Then he'd just be a loot pinata, and that isn't any better. The problem is with his design as well as his loot -- once you get the basics down (and there aren't really many mechanics to learn -- 4H this is not), it's just a matter of throwing more consumables at him and raid-stacking. Even the basic execution check on the fight can be circumvented roughly half the time with consumables (Invulns).

If the fight itself were a lot of fun, that alone would make a difference. I'd have looked forward to Heigan every week even if he dropped complete garbage.

It also helps that there are many different ways to get geared up and gruul's lair is the first of many raid instances. Broken c'thun (c'thun 1.0 I guess it would be called) probably would have gotten a "fuck this shit" if Naxx and 3 more raid instances were just sitting there waiting to be done and equal gear was available in more than 1 other way (as is the case with gruul).

I was rebutting the OP's assertion that loot progression in the expansion is much slower than it was in the original game. It really is not. A raid decked out in T5 is going to smoke Gruul. Obviously consumables, itemization flaws, etc. are still problems. But those aren't new problems, and don't match up with the OP's doom and gloom scenario.

Do sockets really cost more as ilvl increases? Or do you mean sockets cost a percentage cut of the total item budget? The former sounds kind of lame, but the latter makes sense.

Isn't the former a result of the thought behind the latter?

i think this is the real issue here.

If we can just accept a 'greed is good' mindset, and go from there we'd be set. Those that play on pvp servers raid hard to get good loot to have an edge in pvp. PvE'ers...well god only knows but they must have reasons too.

If i want to maximize my gear for pvp, then i want to do the least risk possible for the best rewards. Why in gods name would i spend hours learning something that isn't necessarily repeatable or gives me comparably nothing in return?

While I do agree that as you get better gear (let's say Tier 5), Gruul will become easiser i.e. less risk, but by then the already poor loot table will look even worse. So, technically the reward is the 'same' but relative to your current gear it's not. If both the risk AND reward decrease than the ratio hasn't changed and the original problem still persists.

I don't understand why blizzard has decided to reduce the gear gap so much. Making top lvl blues ilvl 115 is fine, but then the epics shouldn't be so much lower ilvl that they are nearly equivalent. Any fool can see this throws risk vs reward out the window. Granted I don't think we need to see the jump that was UBRS lvl blues -> MC epics that we had before, but still.

If I were doing itemization, i'd make progression like this:

Heroic epics ilvl 105
Kharazan epics ilvl 110
Tier 4 ilvl 115
PVP epics ilvl 115 (to start with)
tier 5 epics ilvl 130
tier 6 epics ilvl 145

Dunno if we'll have a tier 7 in this xpac, depends on how they decide to itemize Hyjal and the black temple, or if we get another instance (zul' aman?) in there before black temple at some point.

They also need to seriously look at consumables and how many you can have on you at once. The game should be about gear progression, not consumable farming.

Many people predicted the death of raiding at the four horsemen as well. The top guilds potted and raided 6 days a week in Naxx to get to the end. I'm in a very casual guild, we only got to 4h but we did it raiding only 3 days a week and using very few consumables.

I think the minimal gear gap is good for WoW as a whole, it will encourage more and more people to run the 5 mans and heroics. What I do wish is that they would socketize more of the Karazhan loot, imo that would make Karazhan a much more fun place to go and encourage many more Karazhan PUGs. Its totally bizzare to me how they introduce a very fun and rewarding socket system, and then proceed to have most of the loot in Karazhan not have sockets.

And yes, I think you will see the number of guilds that go beyond Gruul on a server be extremely low until Blizzard figures out a way to make the heroics more accessible to people. Perhaps its a strategy of theirs, the very hardcore people are doing heroics now and will be Hyjal-raiding over the next 1-3 months, at that point the heroics will be toned down for casual players while the hardcore are raiding.

4H was never a gear fight, and no one who'd done the fight predicted the death of raiding from 4H.