I'm not sure I understand the concern. I'm pretty sure when Blizzard said "No more 40-man instances" they did not mean they were going back to pre-BC instances and lowering the raid cap on them to 25. Just that they were not making any more 40-mans. You will still be able to do Naxxramas with 40 level 70's. Will you want to? Blizzard doesn't seem to care a lot either way:

http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/us/30053963.htm

they'll do the same thing they did with tier0 -> tier0.5 ... 4-5 months after expansion release, when people are bored and next major instance still a ways away, they'll put out a quick patch that "revamps" naxx and will keep people busy for a few months with new loot until instance99183 is out.

Makes tons of sense, why bother retrofitting naxx now when they can get much more juice out of it later down the road, especially if it turns out 60-70% of the level 70s never got past 2-3 bosses in naxx while at 60.

GS also had the problem that we don't recruit the way that guilds like Myth's Fury do. Our membership is composed basically of anyone from SomethingAwful who joins the server. This means that we don't get a whole lot of choice in the quality or class distribution of our new members, and so when people quit (and a lot of people do) we were more or less forced to shift players upward, which caused drama. Essentially, the "fixed A/B/C" setup that Thorvoquien tells is the story of our most recent setup. There seemed to be a widespread feeling among the B team that they were somehow better than the A team, since they were progressing through BWL faster than we had when we learned it several months before (exercise for the reader: what's wrong with this argument?), their overall attitude was better than ours, they didn't have attrition problems, and so on. I think the only reason they DIDN'T split off is because they remembered the last group to split off from us (a year or so ago) died a fairly drawn-out and painful death.

This is, of course, only the latest iteration. Basically, with a large guild, you're going to have differences of philosophy, differences in activity level, and differences of attitude unless you very specifically recruit to avoid these problems. I suspect that a lot of the people here are in guilds built to avoid this problem, but with smaller raid sizes in TBC we may see this problem in a lot of the guilds who can now venture into endgame with 25 man raids.

The real key here is that you have to realize that unless people have something unifying them as a guild, they will start to consider themselves separate, independent guilds that share a guild chat. And, of course, the next logical step is to make separate guilds, and get rid of the pretense. Now, maybe the people talking about running two separate 25 man raids would be fine with splitting their guild in half, but from what I'm seeing that doesn't seem like the outcome people want.

I guess I'd say the concern comes from a narrowly-focused desire to see post-60 content as a logical progression to what we're doing now. I realize though that that's not realistic. The Average Joe isn't someone who's farming Naxx in Nov/Dec, but rather a guy who's just filled half his gear slots with epics from AQ20 and ZG, and is looking to try something similar yet slightly more difficult, making instances like BWL, AQ40 and Naxx completely unnecessary.

Of course you could argue that severing the need for progressing through today's raid content is screwing the hardcore raider who's spent 20+ hours / week in these zones for 1.5 years. But at the end of the day it's the only viable thing to do if you want to keep the customers. There's a whole lot of different groups going into that portal in a few months, and basically you'd want to avoid forcing a large portion of the players to "finish up" existing content before they can conquer the new content. Even if it is a breeze hacking through Naxx using regular 70 gear. Though I expect them to add some incentive to reclear old content every once in a while - they always do (hi ZG enchants!).

I've had my fun. What I'm looking forward to is being able to dominate the content on my way up to 70, through very good gear and an established guild. I can't know exactly how big the difference will be level to level, but I fully expect at least T3 gear to be completely viable even at level 70. (Take a look at the few plausible gear leaks out there; like the Arena sets. If that's how the Arena sets are going to come out I'll be more happy in the gear I have now).

And if we've been in BWL for a year, in AQ since February, cleared Naxx by the time TBC hits ... it just seems like crying over spilt milk having concerns about "losing" these instances when there's a host of new ones to look forward to.

In MF it honeslty wasn't us just sharing guildchat. We shared pots, strategy, when somebody had the 2 thunderfury pieces elementium was loaned to them from A Team. When Eye of Sulfuras dropped the number of ingots needed were loaned, and we could count on eachother to repay those loans back. Team B and C were so successful because A Team walk us through the encounters hand in hand. We were a unified guild, while being seperate at the same time. It worked while it lasted until outdoor raid boss drama. Another biggie were battlegrounds, you could always count on a couple MF BG groups forming up on nonraid nights, regardless of team.

