Remember this chart?

http://www.largeimagehost.com/img/upload/rhrhs/attunement_chart.jpg.html

To get the Tempest Keep Key (to get into Tempest Keep, to get into Mount Hyjal), required Revered with the Sha’tar, Cenarion Expedition, Honor Hold, and Lower City (not to mention all the other hoops.)

Even to run Heroics required you to get revered, sometimes with multiple factions.

I’m really glad to see those types of restrictions lifted so I can maybe get into a Raid sooner than later.

BC
mid Jan 2007

2.1 – BT, easier heroics, working Hyjal?
22 May 2007

2.3 – ZA
13 Nov 2007

2.4 – Sunwell
25 Mar 2008

Sunwell came out one year and two months after BC released. We’re not even close to that yet. You also had to wait that long to run a new 5 man. Assuming 3.2 comes out sometime in September, 3.2 will match up with 2.3 in terms of timing. What’s also interesting to note is that in BC there was a 10 month drought with no new 25 man raid content (I’m assuming ZA was a side distraction for most progression guilds).

It’s perfectly fine to compare BC to Wrath and to point out the ways in which Wrath is not good, but let’s keep in mind the ways in which BC wasn’t good as well.

We still do retroraids for the old stuff, and the trash is even hard! Harder at 70 than at 80. Given we usually run 10 80s for a 25 man, but many times the trash kicks our butt (I’m thinking of TK trash – you know the one that needs 3 tanks, 3 mages, etc). Maybe ulduar is better, idk. But yeah i think they really blew it with the dungeon/raid content in wraith.

Anyway raiders will always bitch; but perhaps the game is just dying, people are no longer interested in the same old paradim. WTB a new MMO.

Now those same people are successfully (albeit not reliably) PuGing Ulduar 10 and some 25.

That pretty much says it all, as far as I can see.

Instances, including heroics, have been dumbed down to the point where the old measures and standards don’t apply. No one on servers like mine bothers to keep “progression” lists anymore — a huge change from BC — because there is no progression in any meaningful sense and everyone knows it. Hardmode was supposed to compensate some for the extreme ease of the encounters, but for the most part so few are interested in bothering with the whole “It’s the same fight, but with lasers!” mentality that it’s hard to get even good players on the average server to attempt them and for the most part no one really thinks of them as ‘progression’ anyway.

Progression is dead as a doornail, this hasn’t been a game for people interested in that since 3.0 hit. “Raids for the masses”, and Wrath has brought us nothing if not that, and the entire concept of progression are mutually exclusive.

Whether or not in the end this will be good for the game, who knows? I suppose it really depends on the player and what in particular they’re looking for in an MMO. Me, I don’t happen to think it’s a very smart or, in the long run, good direction to take things, but then I would think that as I’m no longer the kind of gamer WoW is aimed at.

Kara -> Naxx
Gruul -> OS
Mag -> EoE
SSC/TK -> Ulduar

While Ulduar may have come out a bit late compared to SSC/TK, SSC/TK were amazingly buggy at first, so I think even the timing isn’t crazy far off.

To me, three problems stand out. Wrath heroics are too easy, though before 2.1 the BC heroics were admittedly too hard. Relately, Naxx is a bit too easy. Add that in with the gear reset being less and you have people tearing through all the initial Wrath content a good bit faster than was expected. I actually think I’ve seen a few blue posts that agree with this. They wanted to make content more accessible and succeeded a little too well.

Hyjal/BT -> Coliseum
Sunwell -> Icecrown

The largest coming mismatch seems to be Hyjal/BT -> Coliseum. Unless there is another raid released or Icecrown is a lot larger than Sunwell, the total raid content of Wrath will be less, which I feel is a mistake.

The other unknown quantity here is hard mode. People seemed to be entertained by hard mode OS for quite a bit, and Ulduar looks like it may be shaping up the same way. In that sense, not having as much, or as interesting, hard mode in Naxx might have been the initial problem, though understandably they weren’t quite sure how hard mode would work out. Even then, I’m not sure having Coliseum and hard mode Coliseum is enough to match up to Hyjal/BT.

Anyway, my two cents.

You’re very much dead on when it comes to gearing in TBC and WotLK. When TBC came out, many, many progression raiders cried foul because they were finding quest gear and instance gear from Hellfire that was better than their T1/T2 epics, and by Zangarmarsh, T3 epics were being replaced in some cases… and this really wasn’t fair. It was a huge slap in the face to all of the people who’d spent countless hours raiding content for the best gear. In WotLK, they went back to making gear like the first 60 levels. Blues should last you 4-7 levels, and epics should last you nearly 10 levels before needing to be replaced. I don’t think this would have been a problem, except that they also nerfed the difficulty of all raids and heroics. I remember walking into my first heroic at level 70 – Sethek Halls – and getting crushed because we didn’t use CC. Heroics were so much more difficult than the regular instances, and this was fun. I no longer required 40 people, 25 people, or even 10 people to have fun, I could do it in 5-man heroic instances. In WotLK, instances weren’t difficult at all. I remember my first heroic in WotLK, Azjol Nerub, and we mowed it down in 45 minutes, no wipes. Then we decided to do the timed CoT: Stratholme. We missed it by 1 minute. I subsequently managed to 4-man and 3-man many of the heroics before ever stepping foot in Naxxramas… which was also a huge let-down with regard to difficulty.

