When we're talking about Raiding in 2009, the story actually starts in 2008. Okay, sure, you could talk about raids going all the way back to the opening of the game, and how things have changed, and grown out of each other, and it could go on forever and a day and never actually end and it'd be like a run-on story just like this sentence.

But if we're going to keep the conversation manageable, we'll start in 2008. It was a cold and frigid night in November 2008 when Blizzard released the newest expansion to World of Warcraft. With much hullabaloo, the Wrath of the Lich King hit the shelves with a brand new paradigm.

That paradigm was that end-game raiding should be accessible to everyone. Raiding -- and the gear associated with it -- was no longer the sole province of people who had many, many hours to farm potions, reagents, and hone their skills every single night. This new idea of accessibility would change the way raiding in WoW has worked ever since. The changes were pretty thorough, so let's start breaking it down behind the jump.

In this installment, we're going to take a look at the first three raid instances in Wrath of the Lich King, and the design philosophy that fueled their creation.

10 and 25 man formats

One of the first, most startling changes to raiding that happened when Wrath hit the shelves was that all raiding would now take place in both 10-man and 25-man formats. The biggest difference between 10 and 25, of course, is the amount of behind-the-scenes work you have to do in order to herd the cats into a coherent raid group. If you follow the law that you need 15% overage to ensure your raid is always full, then you're already trying to organize 12 and 29 people.

And then you need to convince them all not to stand in fire, to gem and enchant "properly," and all the other headaches that go into raid leading.

Allowing players to choose their own preference of group size helped everyone decide whether they wanted a mega-raid flavor, or a "me and my friends" level of interaction. I would not presume to say that no 25-man raid is a "friends" format, but I'm guessing most casual players who tend to stick to their real-life friends end up in a 10-man format.

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