Let me rant on this one for a bit...

I've been a 10-man raider since ICC came out; my 25-man guild fell apart at Blood Council so we downsized and never looked back. I've completed all heroic content in every tier since, up to Blackhorn within 10's. My guild exploded in late December, and while searching for a new guild, I decided to give 25's a shot. Everyone said it's harder and more epic, I like difficult raiding! So I applied to a 25-man guild and was accepted as a trial member. I was expecting the content to feel way cooler than the 10's I've raided for several years.

What happened was this raid basically cheesed everything in Dragon Soul. The guild I applied to was working on heroic Ultraxion at the time. Every boss up to that was laughable. If someone screws up and stands in the wrong thing, your team of healers covers your mistake. Heroic Hagara was the funniest thing I've ever seen: for lightning phase there's very few conductors. They aligned the raid in an X shape, killed the elemental, and the phase was over within 5 seconds because of the raid's alignment.

When we reached normal Madness, half the players in the raid didn't know what the hell was going on. We were told to AOE down the tentacles on the claw after losing Alex's buff. In phase 2, the tanks were told to NOT tank the terrors in Nozdormu's Time Zone, and instead completely ignore the Tetanus debuff because the healers handle it (which worked great!).

I ran a 10 man heroic Firelands with these people after the main raid, and they repeatedly wiped to pre-bugged Rhyolith because they ignored the Obsidians. Beth ate a load of spiderlings and healed to full. They also THREE-HEALED every fight in there (except Rag, they opted not to kill him for some reason). This boggled my mind because I had been two-healing every heroic boss in Firelands (even pre-nerf) except Beth, where we added a third as a strict Broodling soaker. I couldn't believe these people with 398+ equipped ilvls were three-healing trivial content, and wiping hard to it because they didn't understand it.

I bailed from that guild and joined another 10-man after a few raids. I literally felt my IQ dropping while I was with them. It seemed like their motto was; "WHAT? IMPORTANT BOSS MECHANIC? BRUTE FORCE IT OR HEAL OVER IT, DOESN'T MATTER!". In 10's, we've only got one combat res available, two if a shaman dies. Losing a person in smaller raids hurts. As such, people in 10's are required to be much more attentive of their environments, since one small slip-up could mean disaster. Your raiders *cannot* afford to sit in fire or other mechanics because you'll OOM your small healer team. 10-mans feel like a family, where everyone is watching out and helping each other. 25's feel like a fish flopping around until things die.

I know some of you will reply to my post and tell me how wrong I am. I am not speaking for EVERY 25 man guild out there, because there's bad 10-mans as well as amazing 25's. However, from what I've seen, and even watched in live streams, I think that the *majority* of average, run-of-the-mill 25's (and even some of the world-first ones) are much like what I described above.

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