Naxxramas

[MongoJerry]

Though people seem to think 20-man dungeons were a step between raiders and casuals, they in fact were a step between the 5-10 man and 40-man.  Blizzard even stated at one point when people were complaining about the difficulty of parts of ZG that it wasn't meant to be a stepping stone in terms of difficulty and time, but more for just organizing the number of people and coordinating and such.

They are there really for raiders that can't get the numbers, rather than the people that can't put in the time, or for the people that purely don't want to raid.

That doesn't jive with reality or the developer comments I have read. ZG is quite easy compared to 40-man content. The first four bosses are jokes. The tiger and panther bosses take some coordination, but once you get the hang of them, they're easy. The only difficult boss is Hexxer, which as an optional boss, was designed to be difficult and also drops higher quality items to compensate for that difficulty. Most of the loot in the instance are high quality blue items that are better than 5-10 man instance loot but not as good as MC loot. The epics that do on rare occations drop in the instance are about on par with MC loot. A couple of items were placed in there that were useful for PvP. Everything about the instance screams "stepping stone" to the bigger 40-man dungeons. And as I said, the developer comments I read prior to ZG coming out were that they were looking at how people were running 15-man UBRS runs and wanted to cater to that kind of a crowd.

Mongo, please stop referring to non-raiding players as casual. Gaming is my major hobby; I'm serious enough that designers have had to revise games after strategies I developed became popular. I am not a casual gamer. However, despite averaging over forty hours a week of WoW at my peak I am not and will never again be a raider.

Fine, touche. I don't understand the emotion behind your comment, but I'll respect it. I have already acknowledged multiple times that the game lacks single or small party level capped content, so I don't know what you're looking for from me. My contention for you, however, is that you are picturing the playerbase too simply by calling it "raider" and "non-raider." As I said, in my previous post whose arguments you didn't acknowledge, ZG and AQ20 were not designed directly for hardcore raiding guilds but more for a larger base of players who don't get the opportunity to participate in the 40-man content as much as a hardcore raider would. Lumping ZG and AQ20 with BWL and AQ40 and saying that Blizzard is throwing all their development at the same people doesn't acknowledge the fact that these two sets of instances are really directed at two different player bases.