Depending on what developers want to accomplish there are plenty of things that could be done to help slower guilds progress through content without directly nerfing this content. As long as a boss drops useful loot upgrades it's always advantageous to kill the boss early rather than late simply because that way you get to use your loot for more time. Logically if the reward from killing a boss goes down as time progresses the difficulty on defeating bosses should go up and to an extent it already does as time passing gives better gear.

Yet in vanilla wow simple passage of time added new content that wasn't top level to game. We got dire maul with gear upgrades that helped - essentially making molten core much easier. We got Zul'Gurub and AQ20. There was darkmoon faire with gear upgrades. Other such things were added in game and those things made raiding easier without really touching the instance at all. Alchemy and tailoring cooldowns are another such mechanic: to make better gear you can do a very reasonable amount of farming and get your stuff if you are patient enough to wait. And thus content gets easier without getting nerfed.

There are a lot of ways similar support mechanics could be introduced. Perhaps eventually horde, alliance, the aldor or the scryers could have provided some minor support to their heroes in the form of weekly bind on pickup consumables. Maybe A'dal could organize a NPC raid into SSC to demolish some of the trash after some time (heck, there are tons of quests where you first weaken the defences, it's about time the NPCs did it for us for a change).

It makes perfect sense that Horde and Alliance should receive supplies from Azeroth and that those supplies should be used to further their goals in the Outlands. From the point of view of the storyline the presence of the factions in outlands should be growing constantly. There are so many ways in which this could have been included in TBC from the moment of release (in some ways it has been such as the non-functional consortium gem donation). It would probably have not only enriched the game world but also helped everyone to progress without the attrition rates we are currently seeing. Top guilds would probably always be a bit ahead of this "help".

There's lots of precedent for this kind of thing.

It makes sense that after a while, the Horde would improve the quality of their PvP awards, to help in the battle against its enemies. It makes sense that after a while, smaller villas like Camp Taurajo, Ratchet, and Un'Goro would have flight points put in due to increased travel. It makes sense that larger cities like Thunder Bluff would get Auction Halls after seeing the success of the Orgrimmar one. It makes sense that the gear that General Drakkisath drops would get better over time, as he is responsible for the slaying of more and more groups. One could even say that the improvement of the meeting stones over time is the result of powerful Horde/Alliance wizards working to make assaults on the large enemy strongholds easier.

More massive overhauls like that of Silithus are a little harder to explain using in-game, lore-related explanations, but there is still precedent for the change of the game world over time.

I like the idea that the major factions would, over time, change slightly to adapt to what is, at least in the story of the game, a dire situation, by providing materials to their army.

Great idea.

To be honest, unless Blizzard introduces a "casual raider" dungeon, I don't see how Blizzard can cater to casual raiders without massiving nerfing content.

You need to understand that for most of us who consider ourselves "non-casual raiders," the progression you had through WoW was this:

Level 1 -> Level 60 -> MC -> BWL -> AQ40 -> Naxx -> Level 70 -> Karazhan -> Maulgar -> etc.

For the majority of people who are casual raiders, I would wager that at best they saw MC and BWL, thus their progression is something like this:

Level 1 -> Level 60 -> MC -> BWL (?) -> Level 70 -> Karazhan -> Maulgar -> etc.

And then there's the players who never raided in vanilla WoW, whose progression is now this:

Level 1 -> Level 70 -> Karazhan -> Maulgar -> etc.

The problem is that the way I see it, the MC -> Naxx step is a very important step in getting into BC raiding and it's something that Blizzard is underestimating.

For me and I assume most hardcore raiders, the grind from level 60 to level 70 was just a simple raiding break. Karazhan pretty much functioned as a refresher course for vanilla-WoW raiders, a reminder of old WoW raiding skills and also introducing a few new tricks that I assume will be useful in future 25-mans. Once Karazhan is mastered, I saw Maulgar, Gruul (pre-nerf), and Magtheridon (both pre-nerf and now) as simply continuing on from AQ40 and Naxx raiding.