It isn’t just progression raiders that are getting jerked around though. Anyone with any skill is getting jerked around. I’m part of a casual guild – we raid one night a week, usually on the weekend. We raid for anywhere from 3-6 hours… 6 on a good night where there are no problems, constant breaks, etc. We mowed Naxxramas down in 3 attempts. We had everything on farm long before Ulduar was released. Ulduar was harder than Naxxramas, but still nowhere near the difficulty of Karazhan. You don’t have to be a progression guild to feel screwed. If you have a group of skilled players who move through the content, you get bored very quickly. Our guild has dropped to 1/4 it’s size since TBC from people who’ve left the game – casual players – because it’s not hard enough. A perfect example: Last week one of my friends – a DK tank (admittedly still a bit OP) – put on his “priest healing set” and went and tanked Ulduar 10 (no hard modes). They downed up to Kologarn with few issues. I watched the whole thing. They recorded it with FRAPS, and are editing the video now to prepare it for Warcraft Movies. This is what those with skill have been reduced to – trying really stupid and funny things to get their money’s worth out of the game.

1) Attunements be gone! Forget the quest chain for the karazhan key, which required 3 separate heroics – you had the quest to summon Nightbane, then you had to get a quest from yet another heroic (time consuming, not overly difficult) to kill Gruul so you could go to SSC (Mag for TKE). What a pain.

2) Soft gear reset. Especially on a small server, the pool of raiders is usually fairly small. In BC if you missed the first Kara rush, you probably weren’t getting into SSC/TKE right away. Miss those, and kiss BT/MH goodbye – and forget about getting into Sunwell. At least now potential raiders can farm older content for comparable gear – giving them a shot at the end game guilds and raids.

3) Hard modes. Love em or leave em, for us they keep the game interesting. Same is true fro achievments in heroics.

Then again – I’m a 5 day a week raider (3 in 25s and 2 in 10s) and we’re currently working on a server first Algalon kill in 10s and the hard modes in 25s.

Side note – I seriously laughed out loud when one of our raid leaders called “Bring the rain” when he wanted AoE. I think he’d just seen Transformers 2 (or maybe watched the first one again).

And lumping in the content as “all at launch” I definitely don’t agree with, since BT was patched in in a content patch, it was the Ulduar of TBC. Sunwell is more akin to the upcoming raids.

Blizz has stated multiple times that after their experience with the massive gear reset (green is the new purple) of TBC, in large part because of stam explosion they were specifically not making the reset as severe this time. And I see a potential longterm problem as the expansions keep piling on, massive mudflation, add 10 levels for your toon and 100+ for their gear, and it accelerates.

SSC and MH weren’t even really tuned at launch, they were massively buggy (at least SSC was) and the first Vashj kills were done with grinding out RNG attempts and MASSIVE abuse of consumables (recall right around this time the 1 battle/1 guardian elixir or 1 flask code went in, IMO a massive improvement to quality of gaming experience since no need for endless farming hours anymore).

There are a lot of reasons that bleeding edge raiders are blowing through content, as noted above people have gotten a ton better at learning fights and coordinating. They’ve also gotten very acclimated to using the PTR to refine strats well before patch day, making them more dress rehearsal than the bug testing that is the goal. And how does Blizzard learn from that? By only spawning and allowing testing on some of the bosses at specified times rather than just allowing them to be spawned continuously.

People farmed Karazhan for badges to buy sunwell level gear without ever setting foot in there, Blizzard removed that with tier badges and now are putting it back (I believe this was planned all along). The KZ farming allowed a lot of gearing up of alts, rerolls and newer players, pushing more people into being able to qualify themselves for higher raiding. Same deal here, a gap between the Ulduar raiding crews and people stuck at Naxx, now with badges allowing more gearing up, more people can make the jump. I’d expect there will be an ongoing effort by Blizz

All games have a problem staying fresh past a certain age, you always get the “good old days”, you can’t ever go back Toto.

Meh, I’m a 2 nights a week raider, I wasn’t able to get to end game in TBC because of time, I’m able to see stuff die in Uld right now, I don’t agree with the speed of incoming nerfs so far, but I am enjoying myself. Blizzard has learned from the good and the bad and you can see a move-countermove between them and the raiders if you look.

If that makes me a Bad, so be it. (Gad what a ramble)