Maybe the differences between horde and alliance were THAT glaring... but no, we never struggled with DPS on any encounter in Nax. Thaddius was a matter of "you guys dont blow us up, and he falls over". We did not world buff once. Not for Loatheb, Gothik, 4H, Sapph, KT.. never. Our problems were always in line with your 2nd example: "someone making a mistake on Anub'rekhan", and I've given other examples before.

Personally I differ from Praetorian; in my view BC is not anymore difficult than Naxx. In essence I believe Naxx took most guilds longer simply because:
a) 4H. Nobody had ever seen an encounter like it... One where EIGHT TANKS took the fight from near impossible to relatively simple; and
b) 40 man raids consisted of players who were relied upon to fill many guilds' raids that were, despite some dislike for the term, dead weight.

Any comparison of BC raiding to BWL bosses is, in my view, a poor one because of the reasons already stated. The game has come a long way since then.

Well a few things, one, on Vael, I think EJ might have had some nice advantage there, in the fact I believe you had a lot of good well geared tanks going into BWL. My horde guild had a few tanks, like 2 of us were pretty well geared, and I was the only one who could really hold solid aggro at the start, so when you've got 2 decent tanks, and have to keep up 3 tanks with sub par gear, not knowing who is going to get aggro was very bad.

Secondly, I think there are issues with comparing old content to new content, but part of that should also be ignoring what was new about the game, either that or we accept that the game can't progress any further. Yeah, horsemen was hard because we'd never seen anything like it, should we accept they can't repeat that kind of "wow, what the hell do we do?" feeling? That's what I'm really hoping to see them be able to do.

Ghando, I totally get the horde/salvation issue and I appreciate it. So let me acknowledge that made Vael hard to some extent. But I think the rest of the Vael discussion proves my point You could've made it hard or you could've breezed through.

I kinda feel like Patchwerk was Vael 2.0. It was a dps check with some stern healing requirements. And yeah it was thrilling to kill him.

But we did it on precisely our 2nd night of trying. Let's be clear about Patchwerk. You needed a ton of consumables. You needed to heal what? Three people? You needed to dps him ridiculously hard.

He died and dropped loot (may as well have dropped Grobbulus' loot too to save the next 10 minutes of key mashing, lol).

I mean there was a huge buildup to Patchwerk and yes healers had to reach a new pinnacle of actually getting the heals there and actually having mana. But the fight was tank and spank. And the notion of having a few tanks standing there getting whacked was already pretty well known from Vael, Broodlord, Ebonroc (if memory serves, and yeah it's hazy).

I mean the kill being thrilling doesn't speak to the encounter design. It speaks to it being at the right place at the right time. Gruul is essentially a much more sophisticated version of Patchwerk with way more damage and Maexxna's "can't heal the tanks" moment. We all didn't have much trouble with Gruul once shatter got nerfed. Why? Because it wasn't new and TBC mechanics (stacking hots) made it all simple.

If you are looking for truly unique encounter designs, I think TBC on balance is far more interesting than the largely tank-and-spank-plus-exotic-damage-mechanic days. I mean C'thun, Four Hourseman, Gothik, and a few others had their unique attributes... One of them is how few guilds ever did them. But Kael and Vashj are of similar sophistication are they not? Maybe you don't find them as thrilling, but in terms of design, the game is way more sophisticated. In fact, no matter how touchy the tanking was or wasn't, all the fights I called tank and spank were tank and spank, even if there were multiple tanks with the spankers.

Razorgore was so much more interesting than what followed and really was so much more intereting than anything in MC it's no wonder it became such a blocking point. Again, I'd argue that was on purpose and that it took till Nef to again make the instance actually interesting.

I agree completely that cube clicking is not as clever a mechanic as polarity and that fighting your way back through the tunnel or getting out of stomach are more interesting than your inner demons, but you know they all had novelty on their side.

Again, the game designers now want people to beat Illidan. For my guild to do that, your guild is not going to have an obscenely tough time. But I think a lot of guilds have enough WoW fatigue that isn't so terrible. It's impossible to make the game work optimally for Nihilum and even get us a chance (and I literally mean my guild) to kill Illidan this winter. Despite the rapid pacing of releases, we are way I think Blizzard wants us to be +/- a month or so. Incidentally, Stormrage (US) is likely to have its second Illidan kill next week and it's third sometime fairly soon after.

