World of Warcraft Raid Lockouts

Question

In World of Warcraft, the way Raid Lockouts work has been changed multiple times.

A Raid Lockout is incurred when you have killed bosses within a Raid, and are then Saved from doing it again until the Weekly Reset is done, which is currently on Wednesday mornings.

I remember for example that in WotLK (patch 3.3.5a), there were 4 lockouts for Icecrown Citadel (ICC).

1. 10 Normal
2. 25 Normal
3. 10 Heroic
4. 25 Heroic

This is obviously no longer the case, plus Flexible Mode has now entered the picture, as well as Raid Finder.

My Questions:

1. How many different Raid Lockouts are there currently (for Siege of Orgrimmar)
2. Do the lockouts for legacy/old Raids still work the same, or are they aligned with the new Raid Lockouts?

Answer 1

There are four separate lockouts for Siege of Orgrimmar:

1. Looking for Raid is a loot-based lockout. You can fight the same boss multiple times in a week, but you only get loot the first time.
2. Normal mode is a loot-based lockout. Supports 10-30 players, with boss health and mechanics scaling to the raid's size.
3. Heroic mode is a loot-based lockout. Like Normal mode in that it scales between 10-30 players, but overall more difficult.
4. Mythic mode is a 20-player instance-based lockout, similar to traditional raid lockouts. When a boss dies in the instance, it's gone for the week. You can only fight a Mythic boss once per week. You cannot join a different group's run once they have started (but you can have them join your run if none of them have started a Mythic run) because when you zone in you see your version of the raid.

The lockouts for legacy raids generally remain unchanged unless there are significant changes to the system. Vanilla raids, BC raids, Naxx, Eye of Eternity, and raids where the difficulty was controlled by in-game mechanics like Obsidian Sanctum and Ulduar only have one difficulty and thus one lockout. Normal/Heroic 10 and 25 all share the same lockout for everything else: Trial of the Crusader, ICC, Ruby Sanctum, and the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria raids (except Siege of Orgrimmar, which was changed to the above). However, Looking for Raid remains a separate lockout.