Organizing 25 mans is a cinch compared to the Vanilla 40 mans. I was a raid and guild leader for one of the top 50 raiding guilds back in Vanilla and getting 40 people to show up on time was a massive pain, let alone getting them to form a cohesive unit to down some pixels. I enjoy both 25 mans and 10 mans. 25 man groups for the sense of size and the increased difficulty, 10 mans for the guerrilla warfare unity it brings. I love that the game is somewhat difficult again. The focus is back on guilds instead of running with whomever, whenever. I'm loving the new guild achievements. Basically, the game is much closer to Vanilla than its been in a long time, and I am enjoying it. People actually have to know their classes again to be effective. I'm glorying in the fact that so many scrubs are having a hard time tanking, healing, and staying alive to dps. I just hope gear doesn't water it back down.

 

That was the most balls out fun quest I have done in the game to date and I cackled maniacally the whole time, every zone should have at least one daily of that quest but with each having a new terrain map. I would be incredibly happy.

 

Then you havent leveled an alliance character through Redridge. That whole series of quests with Keeshan is the best quest line EVER.

 

My brain hurts.

I just thought I'd share that.

Also, on-topic. I'll be raiding in two different 10-man groups in Cataclysm, and participating in arena as per usual. If you want to hit me up on Visque (Resto Shaman) or Voxx (Mage) on Madoran Alliance, feel free. I know there's at least one other person from Madoran Alliance that posts on these boards, no clue if there are more, or not.

 

Edit: Damn, I have to remember to go to the last page before I post.

Also, I started a new one on Manoroth: Gravelthemad, Tauren Paladin(for the lulz), I can't remember the level though.

 

Oh no, I have, but anything that lets me murder Gnomes by the thousands in a fiery hell ball of death and then pays me at the end will win every single time for me.

 

Man, I am LOVING end game. It reminds me of BC, and in a very good way. I also love that healing seems to be "don't heal the morons standing in shit, just heal the tank," because now I have a better excuse to yell with moronic dps as a tank.

 

Healing is relatively fun, but a bit brutal. Efficiency is the key, unlike Wrath, where haste and twitch reactions trumped any consideration that needed to be given to mana consumption. Heroics are still easy unless you have a windowlicking retard in the group, but force you to pay a little bit of attention, at least, rather than faceroll through.

It's a nice change.

 

I have to say; going into Cataclysm I was apprehensive. Of course no matter how bad it was I'd still play given I am a hardcore raider by most casuals standards but I was very fearful of the return of the Naxx and ICC bosses where they were craptastically boring. Ulduar was awesome but everything else in Wrath was shit. The only redeeming quality in ICC was the Lich King Heroic Modes and even then; it wasn't as hard as Yogg 0 on current content.

But now since I've begun raiding; the bosses are fantastic, fun and engaging. I play a tank and in Wrath; I could not help at all whether we wiped or downed the boss, but my experience in downing 6/12 content so far has shown that each individual player can make a difference during each encounter. Playing a paladin tank for example; keeping Seal of Insight up during Maloriak made the healing on the tank that much easier on the healer mana pool and popping Divine Guardian on each fire breath had actually saved many a potential wipe.

Even the DPS; notorious as being the members with the least control over successful boss kills can avert raid wipes. Valiona this evening for example; the blue drake drops a debuff on a raid member which makes him having a damaging aura which hurts nearby raid members while also increasing their damage and healing done by 100%. We were down to 5 players but had a Battle rez which we used on our fire mage and as soon as he was up, he got the debuff. He just popped a mana pot, popped Timewarp on himself as we had Lusted on pull and single handedly did 15% of the bosses health pool in 20 seconds, resulting in our first kill of said boss.

Even the grind for gear to get into the raids was enormously fun where each boss requires skill on behalf of all the players, rather then just letting the tank roflstomp everything like it did in Wrath. Many of such bosses were epic skill checks as well, such as Ozruk in Heroic Stonecore with not one, but TWO instakill abilities the tank and healer have to have total control over.

Overall, I'm very impressed with how Blizzard managed the new expansion and they've managed to regain my respect when in the recent blue post they put their foot down and stated that the heroics were not going to be nerfed and everybody who was QQing should L2P rather then catering to the casuals like they had in Wrath. If I simply had to labor through Wrath for such an awesome expansion I'd gladly do it again.

EDIT: TL; DR - Cataclysm is awesome.

 

Thought I'd poke this thread, and see how people are doing in terms of progression. I know we have a handful of at least casual raiders, which should be enough at this point in time.

I'm focusing on 10-mans only this expansion. Don't want to deal with the hassle of 25-mans on a rather tiny, terribly progressed server. We killed Nefarian, for 12/12 normal modes, relatively easily, but... jesus 10-man hard modes seemed overtuned as hell. Needing 3 tanks or 4 healers on near every encounter is brutal. Especially when we 2-heal everything except Nefarian on normal modes.

Regardless, I love the encounter design. Normal modes are fun, a moderate challenge to the individual player, but not so hard that they should stop a guild in their tracks. Appropriately tuned for a group in full 346 ilevel blues. Even a smattering of epics trivializes certain aspects of fights, though, especially dps burns like Cho'gall, Chim, and Ascendant Council. Oh well. To be expected.

Hard modes, though... bleh. 25-mans appear to be much better tuned, and far easier than 10-mans in general, right now. I don't want to go back to doing 25's just to be able to progress. Sod that. I don't want things easy, I just want them...fixed. Top guild in the world is only 6/13 hard modes in 10-man.

 

My guild is currently 4/13 HM. Hard modes are not that hard, it is just about personal awarness and sitting all the melee you have on most of the fights.

 

I lost my guild and I'm currently stuck on Rivendare, where there's only two decent raiding guilds. I'd join one of them, but they're filled with trolls and elitists. I don't really feel like dealing with that at the moment.

The one I'm currently in is 3/12 in BWD. Ugh.

But raiding can wait right now. Currently getting my characters and professions to max. Having a very fun time doing so.

 

I'm geared and doing pretty well in the raids with my Warlock but while I consider the folks in my current guild to be great friends they are just fucking terrible at raiding and I'm not getting very far so I'm kind of at a tough decision. I've personally just getting into PuGs gotten all the way to Sinestra in Bastion of Twilight and Magmaw in BWD but when I go with my guild I honestly consider it pure luck if we get past Halfus in Bastion which just irritates the fuck out of me. Most of them just really don't know what they're doing and the handful who do are elitist pricks who refuse to tell any of them how to do shit they just keep talking about how it will be cake on vent and then screaming when we fail. That leaves it on me to try and explain shit which I hate to no end.

 

In 10-man? Kudos to you if so, that puts you at 7th best in the world. If you mean 25-man, they really aren't comparable at the moment. 10's are a tad overtuned, it feels like, as evidenced by the top 10-man progression in world being only 6/13 HM. But, eh. I guess it's possible all 10-man raiders and guilds are just awful, right? Heh.

 

My guild runs both a 25 and 10m raid group at different times. We're both 3/13 HM and we're finding the variance in difficulty between 10 and 25m differs on a per encounter basis. The problem with heroic 10s seems to be more a problem of the encounters being impossible/broken rather than 'overtuned'

 

Indeed. We downed Heroic Halfus with... a rather unusual setup, to say the least. No shaman in the raid, and no melee dps. This meant tanks were responsible for every single interrupt, on 10-man, while rolling cooldowns and juggling 3-4 drakes between them, and tank swapping.

Was pretty brutal, but felt like a well tuned fight, even if far, far easier on 25-man.