I think Drysc was more referring to the fact that unlike the 5-10man's that include questlines (for levelling), the current "end-game" content now, is going to be almost totally excluded and never touched once the xpac comes out.

From a design point of view, this would seem like a waste (spending so much time and effort in to dungeons that have a limited life time) but from what it looks like Drysc is just trying to justify it.

You're going to shard the gear eventually. Does it matter that it was because you hit 70 instead of hitting Naxx 2.0?

In theory, anyway.

Please help. Tell me it's ok to shard Nightslayer. Every epic I've ever paid DKP for is stinking up my bank! In a way I'm glad my raid guild fell apart, otherwise I was going to run into some interesting logistical challenges with Yet Another Tier of Raid Gear Banked.

In the way that you're describing it, you make it sound like WoW is a goddamn MMO. I mean, never ending cycles of getting better loot for the lose, right?

all i know is that shits gonna hit the fan when the 70 instances are opened in the beta and/or a PTR-type open beta is done, its gonna get bad when all the new items are leaked and people don't feel like farming for naxx anymore.

they've actually done a great job so far, lots of people still believe that tier3 gear will be useful at 70. you see constantly posts about how high iLevels tier3 is and how it'll help grind, etc. it would be dumb for blizzard not to force a level playing field around level 65.

arena teams quickly match up with equally "skilled" teams (similar win/loss ratios) so that will equalize the gear differences quickly - teams in top gear will rise to the top and play equally geared (or extremely skilled yet undergeared) teams.

Well I doubt that Naxx etc will be completly useless in TBC; seeing how you need an Ashbringer to start the quest after all. Maybe the T3 stuff will be upgraded with new stamina formulas as well, then it wouldn't compare as bad as it does right now to the leaked blues.

A more important concern imo is how on earth is Blizz going to release the expansion in 2 months??? It seems ludicrous to imagine they can do it at this point, given the minor changes of 1.2.1 have taken nearly 3 weeks and the 1.11 patch that introduced naxx was in testing nearly 2 months itself. Unless they are pushing out a nearly finished beta patch to testers in the next 2 weeks it looks more and more like TBC won't be out till january at the earliest.

What is the cut off date anyways? I would say Oct 1st for all-instances-and-areas-done, Nov 1st for wide open beta, Nov 22nd release. All that is pushing it however, 3 weeks for a final open beta test is a bit crazy and pretty much guarantees massive bugs on release.

You'd be suprised how much content is already done. The problem they are going to run into is they don't have enough time to fine-tune a lot of this stuff, especially class changes.

My only concern is if they're gonna keep TM in the protection tree =/

Your concern is my object of excitement.