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Speaking personally, I didn't raid pre-TBC. I got 3 characters to 60 (tank and two dps), and stuck with the 5-mans or UBRS. So I missed out on any "veteran" learning that I could have done.
When BC came out, somewhere along the rush to 70 I decided that I wanted to be a really good rogue instead of one of the thousands that suck and are still asking at 70 where they go to learn poisons. Before I set foot in Karazhan, I had already read up on my class and on several boss fights that I was likely to encounter early on. To this day I continue reading up on my class here and otherwhere, and when a new fight approaches I make sure to research it. So I'm one of those guys that, while I lack "old-school" raiding experience, I'm self-motivated and have the drive to excel, thus I learn and adapt quickly.
My guild is working on downing Vashj at the moment, so I haven't experienced the full spectrum of BC raiding as of yet. However, I have seen how different fights are there to teach different things, and each is its own challenge. The introduction of ZA taught even more things, and I like how that instance teaches you to work under constant pressure (considering we're not in T6, that is). The learning curve I've experienced has been good; it could afford a bit more difficulty, but I'm comfortable where it's at, and would like to see similar things in WotLK.
I would not like to see the difficulty ramped up too much, however, and it's not because I dislike challenge. The problem I see with jacking the difficulty up is the surplus of guilds like mine. We're filled with a handful or two of players that are "hardcore" about playing their characters and raiding, but either don't usually have the time or don't want to raid 5+ days a week for 4+ hours a day. The rest of the players that raid are either around average (nothing wrong with that) or sub-par but required to fill out a raid. This doesn't hamper things on your typical raid boss, but when you've got people that have been raiding for months and still don't know which way is east or that they really shouldn't AoE/DoT the sheep, throwing in too many complicated fights like Vashj will kill off a large amount of raiding guilds out there.
Your bleeding edge guilds will of course rise to the challenge and overcome it, but that's only a small amount of guilds per server. The rest of us will simply end up frustrated and perhaps eventually quit because we're essentially taking 15 people to a 25-person fight. It would be nice to see a split series of dungeons, one set for the really hardcore guilds and one set for the rest of the people, but that doesn't really seem feasible.
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