Wrath of the Lich King raiding - part 2

One of the main problems raiding guilds faced with The Burning Crusade expansion of World of Warcraft, was the step from the 10-man Karazhan dungeon to Gruul's Lair, which requires 25 people. For Wrath of the Lich King however, as you could already read in my previous entry, Blizzard has announced that all raid dungeons will have a 10 and 25-person version. Now, what are the consequences of that?

For the truly hardcore raiding guilds, not much will change hopefully. Their members will rush to level 80 as fast as possible, maybe they'll dabble in the 10-man version for a little while, but then they'll probably hit the 25-man content, never to touch the 10-man raids again, except maybe when they're bored or want to gear up an alt or something.

However, for the not-so-hardcore guilds, I predict it will be quite different. My guild for example, had a few fast levelers who, in TBC, hit level 70 after a week or two and were ready to go to Karazhan. When the more slower levelers caught up, we were ready to form a second raid, cleared Karazhan with both groups, recruited a couple more people and we were ready to tackle the big raid dungeons again.

My guess is, we were lucky to be in an established guild where most people who already knew each other for a while though. I've heared lots of accounts of newer guilds that fell apart, because they had a so-called A and B-team for Karazhan. Where the best team easily cleared Karazhan in a couple of nights, the lesser geared team still struggled on the later bosses. And now comes the challenge for these guilds in WotLK. Given the same scenario with the 10-man raids in the next expansion, will the more advanced group just move on to the next 10-man dungeon, or wait for their slower guildies to catch up and tackle the 25-man version? How many guilds will still be raiding the larger dungeons, especially a couple of months into the expansion, when there already have been a few guilds who split up due to internal drama or something similar.

All I can hope for is that Blizzard will make the larger version of the raid instances appealing enough so that there's still a real incentive to run these, rather than just sticking to the smaller instances. After all, the scale of these raids makes them so much more interesting and exciting in my opinion.