After that, it's going to be quite a while before the other 4-7 guilds with any chance at all get him down. We are a distinctly middling server these days, but 10 different Illidan kills is reachable I believe if the guilds don't melt down on Kael. Of the 10 Illidan kills, I'll bet on 4-5 Sunwell clears before the expansion either ships or slaughters raiding interest.

When we reached 4H in Naxx, we were one of the leading guilds to get there. Not the first, sure, but definitely before anyone had made any progress at all on it.

And we wiped. We went through numerous different strats. Firstly it was the 5 tanks with 4 MT's and 1 tank rotating through. We thought this was a good idea at the time, until we actually started doing the maths on the fight.

Eventually it reached the stage where there always seemed to be a vent channel where there were at least 3 or 4 people just theorycrafting the fight.

And then, after hours of simulations, theorycrafting, excel spreadsheets, flash animations, and good ol' fashion pencil and paper timelines, and the discovery of the safe spot, we finally had something that would work.

That something was an 8 tank rotation, 4 x 2 leading tank healer groups, 4 x 1 lagging tank healers, 4 rotating dps/soaker groups, a selection of custom written mods, and hours of wipes trying to get it all working together.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the 4 Horsemen was a truly epic fight, and an epic experience. When it came down to the crunch, it was actually very forgiving in terms of minor mistakes and bad luck, but it just required so much learning and practice, and was just so ... fun! And this goes for many of the original WoW bosses. Comparing TBC raiding to Naxx, I think I'll always feel that Naxx was more epic.

We wrote a custom mod for 4H as well in Notorious, and Easy Company did so as well. I wonder just how many guilds took that route.

It seems like if Blizzard had kept the Vial system to 3-4 per Vashj (and potentially Kael) kill, at least half the pacing issues might have been fixed. Raids would have had to farm these tier 5 bosses roughly for 2 months before properly asserting their focus to tier 6, and would have made Hyjal/Black Temple an effective July-ish release.

It would be awful for people who aren't a part of the leading edge to realize they have to farm for 2 months forcibly, but it would be easier to come to terms if it was more necessary to have in tier 6. It would, however, effectively give guilds their soft-term vacation.

Naturally the other shoe of this is how wasted it would feel to have to farm tier 5 when half of the tier 6 content is contendable in less than that, and well, to be forced into vacation is sometimes equally unbearable.

Regarding the original post, I have been worrying about this since before we killed mother shahraz for the first time. My guild has been farming Illidan for two months now and cleared BT/Hyjal at a blistering pace to begin with. The speed of our clear, i feel, was largely due to our synergy and just the fact that after a struggle with kael'thas we knew our guilds capabilities inside and out.

During this so-called "malaise" that your guild, mine, and many others are experiencing we have lost a few very talented raiders to boredom or a sense of completion in WoW. As such, and given the design of T6 (basically making it very difficult to recruit from other t6 guilds as T6 progression is very natural and smooth) we are now forced to go back and attune extra people who may or mat not disrupt our raids "harmony".

As a raid leader and someone who is actively involved in the direction of my own guilds recruitment, i have always felt like it was best to overrecruit and weed out the underqualified, less skilled, players on a regular basis. Constant Recruitment. I know alot of other guilds swear by this recruitment approach as well. The obvious question for a guild like mine that comes from this is: How do you maintain the synergy that brought your guild success through this lull?

I am not sure there is as answer to this. WHen you raid everything in 2 days and are already outgearing t6 level bosses its nearly impossible to even measure the strengths of your new players and how they work with your old raid. As a result of this, i think you will see at least a dozen new guilds in the top 50-60 guilds to kill the next end boss. I think some respectable guilds will fade away because of this downtime and i think newer ones that made some "lucky" recruitment decisions could have the energy to really clear the next dungeon fast. Mainly, i think alot of people will just stop caring about the content race. It even happened in BT/Hyjal to a lesser extent. Guilds that my players used to follow are killing illidan et al. several weeks, even months, after we did. Sure it resulted in a temporary boost in confidence and the general feeling that my guild could go up even higher in the world ranks for the next dungeon, but after experiencing this downtime im not so sure it is true anymore. Only time will tell if we can maintain what makes us good.

Is this the root of the problem though - the content race? Are guilds more focused on how quickly they kill bosses over how they go about achieving it?