Karazhan, Maulgar, Gruul, and Magtheridon are all relatively easy and doable for hardcore raiders because they are continuations of the trend that we have seen in AQ40 and Naxx, that is, a rapid increase in the complexity of the encounter. There is also a significant element from MC, the ability to deal with trash. To a raider who has gone through AQ40 and Naxx, a pull like the Maulgar initial pull seems incredibly easy. But for casual raiders, who I assume at best saw BWL or a little bit of early AQ40, the Maulgar pull and even the Moroes pull can seem ridiculously complex. Casual raiders are going to barely blow through the Shade of Aran trash and only be able to get in 1 or 2 attempts before the trash respawns and I think it's likely the group will just give up instead of continuing.

I think that what Blizzard tried to do was to encapsulate what they felt was the MC -> Naxx experience in the BC instances. It's not hard to see where bosses and/or encounters in these instances mirror what we have seen in the old raids. Murmur and Ragnaros. Harbinger Skyriss and High Prophet Skeram. The gauntlet in Shattered Halls versus the gauntlets we have seen in BWL, AQ40, and Naxx.

I think Blizzard felt that by incorporating these vanilla WoW raid elements into the BC instances, they could catch casuals up to speed and allow them to continue putting in raids that followed the intensity and complexity of AQ40 and Naxx instead of backpedaling to more MC and BWL difficulty raids.

The problem is that I fail to see how any of these instances can really match the experience of the MC -> Naxx raid. You can have beaten Skyriss 20 times and the Skeram fight will still seem very very ridiculous and overwhelming in scale. The joke that is Murmur really doesn't even come close to how overwhelming Ragnaros was at that time when MC was big. Hell, even long dps fights like Curator doesn't really come close to the intensity of the Patchwerk fight. The result is that casuals are being indeed somewhat introduced to the old MC -> Naxx experience, but the depths and intensity of that experience is very very casual and lacking in comparison. The Skeram fight is a fairly complex fight. Even the Ragnaros fight is a fairly complex setup. But Skyriss and Ragnaros is a joke in terms of setup and complexity and as such I'm not sure where players are supposed to pick up how to deal with compexity with it being shoved down their throat in Karazhan.

Perhaps what Blizzard should have done was something like what Xi proposed. What they really should have done was to made gear from heroic instances and Karazhan equal to Tier 3 loot. Since Naxx loot could be equipped and used at level 60 as opposed to the level 70 requirements of heroic and Karazhan loot, this and the fact that a good portion of Naxx would have been made much easier as your level goes up, it would have encouraged casuals to give Naxxramas a try. From the one BC Naxx raid my guild did, it would seem to me that a huge portion of Naxx would scale to MC and BWL difficulty with the latter ones remaining at AQ40 or even Naxx difficulty. If Blizzard had found a way to encourage people to go into Naxx even once BC was out, it would have been a very good training ground into raiding. They would have gained much more real raid experience (with a larger safety blanket due to the level difference), learning about handing complex fights, and as a result have a better shot at making progress in Karazhan and others.

Since I doubt Blizzard wants to do anything with Naxx, I don't really see how they could help casuals other than nerfing the current endgame to the ground. Loot quality certainly isn't the primary issue for casual raiders. To me, you could give a casual raiding guild all Tier 6 loot and Magtheridon would still be hopelessly complex due to the coordination of cube clicking and managing summoners that needs to be done. As much as it would probably annoy hardcore raiders, I feel that if Blizzard does indeed want to cater to casuals, what they would probably due is nerf the complexity of Karazhan, Magtheridon's Lair, and Gruul's Lair; retune SSC and the Eye as a BWL/AQ40 complexity encounter; and tune Black Temple and Mount Hyjal as the AQ40/Naxx encounter of BC.

