Naxxramas

[Warlock]

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.
[right][snapback]108017[/snapback][/right]

I didn't respond to your ZG post because I'd basically have been repeating Raelynn - it's there for guilds with the interest but without the numbers to raid. Put another way, because the endgame designers enjoy raiding their first response to complaints about raiding being all there was to do at 60 was to make it easier to raid. After all, they want people to enjoy the content they've put so much time and effort into designing.

I ran ZG a fair bit - the fights are more interesting than MC - but it's on the whole harder than MC while providing inferior loot so it was only ever something we did on off days. I feel Bliz was a little disappointed with the community response as a whole to ZG - 40-man raiders blew through it but weren't hugely interested in the loot (except for a few pieces) and those running Scholo with ten PUG players found the gap in difficulty too big. I imagine ZG and AQ20 will grow in popularity somewhat now that the other instances are appropriately capped.

I do contend that the group that likes 20 man content shares more similarities with the group that likes 40 man content than it does with those that like five man content. Lumping the players=20 and players=40 groups together isn't perfect, but it's easier to write 'raider' and 'non-raider' than 'people that want highly scripted events for large groups that require each member of the group to focus on a single well defined task' and 'those that prefer limited resource fights with close friends that may require multitasking, handling multiple roles, switching responsibilities on the fly and compensating for missing abilities'. The boundary for me (where my compatriots stop being friends and start being resources) is at around six to eight people - the largest number I'd have around to my house at one time for FTF gaming. I can live with ten to twelve, the size of many real world sports teams.

Oh, and thankyou for respecting my PoV and I realise that you've acknowledged the issue exists (unlike, say, Zugzwang). If it helps I have at least as much trouble imagining why anyone would enjoy 40-man play as you do imagining why I dislike it.