Surely Blizzard has a few more raid design tricks up their sleeves that would make Nihilum et al scratch their heads for a bit.

I have. We killed Najentus, Supremus, and Akama, and have put in a little bit of time on Gurtogg. Najentus is good, Supremus is terrible (both in design and in difficulty), and Akama is a very enjoyable fight that is just a bit too easy. What I have seen so far is a lot less daunting than earlier versions of tier 4 and 5 content, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The instance is a lot of fun. However, you have to understand why players - players at all levels, because there are a good number of people in my guild of this mind - might be disconcerted that guilds are beating Kael and immediately dropping four different bosses with little to no prior knowledge of their mechanics (Rage, Najentus, Supremus, Shade of Akama).

I think the scrolls were a great step in the right direction, though perhaps just the first step. If you're looking to reward time spent raiding in regards to entry into the next "tier" so to speak, have a couple bosses drop one of X number tokens needed to buy entry. After clearing say five of six bosses in the instance for weeks but never quite downing the sixth, they can move on if needed and not be locked into just one raid instance.

Could get messy with the forked, intricate attunement process right now though. ^_^

EDIT:
Editted for clarity!

Whatever balancing gets me warglaive of azzinoth quickest is best imo~

Yeah ok raid content dies and it's nice and all but come on, 3 hours between first pull and kill of Illidari council by curse ? Less than 18 real life hours between first pull and illidan's death by Nihilum ? It's a bit sad, imho.

Arguably Gruul's Lair fulfills this condition, no..? By the time you're done with that, you're pretty much ready for SSC. I guess one could argue that Gruul's Lair is a bit hard for a "casual" instance, but I don't think TBC will ever have an MC... nor should it.

And yea, seeing Illidan down already, makes me think either that he's bugged or there will be a general buffing patch soon. Tigole raises many relevant points, but after all that's been said I still don't see the Illidari Council going down in 3 hours and Illidan down in 2 days as the intended pace.

First off, thanks for the insightful post. It's appreciated.

True, though another explanation is that a lot of people didn't fully appreciate aspects of it until they had the alternative in front of them. It's a question of human psychology on some level. Why don't you guys let players reset their own instance timers at will? I.e., keep one-week timers to allow for saved progress, but if a guild wants to reclear sooner, let them /resetraidinfo or something to clear it. Well, it's a pacing mechanism for sure, but I suspect that it's partly because if you could do this, people who play the endgame PvE content somewhat competitively (whether it's for world firsts like Nihilum, Curse, DnT, or for server firsts in smaller communities, or whatever) would feel a certain degree of obligation to do so or else they'd "fall behind" and it's not clear that it would improve players' game experience overall. The multitude of raiding options has a similar downside. I think I actually personally prefer it, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it was pretty daunting trying to figure out how to fit Mag, Gruul, SSC, and TK farming into a schedule with Hyjal and BT learning, without burning myself or my guildmates out in the process, while simultaneously trying to compare ourselves to guilds that are pouring dozens more hours into the content than we are. There's something to be said for periods of relaxation -- if tier 6 content didn't exist right now, we'd clear SSC/TK in 2-3 days and then respec for PvP or do non-WoW stuff for the rest of the week. Now, there is always something we COULD be raiding, which creates a sense of pressure to do so.

I'm having fun, but it's an interesting dynamic.

I agree with this -- I've always said 4H would be a perfectly tuned fight in the post-2.0 world where druids and paladins can be real raid tanks, but pre-2.0, it really did require unacceptable raid-stacking. 4H is cited, however, as an example of the devs' ability to "stump" even the best players without making a fight overtuned like C'Thun v1.0. The version of 4H that players declared impossible in early August 2006 is the same fight that many guilds farmed weekly in Fall 2006. That was impressive.

As to the last question: A few, at least. I think most of the rest are relying on the fact that we've seen guilds 22-man some of the highest tier content in the game over the past week or two, while likely undergeared for it. When you look at Naxx, as you did, consider that the bosses that died quickly in the first few weeks of Naxx dropped ilvl 81-85 loot (mostly 81-83). That's comparable to Nef loot, to Twin Emps'/Ouro loot, and inferior to C'Thun loot. And the guilds that jumped into Naxx with guns blazing had been farming that stuff for months. Our whole raid was decked out in 8pc tier 2, 3pc or 5pc AQ sets where they were better, weapons from AQ, and so forth. We had ilvl 81+ loot and used to kill ilvl81 bosses.