Talking to someone who works at a bookstore who is reading some magazine early because well he's a manager and he can. The interesting thing is that the guy says the magazine stated that TBC will have a couple 40 man raids, Black Temple being one of them. Apparently from what he said the reasoning is is because too many people complained about the 40 mans being gone, and to provide more of a transition. I wonder if this is true. I figure some info would have popped out here if it was. But if there is even one 40 man in TBC, that will be a huge deal to current raid guilds.

Ravenholt slicer Main hand, Thunderfury offhand , Some greens... Pug BG's can be amusing. The need for a big Reset button is definitily their, recruiting without feeling you are the same time poaching is increasingly difficult. We started looking for a new warrior,preferably protection recently and the number of otherwise ok applicants who didnt have wrath pants would make your cry.

Kasi I would be wary of anything read in a magazine without other confirmation.

Apoligies to quoting this a page back but I've wondered the same thing and came up with a few conclusions as to what Blizzard has in mind for Naxx post 60.

1 : Atiesh farming. Level 70 or not a portal to a dungeon is gonna be a handy thing to have.
2 : Ashbringer farming. If this quest sends you to Outlands after one step we can only imagine how it ends.
3 : (Comedy option) Level 60 twink battlegrounds. Actually on second though that would be kinda cool, leave the 60 bracket by itself and let people get whatever loot they can find that requires 60.

I'm fairly certain level based resitances to most mob abilites would lead to the encounters being easily farmable by teams of 25 or less. Watching a level 70 accidentally eat it on the shout in Instructor Raz will be funny though. :V:

As for the raidgroup thing I just want to see how many raidgroups Goon Squad will be fielding once level 70 hits. 4-5 would be my guess.

I think there's some realism in the giant reset button, speaking from a third gen server.

We started Molten Core in June/July '05, made it to BWL a week or two after it was released, had 3 guilds walk into AQ40 the day the gate opened- although only one making major progress in Naxx. It was something of a race to catch up to release servers. Top end release server guilds were killing Ragnaros before we walked into the zone and had the clear gear advantage all the way through BWL, and because of the gear advantage in BWL- there was a gear advantage in AQ40, and it cascades down until the effect dies out. I think it's fair to say that we were with the majority of the world, gear wise, going into Naxx- although we were still a month or two behind the top guilds.

Now, our server was released in May 05 and we're still playing catch up in some ways (although not much to be honest, or progress just isn't cutting edge.) Imagine the fustration of someoen picking up the game in January 06, getting onto one of the servers released the month that AQ40 was released. Well right there you're starting three entire instances behind the curve. Unless you pick up a guild of transfers- you're probably going to be screwed to catch up any time in the next year. The people just now starting BWL? They're not going to see C'Thun before the expansion- much less KT.

I doubt Blizz can afford to have the new servers more than a year behind the old servers in content... so I doubt that any of the current raid instances will be more than fun jaunts at 70 while everyone focuses on the new raid game conveniently reset.

It's good bussiness to even out the haves and the have nots ocassionally.

I agree completely. My server was brought online back in September '05 and I started playing right around the first of January this year, about the time my guild entered ZG - we started MC around March, BWL around May, and have been farming Nef for 2 months now. That being said, we're well behind the curve in terms of progress - there are two guilds ahead of us on the server though, one killed C'thun for the first time about 3 weeks ago, the other is on the Four Horsemen in Naxx - so a pretty clear difference, as we're just on Razuvious now (got him to 28% last night on our second set of attempts - we're trying Naxx this week due to the fact we had consistently massive turnout problems in AQ40).

What we've been hoping (although I think it's more just daydreams) is that in the race to level to 70, the gear level will mostly get balanced out and we can start progressing around the same pace as the other two guilds. Ideally, the fact that the first guild on the server will have people in full Tier 3, or that the second guild will probably have people in close to that, by the time the expansion hits will be somewhat mitigated by the level of blues that can be picked up en route, or else we're going to have even more catchup to play.

