we were looking at +918 shadow dmg. mmmm, tasty. was even better when we brought in a shaman later on and had a Wrath of Air Totem at our disposal; zomg +1019 shadow damage! we wish that's what our stats looked like normally...

as far as the run went, it wasn't bad. they had cleared through morose on a previous night, so we started with maiden and then went on to opera (wizard of oz), curator, shade & chess; they all went down on the first shot. it wasn't always pretty, but we got the job done. prince was a different story. we made four attempts and never got him below about 40%. not really sure why he was so much trouble, but last night was just not our night for prince pwnage.

but what about "teh phat lewtz"?! we thought we'd be sitting pretty, being the only dps clothie in the raid (no mages or warlocks), but the loot gods decreed that it would be all healie gear, all the time. meh. we ended up with a couple bits of it anyway; the [Blue Diamond Witchwand] because none of the other healers needed it and the [Ribbon of Sacrifice] due to a very unfortunate error by the master looter. we still feel pretty bad about that, but at least it'll come in handy if we end up having to heal our way through the arcatraz again. we also picked up our first 10 [Badge of Justice]s. now we have to figure out what to save up for...

speaking of healing arc... never. again. we ended up going in as a healer because we really, really wanted our 3rd kara key fragment and putting together a group was like pulling teeth. we ended up with a prot warrior, 2 rogues, an elemental shaman and a shadow priest in healing gear (a little over +900 heals at the time). it actually went better than we expected it to, partly because the tank was awesome and also due to the shammie backing me up with a couple extra heals when pulls got hairy (that guy was on top of his shit. we love playing with people like that!). we did have one wipe right before the 2nd boss (damn you, aoe silence!), but all the bosses went down on the first try. that said, it was ZOMG STRESSFUL!!!1! we don't know how you full-time healers do it. we spent the entire run staring at health bars; praying they would stop going down and start going back up. one of our resto druids friends told us that she doesn't even know what the inside of most instances look like because all she does is watch health bars. bleh. major props to all you healers out there, but it's definitely not our bag.

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These are the People in your Raid

courtesy of the WoW forums: everything you need to know about the types of people you'll be raiding with.

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d'oh!

Z hit 60 last night. we were going to put together a nice little post about it complete with some screenies today at work (what?), but managed to mail ourselves the wrong screenshots and can't get to the right ones from work. boo!

on a brighter note, the guild had a fairly smooth KZ run on saturday; attumen through curator (including Romulo & Julianne) down in about 90 minutes. this is notable for a few reasons. first off, we weren't sure saturday's raid was even going to happen. lots of the regular crew either couldn't make it or opted out at the last minute. that list very nearly included all of our raid leadership, but our GM decided to go after all. good thing, too, because we weren't looking forward to managing the raid. secondly, KZ's been kicking our guild's ass lately. we've been having rough runs for a few weeks now. rough like only 1/2 the people signed up to raid showing up. rough like wiping twice before reaching attumen, which makes us cry because we (the guild) are better than that. RL distractions, people in bad moods, new folks to the raid, simple mistakes, bad luck, etc. sometimes it adds up and badness happens; sometimes everything works out. saturday was one of those "everything works out" days and it was a badly-needed morale boost for the guild.

it was a pretty good night for us personally, too. no phat lewtz, but there's not much in KZ outside of prince drops that we want anyway. but, we almost broke 800 dps (/preen); 797 and change. so close we can taste it. after the raid, we dropped some badges for the [Choker of Vile Intent], which brings us close enough to the hit cap that we're going to try using [Warp Burger]s next week instead of [Spicy Hot Talbuk]. 800+ dps will be ours, oh yes (/evilgrin).

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awesome raiding video

the vast majority of the WoW population will never see the inside of places like SSC or BT. it's estimated that only about 6% of the player base progresses that far (we've only made it to KZ so far). that's a shame in many ways because some truly awesome design work has gone into these raid instances and the encounters look amazing.

fortunately, there are some pretty good PvE raiding videos that show off the instances. just like the gazillions of PvP videos out there, they range from horribly bad to really damn good. we just came across one of the better ones we've seen this afternoon. what really knocks our socks off is that it shows scenes from *all* the high-end raid instances; most videos tend to focus on just one. it's long (31+ minutes), but very worth watching:

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=61387

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On Playstyles

Ego has a really great post (the reply to the second email) up about end-game playstyles. if you're new to raiding or thinking about starting to raid, you should give this a read.

while we're on the subject of Ego posts and raiding, she's also got a nice guest post up about raid etiquette. another must-read for fresh-faced raiders (and those old-hands who've picked up bad habits over the years).

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