Here, BT bosses drop ilvl 141 stuff from the get-go. Kael/Vashj loot is ilvl 138. The average gear level of most BT/Hyjal raiders is probably around ilvl 125-130 these days (at least t4 everywhere, with some good t5 pieces mixed in). Well-tuned bosses should certainly die to the best guilds given a modicum of effort. No question there. But to groups of 22 and 23 who are only partly geared from the prior tier? I think that's the main concern here. Was it intentional to tune BT/Hyjal over the course of April to the old gear levels (i.e. tier 5 being ilvl 120, tier 4 being ilvl 105), and then buff the gear by 10-15% without revisiting the boss tuning?

To start with, I have killed a boss in Black Temple - 5 of them, and currently working on Essence of Souls.

Earlier, Gurgthok said something along the lines of nobody wants an instance full of Grobbulus. Pretty much, that's what I feel Black Temple is. You can talk about most of Naxx dying quickly, and it did, but in the end, SEVERAL fights took multiple days to learn/beat. Heigan, Patchwerk, Thaddius (though perhaps that was lag),Gothik, 4h, Loatheb. In Black Temple, 1 boss takes more than a day?

I'm sorry, but my guild spent 1 day on the PTR total. We spent 1 day and engaged Najentus, Supremus, and Gorefiend. We killed none of them, we had pugs, and well, those bosses have gone through significant changes.
Let me tell you about our experience in Hyjal/BT so far.

We zoned into Hyjal. We wiped for 2 hrs on trash. A few people would DC, or at the start of a wave, 12 mobs would focus fire 1 tank and kill him, etc. For 2 hrs we'd get to wave 10ish or something, and wipe. We also had 0 choice in raid makeup, as we have exactly 25 people attuned atm, so we're running a crazy healer heavy raid for what Hyjal is. I, as a holy priest, put on blue DPS gear and spammed smite to help us keep up. Finally, after 2 hrs, we managed to get to Rage Winterchill. We still had people dead from the trash, we crezzed a few as we engaged Rage Winterchill, and engaged him with some 22-23 people. All we knew about the fight was "hey, this is 25-man Kel'Thuzad". So we start fighting, expecting a 25man KT. After something like 1 minute, we're down to 15 people. This isn't KT. He has a Frost Blast alright, but it has a front end of 5k dmg, then does the damage Frost Blast did...cool, it was unexpected, we were too spread out, not enough healers could access a person quick enough. (Oh, and Death and Decay is pretty weak) So we got a little tighter, healers realized it took more than 1 person to save someone from death, unlike KT. A few minutes later, Rage Winterchill dies. I'm sorry, but tell me how this is tuned properly? I admit, I don't want a crazy hard boss at the end of a 40minute trash zerg that has to be repeated every time, but that's a design issue. Why is the boss -that- easy? We really had no clue what was going to happen, we got owned at the start by not knowing, and we -still- killed him.

But anyway, after that, we went to BT. We went to Najentus...while we did him on test (with pre-buffed gear), and it felt like a decnetly tuned, though simple encounter, it felt like a joke in Black Temple. It took us a few attempts to kill him, with again a sub-optimal raid makeup.
So we continue on to Supremus. We get a repeat of Rage Winterchill, half our raid dies to "I didn't realize the radius of those volcanos was so large, my bad". So we kill him anyway...with some 2 warlocks and 1 hunter alive as our only DPS for half the fight. He doesn't enrage at 8min like he did when we first fought him, he doesn't enrage at 10 min either...15min enrage timer? Are you kidding me? How can a guild not kill this guy in a few attempts? I mean seriously, Get 2 tanks, like 4 healers, and some monkeys to hit 1-2-3-4 on some dps classes, and supremus will die.

