The 10 and 25 man Debate: Depends ON YOU.

You can see the entire article by Paragon here.

It is quite obvious that in Cataclysm, the 10/25 man format have been relatively similar, in terms of gear and lockout. This forces the raider to choose to simply stick with one raiding format, which I think is beneficial to avoid redundancy and for raiders to fall into that time sink that would be running both raids.

Both raid formats have its pros and cons. Personally though, I would prefer a 10-man setup, being a hardcore-minded raider, but one that does not have enough time to actually set up 24 people, wait for some, organize those loot issues, etcetc. Bad.

However, it is also in my opinion, that in order to fully maximize the epic feel of raiding and teamwork, 25-man is the way to go. If you have a capable raid leader, and several others that can manage these little things for you, then you are in luck (also if they raid with your preferred times as well).

With 4.2 content, Paragon had discussed their opinions on more on the technical aspects of 10 and 25 man raiding:

"Further thoughts

It's immediately obvious that there's a much greater degree of clarity and control in the 10-mans. Thinking logically, this should help quite a lot with the learning curve and avoiding mistakes, but that's not really something we could say our little skirmish 'proved' in practice. We already knew what the encounters were about and what the flame to avoid looked like -- relearning to accommodate differences is very different than learning from scratch.

A theme of more significance that you can clearly see in the three harder bosses for this tier is that the dps requirement is much too lenient in 10-man. This means that you don't really have to cut the amount of healers, which ensures relaxed gameplay for the healers while about half of their 25-man brethren are taking beta blockers just to be able to see clearly. The other half is naturally on the bench, sitting out for the extra dps. Perhaps this is a backlash from what we've been hearing about T11, but it really doesn't work as it is.

Proper tuning has repercussions though, since class balance has a huge impact when you're forced into two-heal and solo heal situations. And that's not even a stretch -- don't be surprised if you see a druid solo healing Ragnaros 10 hc before this tier is over. Might or might not happen, but at least it seemed plausible enough. Try doing that with a shaman.

This leads us to the fact that the gap between an optimal setup and the wrong setup seems to be quite a bit larger in 10-man than in 25s. If the encounters are really hard, you'll need a proper setup. Guilds shooting for a world first should always be expected to come up with one, but those below, the ones without alt raids, will be left hanging. If the encounters are tuned for the 'average' setup, guilds who can afford the optimal one will steamroll through them.

If we were really playing 10-man, we *would* have a close to optimal setup. Even right now, scaled down from 25 to 10, we would have about 14 players and 30-ish fully raid-capable characters. The difficulty and tuning we're concerned about is for that scenario, not for the level where you're simply enjoying the game with the hand you've been dealt."

It is apparent that they found it "easy" when they did 10 mans. However, this is not the case for most, as the content is fairly challenging, and if you do not have the same latency as they have, you probably will suffer more as well with RNGs. If anything, I would like to participate in their raids to know how they communicate, how things are dealt with, and how the leadership is. No, no, this does not mean I'm great. I am just curious as I would love to improve the quality of raiding in my guild as well. Having that communication is essential.

I will agree with the difficulty being "easier" in 10 mans. Our 25 man raids were crap. Not because on individual skill, it was because of lack of communication. It was frustrating. Everyone should actually be talking, but what can we do. What Paragon said on that article rings true. I did say on our forums that going back to 10s can simply be summed up as going back to basics and improving communication.

On other news, I should read more as well, which I have been doing these past few weeks. I have been expanding my knowledge on social networks, and other stuff to dabble on to see if I can profit or generate any buzz on it. I want to make an impact now on the things I do albeit small. You will never know when you will be able to lift someone's spirit up, or an accidental visit to this blog will be what that person actually needs.