This thread has been going for quite a while, and I think the biggest reason things don't feel as "epic" has been mentioned many times; proliferation of strategies. Bosskillers having both written guides and videos for every boss well before most guilds get to them means that we are all very familiar with the fights before we encounter them.

The number of people may be part of it for some people, but I don't think that's really the biggest factor. When Burning Crusade first came out I thought most of the new 5-man content felt pretty epic, because nobody had seen it before. I leveled to 70 very quickly and was seeing this stuff before anyone had told me about it, etc. It's that feeling of discovery, I think, that most people are missing.


To touch on the DPS topic briefly; Mages are definitely lacking in single target DPS and this is largely due to the -10% coefficient nerf that Blizzard implemented shortly after BC came out. It may not seem like much to lose 10% of your +Damage on Fireball, but that ~150 +damage raid buffed is before all the many multipliers.

That combined with missing Elemental Shaman, Owlbeasts and of course, no equivallent to Dragonspine Trophy, combines to form a perfect storm of Mages' shrinking ePeens.

I don't think it's just that - fixing that would leave arcane completely neutered as well, and it's only just carving out a decent place for iteself in mage specs as it is. There were rumblings from Blizzcon of them taking a look at mage damage, so I guess we will have to see what comes.

Well, I wasn't exactly talking about 'back in the day' as it were, but rather trying to compare the raid game now and the direction it went in, to a similar spot pre-BC, say about halfway in when you had things like AQ20 and a really difficult 40 man. MC at one point in time was ultra difficult, you're right, but that's not really what I'm talking about. Those guilds who were able to form back then and stick it out are, for the most part, still around today because that's just the type of guild they are. The raid game back then, if you don't recall, also had a pretty harsh barrier to entry with an absurd amount of bugs. It wouldn't be fair to compare now, with a much, MUCH more stable and diverse raid game, to then, with an extremely buggy, unstable, singular raid dungeon.

They might, it's entirely possible. But with a larger raid size, it becomes much easier to place these 'hybrid' specs into a raid without compromising core classes. I'd wager, however, that you'd start to see things like holy priests come back in style, while offering a spot to more than just one of that hybrid spec (who brings two enhancement shaman? two elemental shaman? two feral druids? two protection paladins?).

That all said, I also certainly don't want to downplay the fact that now players have many, many more options to obtain epics for their characters than they did pre-BC. Pre-BC, all you could do to get the epics was raid, and PvP in one of the most hardcore ranking systems ever invented. It made sense for level capped players to seek out raiding guilds, because that was the only venue to continue the progression of their character.

I don't know if it applies for all servers, but on my server at last population have been a serious issue. There simply aren't nearly as many people around as there were pre-BC. Lots of people transfered off over time, not to mention how many (good) people have quit the game. If raids were 40-man I doubt alliance on my server would have more than 2 serious raiding guilds, compared to quite a few raiding guilds it had pre-bc. Even with 25-man raids our top guilds struggle to recruit to fill their raids - discounting nub apps.

IMO the problem is not really the raid size, it's more of a lack of population on servers. Maybe I just need to transfer, but let's face it - I doubt there are nearly as many people playing the game now as there were pre-BC. I just remember I could lead a pug ZG almost any time of the day and after an hour+ of work I'd have a reasonably geared raid picked up from the LFG/trade channel ready to rock the place. Now if you want to run a non-heroic you'll have a hard time regardless of the hour.

That could be a lot of it. I remember going into Shadow Lab on the Friday after BC released with nothing more than "I heard the second boss is kinda buggy". Anyone else remember corpse-zerging him with every mind control disconnecting 2-3 people? When that boss died it felt more epic than most of the raid bosses I've killed so far, and Murmur was just cool.

I just have a feeling most players won't agree with this. I've been a raider since release and by far the most frustrating moments are knowing you figured out a fight in 2 pulls and then waiting for 39 or 24 other people to figure it out. Like Whiteknight posted, having more people just increases the chance that any players, even good ones, will make a mistake and wipe your raid. Sure, it's harder, but I don't think just adding people is the best way to increase difficulty. I mean, raids could be 100 people. Imagine "The 16 Horsemen" with a 100 person raid involving tank and DPS rotations. It would be incredibly difficult, but not fun in the slightest.

