Naxxramas

[oldmandennis]

A few purples that *are* on par with the lower instance late-game items are over 1k, which makes purchasing them impractical. Even if they were however, that still leaves the better ones out of reach, no matter how much gold you are willing to spend.

I don't know, 1k sounds reasonable to me. A lot of people have spent as much on items, many people were happy to spend that much on Quel (yes a raiding item, but its not that hard to find a guild willing to take a warrior along) before the market dried up. On my server atleast, the price of MC BOE's are drifting close to the 1k mark. I think 1k was the standard price of a Chromatic Caraprice or Pristine HOTB too.

And I have purchased or farmed a few items in the 1k range, despite spending huge chunks of time raiding, paying the repair bills for raiding, and a pretty solid pvp effort. If I was to spend most of my time farming gold and crafting items, I'm sure I could afford 1k per slot.

It is understandable that those that play 1/2 the time that others do, should have worse items. What is not, is that instead of having roughly 1/2 of the good items as those that play twice as much, they have (and will have) none. You can't raid - you have a 0% chance of getting the higher end items. I see something wrong with that.
-A
[right][snapback]107846[/snapback][/right]

Well are you saying they should have 1/2 the good items? Call shoulders, legs, gloves, and boots the "Casual slots", and make sure there are craftable items in those slots on par with the best drops. On the rest of the slots, make sure there is nothing even close?

Or are you saying that there should be craftable/buyable/blue dungeonable items in every slot of 1/2 the power of the raid items? Cause I think for most classes there are : PHOTB/CC items, ZG crafted items like primal bat and tiger, BOE MC epics, DMF for your neck, AV for rings offhands and weapons, Field duty, Dungeon 2, Hide of the Wild, Devilsaur, DM trinkets/Quel, top end librams and enchants for all of this stuff.....

I don't know. I _really_ doubt there are a lot of players who have gone through _all_ of this stuff, and still need more casual content. I find it more likely that there is a large group of players who have just gotten tired of what's out there. Maybe they have just finished their Dungeon 2 set and are looking at a 2.5k bill for 2 MC BOE's, and have decided that a marginal upgrade isn't worth the time. I might be wrong.

Already many of the items I described are pushing very close to MC level items. I know if I could, I'd trade my Earthfury boots for 5 thunders (well maybe not with NXM comin soon).