10-man Shanty Town

10-man raiding is being ghettofied more and more, and it's causing problems for both raiders and Blizzard. Let's break it down.

Firstly, Icewell Radiance was created because of an excessive growth of gear: they had to make 4 levels of gear per-tier: 10, 25, heroic 10, and heroic 25. That's 16 levels of gear all together. Meaning, there was a gross inflation of stats as WotLK went on, and so at the end, Blizz had few options. Either A: every ICC boss hits like two trucks tapped together with liquid hate, B: lower avoidance in ICC, or C: ICC bosses aren't threatening to tanks. I can see why they picked B at this stage in the game, and there's no lost love over THAT, but they painted themselves into this corner.

Now, look at 10-man raiding. When the new 10/25 system was announced, I thought the gear to be found in each would be equivalent, if not identical, and thus the choice came down to preference (or do both for 2x loot drops). Now it's clear Blizz is worried people will stop 25 man raiding if that was the case, so they shower the big kid raid format with a thousand perks, including tokens to get gear only available to 10-man groups if they do hard modes. Let there be no doubt, 10-hard is MUCH harder than 25-normal, and yet the rewards are the same? No wonder so many serious players opt for 25-man guilds.

It didn't need to be this way: allow me to illustrate the raiding utopia WotLK could have been. Firstly, all bosses in normal modes, whether 10 or 25, should have the SAME loot tables. Secondly, 10-hard bosses should have better items than the normals, and 25-hard should have better items than the 10-hard. Reason being, hard modes, at least the cutting edge ones, require almost the whole raid to be golden-club inner-circle quality, and it's definitely harder to get 25 bad dudes than 10.

Instead of the 10/25 dichotomy in progression, there would be a normal/hard dichotomy. Hard-mode guilds fight harder dungeons for greater rewards than their normal counterparts, who still have the thrill of new loot and content be accessible. There might be a drop in the number of 25-man guilds, but that's not a failure; that would be a triumph of the 10/25 system! 25 man guilds would still be the standard for the xhardcorex crowd because of the extra rewarding hard modes and 2x chances at loot every week, and the rest of us would have more latitude in our preferred raiding format.

Bottom line, Blizzard is rewarding 25 guilds more for clearing equally challenging (perhaps less challenging) content, and that is hurting everyone. Hopefully in Cataclysm the clouds will part, the sun will shine down, and gear will be given in accordance with true raid tier difficulty.