Also, being that this is still an RPG, and the fact that the entire advancement in the game is based around making your character more powerful, this seems to be an odd way to look at things.

This an important point, 25 man raiding and server xfers have galvanized the hardcore raiding populace into fewer guilds on fewer servers. This accounts for faster progression (because you have better people) but also probably less people overall experiencing content since they aren't being dragged along.

You aren't putting this into perspective. No one was clearing MC from the beginning, at least not for a few months. For a while at least my rotation was UBRS -> Couple of MC bosses, go wipe to Onyxia. Rinse/Repeat. Once we got Rag down, we would clear MC in 1-2 Nights, then when BWL came out it was kill 1-2 bosses in MC, then go to BWL for Vael wipes. After we had both on farm, sure we were clearing them in one night - but that was well into release.

On the same token we clear TK or SSC (sometimes both) in one night, same with Hyjal, and eventually I suspect BT on Sundays. It just takes time getting there, just like in Vanilla. The main difference being that with TBC almost everything was thrown at you at once, whereas with Vanilla we had months between instances.

To jump on the mage derail

Obviously the 10% coefficient nerf is hurting mages badly.
We just scale less now than other classes (hi rogues).

What noone seemed to talk about so far is how a lot of the end-game fights are in one way or another mage unfriendly.
This is looking from what my own guild does ofcourse.
I've done most fights as fire and arcane.

Hyjal
Winterchill, fine everyone has to move every once in a while.
Anetheron, rogues on the boss.. mages have to switch target (keep an eye on scorch on the boss) and can't just dot both
Kaz'rogal - mana drain, with some resistance gear this is not that much of a problem but then you're swapping good dps gear for bad dps gear
Azgalor - silence
Archimonde - decurse, you can't slack on that cause you will wipe

BT
Naj'entus - have to wear stam gear, bad for dps
Supremus - fire has insane resistrate, arcane is a bit tricky with range
Shade - alright as fire, fun as arcane cause of ab spam
Teron - personally love this fight for a dps race, but guess how often your spells get interrupted and invis is nearly impossible to complete
EoS:
p1 is like the ideal mage fight, stand and nuke
p2 interrupting yourself or if healing is slacking you can take yourself out on a daeden, spellsteal just to be sure the raid doesn't wipe
p3 great for both arcane and fire
Gurtogg - lot of moving again for ranged classes, good times invis should take care of agro issues
Mother - debuff and mana drain, not much to add
Council - im the tank, but the random dmg seems to be a pain for everyone
Illidan - fine fight, spec arcane/frost for p2 or do mediocre dmg then.. range of fire is pro for the demons

So i agree that scaling for mages is sorta messed up, but it's also the encounters and the role mages have on those fights. I don't mind that we don't just stand there and fullout nuke, but it's something you have to think about when you are talking about mage dps. There aren't a lot of stand and nuke fights anymore which are the best you can get for a fireball spamming mage.

For my server I think there are people playing usually. Many just aren't intressted anymore. Sure there is the issue with instances beeing harder sort off; and many seems to rather wait for a proper group than just go with a PuG.

One thing that kind of seems to happen to people is that they are tired of waiting for groups to form in the first place. Sure there are the people who spam /trade for hours with LF2M Tank/healer but really most just seem to logon, check mail and do a quest or two, and if nothing popped up during that time they just log-off again.

For my guild scheduling events are fine; even 5-man heroics. But trying to just log-on and get a group in a resonable time isn't easy. Everyone is either busy with something they really want to do; or are logged off doing something else (LotR online seems common). Even as tank+healer lf3m anydps; at least if beeing reluctant to just take anyone unless at least recognizing the guild as one that mostly has ok players.

