Quote:There's a different aspect to the difficulty in a 25-man as compared to a 10-man than the organizing.
The more players you have, the more difficult coordination within an encounter becomes. If the encounter's difficulty relies on that coordination, it cannot be directly translated to a lesser-sized group. The encounter has to be significantly revised.
Assuming that Blizzard can successfully revise every encounter to keep the same difficulty in a 25-man as in a 10-man is a stretch, frankly.
That, combined with the problems involved in organizing 25 people compared to 10, more than justifies the "roughly one tier" of quality the 25-man raids will have over the 10-mans, at least in my eyes.
The lionshare of that increase in difficulty is on frequently on the raid and guild leaders. What about people who are there to (as an example) to do their DPS, get their DKP (or loot) and go home? External forces being equal (i.e., time, consumables) do the "grunts" deserve an extra tier for getting into right raid guild? Do they deserve an extra tier for being on a farm run with the right raid guild 3 months after that boss was first killed?
There should be extra rewards for being at the edge of content--The first raid (or 3 or some other limit) that clears a raid instance should get shiny things and titles and their choice of unique items. Perhaps there could be more bear-mount type challenges. And maybe Raid Leaders or Guild Leaders could be compensated in some impressive but non-character-power way by Blizzard.
But it needs to have a limit or specific targeting. The problem with giving all 25-man raids a higher tier of gear than 10-man raids is that the effective difference-in-difficulty isn't uniform across all raiders (or as time passes), but the rewards remain uniformly better.