So the next day we come back, and engage Shade of Akama. It takes us a few attempts to figure out what to do, then we get our plan down. DPS zerg. So we DPS zerg Kazzak 1.0, err wait, we're in Black Temple. We DPS zerg the garbage we have to kill, we kill Shade...and we get loot, we were engaged something like <2min in combat. Again, on this encounter, I as a holy priest, put on dps gear and started smiting, so did another healer or 2. Such great design.
We continue to Teron Gorefiend. A few of us fought him on the PTR...as if it matters, everyone knows how the fight goes, the only learning curve is a little bit of small micro things, and everyone understanding exactly what abilities to use when they get control of a shade. He dies same night.
We didn't really raid the next day, and then yesterday, we dropped Bloodboil. To be fair, we tried Bloodboil 1 other day, for a decent amount of time. As a disclaimer, the only reason it took 2 days on him, is we expected some gimmick to kiling him. Any guild that goes into Bloodboil with the understanding that it's just a healer check, should probably kill him in 1 night.
We then engaged Essence of Souls...got p1 down after a few tries, saw p2. The fight seems decent, it doesn't seem quite what it's made up to be, however.

So anyway, there's my narrative. We didn't spend time on PTR, like I said, we don't generally raid long hours like Nihilum, and we've been behind since BC release. We started raiding a week or 2 after other guilds, and have offnights every week. Black Temple, to me, has been a huge disappointment. I play games like this one because I like to be challenged. It's nice to compete for first kills on things, but in the end, I care more about having fun playing the game than anything else. Honestly, at this point, I don't care about the SSC/TK nerfs. I think Alar was entirely ruined, it went from one of the most fun fights in WoW to a huge tedious joke. But at least I got to experience the fun encounter first. If nothing else, make Black Temple hard and challenging, and nerf it in a month when these casual guilds get there. I don't want them to be denied their content, but I want to have challenging content myself, not the pushover that is Black Temple. On Saturday, I was excited to raid, to perhaps catch up to Nihilum when they reached some hard encounters at the end of Black Temple...then suddenly the last 3 bosses drop within a day of each other, council within 3 hrs. That's pathetic. It's not well tuned. I agree a well tuned boss will be dropped in a decent time-frame. 3 hours, however, is not a decent time frame.

Yes, how fast Nihilum is making progress leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. But in the end, how fast my guild is making progress, having never seen the content before, is even worse.

Beyond immediate entertainment, we (and by we, I mean dedicated raiders everywhere) also put in a lot of time for that lingering sense of accomplishment. It's nice to say that we got there first. We perservered. You know what I mean? Cracking loot pinatas is fun for the whole family, but if the raid game didn't present meaningful challenges, I wouldn't play. I'm not implying that BT is at this level of difficulty, but if you are ever tempted to release an instance that is . . . please remember that a portion of your playerbase is in it for the challenge. In the long run, that's where I get my fun.

Consider that a more average guild will (a) learn slower and (b) raids ~12-15 hours a week.

Factor in the time taken to clear to a progression boss, and you're looking at maybe killing the Council in the first week you meet them - and Illidan will take a good few weeks to learn.

I'm not talking about Nihilum here, I'm talking about the groups who took 3 weeks to learn Vael and another 3 to learn Firemaw.

Very helpful if you saw Kel'Thuzad, no doubt :-) I do of course take the point that the bleeding edge have different expectations of new content.

Personally, the most frustrating thing with BT being cleared already is that a guild is clearing an instance that vast majority of guilds _can't even get into yet_. Less than 30 guilds in the world can even zone in, and it's already been cleared.

Even if progression in Naxx was about at the same pace up to 4H, all guilds could at least zone in and try them out, maybe take out a boss or two and start collecting some tier 3.

It really feels like this is going to turn Kael'thas into a point of intense frustration for most guilds. He's going to be the gatekeeper to the riches of BT for the majority of the raiding playerbase, and it seems that most guilds are spending far more time on him than any of the BT bosses. It feels like he's taking most "top end" guilds 2-4 nights to really work out all the details and down him, and it'll probably take the next tier of guilds about the same once the strategies become more widely known.

If the BT bosses were going down every 2-4 nights, I think most people would be fine with that. But 13 new bosses in 10 days? That's just craziness.