Raid Refinements
Flexible Raid Lock
Available in Patch 4.0.1
Starting with patch 4.0.1, all new raids (as well as Icecrown Citadel and Ruby Sanctum) will follow the new Flexible Raid Lock system. Put simply, this means that you will no longer be restricted by an arbitrarily chosen ID when progressing through a raid. What will matter instead will be the number of bosses your group has killed.
This means that you can go raid Icecrown Citadel with your guild on Tuesday, defeat the first four bosses as well as the Blood Wing and call it a night. Wednesday many people show up and there isn’t a spot for you. With the old system you’d be stuck with merely half of the bosses down. With the Flexible Raid Lock you can find a different group and finish the place up without interfering with your guild’s progress. The only requirement is that your new group has killed all the bosses you have (and possibly some extras). In addition to this, you will not be locked to your new raid’s progression until you actually participate in a boss kill. So if you join a group that has cleared all the way up to the Lich King (so they are Plague and Frost Wing ahead of you), but actually don’t manage to kill the LK, you will not be locked to their progression just for participating in the attempts – you will be able to go find a different group that meet the requirements above.
Dynamic Size & Difficulty
Available in Patch 4.0.1
Dynamic Difficulty is another aspect of the Flexible Raid Lock system. It restricts every raider to defeating every boss only once a week, regardless of the raid size and difficulty. This means that you can start the week by defeating the first four bosses in ICC in a 25-man group, then split the raid into a few 10-mans and defeat the three wings, and then bring everyone together again for a 25-man Lich King. The only restrictions this system enforces come when you start messing with Heroic modes. If you, as an individual raider, defeat a boss on Heroic, you are “locked” to this raid and size if you want to continue doing Heroic bosses. So if your guilds defeats Saurfang on 25 Heroic, and he is its first Heroic boss for the week, everyone in the group will be “locked” to raid size of 25 people and difficulty of “Heroic.” You will not be able to split the raid into two 10-mans (or go up from a few Heroic 10-mans to a Heroic 25), and you will not be able to do any bosses on Normal 25 with this raid. If you want to do bosses on Normal difficulty, you will need to join a different group that has not defeated any bosses on Heroic. And if you do so, that group will not be able to do any Heroic bosses while you are in it.
Common Loot
Come Cataclysm both 10- and 25-man raids will drop the same loot – or at least the same items. To accommodate for 25-mans being harder to organize and coordinate, bosses defeated by a raid of 25 people will drop “more loot person” – more Justice/Valor Points, and possibly just more items than a 10-man boss would.
Wrath of the Lich King presented us with a number of raid system changes – different difficulties for individual bosses (hard modes), separation of 10 and 25-player raids, different difficulties for entire raids, and finally the complex combination of all those concepts we see in Icecrown Citadel.
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