It seems a bit backwards to say a fight where mage utility is extremely valuable is mage-unfriendly. Sure, you're probably not doing as much damage as someone with no extra responsibilities on arch, but that's because part of the time you're doing something much more valuable than anyone's individual dps. There does seem to be an imbalance in terms of how often having a mana bar is punished vs how often being in melee range is punished though from what I've seen and read. Perhaps they originally thought the 360 cleaves etc were a fair analogue to the silences and mana burns, realized they were awful and decided to remove them in 2.1, and then had nothing left in their place.

It strikes me that there's another way in which smaller raid caps lead to less raiding. Over and above the increased demands on the individual player, TBC has put unprecedented stress on the leadership positions within each raid guild / raid group.

Let's consider for a moment the proposition that there are simply a limited number of people per server who are willing to put in the time and effort to run a raid group. In that case, lowering the raid cap will cut the amount of raiding in strict proportion to the raid size. The pre-TBC expectation was that the lowered raid cap would lead to a larger number of smaller-scale raid groups. But if there is no pool of candidates willing to step forward and lead the new groups, that can't happen.

If anything, the reverse is true. Not only is running a 25-man group not appreciably simpler than running a 40-man group, it's actually considerably harder. The leadership role in TBC requires much more knowledge of individual class synergies in order to achieve a group's potential. Recruitment requirements have become that much more complex, now that you can't just throw X tanks, Y healers and (40-X-Y) DPS at an instance. Logistics and scheduling tasks have become much harder - especially at the low end where the schedule planner will be juggling multiple incompatible Karazhan raid IDs. Even in the 25-man instances, there are now two parallel instances at each Tier rather than a single instance. Choice is in many ways good, but can lead to either paralysis through indecision, or unproductive division of effort.

This thread and others have contained a lot of complaints (much of it from me, for which I apologise) about content complexity, and the fact that the "passengers" from 40-man content simply get left out. On longer reflection, that cannot simply be the case. I see too many frankly idiotic questions on the Class Mechanics forums to believe otherwise. At least some of these so-called "passengers" and "mouthbreathers" are still there, and they're doing pretty well in their BT/Hyjal groups, thank you very much. But that's the ones who are lucky enough to happen to have wound up in those groups.

If the leaders aren't there, the groups can't get off the ground: witness the large number of people farming Karazhan but unable to break into 25-man content. Not necessarily for lack of skill, gear or time, but for lack of effective leadership.

I'll leave you with a couple of simple questions:

1) Of those of you currently in guilds tackling 25-man content: how many of those guilds are "new" startups post-TBC?

2) Of those of you leading guilds: how many of you were *not* guild leaders or officers prior to TBC?


In each case, the answer should be around 50%. Going from 40 to 25-man raids means that if the same number of people are raiding, you need twice as many groups, thus twice as many leaders. I just don't see that happening. Sure, the new groups are forming, but they're bombing out at the 10 -> 25-man transition. And the more they nerf the instances, retune the the bosses, remove attunements etc., the more it looks to me like it's a lack of leaders that's the problem, not the accessibility of the content itself.


Discuss.

What concerns me at the moment is that currently blizzard is developing raid-content for < ~1% of the WoW-players, if even. Only a minority has even seen Illidan yet and it will not get better when the last 70 25man comes out.

Currently high-end-raiding is only for people that are willing to spend much of their lifetime in WoW. Its far to expensive, in many ways and time is a big one. Everything in WoW costs a lot of time.

If you are honest, to see Illidan you will have to invest ~like 4 hours, 5days a week which is ~20 hours a week into WoW. This is a half-day job. If you are leading a guild you will need to spend even more time to keep everything running.

Blizzard should ask themselves if its worth the effort to spend so much time into encounters that the vast majority of the players will get to know from videos!?

I think the heroic (or the normal, nightmare, hell) system is an awesome tool to get us around this. There should be a way to see content for everyone.

This must be done by making it more accessible and less time consuming. Giving raid dungeons some heroic mode is a perfect way to grant pro-guilds some really tuff and rewarding encounters while letting casual-hardcores or hardcore-casuals expierence the encounters on normal mode.