You mentioned weeding out the weaker players, but were there players you liked more as people who you removed ? Would you now prefer to be playing with those people, but only just having completed all the content now, instead of 2 months ago ? I suspect this is the case for quite a few guilds - they have dropped people they like over better players and are now bored and don't really like the people they play with a lot.

Are you good if you kill a boss before another guild but you spent 5 nights raiding for 5 hours, or are you better if you raid for 3 nights, for 3-4 horrs and kill a boss a week or two later ?

Competition is a natural occurance, and in no way am I suggesting guilds are at fault for pushing hard but WoW hardly seems to be a game which provides suitable platform for guild competition. Maybe guilds will re-evaluate their raid schedule and settle into a more relaxed rate of progression and/or maybe Blizzard could try provide an alternate way for guilds to compete.

For starters i should say that weeding out the weaker players has more to do with recruiting as we completely restructured pre-TBC to make a guild that felt like home. Whether or not someone fits in with our raid environment is very important. We tend to goof off in raids alot and people who are uptight or easily offended usually don't last very long at all. Secondly, part of being a weaker player (because the game itself is very very simple by comparison to say, a difficult job in the real world or some other competitive environment) has alot to do with one's dedication.

The strongest guilds in the world don't necessarily have the best players. Look at yourself as a player and ask yourself if you think you've got what it takes to be in a guild like nihilum or DnT or any other o the world first type guilds. Skillwise and intellectually there are an infinite number of players in this game who could make the cut in a guild like that. They are succesful because they understand the game very well, and more importantly, because they all have similar interests and goals. When we weed out new recruits its usually the guys that half-ass encounters, the guys that don't focus, the guys that DONT do the things that all the people in our raids are doing. Once that happens, the players no longer fit in with the community. People resent looking at the guy standing next to them not potted up or even the lazy guy that never runs back.

Having said that, people raid in this game for different reasons. Half the people in my guild care about hearing what illidan yells before you pull him. Personally, and even from the position of raid leader, i raid because i'm very competitive. I want to be the first to do something for bragging rights or whatever because, to me, raiding is a competition. No matter what meaning raiding is to you or your guild, i think that in order to be both solid and synergetic your players have to put in similar amounts of effort or they won't get along with each other for long. Your more dedicated and competitive players that really want to dominate the content will move on to a guild that can provide that. They will get sick of the guy that they've been playing with for a year that can't provide that to him due to lack of effort. Similar minded players tend to gravitate towards each other and i think that makes a solid for a guild community. So to retort, no we really haven't kicked out people we liked as people, and if someone is not going to be raiding with us theyre always welcome to stay in guild as a friend and community member.

As for our raid schedule we've only really pushed hard when we are really close to getting a new boss down. We limit raids to 4 hours otherwise and right now we onyl raid 2.5 days at the most if we arent focused. Ask anyone in our guild we are about as lighthearted as you can get our new recruits seem to always comment on the fact that we don't really bitch at people on vent when they screw up. The latter is true BECAUSE of the fact that we have those similar goals and work ethic in raids. If someone screws up i know its not for lack of effort and i know that they are really raiding for the sake of making us move forward and it is absolutely refreshing to be able to say that. We have good players that get along and go all out every raid and we have one of the most active and lively vent communities i've ever experienced in any game.

I'm done patting my guild on the back but as you can see i respectfully disagree. I don't think there is a problem with the competition in content. While i do agree with Gurgthok that there is a negative effect on guilds during these lulls i do not think blizzard can fix it but pushing out more content or even pacing it. I think too many people would complain if they rushed out an unfinished product and buggy product. This game still has a ton of bugs even when they don't rush out content. I think naxx as an example was content that was worth the wait, but then again it wasn't much of a wait. If they put as much care into every dungeon as they did with naxxramas i don't think the raiding community would have much room to complain at all. THe player base is too demanding as it is.

I think, as Gurgthok was hinting, that if they overlapped the PvP and PvE content expansions a little better it would satisfy more people. What i mean by this is that they could have probably done a better job of making people really feel like season 2 arenas was at an important juncture when guilds were beginning to finish up PvE. This would give them a new territory to conquer that, lets face it, is very difficult to conquer while raiding 5 nights a week. As the PvP season winds down they could throw out the next dungeon. And then, the following season would begin after some time has gone by, a month or so.

Regarding competition, a staggered release has an advantage in that it creates many small races rather than one giant race.

