If there are no more resist fights, then the guy who itemizes boe greens in TBC is out of touch with future instance content. There are some absolutely excellent resist drops "of XXX Protection" that basically replace old non-epic resist items.

I would say that farming nights are sometimes more difficult to fill out the raid than are nights on new content for us. It's not a terrible attitude to have for a lot of people, but unfortunately not having the best people around to farm old bosses means we get less time on new content.

A lot of this is an issue with two things, in my opinion - AQ/Naxx design, and Raid IDs/Lockouts. Note that I'm writing this with respect to the mid-tier guilds who dont have more than 9 or 10 bosses down in Naxx and quite possibly aren't killing c'thun/ouro yet (or lolviscidus). They're falling apart the fastest on my server. They've farmed BWL and it's boring, and they know they wont be killing kel or even 4h before expansion. The fun is seeping out of the game for many people, including myself. Besides the obvious "we've done pretty much everything already" reason, here's my take on the source of fun-drain.


AQ/Naxx design:
Boss fights are fairly well thought out, but they have some issues that make them a real chore.

In AQ, farming for huhu NR gear sucked. Now you can buy a lot of the gear, but that costs $$$ which = more farming. This is exacerbated by the horrendous cash drops from bosses. It takes a while before you make money in AQ, and the post-huhu trash is ridiculously monotonous. It may be easy, but it's boring. Add insult to injury when it's on free for all loot and you have 2 people making 13 gold per clear in grey drops and 0 gold for the healers who cant get to the corpses, and there's a recipe for resenting the whole bloody place. Also, prepatch run back to c'thun... well, we all know what that was like.

In Naxx, necessary farming and consumables logistics only got worse. So many fights are enrage timed that extra farming (or spending gold) for dps items, or mana regen pots, or flasks, or resist pots really takes a lot of the fun out. I'm sure the people responsible for passing out dozens of flasks and stoneshield pots think that's really fun. It's also really fun for the rest of the raid to stand around and wait for last minute distributions. Or the people who have to run ZG to get the buff if you do that pre-loatheb. Or the people who have to manage Zandalar coins if you use those pots. And let me tell you how much i love scarlett monestary atm. Again, the number of bosses means that you're going to take a long time before you start making money on naxx in a per week basis, and that's just repair costs. any consumable costs are additional time sinks you need to spend farming for.

One thing they did really nice in MC (cant believe i'm about to complement an MC design decision) is to have the mats for a lot of the fire gear (lava core, firey core, corehound leather, dark iron, essence of fire) obtained along the way. About the only thing i farmed for was elemental fire while learning rag.

Raid Timers/IDs:
Some of the most fun I've had recently is going with some of my old friends who are now with another guild on their MC runs. I can only do this because our guild doesnt run MC anymore. I think it's pretty horrible game design to effectively trap you into the same people every single week, or even within a week. Let me have my "raid ID" exist as a temporary thing, and when i want to clear it and join a diff raid ID, LET ME DO IT. Just dont let me loot a boss after the first kill for the week. Let me go hang out with my friends on random BWL/MC/AQ runs when they need a hand or (gasp) just want the company.

I've heard "BC is going to be a great excuse for me to go casual" from people up and down my friends list. People seem to want to have fun again, and after the chore that raiding's become (rather, farming for raiding in addition to certain wonderful encounters themselves like cthun trash and heigan guantlet and 5 packs of the exact same stuff before patch), I think i'd like to start having fun again too. Right now raiding is a way to spend time with friends i've made over the past couple years. Before it was both that and also fun on its own. Hopefully it can move back to the latter.

*raises his hand*

This is exactly what we're experiencing at the moment. We've gone from having a regular 42-46 people online on raid nights to 34-36 for the last week and just barely reaching 40 for the last month. I highly doubt it's a coincidence considering the recent official TBC release date.

We've been around since EU retail launch last year and we've had downtime before, but those has always been seasonal; mainly christmas and summer holidays.

I had an experience like that yesterday. I logged onto an old character to talk to someone and I get a raid invite from my old guild. They did it just to talk to me for a bit, but I saw them in Naxx and decided I'd get attuned and come along for kicks and giggles. It's the kind of thing I'd never done before, play in an instance twice in the same reset. It was pretty fun to play with them again and to do some of the same encounters I'd been doing on my warlock but from a priest's perspective. Unfortunately for our healers, I also gained new perspective on how some of the encounters are actually much easier to heal than they make out. Oops. :P

Frankly it's made me reconsider some of my earlier stances in regards to alts and maybe even wonder if the idea of mains and alts should become antiquated. There's been many times where I've thought to myself "if only my priest was on this server" (xfers aren't open here yet) when we're short on priests or the ones online are suffering from brain freeze that night, or when some smartass new priest decided he knows better than a warlock how to heal despite having no clue. Same thing for my brother's geared up warrior when one of the main tanks isn't on. I'm thinking that a player with 2-3 classes up his sleave could be pretty valuable, especially if blizzard continues with token systems as they make gearing up so much easier.

I guess my raid is an oddball or it also might be different for us because we aren't hitting consumable dependent fights. (Horde side Sargeras.) The xpac coming out has lit a fire under our butts. I was worried that we would fall apart after we killed Nef (about a month ago) since TBC was coming soon. Instead people have gotten excited about seeing as much as we can before the xpac comes out. I've seen more dedication out of a number of people than in the history of our raid. More than just the usual hardcore people are asking to rearrange the schedule for more progression time. I am suprised and excited. We've also have always had attendence problems on progression time and those are starting to be our fullest raid days.

Being a raid well behind (and an alliance of guilds at that) we've always had problems recruiting, but recently we've picked up people here and there who just want to see bosses past MC/start-of-BWL lately. And I continue to ask Class Leaders and Vets to recruit more people like that to fluff the ranks incase we do start to see attendence drop off because of TBC expections.

Maybe it won't last, but thought I'd throw out a positive story as opposed to the doom and gloom.