We may as well start a threat on this since it did seem like an interesting topic area. The basic dichotomy is something like this:

1) In vanilla WoW, Blizzard released raiding content in a very staggered fashion. You had MC, guilds of various levels had time to finish it, then you released BWL, and so forth. For the top guilds, at the end of every instance you had a few months with no new content. You would basically farm it all, and take the rest off. If the upcoming instance was on the PTR, this gave those guilds time to dedicate some real raids there. Guilds farther behind in progression caught up simply because the top guilds had no where to go.

2) In TBC, Blizzard released almost everything simultaneously. Had a lot of the content been functional, top guilds would have likely been waiting for it, but as it was they weren't. Since the patch, however, the gap between tiers in raiding guilds has become incredibly obvious. On one hand you have Nihilum et al literally dozens of bosses ahead of quality raiding guilds, and multiple tiers ahead of many average guilds. There

I think it would be an interesting discussion here to talk about the merits of each approach, and speculate as to what Blizzard should do in the future. What is best for the raiders? What is best for their playerbase? What is best for Blizzard? I'll post some comments of my own shortly but I thought it would be useful to get a discussion going.

Back when MC came out and DM was not a thought, had BWL existed, it would not have been possible without gearing up in MC. Hell, you could achieve some limited success going into Naxx with just MC gear. But you wouldn't get far.

Today, you can gear up in heroics and KZ and be fine through BT. The lack of the gear gap means that there is no longer a need to farm up as much. Attunements aside, I don't see a whole lot keeping the heroic/KZ group from succeeding in what are primarily execution fights.

IMO, Blizzard should do periodic instance releases, and only when the previous instance is sufficiently farmed by the top guilds.

It's pretty ridiculous that Nihilum is working on Illidan when there are only 25 guilds or so worldwide that have downed Kael'thas. I suppose that speaks more to the tuning of the encounters in Hyjal and BT versus Kael'thas than the simultaneous release of multiple instances, but still it's kind of absurd. According to bosskillers, there are a full dozen bosses worth of separation between the #1 guild and the #23 guild. Something's gone wrong with the tuning.

Releasing everything at once gave an interesting spin on approaching raid content once again. It gives raiders a sort of "long-term" view on what to aspire towards, especially now that everything seems to be in a pretty reasonable and attainable progression ladder for most guilds. I hope Blizzard doesn't start machine gun releasing raid instances to keep guilds like Nihilum happy, because if the progression looks too unreasonable to the more average guild, then goals become too far, and most people will lose their motivation.

I think that in their 2.1 forms, Kara through SSC/TK seem to be about right. You aren't going to have the DPS to do Vashj or Kael if you aren't geared in epics from the t4 content and some t5 stuff. You need to gear up in Karazhan and Mag/Gruul to an extent -- no one is beating Kael in heroic gear and blues.

The problem may be not so much with the lack of tiered release, but rather simply with how BT and Hyjal were tuned. Or rather, not tuned.

Forgive the theorycraft here -- we should be in BT next timer, but in the meantime all I can do is speculate, and I encourage those with firsthand experience to correct me if I'm wrong -- but it seems like they simply undertuned the numbers involved in basically all the tier 6 content. I'd suspected this might be the case, but wanted to see how things played out on the live servers first.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the case that t5-geared raid groups on the PTR were killing most of the Hyjal bosses (easily), and the first half of BT (in the case of the organized raid guild efforts, anyway), as tuning was ongoing? And then, a week before 2.1 went live, Blizzard increased the power of everyone's gear by roughly 10-15%. This change was designed to make SSC/TK encounters that had previously required heavy potting more accessible, and doable for guilds under the restrictions of the new consumables changes. It was meant to equalize "old epics" + "2.0 consumables" with "new epics" + "2.1 consumables."

...except that BT and Hyjal had been tested and tuned for a month around "old epics" + "2.1 consumables." And they didn't go back and buff them after changing all the items. If you think about it, the gear that guilds used back in April to down Naj'entus, Supremus, Winterchill, and so forth, is strictly inferior to the gear that guilds are entering the zone with, on their first day. In the initial PTR build, we got premade kits of loot ranging from ilvl 110 to ilvl 125 (along with random stuff like Rejuv Gem). Today, any guild that's going into BT has ilvl 120 loot in most of their slots, going up to ilvl 138 stuff from Vashj/Kael. But they didn't retune any of the tier 6 fights after they buffed the hell out of the gear. Why not? What did they expect would happen when you took bosses that were dying, quickly, to any organized and serious raid group, and then gave players much better gear across the board?

The simple fact that guilds can go into Hyjal and BT with raids of 23, 22, 21 people, and kill multiple bosses, is a testament to the fact that Blizzard just plain got the numbers wrong, in a bad way. Guilds are going in with one Kael kill under their belts, most members of their raids with maybe two pieces of t5 gear on average (maybe a tank or two with 5/5 or something), and they're functioning as though they effectively outgear the encounters already. Likely because they do. As an analogy, was it possible to go into Naxxramas with only a couple of Nef and C'Thun kills under your belt, in mixed tier 1/tier 2/AQ gear, and kill some bosses? Sure. Could you kill Patchwerk? Yeah, with consumables and skilled play, and some luck, with extreme difficulty. Could you do it with 35 people? No way in hell.