You're talking as if there isn't going to be an early instance that's in the same league of difficulty as Naxx. Has there been any indication of this being the case? If not, why shouldn't we be able to go straight into a "dungeon" that contains loot equal to or better than Naxx? Are guilds who can easily field a 40-person Naxx raid now expected to trudge through lesser instances, and loot lesser items, all for the sake of the average guy who wants a level of equality that wasn't rightfully earned? Sorry, but that's like giving us ZG and AQ20 without the BWL and AQ40 to go with it. And for myself and many other frequent raiders, the idea of sharding most of the equipment we loot early on isn't exactly an incentive to buy into the expansion.

I guess we could settle for a less troublesome progression from 60 to 70 due to our current (superior) gear, but I'd much rather come out of the gate and have something that challenges the post-Naxx crowd.

It does seem people have already forgotten the difficulty settings on the instances...

Lets take this example,

Your 5 man group are in ZG/AQ20 gear, you enter the first 5 man dungeon set it to normal difficulty and find it a challenge, but good fun and beatable with a bit of effort. You work through it, and get upgrades, you level and progress to the next.

Your 5 man group are in 7 or 8/9 t3 with naxx loot, you enter the first 5 man on normal, and find it a walk in the park, you get no upgrades from it and complete it with no effort, you are unable to progress to the next 5 man due to the level diff. So you change your difficulty setting, increasing the loot rewards and XP from the instance then come out having found it challenging and rewarding (in loot terms too), you level faster than the AQ20/ZG equipped people due to the faster xp gain, and move on to get the next upgrades that much faster from the next dungeon.

Seems like theres a reasonable level of challenge and reward for everyone there to me...

I guess I need to come out from under my rock. So there's going to be difficulty settings for each instance? And higher difficulty equates to better rewards? If so, that changes a whole lot of what I've said up until now.

I think difficulty settings are greatly misunderstood. My take is that all they are is mechanism to keep lower level content viable longer. Think of it this way, you run Maraudon at 50. Then you have the option of dialing it up to a lvl 60 version, which will give appropriate level rewards/challenges.

Yes. I don't know if this will apply to all instances but it is a major feature of the release.

I suspect the way it will work - based on the what Blizzard has been saying about loot levels - is that people in Naxx gear are going to get to Kharazan (which Blizzard considers to be the next "prize" for the raiding crowd even though it is only 10-man) fairly quickly. Blizzard has said they may get "some" upgrades and sidegrades along the way but the real prize is in Kharazan. So in your T3 + some upgrades/sidegrades you'll be well prepared for Kharazan.

Joe Blues who is just wrapping up ZG and AQ20 is going to get a lot of upgrades on his way to 70. It looks like he'll be able to get Naxx-level loot and better without going to Naxx. But I suspect that in order to do it he's going to be farming the pre-Kharazan instances for a while before he's really as well prepared for Kharazan as you are. He'll be like a level 60 hitting Strat/Scholo/BRS/DM was in preparation for Molten Core - he's going to have to run the pre-Kharazan instances a lot more than you do to be ready for the big challenge.

Far from it... don't forget that they made a big point of telling everyone that you would be able to save your progress in an instance and come back to that spot the next raid. This sort of implies that there's going to be sections that will take a long time to work through.

Honestly I'm quite excited for 25 man raiding just so we can cut down the logistics and collateral issues with running 40 people at once.

I suspect many are, I would think the majority of small guilds have around ~25-30 raid members who are serious about progression and for whom loot is a necessary means to an end (and ofc means you can pimp it up in your capital city of choice :D ).

Those other members who fill the last 10 no longer have a easy spot in the raid just because you need them.

Organization has been and will continue to be the biggest advantage for raiding guilds over the masses. Even for most raiders, they joined the game without a guild and pugged it along until joining a guild at 60. Now we have the advantage of starting with all those social connections/resources out of the gate.

It'd be almost pointless for Blizzard to change the raiding dynamic to primarily 25 man dungeons and then throw in a few 40 mans just to appease people. Especially since what seems to be the overwhelming majority is already biased towards running a single group for progression over fielding multiple groups, the progressive guilds that cut down from 40+ to 25 members will be tearing out their hair.

Yeah that's what I figured. He said he would scan it later today or something and post it on his guild's website? Honestly I think the magazine is just outdated info or just plain wrong. If such a magazine had come out saying such a thing I figured the forums would be awash with some post.