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The funny thing is I remember all the doom and gloom talk after it was announced raid sizes in TBC would be reduced to 25 people, but a lot of the top end guilds saw it as a way to drop that 10-15 people dead weight the majority of them KNEW they were dragging along. Oddly enough it probably still seems to most people even after the switch to 25 man raids there are a few people they could shave off from that number. Its not that the fights got harder, its just that everyone has to pull their weight.
The main problem with the game as many have stated on this thread is that they already build in a curve for all the non hardcore raiders...nerfs. I fully understand if they were trying to slow down progression with all of the bs early on in TBC raiding, but the way they did it was just a terrible timesink or a retarded grind your faces against the wall and you might pull through. Gruul, consumables, t5 trash on 45 min respawn...all of it was poorly thoughtout and obviously over-tuned on purpose to prevent guilds from going to far too fast. Many of us had seen this before with Everquest expansions and unfinished content months after the release of said expansions.
Their solution to the difficulty issues after the front lines got through the zones was to nerf it into oblivion until any old guild with some decent gear and half a brain could do it. Remove key quests, allow full entry, and fight now easier bosses so you too can see the whole game! I guess it just irks me that vanilla WoW did NOT have this problem towards the end before TBC came out. Yes zones like MC and BWL got fixes/nerfs for a lot of stupid problems, but on the whole they didn't change as much with even AQ40 and Naxx they pretty much left more alone than any other raid instance I can think of. This is probably why most people never finished that zone, because it wasn't "dumbed down" for them to get easy epics.
Its not that I don't see a value to doing across the board nerfs of content the front-line raiders have already progressed through for Blizzard money-wise, I just think its a further extension of the problem with 1-70 not being a "boot camp" for the game after one hits 70 and still wants to keep progressing. Technically they will continue to get better gear as they beat the next nerfed to hell encounters, but it will be very hard for a middle of the road guild to be one of the guilds seeing the content first because they will not be able to deal with the encounters before they are watered down. Virtually all of the legit "tough" fights that required a higher level of skill to beat have been nerfed in this fashion. Original Gruul may have been a bit much but jesus he couldn't even walk after he got beat so bad with the nerf bat. Fights that were amazing in their original form (Leo and Kael stick out for me) fell victim to the constant whining of the casual raiders who didn't want to have to step up their game.
Combine all of this with the welfare epics they keep making easier and easier to get getting very close to matching the gear the top end raiders see (and mostly through beating the content before its retarded easy after nerfs) I just don't think they can continue to see the top guilds be satisfied with doing the most amount of work for the least amount of benefit. There are exceptions of course but on the whole I see WotLK as the same race to beat the content before the nerf bat hits if you want to feel like your guild actually accomplished something.
Maybe the head raid designer just saw too many pug raids cause too much Doomwalker spam in SMV over and over even after they took out the sub 20% 16k earthquakes. "Wait a while and EZ Mode" became the new fix it.
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