After having completed all 5 man dungeons in normal mode I'm asking myself what to do next.

What is about you the natural progression in terms of difficulty in TBC encounters after having completed all 5 man raid in normal mode ?

5 man raid normal < Karazhan < Rampart Heroic < Furnace Heroic < Slave Pens Heroic < ....

or something else ?

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by a "5-man raid"...

Having not done any heroics yet, I can't speak to their difficulty, but certain encounters in Karazhan are very techinical.

Progression in TBC is dictated by the attunement or key requirements for each given zone.

Karazhan requires the completion of a number of the max level 5-man zones.

Serpentshire Cavern requires defeating Gruul / Karazhan and Tempest Keep requires completing at least 4 of the heroic instances.

The Battle of Mount Hyjal requires completion of both Tempest Keep and Serpentshire Cavern raid zones.

http://worldofraids.free.fr/bc/diagramm.jpg is an excellent guide to the progression.

Thanks for linking that guide, it's a huge help. Does anyone have a similar link with a more detailed information on some of the quest lines? namely just their starting location/npc.

Karazhan quest line starts at the entrance to Karazhan.
Tempest Keep quest line is the Cipher of Damnation line, starting with "The Hand of Gul'dan" in Wildhammer.
Arcatraz line start with "Consortium Crystal Collection" in Area 52.
Shattered Halls Normal key starts by killing Smith Gorlunk outside Black Temple.
I don't know what Nightbane Quest line is.

Nightbane quest line starts at Karazhan at friendly, and ultimately requires Shattered Halls/Setthek Halls heroic (to the warlocks)

The Nightbane quest line starts at the entrance to Kara once you are Friendly, eventually leads you to kill Aran, and then sends you to do a partial clear of Heroic Sethekk and Shattered Halls, in order to get the item to spawn Nightbane.

The Serpentshrine attunement quest starts in Heroic Slave Pens (you get it there) and requres you to kill Nightbane and Gruul. So there's a clear progression there.

Basically, when in doubt, ask the flowchart. It will know what to do.

So I'm sure everyone heard that Doom Lord Kazzak has gone down a couple times now - in one case to a 40 man raid. Now, is that encounter tuned for 25 man or 40 man raids? If tuned for 40 man, all these guilds that downsized will face problems. If tuned for 25 man the encounter becomes trivial. Then again, how do you prevent a 40 man raid from going there?

I mean "5 man" instances...

I was wondering about heroic instance progression.

I know all the heroics are all roughly balanced around the same level, but some will obviously be easier than others based on pulls and effects.

What would you guys say would be the easiest -> hardest progression of heroics, and how well are those itemized?

We took a stab at Kazzak last night with 25 people. We probably didn't have the optimal group since we only had 24 level 70's and one 69 but the short of it is we needed a lot more dps, we weren't even close. We had cleared everything but kel in nax if you're curious.

Nihilum and DnT took 35-40 people if I'm not mistaken.

edit:spelling correction

Definitely tuned for 40.

Yeah, Kazzak is in no way, shape, or form a 25-man encounter. Not for a year or so, anyway. He's not "hard" -- it's just numbers. Can you do 1m+ damage in one minute? If so, collect loot. If not, collect repair bills.

Back to the point of the OP.

We should talk about true progression.

In my mind, I'm kind of thinking:

Normal 5mans get you into Karazhan and a few bosses.
Some Karazhan, Exalted faction rewards and maybe a heroic or two leads you to Gruul's lair (High King)
Gruul's lair farming and first half of Karazhan leads you to the end of Karazhan.
Farming all of the above will lead you to finishing Gruul's, Mag's Lair and ???....perhaps Tempest Keep...but what about SerpentShrine. Perhaps TK and SS are about the same difficulty....

But this is all just supposition. I've heard a lot of people say the heroics rape, and if that's true, not sure how we're going to run the majority of our people through them to get TK attunement if they're in blues....

My understanding of the current progression, roughly, has been that TBC raiding is structured as follows:

1) Karazhan, Gruul's, Magtheridon
2) Serpentshrine, The Eye (TK)
2.5) Hyjal (?)
3) Black Temple

It's still unclear where Hyjal fits in -- the fact that it requires Vashj and Kael dead suggests it's a clear next step in progression, but Black Temple is supposed to stand alone atop the TBC raid pyramid.