For me its frustrating that I never had the opportunity to see Kel'Thuzad, even if I wanted to, that wouldn't have been possible.

Currently many players are PvP'ing since its the only way to get sth. done with a limited timepool. If you want to do sth. in WoW it costs much time and you are not flexible. Diablo 2 is and was played from millions for years since its easy to learn and very rewarding. Plus if you want to do sth you are very flexible.

Make WoW less time consuming and raid content accessible for noobs while making heroic raids for pro-guilds. This would open up random raids too. Currently random raids a "nonsense" since you will have no chance.

MC and BWL were big efforts since you only needed some equip to get them done. Alchemy is really bad for raiding since Naxxramas equip alone is not enough without potions you will not be able to beat stuff. But next to equip farming potions is another time factor and casuals have no time.

Heh, I suspect that's the same picture seen from the other side. To clarify, I'm talking about a shortage of people willing and able to lead a full-size raid group.

Yes, there are people interested in leading raids at 10-man level. I do not believe most of them would be able to lead a group at 25-man level, what with learning about group synergies (how complex can it possibly get in Kara, with 2 groups max?), possibly juggling raid IDs for multiple Kara runs, the recruitment headaches outlined above, and so on.

Kara is doable without significant leadership input. It can be led by anyone who can regurgitate Wowwiki information, as you delicately put it. Heck, now that the raider pool as a whole is getting geared up, I'm seeing occasional pug runs there. 25-man is a different ball game.

Looking at my server (and at the official forum pages for other servers), the number of 25-man groups is no more than the number of 40-man groups which existed pre-TBC, and on many servers, it's lower.

That could be, as you suggest, because everyone is trapped in 10-man groups, and nobody wants their group to be the one that disbands in order to pump the other groups up to 25-man size. But that doesn't accord with my perception, which is that people are all too ready to leave their 10-man groups if there's a chance of getting into a 25-man group.

Instead, what we have is the same groups we've always had - mostly they're full and don't have room for more recruits - and there's nobody coming forward that's able to take the reins and build new 25-man groups.

10/20/25/40 man, those are all do-able in terms of content.

The only raids that truly hurt are the little bottleneck issues that prevent raiding from occuring, such as the often cursed Kael'Thas cockblock ....we've seen backflagging issues like that in EQ (Plane Flags, Citidal of Anguish keys), but with WoW compared to EQ, WoW is easier to quit and extremely easy to pick up an re-gear again ("Hi, I'll be back for expansion since all the gear I get now is meaningless" arguement), whereas some EQ end-game gear can last for at least 2 or more expansions. That's one source of players quitting frustration.

The biggest issue I've witnessed so far is having enough of the correct people to raid, and if you run with a tight crew, it's very hard to find replacements, or replacements that don't mind rotating in and out. As mentioned with Kael'thas, that seems to be the worst fight to go through in BC - and with every new person you bring aboard, the raid must relearn the fight to an extent since every guild does it differently. Raid makeup fluxuate between 6-9 healers, 2-4 prot-type tanks/feral-druids, range dps... etc. The amount and type of people online determines what all you can do. I've seen morale drop because we had to do TK/SSC instead of doing BT/MH due to lack of key classes.

With recruiting, like Galzahor said, there is a serious lack of skilled players on most servers - my old server of Zul'jin has a "Full" population at prime time, yet the Horde has only a handful of talent left after my old guild disbanded. Even at our prime, we had a tough time recruiting.

There's also a shortage of good leaders who can hold things together/take initiative. The leadership also requires much more knowledge of what to expect and also execute raids in a more efficient way, espicially with 25 man raids, be the Human Resources of their guild to an extent, and plan for the future. It does seem like it's too much trouble to get raids going, with the cost of how much stress and prep it takes to run a good raid. IMO - it's best to take former leadership as part of your crew - they know more of what's at stake.

I imagine that this is the dichotomy between two very different pools of players, moreso than a fundamental difference of opinion on the necessary investments to be a successful raid leader.

