Originally Posted by Praetorian

I think that in their 2.1 forms, Kara through SSC/TK seem to be about right. You aren't going to have the DPS to do Vashj or Kael if you aren't geared in epics from the t4 content and some t5 stuff. You need to gear up in Karazhan and Mag/Gruul to an extent -- no one is beating Kael in heroic gear and blues.

The problem may be not so much with the lack of tiered release, but rather simply with how BT and Hyjal were tuned. Or rather, not tuned.

Forgive the theorycraft here -- we should be in BT next timer, but in the meantime all I can do is speculate, and I encourage those with firsthand experience to correct me if I'm wrong -- but it seems like they simply undertuned the numbers involved in basically all the tier 6 content. I'd suspected this might be the case, but wanted to see how things played out on the live servers first.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the case that t5-geared raid groups on the PTR were killing most of the Hyjal bosses (easily), and the first half of BT (in the case of the organized raid guild efforts, anyway), as tuning was ongoing? And then, a week before 2.1 went live, Blizzard increased the power of everyone's gear by roughly 10-15%. This change was designed to make SSC/TK encounters that had previously required heavy potting more accessible, and doable for guilds under the restrictions of the new consumables changes. It was meant to equalize "old epics" + "2.0 consumables" with "new epics" + "2.1 consumables."

...except that BT and Hyjal had been tested and tuned for a month around "old epics" + "2.1 consumables." And they didn't go back and buff them after changing all the items. If you think about it, the gear that guilds used back in April to down Naj'entus, Supremus, Winterchill, and so forth, is strictly inferior to the gear that guilds are entering the zone with, on their first day. In the initial PTR build, we got premade kits of loot ranging from ilvl 110 to ilvl 125 (along with random stuff like Rejuv Gem). Today, any guild that's going into BT has ilvl 120 loot in most of their slots, going up to ilvl 138 stuff from Vashj/Kael. But they didn't retune any of the tier 6 fights after they buffed the hell out of the gear. Why not? What did they expect would happen when you took bosses that were dying, quickly, to any organized and serious raid group, and then gave players much better gear across the board?

The simple fact that guilds can go into Hyjal and BT with raids of 23, 22, 21 people, and kill multiple bosses, is a testament to the fact that Blizzard just plain got the numbers wrong, in a bad way. Guilds are going in with one Kael kill under their belts, most members of their raids with maybe two pieces of t5 gear on average (maybe a tank or two with 5/5 or something), and they're functioning as though they effectively outgear the encounters already. Likely because they do. As an analogy, was it possible to go into Naxxramas with only a couple of Nef and C'Thun kills under your belt, in mixed tier 1/tier 2/AQ gear, and kill some bosses? Sure. Could you kill Patchwerk? Yeah, with consumables and skilled play, and some luck, with extreme difficulty. Could you do it with 35 people? No way in hell.

Am I wrong? I'd be curious to hear from guilds that have been doing this stuff intensively for the past week. What I'm seeing, from an outsider's perspective, is fights that have some creative mechanics, but too much margin for error based on the numbers involved.

Query: If you can clear to Illidan in tier 4 gear, what the hell is the purpose of tier 6 gear? Faster farming clears?