The biggest bane of being a casual raider as opposed to hardcore (I've been both) is the organization required for larger raids. WoW is not a hard game mechanically. If we we took bowser from Mario 64 and made that into a raid boss with the platforming skills required, then WoW would be insanely hard.

However, organizing any amount of people greater then 20 and coordinating them is the true challenge and thats what truly separates exceptional guilds from everyone else. Granted, farming six hours a day is not an easy task, but its also nowhere near as time consuming as planning and implementing raids and then, when things inexplicably yet wonderfully fail, figure out what the issue is.

I don't think this can be addressed in anyway other then giving smaller guilds more instances to run with nice loot. Two more ten-man's and a twenty man stepping stone, for instance, before the 25 man's with proper linear gear progression would be excellent. The really hardcore guilds would blow through all that content while everyone else will gradually gear up and move onto the 25 mans. Maybe it'll end up being this way. Its too early to tell.

I really think its that simple. Instead of making tiers for raiding and nothing else, with TBC Blizzard just kind of gave you 20 choices of things to do but they all end in the same place. A plateau of all these different choices.

The problem with Vanilla WoW was not that their were 3 tiers of raiding that made too large a gap of power between raiders and casuals, but that there was not 3 tiers of 5 man's and crafting and factions and all the other methods to advance.

I mean a person in the absolute best Blues could at the time of MC (and even into BWL) still compete in PVP relatively well if they were good. But by the end of AQ it was pointless to try. However if they had come out with Dire Maul 2.0 or 3.0 along with BWL and AQ and Naxx to not maintain equality but at least maintain a sane sized gap, it would have been fine.

The only problem with that is your old raiding zones get outdated faster as new raiders simply would choose to upgrade in the other avenues rather than gather 25 people for zones that have been bypassed by 5 mans. But oh well, most raiders were dying to retire MC and BWL long before they stopped running them anyway.

As for nerfing encounters, I think there is no such thing as a *fair* or perfectly balanced encounter in Blizzard's eyes. Content is nerfed or not depending on how many people are at the content cap and how soon new content is ready to come down the pipe. When the next tier of dungeons is ready for release things get nerfed, not because they were too hard in the first place but because Blizz wants a large portion of the player base to now move on. But you dont want that large portion moving on too soon, becauses far more people quit the game when there is nothing to do than quit because something is too hard or even broke.

Bekah, I understand what you are saying and where you are coming from, but I think there is some misunderstanding in my words. I am not suggesting that in order to get the full MC -> Naxx experience that you had to have run MC right when it first really became accessible or BWL the day it came out, etc. By the MC -> Naxx experience I refer to any guild that has made serious attempts and progress through these instances at some point in vanilla WoW.

I myself am far from the hardcores that are there on Day 1. I only first walked into MC in late spring of last year. I joined a new guild in the middle of last summer that more or less understood MC and was making their first real steps into BWL. We downed BWL but eventually disbanded due to guild drama around November of last year once we hit the brick wall of the Twin Emperors. I later joined the guild I am in now, which had C'thun on farm but had only completed about 1/2 of the bosses in Naxx, only completed the spider wing at the point that I joined and by the time BC came out, we had just managed to down Loatheb.

I definitely was a late-comer to raiding and I know I was spoon-fed through MC, the later half of AQ40, and the earlier battles in Naxx, but I think that the experience I had figuring out BWL and AQ40 up to and including the Twin Emperors as well as the experiences I had in other raiding encounters helped me to understand and learn to handle the complexities that is a raid fight.

I understand what you are talking about with respect to different guild leadership styles and levels of player awareness and that's what I was trying to allude to.

In general, I would say that MC was 90% strategy and 10% individual decisions and awareness. Almost every boss and its strategy could be planned out, rationalized, and worked out well in advance (or even on the spot if you so choose) and for the most part, MC bosses required few deviations from these strategies. As a mage, dps carefully, decurse, run away from danger, etc. Hell, for the majority of MC, as a mage you didn't even really have to watch your own health or actively work on mana conservation if you were really that lazy. Very few moments existed if any that removed the player away from the planned out strategy and required him or her to make a judgement call that could be the difference between a wipe or success.