I mean, once Nihilium got out in front at the end of T4 content, they led all the way to the end. If T6 had come out around in 2.2, there would have been many guilds at that level, and the race would have started again.

This would actually be a great idea, with a few tweaks:

Change the Hyjal attunement to require only the Vashj vial.
Make Vashj drop 5 BoP Vials which complete the quest, and one Scroll of the Maelstrom that attunes the target to Hyjal.
Bump Vashj's ilevel to 141 and give her a guaranteed weapon or trinket drop.
Tune the first Hyjal boss to be possible to complete with something around ~21 raiders decked in good T5-equivalent gear.

Change the BT attunement to require only killing Kael'thas.
Bump Kael'thas's ilevel to 141 and give him a guaranteed weapon or trinket drop.
Killing Kael'thas completes BT attunement for all 25 in raid and Kael'thas also drops one Scroll of the Sun that attunes the target to Black Temple.
Remove the door to Kael'thas so that if a guild's willing to clear the trash to him they can have their shot at him without having to clear the whole instance.

This essentially changes the progression path from:
5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK->6/6 SSC, 3/4 TK->[Huge block]->4/5 Hyjal, 4/9 BT
To something like:
5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK->6/6 SSC, 3/4 TK, 4/5 Hyjal->4/4 TK, 4/5 Hyjal, 4/9 BT

Guilds are forced to farm SSC for five weeks but that time can be spent learning TK bosses, and the reward from killing Vashj is much greater. Guilds which want to max push content will save scrolls so that they never have to come back, guilds which are more casual will kill Vashj more than five times anyways. It also solves many other problems, such as going back to reattune old members. It provides multiple progression paths so that a guild stuck on Kael'thas can try its hand at the easier early bosses in Hyjal. It allows Blizzard to avoid nerfing Kael'thas or Vashj, two bosses that should be extremely difficult, given their place in the lore. It keeps middle-ground and hardcore raiders happy with concessions to each. (ZA is going to be the zone of choice for the truly casual, and it looks like Blizzard wants it to be this way, so Vashj shouldn't need to be removed from the progression chain.)

I can't think of any problems with this besides possibly incentivizing the ninjaing of Vashj attuned members to 4/5 Hyjal guilds that haven't yet killed Kael'thas, but to be honest, guilds working on Kael'thas might need an incentive in order to recruit members.

Another possible problem would be that cutting-edge guilds might become BT attuned before being Hyjal attuned, thus not being paced at all. A possible solution would be to reduce the number of Vashj kills required to attune the raid, or to increase the number of Kael'thas kills required to attune the raid. The thing to consider, though, is that Nihilum killed Illidan before Archimonde anyway with the current attunement regime. For the vast majority of guilds, these changes would be more sensible.

Yeah, it's more a model for how things should go in the future -- obviously, we can't unattune everyone to Hyjal.

The raid game is getting easier. It was inevitable and, I think, intentional by design. I doubt it will take more than two weeks for most high end guilds to clear Sunwell especially given enough time to test it on the PTR.

I don't agree with the placement of your proposed Scroll drops. When Vashj and Kael dropped them it was for the instance they were in, not the one they themselves attuned you for. If the scroll is for the next instance why not just make Vashj drop 6 vials?

If the scrolls reemerge in the game then the attunment scroll for Hyjal should drop off of Archimonde, if you can kill Vashj once, its more than repeatable on a weakly basis. The BT scroll should come from either RoS or Mother Shahraz.

Also if it was intended for Azgalor to be killed before Kael'thas then Hyjal would of been released before Tempest Keep.

So you can save them and attune potential recruits, or use them immediately and get into the instance sooner, depending on what makes sense for your guild. A continued complaint from high-level raid guilds is having to return to TK and SSC to attune applicants. Put the scrolls in and you only have to come back for 50% of your recruits at max, since you can always bank the scroll.

If it was intended for Void Reaver to be killed before Hydross then TK wouldn't have shipped with an attunement. Oh, wait... Or, if you prefer, if it was intended for Solarian to be a fight with two arcane resist tanks slash-dancing then it wouldn't have shipped with the Wrath of the Astromancer debuff... Blizzard's intentions are sometimes misguided and sometimes they aren't able to accomplish their intentions.

