#0 - April 27, 2010, 7:58 a.m.
We have done 10/12 ICC10, and while this is below what many PUGs have accomplished we still feel that we are making progress and having fun doing it.
I have been a warm supporter of shared lockouts, so I can only say that I welcome this design decision. The past year, I have felt that my decision to focus on 10man raiding has penalized me compared to other players. Certain pieces of loot only available in 25man raids and faster gearing due to running two raids/week just to name a few peeves.
This change is for the better.
The hardcore raiders will eventually come up with a definition that 10man is not "real raiding" and the world-race will still be in 25man. They will also favor 25man, because they will gear up faster and will be less vulnerable to a single player missing a raid.
On the other hand, they will not be able to farm "freebies" in content that is not tuned for their gear level. Judging from the amount of posts about how easy ICC10 is, I think this is a welcome change. No need to force players to do something they consider below their worth, just because they would otherwise feel they miss out (see random daily HC for more feedback on this, really poor design).
But on to the real benefits:
Players that for whatever reason want to limit their social involvement in the game to 10 players rather than 25 will not feel that they are 2nd rank raiders. They are not getting out-geared by others simply because they bring 25 more to the raid.
I still think 10man will have problems. If difficulty has to be the same, it will be a pain to heal and rather troublesome to balance your raid to cover all bases. But that is part of the 10man raiding. Errors are punished harder (depending on who make them, but generally this is true). And it sets higher demands to raid stacking because you cannot bring all buffs/debuffs.
But that is a small price to pay for being able to raid in a setup where everyone can have active mics on vent without turning it into a trainstation worth of noise. And where you can play without complex loot rules and still allow people to gear up nicely.
So all in all, great changes.
But of course it will not be welcomed by all. Especially not those with enough gametime to play both raids in the current setup.