Trying to get a strong 25-man guild together on some of the newer servers (or any low population server, really) has been an absolute nightmare. For every quality player I get, there's 5 that simply "don't want to". There are thousands of max-level players on the server, yet we can only get 4 decent 25-man raiding guilds together?

Part of the problem, as I see it, is also the "months behind" effect - no one wants to start a new 25-man raiding guild now, only to become an attunement/feeder guild to a more progressed counterpart on their server. Between competing guilds with similar progression, this is less of an issue - people pick a banner and stand squarely behind it. On a server where there's a handful of Hyjal/BT guilds, though, what incentive is there to start a guild that's going to struggle their way through Gruul, Magtheridon, and the easier SSC/TK bosses, only to have their best-geared raiders jump ship?

I don't know who or what the exact culprit is, but I think we can all certainly agree on some of the contributing factors:
- Server transfers
- Lower raid cap
- Raid 'difficulty' (use of more complex mechanics, requiring more situational awareness from most/all raid members)

You are right, i was solely referring to the dps side of the fights.
I totally agree that on a fight like archimonde a mage has a really important/valuable task.

Could be that blizz thought it was equal, but after the removal never came back on the caster part (which is less harsh on casters imo, just mother is the worst piece of anti-caster fight until the next patch i guess).

You seem to be an officer in your guild.
Let me guess, you are a raid-leader for the 25-man raids in your guild too ?

I think you are overestimating the difficulty of this game. And maybe underestimating the capabilities of the average player. Yes, there are many motards in the game, just like in the real world. But I'm pretty sure the average WoW player is of average intelligence. And that is enough to play this game, and even to lead raids.

Group synergy isn't that overly complex. Everybody can learn it in a few hours. Juggling raid ideas isn't rocket science. Recruitment can indeed be tricky, but it seems recruitment is more about the ability to be harsh towards friendly but undergeared people than anything else.


A huge problem indeed is the way guilds in WoW "feed" of each other. In the real world, organizations have much stricter coherency. Companies, clubs, organization exist for decades, centuries even. People get paid real money for their efforts. There are contracts. In case of disputes, you can go to court. All these are measures to make sure people take their responsibilities and stick to the plan. In WoW, there is nothing, except a vague promise that one day you might get an epic item.

You can raid for months straight, but if the officers decide to disbandon and reform the guild, you lost all your dkp. If an officer doesn't like you, and kicks you, there is no way to get justice. Heck, being an officer is already a position which depends mostly on luck (who was here first), and sucking up. Have you ever heard of a guild that does "elections" for their officers ? Or their GM ? Or their raidleaders ? You can easily do elections with forum voting, or even in-game voting via mods. I've seen only one guild do this. (One where I was a founder). I keep repeating myself, but the biggest problem with WoW is that the game forces you to be in a larger organization, while at the same time only has tools for hierarchical leadership. This creates a situation where the average peon in the average guild probably doesn't like half his officers. And therefor probably has much less desire to be faithfull to his guild.

This is one of the benefits of 10-man raids. Management can (and often will) be less hierarchical. Everyone can have input, both in strategy, as in execution, as in the overall athmosphere of the group. Therefor people will be more inclined to stick with such a group. If you don't like an existing group, it is easier to form your own.

So what can be done ?
Create more hard content for smaller groups. Karazhan is awesome for the average serious player. We're all looking forward to Zul'Aman. It is a shame that heroics get slowly nerfed over time. I think the solution would have been to improve the loot of heroics, not nerf their difficulty. Just adding more diversity of loot in different heroic would make people run other instances than just Mechanar and Slave Pens.

Add more tools for democracy in a guild. Introduce a tool to let all guild-members vote on new officers. And on other issues. Without the need to get everyone in a raid and run CTRA. Something like that.

Allow free cross-server transfers.
Lower the cooldown on cross-server transfers. Something like a month or a even a week.
Allow people to transfer back to their previous server whenever they want.

