Cata, the death of the 25 man guild... or is it?

When Blizzard announced that they were changing the culture behind 10 man vs 25 man raids and making equal loot drop in both, my initial reaction was: goodbye 25 man raids. Any top end guild has to do bring at least 10% of the raid that is less than awesome. Hell some are just marginally better than an empty raid spot. If you can get the same loot from 10s that you can from 25s then why not just set up the best 10 players you have?

Well, news came out today to expand on Blizzard's thinking on raiding structure. And oh boy, its good news. Here it is via Wowhead (my comments in white)

10-Mans and 25-Mans

You guys already know that Blizzard is planning to consolidate 10-man and 25-man raiding into less of a difficulty setting and more of a playstyle choice. This means that 10-man and 25-man encounters will be designed to have roughly the same difficulty level, and will drop items from the same loot table. To compensate for the additional logistical hassle of getting 25 players online rather than 10, Blizzard will be giving out more loot per player in 25-mans—specifically, about 50% more. It was strongly hinted that this extra loot would come in the form of Emblems.

Even if you get more loot per player it still wont fix the problem of bringing your bottom of the barrel players. Lets say on a 10 man boss you get 2 pieces of loot. That's 1 piece of loot per person every 5 bosses (with perfect rng). If you get 50% more pieces of loot per person in a 25 man raid that's 7.5 pieces of loot per boss or 1 piece of loot every 1.66 bosses per person (with perfect rng)

7.5 pieces of loot per boss sounds much better than 2 pieces of loot per boss, but the real deciding factor is time. Having a 10 man that can down all the raids in 2 days every week is much, much better than trying to organize 25 man raids for 3 or 4 days and statistically not finishing them all every week.

What they hadn't announced previously is the ability to "downshift" your raid. Imagine if you do a 25-man run of a new instance, get about halfway through, and call it a night. The next day you get back together to do another run, but—big surprise—only 20 people show up. Well, now you can "downshift" your raid into two separate 10-man groups, and just keep right on going. The maximum number of 10-mans you can make out of one 25-man is three—meaning, if the remaining five guys show up the next day, they can swap down to a 10-man as well and keep right on going.

This is a minor solution that would still mean trying to salvage a bad situation of still having sub par players and filler players in the raid.

Raid Lockouts

Here's another big change—they've added a great deal of flexibility to raid lockouts. Rather than being locked into a particular raid ID, you can now join any raid, as long as it doesn't have any bosses up that you have already killed. Basically, as long as you're not killing the same boss twice in one lockout period—you have total freedom.

This is the big one. This is what will really save the 25 man guilds now. I foresee top end guilds running two 10 man raids. The current problem with the raid lockout system is that once you kill one boss you can't help anyone other than the group you went with. If your guild runs two 10s and get half the bosses down each then the next night 2 tanks and 3 healers don't log on both groups are screwed. If Morrogwar is the the weekly raid quest boss you can't ever get replacements because everyone forms a raid and kills him then leaves.

This structure solves all of this in one fell swoop. Guilds will run two 10 mans and when people don't show up they can mix and match according to who is on. They can even start the week out on 25s bringing more people on the days when there are 35 people on then downshift to 10s later in the week to finish off the raid with the 15 who always log on for the end of week raids.

I foresee this structure being a big win for Blizzard after the dust settles and the top guilds are running level 85 raids. At first there will be some stigma with completing the bosses on 10 man setting but as guilds mix and match and achieve success no one will care.