Lets get some of the "pros" about the current cataclysm raiding setup, including some aspects introduced in wrath.
First point of call: Badges, emblems, points whatever you want to call them have been a good thing for raiding, it means that you are rewarded for downing a boss no matter how much rng you randomly got and will eventually get a good amount of gear, I personally like the ICC implementation of tier upgrading, although personally I would remove rng from this totally and be like First part requires only hero points, then the final point would be the 1st part + more hero points and get rid of the third part of the tier set *or* unlock it via boss kills and it would *just* be a reskin (similar to what has been done with arena) so it looks cool and is based on boss kills.
There are bad things with emblems though: 1) It encourages farming, whatever implementation of the system unless you introduce daily/weekly caps on the amount of BOTH justice points and heroic points. 2) It's ludicrous that people doing content that will eventually be completely trivialised by gear can get gear that is much higher than the content they are attempting (this is a real flaw in raid progression which I will touch on later). and finally 3) In the current implementation items are too expensive compared to the effort put in, say you can cap out at 1000 points (if like i said in 1 this basically just requires 1 heroic raid a week) then you should get 1 item from it so basically you can get 1 item a week and after 5 weeks you would have a full tier set (yes I actually would have it so that a full clear of heroic meant you could upgrade straight to the "normal/heroic tier" in 5 weeks).
The next thing: Heroic Raiding. I want to make it clear that the ONLY pro to heroic raiding in my mind is that people who purely want to see the story/content can see it in normal mode.
A few fallacies I want to dispel before going on here is that: Heroic mode does not provide an "extra challenge", it simply replaces the challenge normal modes presented in TBC, (lets ignore the fact that wrath "style" (ie infinite mana healers) has led to really easy heroic encounters). The second fallacy is that heroic modes do not provide a natural progression, they provide a brick wall, the difference between normal and heroic modes (lets discount gunship) is a gigantic gulf without including LK normal, it's amazing how big the increase in difficulty is from normal to heroic and this is attrocious, most of the player base is better than normal mode raids and worse than the "elite" guilds that want the "challenge" of heroic raiding. The final fallacy is that heroic raids are satisfying, this is my biggest "annoyance" with heroic modes, there is too much "choice" to go and just say "fuck it lets do normal the gear is almost as good" because of the previous point and there being such a gulf if people are wiping on heroic mode it isn't rewarding enough to progress through that gulf and have to wipe far too much and not have that progression, let me state that wiping is good but from wiping say 3x on a boss in normal to wiping 30x on a boss in hard mode with no real progression here is quite horrid. It should be smooth.
So, lets get to the meat and potatoes of my post here. Lets face it, in wrath there is no progression raiding and in cataclysm its likely to be similar, firstly the introduction of multiple raids per tier is A BIG IMPROVEMENT, doing 1 instance over and over and over again for around 6 months on average is hugely boring so with multiple raids per tier this is at least an improvement.
Firstly lets state the wrath model, that is each tier is your progression cycle, so in tier 8 you did Normal Ulduar -> Heroic Ulduar and used heroics to gear you up for ulduar, in tier 9 you did Normal Toc/Onyxia (later) -> Heroic Toc and in tier 10 you did Normal Icc -> Heroic Icc.
With the previous points you can see how this is flawed, because of the way normal has been set up "so everyone can experience the content", basically an easy mode in any other game, means there is a very shallow progression between bosses, there will be some but mostly its pretty shallow. This inevitably leads to a huge progression curve in the heroic mode, either it starts out really hard (like ulduar/ToC) or it progresses really sharply (ICC). Basically this means that most guilds will hit either a fight (Heroic LK) or just Heroic Modes (Beasts in ToC/Ulduar Heroics in General) where it's just so much harder than what they have been progressing through on normal mode, this breaks guilds and makes raiding less fun.