I think a server transfer is a very cheap thing for Blizzard. Asking money for it is just an easy way of fraude, imho. There is no need. Transfers should be a service, just like the armory is a free service. I believe that in some SOE games, you'll have to pay extra for certain services like the armory. Bah.
If server transfers were free, and it would be easier to transfer back, then more people would be inclined to transfer with their whole guild to another server. Right now, if you want to migrate, you will lose all your friends, and all your guildies. If you try to organize a transfer with more people, there's always people who don't want to pay. Or who are very careful about the next server, and don't dare to make the jump. Some people have 9 lvl70s, and don't want to pay 9x the cost. If transfers were free, and you could easily migrate back, we could see a whole different style of group forming.

Or perhaps the answer is simply: it doesn't pay to be a raid leader. Why go thru the trouble of building a raid group (recruiting), organize schedules, research encounters, and provide raid-time instructions if someone else is willing to do it for you? If established raid groups are full, well, can always wait till they have an opening, it easier than trying to build up your own group from scratch.

The irony is, I'm a raid leader! I'm well aware that the role requires the most time-investment as well as coordinating/instructing during a raid. It can be very rewarding when people show up ready to put a boss down, but can also be frustrating on evenings where people have checked their brains at the door.

The "average" WoW player, IMO, tends to go into fights knowing only his/her role in it. They don't take a strong interest in what the other 8 classes are doing, and even if a strat spells it out for each, it is often overlooked. People show up, they think "OK, I need to do X" and have an incomplete picture of how the fight should flow.

Raid leaders can't lead like that. They need to know each piece of the fight, and how each member of the raid fits within it. And so there are two types of players here. Those that show up to raid, fulfill their role and then there are those that show up knowing the entire "scope" of the fight. Sure way to tell is to re-run old content on alts, those who knew what was going on, won't really have any questions on the fights, those who were coasting along but didn't pay much attention to other roles (common among DPSers), will need to re-learn it.

This is far too accurate for a lot of guilds. For example, yesterday we were doing reliquary of souls going for our second kill, and you'd be amazed by the number of questions that I got from people that were there for the entire learning process of our first kill.

"So what does deaden do? How come it makes people take more damage?"
"What exactly are you guys interrupting again?"
"How does his aggro work in phase 1, I can't figure it out."

This stuff, to me, seems like it would be absolutely key for everyone in the raid to know, and yet somehow we get the kills with seemingly half the raid not knowing what's going on outside their little box.

Yes that is the case for me. I was basically "forced" to raid in 40 mans or quit the game (I'd leveled enough alts and been pwned in enough pvp!).

Now to see Vashj/Kael/Hyjal/BT would be a huge sacrifice to what I enjoy in the game and I'm happy enough with my current gear with crafting, kara gear, pvp gear, and arena gear...and ZA just around the corner.

The simple fact is many (most?) people don't enjoy being in raiding guilds because of the "corporate" atmosphere. They prefer raiding with nine online friends in an atmosphere that suits their own style. Its difficult to maintain that atmosphere when you jump to 24 hardcore "friends." In my case it would definitely be a large sacrifice for the sake of some slightly better purples to move to a top raid progression guild.

I'm sorry if this comes across as combatative, but I really whole-heartidly disagree with just about everything you've said, and I think there are some core problems with some of your assertions.

BT seems to be the most "accessible" end-game raid that blizzard has ever introduced. The instance was cleared before its first reset, a significant number of guilds around the world have kills on him, and a larger number are progressing steadily through the instance. Thats not bad for 2 month old content.

This is completely un-substantiated. You have made this up- conjured it from thin air. there is absolutely nothing preventing me from (eventually) downing illidan. Our guild has 1-3-6 month goals, and fully expects to down illidan well before the next expansion is released. and we don't invest anywhere near 20 hours per week.


KZ was, acutally, inaccessible to me; i was in a BWL raiding guild at the time, and there was no way that 40 raiders in my guild would have been able to get anywhere near kz because there were some very, very large gaps to cross. The gear gaps between tiers was substantial, and could only ever be made up with flasks. there were resistance based fights that even further required flasks, and special resist outfits, and there were numerous encounters between BWL and KZ that absolutely required 40 people performing perfectly for 5-10 minutes. honestly, I think that naxx, as wonderfuly designed as it was, is actually the epitomy of how bad classic wow raiding was. its truly a shame that the best content ever created for wow was experienced by so few.

