Quote:err, don't the Vortices only drop in Serpentshrine Cavern (and beyond). Doesn't seem that out of place to me. I mean it takes a while to collect 15 vortices if you assume that most bosses probably only drop 1-2 and that has to be split among 25 people. You're probably looking at 15-25 SSC boss kills to get one T3 upgraded weapon in your entire guild.
I'm dismayed that non-raider crafting still isn't competitive. The current choices are 1) raid 2) raid but be a master crafter with it and 3) arena but only for 6-7 equipment slots. As more raid instances come out and further mudflate the gear we will be back to pre-TBC where groups of players from raid guilds absolutely destroy everyone in pvp. I'm not convinced that non-raiding arena farming is anywhere close to viable, I think rather if you want to win you have to do both
As for Nihilum there's an interesting interview with them here:
http://www.nihilum.co.uk/wcradio/nihiinterviewhq.mp3
It's a long interview but when asked about the bugginess they stated that they feel they are beta testing the game for Blizzard and that some encounters have been quite literally impossible. Interestingly they don't realise why. The reason I'm sure is that Blizzard QA simply don't have 25 people as good at playing WoW as these guilds so even with a free selection of gear and consumables they can't test bleeding edge adequately