Naxxramas

[Kjartan]

3) Balance.  The effect of gear post level cap is simply astounding.  Blizzard cannot balance *anything* anymore, really, since the gap between epiced-out raiders and non-raiding 60's is so immense.  Cleoboltra still has two blue items on her, a ring and an amulet, but the rest are purples.  Net effect?  On a duel the other day with a standard greens-and-blues recently-capped Warrior, she stood still, cast Shadow Word Pain on the Warrior and Renew on herself repeatedly, and beat the Warrior to a pulp with her staff.  Nothing else was cast.  No skill involved whatsoever; the Warrior simply couldn't outpace her Renew damage-wise, despite everything he tried.
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At this stage it is probably not worth the time to balance it out, but I hope they have a better plan in the expansion. What I would like to see is rewards progression for all types of players regardless of what they enjoy. As an example every new raid instance would be accompanied with a 5-10 man instance for non-casual+non-raiders, and an open zone with new quests that are doable with 1-2 people. Just like you don't skip MC to do BWL you couldn't skip those other zones/smaller instances to go to the next level. This would let the non-raiders get a callenge, as the new stuff would be balanced around you having gear from the previous zone.

The major problem with PvP and doing new non-raid content is the power difference. A level 60 with ilvl 80 epics has a meta-level of 80. Dueling someone in ilvl 60 blues is like a lvl 60 dueling a lvl 40. There is no way to balance that. If you match up ilvl 80 epics with ilvl 80 blues, the person with the epics has an edge, but it isn't as massive as the current imbalance.

Silitus/AQ would have been the perfect zone if they had made one of the smaller hives into a 5man instance (making it a bit larger of course), changed some of the combat quest not require killing elites (hard to solo) and have a few more non-repeatable quests. The 5man zone giving ilvl 75-80 blues, aq20 and aq40 just like now (well, aq40 itemization is a bit weird), and the solo stuff could give ilvl 75-80 greens until you get the rep up to get the current rewards. If done right per zone it would satisfy almost all the play styles out there, and let newer challenges actually be harder for the non-raiders while being rewarding.

You might end up some very skilled non-raiders getting Dungeon 5 sets then take on the Raid 3 zones, but as long as you make progression of raid zones tied together this can be curbed. Not many guilds would be able to get BWL on farm without getting the FR gear from MC first, or farming Onyxia long enough to get the cloaks made up.