Imagine playing an rpg on easy mode where say you have unlimited ammo/invulnerability and then going to the *ONLY OTHER DIFFICULTY* lets say normal for this case where you have limited ammo, limited health and all the mobs hit harder/challenging mechanics. A good example of this is F1 2010 which I played recently, I did a couple of races on easy where all your acceleration is automated along with being invulnerable and showing the racing line so basically you just steer and going from easy->medium increases competence of your opponents and stops automating acceleration and gets rid of alot of the racing line and makes you vulnerable to damage and the learning curve is just HUGE, not that I mind the actual difficulty level of medium, it's just it would have been more enjoyable to learn on a curve.
So, in cataclysm this is set to continue that the progression level of players is meant to go from normal->heroic in the same tier and because cataclysm class systems and such (ie healers can go oom) there is a much much much bigger room for making more difficult encounters, means that the gap between normals and heroics is only going to grow, even if normals are harder base than in wrath, heroic mode will be just that much harder and I can only see this happening.
So what would I do about this, simple look back at the past about what I enjoyed about Tbc raiding. Ignoring stuff like attunements and such it was the fact there was a very clear progression path, Heroics/Kara->Gruul/Maggy->SSC/TK/ZA->Hyjal/BT->Sunwell. I was in pretty bad guilds in tbc since this was when I started raiding, but what I loved was that I was always progressing through content and I had a clear goal of how good/bad a guild was. I knew that if a guild was in ssc/tk it was better than a guild just starting in gruul/maggy. The gear disparity was much bigger, which I also thought was a good thing (although not necessarily needed). The main point here was that there was a huge progression curve, you could progress up through bosses and because it was long there weren't that many cockblocks, sure Kael/Vashj were harder than the rest of TK/SSC but they were good step-ups and not outrageous ones in my mind. I never personally was annoyed that I missed out on sunwell because I knew I needed to improve to get to that level which was great.
So what would I do, I would set Normal mode as the entry level raiding, basically every normal raid would be very similar of difficulty, whatever the tier so the Last tier raid would be equal in difficulty (perhaps slightly harder) but would reward the same level of loot. So in cataclysm all normal raids would drop 259 epic loot, basically everything "easymode" would reward entry level loot, this would mean that if people want to "see the content" then they can do it on easymode and then heroic is where the real progression happens, and loot progresses upwards from t11->t12->t13->t14? and there is no option apart from t11 to just do normal really because there is no reward for doing so, normal raids would also only reward justice points which could give you some tier below content to help progression a little on the heroic mode progression.
Heroics would not reward justice points or heroic points at all, they would be purely to get 246 gear which would be required for the normal raids, the challenge of heroics should be the only reason one should do them. Heroic 5 mans should not be a valid way of getting gear of the current tier or even the tier below, they should be there to make a jump from fresh 80->Normal 5-mans->Heroic 5-mans-> Normal Raids-> Heroic Raids on a much larger plain than currently.
I believe this system combines both the perks of the wrath raiding (of which there are very very very few) and tbc raiding (which I personally loved) and allows for a silky smooth progression curve and allows people to see the content if they want to. I also feel like it would truly show you how many people want to see the content if it's not challenging, if that option is there for no reward but to see the content would people go and see it or would rather progress through the tiers to see it when they were good enough. Obviously the first few tiers of heroic content would be a little easier than it would be with the other system but I feel like it would be so worth it in the long run of the expansion.
I understand it might be "too late" to implement this because the ilvl's for the last raid in cataclysm have already been formulated to make sure the progression of character power is balanced, but if this isn't I would love to consider this idea, I feel this is far superior to a proposed 3rd difficulty level which just stagnates content, how many people replay an rpg on easy, normal and hard difficulty. Mostly if people want to see the story they will do it on easy and then go straight to the hardest difficulty and replay or not do it at all, and if people want to just do the game at their difficulty level they will do just that and not go through on easy first.
I also want to add as an adendum that normal mode should absolutely not be required to do heroic modes in it's current format, it's ridiculous that people should somehow be forced into doing an easy version before the hard version because of an attunement. I hate rpgs/other games that unlock a harder difficulty after completing it on the hardest difficulty, it's dumb I want to be able to do the hardest challenge the first time through, not the 2nd time after certain things are "spoiled".
