Flexible Raid Lock System in 4.0.1

[Imhullu]

Yeah I understand all of this for cataclysm when the raids will share identical loot and such, but right now I very much want to complete the purple colored warlock offset gear found from 10 man heroic just to have for fun, while also continuing to raid my guilds scheduled 25's everyweek until cataclysms release, and it is looking like I cannot continue to do both when this patch hits. (next tuesday?)

What about the gear that drops?
What about the raid achievements?
Bane of the Fallen, Light of Dawn?
Invincible?
10man vs. 25man difficulty?

Hard to believe that with such a huge post, neither of these were even remotely answered.

My thoughts exactly.

[Zinnin]

It doesn't sound like a terrible thing, except for the Heroic restrictions...I don't see why they keep putting limits on Heroic raiders

[Ankzu]

Will ICC 10 and 25 be dropping the same loot now? Will the infusions and shards be available in 10 now?

[Vasz]

Nice, this might actually open up a few people who were opposed to pugging before. Even though my reason is because I like raiding with my friends, I can still see where some people might give pugging a chance. Blizz gets 2 interwebz for this.

It will also open up a lot of people who did a pug on Wednesday, killed one boss and was locked into that raid ID all week.

I think it is a great idea.

[Mandible]

All I would like to know is this - Is the loot set to one instance only, and in the case is it 10 or 25 man...

If split I can only say OMFG NOOOOOO!!!!

[Salicylic]

are the loots going to be share or still be the same?

[Parhadox]

TL;DR.. nah! jk! Very informative wall of text, all of it is relevant so it was a good chunk of knowledge.

[Xentropy]

I love that they went back on their original plan to only allow raids to "downgrade" from 25 to 10 and will also allow movement back from 10's to a 25.

I hate that they basically flipped off anyone doing heroics and said you're still stuck with the old rigid system, deal with it. What POSSIBLE reason is there to ignore this change for anyone raiding Heroic modes? Protip: Guilds doing Heroics have attendance issues sometimes too.

[Sulika]

This does have some downsides.

My own guild has has a 25 man raid during the week and runs two 10 man groups on the weekends. One of the 10 man groups has killed LK10HC, the other is still working on it. Now we are basically going to be screwed. If we want to continue with our regular 25 man raids then it means half the guild will never be able to get a LK 10 HC kill. They will always be saved to the 25 man raid. After a lot of time and effort this leaves a lot of our guild members in an awful position. Either give up on the LK10 title altogether or bring a bunch of alts into the 25 man raid and gimp our potential for progression there.

This is pretty much a lose lose situation for us. "Flexible" indeed.

[GrieverXIII]

tl;dr - R.I.P. 10man raiding unless all you do is do 10mans or alt runs.

Considering in Cataclysm both 10man and 25 drop the same thing, are suposed to be just as hard and both permits realm firsts and such. I really don't see how 10man guilds are penalised.

At the moment, yeah it sucks since you can't do bosses twice to get 10/25man loots, but honestly, WOLTK is finished, they are using ICC just to test the feature.

I really don't see why people QQ about the heroic restriction either. Lets keep ICC as an example and say that a guild utterly fail at Sindragosa 25man heroic, but they killed everything else and want to work on the Lich King cause nobody else killed it on their crappy server, its to prevent that this guild, switch Sindragosa heroic to 10man and kill her with their 10 decent raiders, so they can continue their 25man progression while skipping a boss.

[Chareoss]

Does anyone else see this getting slightly complicated when recruiting people for raids? especially people who didn't bother to understand it?

[Rurikar]

I wish I worked at Bliz. The simple version of this would be "Each player can only loot each boss once per week regardless of raid size or difficulty." That is the solution I've been suggesting since day 1. This would allow people to raid with whatever friends they want, whenever they want. And never HAVE to raid more than once for the sake of min/maxing progression. They're half way there. Maybe someday they'll figure it out.

Except for the fact then I could then raid a 25 man raid and swap people in feed them loot. Kill marrowgarr, give loot to people. Redo instance, swap three new people in. Those three people have all the loot that drops for them. They thought of your idea and thats the issue with it. You are not as smart as you think you are.

[Asherett]

How the heck are they trying to pass this off as a "nice thing". The whole thing might just have read
"LOL you may no longer raid both 10 and 25man in one week. And LOL since we know perfectly well heroic mode is the only relevant raiding, we'll completeley lock you out of that instance if you do a single boss on heroic. GLHF."

Fair enough that they want to do changes, but this is a major nerf and insult to any raiding guild currently doing 10 and 25man heroic content.

[Genju]

What about the gear that drops?
What about the raid achievements?
Bane of the Fallen, Light of Dawn?
Invincible?
10man vs. 25man difficulty?

Hard to believe that with such a huge post, neither of these were even remotely answered.

Just fyi, all these Questions were already answered.
There are no separate 10/25 Achievements, just one version.
10 man difficulty = 25 man = Same gear
and who the fuck cares about stupid mounts/titels.

[tusker]

Only issue I can maybe see with only being locked to badges/loot per boss, rather than being locked out of the boss encounter itself, is that you could technically have a group of people carry others through boss fights. And they could it as many times as they want.

You could have a group of five "awesome" people in your guild, group them with five not-so-great people, and effectively run them through some bosses. You could then swap the five not-so-great people for five others, and do the exact same thing. Each time only the five "new" people would be able to loot. I'm guessing this is the reason this isn't implemented.

Regardless, I do wish being locked out of gear/badges rather than bosses as draticus notes was something Blizzard added in. It was definitely something they mentioned doing in the past.

edit: What Rurikar said above, but he did it in less words than me

[Dyra]

Hmmm shame about you being unable to continue in heroic 10 if you lose people for late week raiding. I'ld have liked to be able to convert down to a 10 man raid in heroic but there you go. It's also going to kill my chances of getting Bane of the Fallen King in 10 man unless we kill him and we kill him soon.

I'm assuming that the loot lists also won't be combined. So even if we can convert it down to a 10 man raid we probably won't bother since a) it will be the 10 man loot list and b) we can only get the normal version of the loot so it really will not be worth our time.

On the other hand ICC raiding will soon be over and this will be an amazing change for Cata raiding (since I doubt I'll be seeing any heroic content, save dungeons, for some time :3).

[Spotnick]

My head is hurting.

Geez, can they make this more complicated or what?

[derphurrdurr]

Awesome!

[ramennoodleking]

Here's the big question they didn't address:

Are they normalizing loot as well? It would only make sense considering they are locking you to both 10 and 25? It almost eliminates the desire to go to pug 10s if a persons only chance at marks is in 25 man

[1GoodReasonY]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Bliz is not going to merge the loot tables and whatnot for ICC and RS since they already went through all the work of designing and itemizing the gear.