Let's be honest here, most would agree that the fights in Hyjal before Archimonde, and the fights in BT before RoS, are easier strategically than Kael'thas. Some may have gearcheck components which is a valid pacing mechanism, but there's no reason that players should be locked out of Rage Winterchill's ilevel 141 epics when Vashj and Kael'thas are only dropping ilevel 138. The attunement process should reflect the difficulty of the encounters, and it doesn't currently do so. There's no good reason to lock people out of Hyjal until they kill Kael'thas and it'd be a much better way to "nerf" the encounter than reducing the health of the adds by 10%.

I am probably getting into the territory of "Attunements and Recruitment" thread here, though. My point was that a limited number of vial drops could have worked as a pacing mechanism if the attunement process was set up differently.

Pff, that solves little in the way of backflagging. Have Vashj drop a key that lets you activate the bridge controls without killing the other bosses. That way once you've killed her once, you can go back and do it again without having to clear the entire instance. The groups that still need the loot from other bosses will do it anyway.

Or go the whole hog - have the Hyjal attunement require two "Vials of Eternity". Zul'jin drops 1 vial per kill, Vashj drops 10, and Kael drops 50. So you could very slowly attune 30 people to Hyjal by grinding ZA over and over, or you could go through SSC for 6 weeks, or kill Kael'thas once or twice. And backflagging a new recruit takes a couple of zergs through ZA on your off-days.

(Sorry for bumping this... After quite a little bit of consideration between starting a new thread, posting in the currently active "what next after BT/Hyjal?" thread or bumping this, I decided this was the best course of action. Lock it up if it's better off being in a new thread, I guess... this thread is admittedly quite a mess of the same few points being beaten on way too much)

China killed Illidan last night, just a tad over fifty days of TBC being released there. Now, last thing I want want to do is start a shit-flinging competition regarding how they "had it easier" or "fights were nerfed" or "strats are out", etc, but I want to focus a little about what it says about the overall tuning and pacing. If we assume 2.1 is closer to the ultimate endgame model Blizzard had in mind for TBC as opposed to 2.0, this would mean that with all the proper preparation, etc, the game could have been cleared in 50 days. If TBC had been launched as 2.1, how fast would the forefront guilds have cleared everything? 70 days, or 10 resets?

I sit back and ask myself... all else being equal, could WoW 1.0 have been cleared in 70 days from start to Kel'Thuzad, assuming the old lv60 meta-game, assuming that the mechanics and shiat for all bosses were known, so on, so forth?

Of course, there are other factors such as building up a server economy from lv1 being much slower than making it go from a lv60 -> lv70 economy. Consumables/world buffing as it was pre-2.1 may have put an additional ltitle wrench in how fast content is cleared.

But there were so many slow-me-down mechanics designed into the game - biggest of which would be FR farming for Rag/Vael, Onyxia Cloak farming (somewhat) for Nefarian, gearing up for Patchwerk, and ultimately FrR for Sapphiron. I guess a significant overall factor was the gear gap difference between TBC endgame and 1.0 endgame.

One other difference seems to be how fast people get geared up these days. Back then, it was 2 tokens for 40 per week, with a really shitty chance of getting the ones you want (meaning tanks could take months to get T2, etc) Now it's 2 per 25, with a >50% chance that a token you need will drop, any given week. That ability to gear up parts of your raid which need it, as well as the fact that a larger fraction of the raid gets gear per reset, seems to lead to people 'completing' their characters faster.

Is 50 days (in admittedly literally laboratory-perfect conditions - people seeing encounters for the first time wouldn't clear anywhere near that speed) to clear all content a little too fast? I'd say so. But then again, there lies the problem with the macro-view. With too much gear progression, the jump in power levels for each subsequent expansion would be ridiculous, and we'd be seeing very pronounced mudflation issues.

Short of artificially halting progression via staggered releases to maintain a much smoother progression slope, I'm not too sure what Blizzard could do. All the aforementioned methods that 1.0 had would be frowned upon in the raiding game of today. Farming resist gear? Even with it sitting on your lap compared to the huge mess that was Huhuran, it would seem the least enjoyable part of BT for most guilds was getting SR put together. Artificial blocks in the form of 4 vials per Vashj/Kael kill? We all know how that turned out. Attunements? Not a good thing, and even I agree that lifting SSC/TK attunement was the best thing to happen to the raid game, because of the logistical nightmare it created.


