Cataclysm - Blizzard Says 10 and 25 Man Raids Will Share Lockout

Cataclysm – Blizzard Says 10 and 25 Man Raids Will Share Lockout

by Baros on Apr.26, 2010, under Cataclysm, World of Warcraft

Blizzard stated today that in the new expansion; Cataclysm, raid lockouts for 10 and 25 man raids will be the same. What exactly does this mean?

Quote from: Nethaera (Source)
We’re continuing to refine the raid progression paths in Cataclysm, and we’d like to share some of those changes with you today. Please enjoy!

The first of the refinements being made is that we’re combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn’t apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.

We’re designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They’ll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.

So it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing the 10 man or the 25 man of a raid, the item difference is between the normal and heroic versions of the raid. Personally, I think this is a great way to separate the casual raiders from the hardcore raiders and allows the hardcore to keep getting the best of the best gear while still keeping content open for those who don’t have the time to raid more than once or twice a week.

How do you feel about this upcoming change? Do you think that this will help or hurt the game?