Am I wrong? I'd be curious to hear from guilds that have been doing this stuff intensively for the past week. What I'm seeing, from an outsider's perspective, is fights that have some creative mechanics, but too much margin for error based on the numbers involved.

Query: If you can clear to Illidan in tier 4 gear, what the hell is the purpose of tier 6 gear? Faster farming clears?

I really don't think either of these are accurate. In the post-2.1 consumable world, progressing in Naxxramas would not be possible with a little bit of MC gear; not even with entirely MC gear. The gear gap in Vanilla WoW is extremely large between teirs of gear. Maybe buffed to the gills in the old-style way, but it's really not possible.

Similarly, in the post-2.1 consumable game, I don't think it's possible to simply run a few heroics, clear Karazhan once or twice, and think you're gonna be able to hit the ground running in the Black Temple. There is more gearing up that needs to be done. A tank with only 10 or 11k HP is gonna have a hard time taking Frostshock/Windfury combos from Tidalvess. There are plenty of other examples that mirror this.

And in any case, the gear gap is back in a way. Look at your tiered weapons. 80 to 90 to 100 DPS weapons. Healing weapons with 200 to 300 to 400 healing. You can't tell me that's not gear gap. These are not the only equipment slots where this is evident either.

As far as content and release timing goes, I think looking at Nihilum is the worst way to determine your schedule. My Guild has a few bosses down in SSC, and working on TK; I'd like to think that's average or a little below-average. It seems like with gear buffs and content nerfs, progression rate as a whole, across the WoW raiding scene is moving up. People are getting into the T5 instances at a good pace, and they've got content accessable to them in short order as they complete those instances. I think my guild is a month or two off of seeing T6 instances; probably a longer amount of time before we've really them cleared. I imagine there will be another chunk of content for us to bite into around that time, and that's perfect. Let Nihilum farm for a few months, it's the price you pay for being first. Another expansion? I hope it's not that soon.

I used to think that the TBC approach was ultimately better, and perhaps it is in its own light. However, I honestly am starting to miss farm periods where we raid 2 days a week, decimate old content, gear up, and anxiously await the next zone release. I am quite honestly happy that my guild isn't blazing through black temple right now, I'm sure we will be in the next few weeks, but if we were there right now what exactly would we have left to look forward to short of the next expansion?

Anyway, I hope to see a mix of both approaches. I think if Blizzard had a new raid instance going into the game in say 6 months that was harder than BT that would be a reasonable time to farm out all the old stuff and wait for it, however as far as I know BT is the highest up raiding TBC will see.

Perhaps BT should have waited till patch 2.2, it certainly would have made more sense to fix all the existing stuff first before releasing new content, but hindsight is 20/20. All in all I can't complain about anything right now because its simply a good time to be a raider. My guild and I are having FUN raiding and as long as they keep it that way I could care less what their release cycle for raid dungeons is like.

I like the new way personally. It really sets apart guilds having all the content laid out at front, whereas in WoW vanilla you had a race that began anew with each instance release 6 months apart. Now it is quite interesting to see how far some guilds can get compared to guilds that were fairly competitive with each other prior.

poster seems to have died midsentence and his last action was for his nose to hit the left mouse button as it was hovering over "Submit Reply"

I also think the pace is entirely too frantic. It was nice in the old days to be able to keep up even while holding down a full-time job.

Unfortunately I'm inclined to agree. I was in my junior/senior year of college during WoW 1.X and I was always wishing that we had more content. Now that I'm working 40-50 hours a week I wish we had our breaks between content if only to recuperate a little bit!

Gurg, I suspect you are right about the tuning around unbuffed gear. It really does appear like guilds are outgearing fights their FIRST time on them which seems a little absurd. You mention Naxxramas and under-manning content. My guild killed c'thun the first night they fixed him and had top 10 on nearly every AQ kill due to our early opening so we started Naxx with as good of gear really as possible for the time. Sure since the first few encounters were tuned around twin-emp difficulty we effectively outgeared many of the first fights and our first kills on several (6-7) bosses were with less than 40 people, gothik included. Anyway I'm not trying to disagree so let me get to the point. Right now guilds should not be outgearing BT/Hyjal because its supposed to be a direct step UP in difficulty, just look at the item levels. The fights are supposed to be harder but they are seemingly not.

In reply to Praetorian:

You're right, the fights are really creative, some being completely different to anything seen before, they are fun, and people will enjoy BT, but it's also really easy so far. BT has only one hard fight which is Essence of Souls and one gear check Mother Shahraz, now if you don't have the resources of the top guilds you can definately get stuck on these bosses for a while just like guilds got stuck on Twin Emps and Vael.

Only Anatheron was buffed from ptr I believe but that's only because one of his skills weren't working as intended, im with you though, I don't think they took into account the buffs to tier 4 and 5 equipment near the end of ptr and didnt buff the bosses accordingly, Shade of Akama phase 2 seems to want to be a dps race but it's just too easy and you can outdps the shade with only 20 people.

Personally I like the way they release content now, it gives guilds alot more options and means when you dont have enough of a certain class you can go try the other instance on the same tier without having to cancel the raid.