Originally Posted by Wraithlin
You dont need to hit the defence cap to tank normals, and not even heroics though it helps.
Again, there is what you need to know for raiding and what you need to know for playing; not every player needs a a T6 raiders skillset.
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Having the only way available to develope the t6 raider skillset dependant on a 3rd party non-blizzard provided source seems terribly bad for the future of t6 raider populations.
There is a reason that the first level of super mario brothers doesn't just run you directly into bowser. Instead you fight the lowly goomba. It's to teach you the skills you will use to overcome later challenges. This is really core design philosophy for games.
The mechanics for high level raiding are often largely obscured to the extent that there isn't even a good reference pointing you to someone who knows better. You can't even pull out "this hunter is doing more damage than me" from the game without a 3rd party addon. Even the mechanics for basic raiding, stuff like you really want a composition that fits your groups into roles, isn't too obvious. As an example - what if we gained a size or saturation visual buff based on which player in the group had dealt the most damage, mitigated the most damage/andor generated the most threat, and healed the most damage? That would help the new people some.
There's a real benefit to adding items like this to the game world for both the developers and the players. The players get a wider community of competent participants (in turn earning more demographic share for their preferred playstyle) and the developers get longer subscriptions because there is "more to do". It's much cheaper to teach 10000 willing but clueless people to raid than it is to develope the next raid zone for the 1000 people already raiding, and in the long run it's better for both groups.
Cynical Aside: Unless you really want wow to go more casual and more arena focused, you should probably consider the merits of growing the "raider" population relative to the "non-raider" population. Even if the majority of "raiders" are in karazhan 2.0 as a result of the changes, having them there instead of Arena 2.0 means that in turn more resources will be devoted to BT/Sunwell 2.0
Pretty much every "amazing" game I can think of has excellent player training. Your example of "A room of target dummies" is actually "bad player training". I'd offer as an example of good player training the initial start room in portal, which gives you insight into how the portal mechanic works. I'd offer the first goomba in mario brothers as insight into "you can jump on me, but you can't run into me". Games have a lot of these moments where you teach the rules through gameplay. I want some of that type of "good" player training added to try and give players the skillset required for t6. As an amusing corrolary, this would automaticly require harder gameplay in some places.
It's just as important, if you enjoy playing the game in way x, to make sure that there are new people entering who enjoy that playstyle, as it is to make sure that there is new content entering that matches that playstyle. (Perhaps moreso, given that content tends to be developed in response to demand, whereas demand tends to be a result of people enjoying something.)