Did you resubscribe for Cataclysm? Did Shadowkanji let YOU run around on an alt for three days before casually mentioning that you could buy a bind to account book that lets you fly in Northrend at 70? Are you too becoming reacquainted with the sound of Mut raging on vent after a rogue ganks his alt? If so, posting in this thread may be for you!
This thread http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19377467311&sid=1 has some good information about Cataclysm,
While this thread, http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24401856405&sid=1 posted yesterday, talks about the upcoming changes to dungeons and raiding.
Highlight: 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.
The WoW forums are lit up with a bunch of fat nerds crying into their neckbeards about the changes. It's some pretty good reading if you like to experience your drama remotely.
Also, if you post in this thread, have an active char in guild, and you are an old vet whose name I recognize, I'll go ahead and give you full forum access because I'm feeling uncharacteristically charitable.
