Second Class Raiders.

There are a lot of problems with 10-man raiding. PTR testing of bosses results in 25-man values for certain boss mechanics getting assigned erroneously to 10-man content owing to the large number of people who test stuff in 10-man wearing 25-man (Normal or Heroic) gear. On Live servers, 25-man guilds will steamroll through 10-man content, outgearing it the whole way, and claim that it's "easier by design", when that is certainly not true (you can believe it's true if you want. I'm tired of trying to dispel the myth of 25-man content being any more or less challenging than 10-man content from a design and tuning perspective. Until a blue poster comes along to tell everyone that I'm right, I won't continue to waste my breath.)

But today, the thing that has annoyed me about 10-man raiding is the gear. Aside from the illogic of allowing 25-man Normal Mode raiders access to legendaries when 25N content is easier than 10H, there are problems of the itemisation and distribution of epics. In Trial of the Crusader, every single one of the 10-man trinkets was underbudgeted, and every single one of the 25-man trinkets was overbudgeted.

In Icecrown, 10-man spellcasters actually get a decent trinket. Please note: a decent trinket. Having gone back to look at the patch notes, I discovered this:

Icecrown Citadel Items: Normal and Heroic versions of Icecrown Citadel rings and trinkets are considered Unique-Equipped and cannot be used at the same time.

Now, since the ToC10 trinkets were rubbish, that means we have to look to earlier tiers of content to find anything worth taking ... From a shadow priest perspective, with four pieces of Tier 10 in the middle-distance causing my Haste priorities to shoot up, do you know what my two BiS trinkets are, if I were to look at 10-man and 5-man content only? Spyglass, of course, and ... Abyssal Rune. Yep. My BiS 10-man-heroic ICECROWN-GEARED priest would be using an iLvl200 trinket if she hadn't lucked out in Obsidian Sanctum. Broodmother doesn't make the list, thanks to Haste far out-stripping crit at a 4T10 level. Neither does the gimmicky NIC, much as I might like it to.

So the options are zero from 10-man raiding. If you happen to be unbelievably lucky, you can pick up Reign of the Unliving/Dead from a ToC25 pug.

But this is only half the problem. I could say, at this point, that since 25-man raiders are tuned 13 item levels above 10-mans, they don't need to worry about being unable to double-equip their Foreign Object; they're free to enter ICC10H with their 264 epics from 25N and overgear the place, thus allowing them to pick up the Spyglass. This, already, is unfair ...

But I don't need to make that argument, because there is a far stronger argument to be made here: 25-man casters already have two caster trinkets in their ICC 25-man loot tables. Not only do they have the one I have already linked, they also have the closest thing to Timbal's I've seen in this expansion.

Why should it be that 25-manners get absolutely no hassle at all with their trinket options, since they're given two trinkets to circumvent the unique-equipped problem, and 10-man raiders have to scramble around in ToC5, or, worse, a ToC25 or Sartharion25 PuG? Blizzard says that they like people to be thinking carefully about the gear they take ... So why are 25-manners not being made to think? Further, why should we 10-man raiders take our own raiding tier seriously if Blizzard acts as if 10-man raiding is a mere concession with no competitive or self-sustaining enjoyment within it -- merely as something to please the casuals?