Different!
From my personal perspective, I welcome the changes wholeheartedly.
I'm not interested in 25-player raiding. I've done my fair share of it, during The Burning Crusade and even up through Ulduar in Wrath of the Lich King. My preference, though, is strongly for 10-player raiding; I prefer the camaraderie of a smaller group anyway, and since I don't really enjoy playing with strangers all that much - there's a reason I've barely taken advantage of the Dungeon Finder - the fact that my guild isn't large enough to run 25-player raids suits me very well.
In all honestly, although I said that I welcome the changes, they're not going to make very much of an impact on me at all. If the current system continued, I still wouldn't be raiding 25s, and therefore I wouldn't care that the people who did were getting better gear than me. The fact that Cataclysm raiding will give me the same rewards as people who raids 25s is a nice bonus - I'm not being "penalised" for my preference for 10-player raiding.
If Blizzard can get the difficulty tuned to the same level between 10- and 25-player raids, I think this is eminently reasonable. It's clearly part of their recent "play the way you want to play" philosophy.
The other side of the coin is the change from the current emblems/honour points/arena points system to the new system of PvE and PvP rewards.
I really like these changes too. Maintaining the same two-tiered system throughout every new . . . tier . . . of raiding and PvP content makes a lot of sense, and certainly avoids the problems of the current system where we have five different kinds of badges, three of which only still exist in the game for legacy reasons - they don't drop, and you can only acquire them in order to spend them by going to an NPC. True, it's not exactly hard, but what it is is unnecessary.
I also approve of the weekly cap on Valour and Conquest points. Anyone who has given it any thought at all will realise that when you can earn rewards for logging in every day and doing a random heroic, that becomes a strong pressure on players until they feel like they must do so in order to "keep up". Now, as I alluded to before, I'm not one of those players; you can count the number of random heroics I've done without taking off your shoes and socks. I do, however, have friends whose desire to be "competitive" means that they end up running dungeons every single day, even when they don't want to be doing that.
In Cataclysm, these friends of mine might end up just doing their normal weekly raiding, the weekly raid quest, and a couple of heroics - leaving them more time for other hobbies, or (more importantly from Blizzard's point of view) giving them an incentive to devote time in World of Warcraft to other forms of content, like rated battlegrounds. Many of my raiding friends are also interested in PvP, and I predict that my guild is probably going to have a regular rated battleground night just as we have a regular raiding night today.
In other news, I think my next post will probably talk about what I'm specifically up to in the game these days. Hopefully it won't be delayed too long.
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