The developers did mention that 25 man content is going to be available before the 10 man content will for the sheer fact that raids could sit in the 10 man until they have encounters down pat, and then go potentially one shot the 25 man version.

I look at it this way, the Original and TBC end game raids were more tuned for the players that could dedicate weeks upon months of time learning encounters just to down them. Wrath looks to be a focus at more of letting the not-so-hardcore players take a shot at the prominent bad guys in the game. It's a chance to rectify a theoretical mistake Blizzard made in tuning raid encounters.

One thing that I think would be really good and cool would be to tie the 10 and 25 man versions of Icecrown together. One of them being that you have a certain time frame in which the same raid would have to "down" the Lich King and continue on to the 25 man version to actually defeat him. Another being that two raids (One 10 man, one 25 man, 35 in total) working together in both raids (similar to the Kaelcgos fight with the portal system) to down the Lich King.

I think we as a community are taking the little information that we have been given on how the instance/raid content will work, and blowing it out of proportion. There's a lot of experimentation that has occurred in TBC in many aspects, and I would only imagine, since Icecrown won't be released for quite some time after Wrath, that the experimentation will continue and the whole idea might change.

In the end I am sure both versions of the Icecrown instance will be epic in their separate ways. Yes it doesn't seem plausible that 10 players can take down a boss that easily defeated Illidan, nor does it seem plausible that 25 players can do it, but Blizzard is going to make it so. If you put it into a reality perspective, it could take as many as 80 or more people to even make a dent in what the Lich King's purpose really serves.

I'm sure we all QQ'ed when Illidan was only a 25 man, but the encounter itself was difficult, right? It was epic in its own way, Icecrown and the defeat of the Lich King will be too.

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