Black Temple, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. there is a very clear, well defined progression path to follow that will eventually end with your guild taking a screenshot of themselves /flexing over illidan. Further, that progression plan even allows flexibility in exactly how you implement it, based on the strengths and weaknesses of your teams. dungeon 3 gear works well in kara. kara gear works well in gruuls and mags. tier 4 gear works well in SSC/Eye, etc. There are resist based fights, but there are also reasonable ways to get resist gear. the only major "block" to progression is (what seems to be...) a downright skill check at kael. if your skilled enough to beat kael, then your skilled enough to down illidan, given enough time (caveat: this is only based on what i've read).

please stop beating this dead horse? you simply can't make an "easy" version of four hourseman. even if you could, you wouldn't be experiencing anything close to what 4hm actually was when it was first downed. similarly, you cannot somehow turn murmer into 5 man twin emps by adding "hell" mode.


this may have had some relevance a year ago, but the consumable game has changed pretty significantly since then. Changes to how elixirs and flasks stack with abilities, newly introduce recipes, masteries, and cauldrons have all reduced the costs of alchemy, and changes to encounters themselves have reduced the degree that they're required anyway. Further, most instances actually offer relatively "Free" mechanisms for members to farm their own pots, even if they're not alchemists (i.e., unstable flasks in blades edge).

And finally? I can't comprehend what any of this has to do with raid sizes and the future of wow raiding. It kinda just reads like a casual vs. raider whinge post.

Although I'm very much looking at this "from the underneath", it seems that you're right. The problem is in the total number of raiding guilds. We may indeed be at the point where a large proportion of the guilds that raid 25-man will indeed end up /flexing over Illidan (assuming they nerf Kael at some point, as seems inevitable).

But it looks as though that may well still be fewer people than ever killed Nefarian. Across the board, on all servers I've looked at (and I have been taking a very active interest in this), we seem to have gone from 20+ BWL-capable guilds to a smaller number of SSC-capable guilds. That's a double whammy - fewer guilds, and each one of them raiding 25-man content rather than 40-man content. And that's even if we restrict ourselves to BWL-capable raid groups and ignore the much larger numbers that raided ZG, AQ20 and MC.

So, we're left with a strange paradox. BT is indeed more accessible, but it's still accessible to fewer people, because there are nowhere near as many people tackling cap-size content as there used to be.

Why? My contention is that a significant factor is the pool of leaders - each server can support at most a couple of dozen cap-size guilds, because that accounts for all the people that have the time and ability to lead a raid group. With a 25-man cap, you get 20 25-man guilds. With a 40-man cap, you get 20 40-man guilds. With an 80-man cap, you'd have 20 80-man guilds. The consequences for the total number of raiders are obvious. Please note, I'm talking about leading the guild here, not just leading the raid on any particular night. I mean managing the loot system, the guild drama, the recruitment, the timetabling, the tactics, the theorycrafting, the teaching of new members.. all the million and one things that make a raid group a success or a failure, and which by and large fall on the shoulders of a few.

Gryzemuis throws another factor into the mix - there may be fewer cap-size raiders these days simply because people on the whole prefer 10-man content. If that's the case, then why in blue blazes do all the Kara groups advertise themselves as "Looking to recruit more and move into 25-man content" - because they do. I just don't believe that they're all really happy staying in 10-man instances, and that many of them wouldn't rather raid 25-man if they could only find the organisational expertise to do so.

(Aside to Gryzemuis: Yes, it is possible to run a 25-man or even a 40-man raid group on more or less democratic lines, without strict hierarchy/officers/militaristic style - I was a founding member in such a group and helped administer it for two years)

What we have is a social impasse: many people wanting to raid 25-man content, but a dearth of the necessary skills to coordinate that activity. I wish I had a solution.