Siege of Orgrimmar: Cross-realm Raids Enabled

We’ve recently implemented an often requested feature to enable cross-realm raiding for Siege of Orgrimmar. Cross-realm BattleTag™ and Real ID friends can now raid together and take the fight to Garrosh on Normal or Heroic difficulty. Players will be able to earn greater rewards such as Reins of the Kor'kron War Wolf or the title of Conqueror/Liberator of Orgrimmar; both of which aren’t available to be earned within Flexible or Raid Finder difficulty.

UPDATE: The changes are now live.

Below are additional clarifications from Lead Encounter Designer Watcher.

How will this affect Heroic realm firsts?

As for realm firsts, realm firsts are guild achievements; you need to be in a guild group, which is by definition 8/10 or 20/25 members coming from a single guild on a single server. You could theoretically have a couple of guests from a different server and still claim the realm first, but ultimately 80% of the group still has to be from the same guild.

How this will affect loot and lockouts?

As for loot and lockout, nothing about this affects either of those. Loot is not personal in Normal/Heroic; the exact loot setting depends on the raid leader, as always. As for lockouts, Normal lockouts will continue to prevent you from entering a raid in which a boss is alive that you've already killed during a given week. Heroic still uses fixed lockouts, and once you're saved to one Heroic ID, you cannot zone into any different Heroic ID that week.

Current-tier Mythic raiding in Warlords will still be limited to players from a single server. In the meantime, though, this change may help guilds that are trying to recruit and grow in preparation for Mythic raiding.