Edit: blagh, my posts always end up needlessly convoluted. The main point I have is, 'I sure would hate to be those guys, to have beaten the game in 50 days and not have anything to do for the next few months, especially after all the hype that surrounded the release of TBC'. The main question I have is... past the suggestions floated within this thread, what else COULD Blizzard do?

Initial TBC as 2.1 cleared in 50days? No.
Like you wrote, people had strats/videos and most likely played a level 70 already on us/eu servers.
But that fast clear also shows, that gear is not that important and that KT etc. are not that hard as you may think with all those "whine" threads.

Towards pacing, the main significant is the change from 40 player raid to 25 player raid. In pre-TBC, most guilds would reach instance fatigue after about 3 months. It took time to gear up 40 players, maybe even more if you had rotations, the instances were larger, as in more bosses, and - especially for Naxx - the fights were about perfect execution, and not just Tank'n'Spank (with a twist).

IMO the worst mistake Blizzard did towards raiding was to lower instances from 40 to 25. While this allowed more casual guilds to have a player base, casual guilds dont progress, so HC raiding guilds suddenly had instances with fewer bosses, faster tier (as in 33% chance for 3 classes, vs 15% per class pre-TBC) and easier bosses, as most bosses in TBC are Tank'n'Spank (with a Twist). Progression became faster than tier fatigue, gear became less important than skill (as you also could enhance gear with PvP weapons and Heroic stuff).

This adresses another issue with Blizzard and TBC, namely the nerfing of bosses, almost per patch. If no longer requires attunement to enter TK or SSC, and bosses there are nerfed significantly; both Vashj and Kael are quiet easy now, considering their pre-nerf forms. And considering how easy the first two bosses are in MH, it is a free run to RoS (BT) and Kaz (MH) once you downed Kael. And with the nerf of Mother, who now is a joke vs a random C***Block beforehand, once you get RoS down, Illiadan is more or less easier to reach. More so, they buffed SSC/TK gear to be better than BT/MH gear, so you are almost overgeared entering BT/MH.

And yes, Sunwell will be cleared very fast; not just because most raiding guilds enter Sunwell with full tier6, but also because of the training on PTR.

What Blizzard needs to do is put more effort into creating bosses than enviroment. Most bosses are so generic now, that they are easily adaptable. They need to create instances with more than 5 bosses, why not 10? They need to make them more complex and far more execution than tank'n'spank.

Mechanicswise, Blizzard did a fantastic job with most of the bosses in BT, as well as a few outstanding ones in T5 (Hydross stands out to me as a really cool idea, even if it's a resistance fight. Vashj and Kael are pretty revolutionary)

I don't think TBC is any more tank-and-spank than 1.0 was. In fact, the only one offhand I can think of which wasn't a conventional tank holds aggro and soaks damage, healers heal tank, dps kills boss before healers run oom would be C'Thun.

I would say that pretty much every single boss in SSC ot TK is more mechanically complex than any boss before Nefarian. Dismissing them all as tank and spank is lunacy, unless your definition of a "tank and spank fight" is any fight with a meaningful aggro table.

Hell, even Gruul revolves around having absolute control both of the top two spaces on the hate list, which is a mechanic that wasn't introduced until Patchwerk.

I think the top groups just don't realise how good they are these days. If you took two current BT guilds and stapled them together to make one 40-man raid group, how long do you think it would take to get through pre-TBC content, gearchecks aside?

I guess more what it feels like is they haven't pushed it to the level above what was seen before, and that's why I am willing to bet a lot of the raiding population is hinged on sunwell.

No it's not like I can say everything is so easy, everything in 1.0 was harder, but it's lacking the amazingness of a few of the late Naxx fights thus far (IMO) as well as C'thun, plus lacking the push beyond that. The big thing was for a while everyone thought Illidan was the end, so when they got there and were thinking "That's it? No horsemen difficulty fight? No C'thun nothing like anything else fight? No perfectly tuned yet so precarious fight like Kel'thuzad?" nothing that really just made you sit back and appreciate your time playing the game as a comparison (i.e. I don't really care about raiding right now, I raid to progress the guild and hope for a damned pvp weapon, in 1.0 I looked forward to horsemen every week, from the first wipe to the last kill right before tbc came out)

So it feels like while no, calling pretty much everything a tank and spank isn't fair, they haven't pushed the limits again, and I think that's what people are feeling.