Yeah at this point I am considering just playing WoW casual and giving up raiding, which will likely just lead to giving up WoW at some point.

I'm sure there may be good reasons to make the keying process so difficult but whereas before I could reasonably pug up the keying process for BWL/Naxx/MC now it requires running heroics with people you know on voice-comms, and worst of all to progress beyond Gruuls you will need to gear up 30+ people in the guild with crazy FR gear (from said heroics), and I have no desire to run them dozens and dozens of times.

I have to say though playing more casual is fun, the gear gap between stuff you get from shadow/arca/etc is so minimal with stuff from kara/gruul. Not really sure where Blizzard is trying to go with raid itemization.

How often do you think Blizzard plan on releasing expansions? The earliest I could see the next expansion coming out is about 11 months from now (a year from TBC) and even that's pretty unlikely if you ask me. To say that most people won't be anywhere near done with TBC by the time it comes out is a pretty big overstatement.

It's been under a month since the expansion came out. In that time, most people have levelled from 60-70, gone through all non-heroic 5man content, cleared most (if not all) of Karazhan and done at least a few heroics. A significant number of guilds are starting to finish up the first 25 man raid zone. Again, this is less than a month since release. In another couple of weeks, as people keep doing heroics, clearing Karazhan, etc... you'll probably see more and more people killing Gruul and working on either Magtheridon or Serpentshrine Cavern.

At this point we have 4 zones that have been virtually untouched by most: Serpentshrine, TK, Hyjal and Black Temple. Equate that to MC, BWL, AQ and Naxx, take away the 2 month grace period between the patches that implemented those zones, add in the skill, teamwork and knowledge of the game people now have and you're looking at a very well laid out progression schedule. The only issue I forsee is that without the period between raid zones were released, some guilds are just going to blow through the content unless there's a nice "cockblock" along the way and either solution is gonna lead to complaints. Either "this is bullshit, why are you stopping us from progressing artificially" or "ok.. we've done all there is to do and everyone else is 2 months behind us.. we want content." Plausible solutions? I have no idea, maybe thats why Black Temple isn't released yet.

As for playing casually... I don't really understand what people are looking for. If you don't consider 5man instances (heroic or not) casual, what do you? Surely you can't expect all of the content to be instantly accessible and as easy as running Steamvaults on normal difficulty... There has to be some form of difficulty or time consumption to reward progression, and having to farm heroics for badges is easily one of the most fun solutions to that problem since there are upwards of 15-20 instances each giving multiple badges and each being a lot of fun for the first few times they're ran, so I wouldn't really classify that as hardcore farming/grinding.

Ghostz, I don't know about "most people" clearing most of Karazhan and Heroic, and the "significant number" of guilds finishing up the first 25-man...

That may be true of the people who post here, if that's what you are referring to, but I don't think it's true in the context of the subscriber base.

That's the group for whom the TBC 25-man raid content is designed, though. TBC raid content is absolutely more exclusive than it used to be. But Blizzard can get away with that, because they have far, far more for non-raiders to do than the pre-expansion game did.

Agreed-I don't think it's necessarily even true of those who consider themselves raiders. My guild only started Karazhan this week and we're made up largely of people who cleared 2+ wings in Naxx prior to the expansion.

On Mal'Ganis alliance side, I'm pretty sure every raiding guild has cleared most (referring to more than half I guess) of Karazhan, some with more than one group as well. I wasn't really referring to the overall WoW population, more so the people that actually plan on raiding and doing the 25 mans. There's a large section of people that never plan on stepping inside Serpentshrine/TK/Hyjal and I don't think they really need to be looked at when discussing raid progression.

As for the Gruul kills, I based my comment mainly from these forums since I don't really check on progression sites and such, but it's certainly more than just DnT and Nihilum killing him with an inhumane number of consumables and a fully flasked raid. I also think now that people know he's possible you're going to see a lot more guilds actually putting time into it and killing him within the next week or so. The fight isn't overly complicated, just takes some practice and gear/consumables.

That was an old post based on the impression that you had to kill him within one minute or the fight was over.

Sorry, just started reading this thread, should have dug deeper and read the entire thing first.

Doomwalker got mad nerfed. Enrage is just +melee damage now and he's a complete joke.

This goes under the category of "Haven't been there yet." but one of the persistent rumors about Magtheridon is the requirement of heavy FR for the entire raid. For those of you who have attempted it- Does the encounter feel like a simple resist check that your guild hasn't built up to yet or is there some tactical element missing? The main reason I'm wondering is the heroic badges FR gear. It's a question of if it's necessary to be bypassing loot that could help us now for a future set of resist gear that helps us later.