I am not sure if we have enough information to make a full decision about this but here goes my thoughts on it. 

First of all if you have not run a close knit 10 man it will be hard for you to understand just how awesome they are.

A 10 man is usually going to be a close group of friends that have been playing together for some time. This makes for a lot less QQ’ing about loot and progression. Nerd Rage is hard to deal with for the person raging and the people getting raged on, in a 10 man that is curbed quite a bit. Because there is less of every class it should be easier to gear, and the format for handing out the gear will be less strict because generally it is just a simple need before greed MS/OS situation.

Another bonus of 10 mans is that I can usually find 9 people I want to hang with for long periods of time, with 25 mans that has never been the case. Too many personalities, to many bads, people not doing their job and either no one wants to tell them or they do not listen when told. The drama in 25 mans is unsurpassed by anything I have encountered in my real life drama and I play a game to have FUN and ignore my RL drama even if for only a few hours.

The downside of turning to 10 mans  remains to be seen as far as loot and progression. I can tell you that it is highly likely your guild will get more cliquey with each 10 man only wanting to hang with the people from their 10 man. If you have more then 1 10 man running it will become a competition of who is beating who in progression. The 10 man team that is doing better will be inundated with requests from members to join their 10 man which causes hurt feelings. 

I speak from being on both sides of the 10man, having a team running that had no room and running a team that had no room. It can be hard for everyone involved, and causes a huge amount fighting and behind the back talking. 

I personally only want to run 10 mans but I love my guild and the people in it so if as a guild we decide to run 25 mans I will do it (maybe happily). I am concerned that this will cause a rift in many guilds and that the backlash will leave many guilds disbanded. Planning for the raid lockouts and what kind of guild you want to be should begin now.

EXAMPLE:

Current guild situation we have a bloated roster due to many “core raiders” having stepped down from raiding until Cata goes live. We have recruited many people I personally find less then friendly which is of course is part of the problem of coming to the “end” of an expansion, you end up with less quality recruits. I was a core raider that had to step down due to work, and now I am back and just floating, I look at the current roster and think how can we run 25 man when we have 35-45 raiders. I am personally unwilling to sit and wait list forever and will most definitely want to experience the new content a.s.a.p. 

So what is the answer, do you drop the people who are newer, that does not seem fair. Do you tell core raiders who stepped down tough, you stepped down we are going with the newer peeps and rick losing those people? Do you try and recruit more people and run  2 25’s?

So far we have not come to a decision on what to do. There was a suggestion to run 1 25 and 1 10, but I still believe this will call some inner fighting and nastiness, yet it seems to be the best and most fair decision.

Question is how do you split the raiders up? Going to need 2 tanks min for each raid not a lot of guilds running around with 4-6 geared tanks. You need at least 3 Heals for the 10 man and 5-6 for 25 man so 8-10 geared healers. Now some would think deeps is deeps but you need to split em up right, we need both physical and magic as well as certain buffs from certain classes. It is a nightmare just thinking the whole thing through logistically.

Personally I am uber afraid as far as the guild drama that will ensue and we all start to reach 85, maybe it will be as easy as he who burns the content fastest is king (BAH)? I dunno but for now I have taken a very wth attitude about it in hopes I will be able to raid with the guildies I know and love in the next expansion.

As we start to ramp up to the release of Cataclysm I am spending a ton of time reading developer posts about changes and the like. The new raid lock out really got my interest. The reason is that I really prefer 10 over 25 man raids. There is less people less drama less fail bots. 10 mans tend to be a well oiled machine able to move through the content very efficiently while having a certain feeling serious accomplishment. I have no idea of course how Blizzard intends to entice us to spend the lock out on 25. Maybe a substantial increase the amount of loot that drops. It would have to be a lot more because a 10 man will tend to move through the content faster and has less the half the amount of people.

 

We’re continuing to refine the raid progression paths in Cataclysm, and we’d like to share some of those changes with you today. Please enjoy!

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The first of the refinements being made is that we’re combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn’t apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.
We’re designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They’ll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.

Dungeon Difficulty and Rewards
* 10 and 25-player (Normal difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop the exact same items as each other.
* 10 and 25-player (Heroic difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop more powerful versions of the normal-difficulty items.

We of course recognize the logistical realities of organizing larger groups of people, so while the loot quality will not change, 25-player versions will drop a higher quantity of loot per player (items, but also badges, and even gold), making it a more efficient route if you’re able to gather the people. The raid designers are designing encounters with these changes in mind, and the class designers are making class changes to help make 10-person groups easier to build. Running 25-player raids will be a bit more lucrative, as should be expected, but if for a week or two you need to do 10s because half the guild is away on vacation, you can do that and not suffer a dramatic loss to your ability to get the items you want.
We recognize that very long raids can be a barrier for some players, but we also want to provide enough encounters for the experience to feel epic. For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid. All of these bosses would drop the same item level gear, but the dungeons themselves being different environments will provide some variety in location and visual style, as well as separate raid lockouts. Think of how you could raid Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep separately, but you might still want to hit both every week.
We do like how gating bosses over time allows the community to focus on individual encounters instead of just racing to the end boss, so we’re likely to keep that design moving forward. We don’t plan to impose attempt limitations again though, except maybe in cases of rare optional bosses (like Algalon). Heroic mode may not be open from day one, but will become available after defeating normal mode perhaps as little as once or twice.
In terms of tuning, we want groups to be able to jump into the first raids pretty quickly, but we also don’t want them to overshadow the Heroic 5-player dungeons and more powerful quest rewards. We’ll be designing the first few raid zones assuming that players have accumulated some blue gear from dungeons, crafted equipment, or quest rewards. In general, we want you and your guild members to participate in and enjoy the level up experience.
We design our raids to be accessible to a broad spectrum of players, so we want groups to be able to make the decision about whether to attempt the normal or Heroic versions of raids pretty quickly. The goal with all of these changes is to make it as much of a choice or effect of circumstance whether you raid as a group of 10 or as a group of 25 as possible. Whether you’re a big guild or a small guild the choice won’t be dependent on what items drop, but instead on what you enjoy the most.

We realize that with any changes to progression pathways there are going to be questions. We’re eagerly awaiting any that we may have left unanswered. To the comments!