This is my first time blogging on Gameriot so I'll just take a brief moment to give some information about myself.  If you don't care, then just skip the first paragraph.  I am a hunter in what could be considered a casually-hardcore raiding guild.  By that I mean we only raid 3 days a week, but we don't suck and generally progress faster than guilds that raid almost twice as often as we do. We're currently progressing through BT and have cleared Hyjal (and yes, we have killed Kael and Vashj multiple times and completed the attunement chains before starting T6 progression).
   
    With that out of the way I'll get to the substance of this entry.  I'm sure by know most of you have seen the new announcements regarding WotLK.  If not, you can find them here: http://www.worldofwar.net/articles/413359/wrath-presentation-all-the-facts-none-of-the-fluff
   
    The first thing that jumps out is the announcement that they will be including both 10 man and 25 man versions of each raid instance.  So they're throwing the people who can't find 24 other non-retards to raid with a bone.  Ok.  My concern isn't "OMG CASUALS IN THE SAME INSTANCES AS ME."  They've stated that there are seperate loot tables, so I'm assuming that the 25 man loot will be quite a bit better than the 10 man loot.
    What I do have a problem with is how designing an instance for both 10 and 25-man raiding will effect the complexity of the fights.  So far my two favorite fights have been Kael and Vashj.  They're both fights that require the raid to be highly coordinated and be able to perform multiple tasks at once.  I cannot imagine either of these fights translating to a 10 man format in their current states, and this is what worries me.
    It really all depends on how Blizzard approaches the design of the raids.  If they design instances around a 25-man format first, then great.  I really hope they do this and then simplify from there, like they did with Kael in MagT.  It's very similar to the real thing (or at least the last half of it), but they removed a lot of stuff because it would just be too complex for a 5-man group.  If they take this sort of approach in WotLK as well, that's fine.  I still can't imagine any part of an encounter like Vashj even translating to a 10 man, though, unless they made 2 completely different fights for each setting.
    The real problems start forming if fights are going to be developed with both 10 and 25 man groups in mind at the same time.  Fights will become over-simplified and it really could end up killing the raiding portion of the game.  Blizzard needs to be very careful to not over-simplify 25-man.  That's still where serious raiding guilds will be.  You won't see people giving a **** about a world first Arthas 10-man kill.  If Blizzard messes this up,  WoW will die.

    There were a few other issues I had with some announcements.  For instance, the mention of other Pre-BC raids being brought back and re-tuned like they're already doing with Naxx.  I never played Pre-BC (flame on) so I guess I would be interested in seeing these raids, but I really hope they aren't put in as progression content (as Naxx currently is).  I doubt this will happen and they will mainly be around as extras, or possibly ZA-like filler content.  With Blizzard's apparent laziness lately, though, who knows?

    Finally, what piece of Wrath-related writing would be complete without some mention of Deathknights.  55 seems like a good starting level for the character, and the bits they mentioned about the playstyle and spells seemed pretty interesting.  Everything looked good about them until I noticed this: "Death Knights will be available to players who have a character level 55+ on the same realm. There is no other requirement at this time."
    Unless there is some change to this, you can be pretty sure that come release Northrend will be pretty quiet, but EPL will be overflowing with thousands of Deathknights.  Hopefully they'll add on some sort of quest chain to unlock the ability to roll a Deathknight just to stem the flow of people re-rolling.  At least make the level requirement for making one 80 rather than 55.  Since Naxx will be the first raid instance I would say doing something there would be relevant, but it wouldn't really be fair to non-raiders.

    Even though these announcements are a lot of information compared to what previously knew, there's still a lot of unknown stuff out there that could completely change the game, so it's really too early to condemn or praise anything too much at this point.