Let's look at Magtheridon now, from a mage's perspective (I see you are a mage so I am sure we can relate on this). In phase 1, you need to dps down the adds very hard. You have to be able to make judgement calls and know how to communicate over Vent or chat on who is going to use CS to interrupt a spell this time. You need to watch out for random elemental adds that can spawn anywhere and will probably take a little bit of time before they are feared or banished. You need to time and coordinate cooldowns with the other mages and dpsers. So now phase 2 is here. Now you need to coordinate on clicking with the boxes with 4 other people in a group. If someone dies during at some point in the fight, you potentially need to be ready to cover that block. You need to dps hard but also give yourself the ability to heal yourself and regen mana for the phase 3 transition. Once phase 3 begins, you need to not only be doing everything in phase 2, but you also now have to watch out for the completely random ceiling cave-ins and possibly dps even harder. And throughout the whole fight, you have to be able to survive and take care of yourself in case a healer is occupied.

The Magtheridon fight is just like any MC fight in that you can easily work out a strategy and go from there. The difference is that the Magtheridon fight has many many moments that aren't on a timer, can happen completely randomly, and in order words, requires you to make a potentially raid-breaking decision. If you are a mage and you die in phase 1, you've pretty much compromised your raid's ability to down the channels fast enough. If you die in phase 2 and 3 at inopportune times and do not have a well-worked out way of handling "oh shit" moments, one less person will be clicking on the box and Magtheridon's blast wave will pretty much wipe the raid.

In a way, the BC 5-mans teaches raid basics: it introduces the bag of tricks and nifty types of skills that raid bosses have used. But it doesn't do what I feel that the path from MC to Naxx taught players, which is introducing and getting players used to increasingly complex and individual-responsiblilty fights.

As it is, Harbinger Skyriss just runs around tossing trivial attacks around the room while splitting into adds that have so little hp that they are easily identified and quickly downed. You don't even need to tank the adds: just dps them down fast. Compare that with the Skeram fight where you need to have three tanks, rogues in position to get mind controlled, mages to do the polymorphing of the mind-controlled, and more. As a mage, you have to watch out for line-of-sight issues and be prepared to assist other mages if a polymorph is missed. And when Skeram split, the adds were genuinely dangerous and you needed to quickly determine who is the real Skeram and who is not (admittedly there are plenty of tricks for this one) and then everyone must focus fire to quickly deal with the splits. Skeram and Skyriss both teach players about an encounter where the boss splits into multiple selves, but Skeram and not Skyriss forces players to get used to a very complex encounter where everyone has a unique role in the encounter and must occasionally think outside the box in some bad runs.

So in other words, going from MC -> Naxx, regardless of when you did it in the game's history, teaches you a bunch of innovative WoW boss tricks and abilities and it teaches you to handle increasing complex tasks and gameplay requirements. Suceeding in BC raiding requires both. For a person who has never raided or raided very very casually, BC 5-mans teaches you innovative WoW boss tricks and abilities, but it doesn't really prepare you for the complexity of raid encounters: it expects you to put it together yourself.

BC 5 mans are not trivial for PuGs and the people in those pugs are the ones meant to take away some learning. Something as simple as basic assists are learned slowly- but I'd go far enough to say anyone who's finished out their revered keying in 3+ reps is either incredibly stubborn (which has it's pluses) or has probably taken away enough knowledge from the 5 man keying process not to embarrass themselves on a raid.

It's night and day though- the difference between pugging with the general population and doing a guild run. I've yet to run into anything that I found exceptionally difficult with a solid group that already knows what the instances are beating into my pugs...

(and I'm not raiding yet on a mage, 60 on my belf and 68 on my gnome. I'm a late reroll ^.^)