Naxxramas

[MongoJerry]

It's not that casual gamers should get to experience everything, it's that beyond Tier 0 (which I'm admittedly still unfamiliar with), there isn't currently an upgrade path for casual gamers. As Warlock pointed out, there is hardly* a part of the game where the 'best' isn't exclusively available through raiding.

I've often wondered, as with the Dungeon sets, why the epic sets didn't drop in a couple of different sized instances. For example, why didn't Blizzard make T1 bracers and belts as BoP drops off quest boss in UBRS? Or a hard-to-unlock BRD quest boss? Sure, then everyone and their kid sister would have easier access to those epics and it would be slightly less epic to have the whole set. Is that a really bad thing, though? Wouldn't flattening out the gear curve help other places a bit?

What's wierd with your complaint is that this is almost exactly what they've done with 1.10. Tier 0 sets are the blue sets like the warrior Valor and priest Devout sets that one can get in the normal 5- or 10-man dungeons like Scholomance, Strateholme, and BRS (lower and upper). These sets have been in the game since release and have long been outdated. Finally, Blizzard has has made a way for semi-casual players to upgrade that tier 0 equipment through a series of quests involving new bosses in these instances. Some of the new equipment, which has been termed "tier 0.5," is quite nice. I know some tier 2 epic'd out priests who look at the tier 0.5 boots and think they would rather use those for raiding than the tier 2 transcendence boots. Plus, the new stuff has +damage/healing on them rather than just +healing, so that makes them better for priests while they're soloing.

Of course, overall, the tier 0.5 equipment is not nearly as good as loot in BWL or AQ40, but that's to be expected, since the loot is doesn't require a well geared and coordinated group of 40 people to get. On the other hand, it is on par or better than much of the gear one would get in Molten Core, so it is still very good. When you combine that gear with some of the gear you can get in Silithus, solo and small group players can finally get gear that is very good.

It also doesn't help that the "solo and small group friendly" content in Silithus got ninja-changed into small raid quest mobs at some random point.

I don't know what you mean. The most difficult of the Field Duty quests require taking down the 5-man dukes. There are Cenarian Hold quests that require going into AQ20, but I don't think anyone has ever claimed them to be "solo and small group friendly."

Anyway, it seems to me to that there is a lot more room in the game for all kinds of different players than Bliz has currently satisfied, but I'm not optimistic that they will explore it (unless the profit motive dictates otherwise, not that there's anything wrong with that).

Since the majority of players aren't major raiders, I think there is some hope for this in that there definitely is a profit motive there. I think the problem at the end game stems from the fact that the game got rushed to market before that end game content got a chance to get polished. I am hopeful that the expansion will be better in that clearly all of the content and effort will be focused at the high level end game as opposed to the initial release whose development was focused at the low level game.