Why Have Attunements?

[Bolty]

I don't find this to be true at all. Personally my guild was pretty close to killing C'thun, but certainly wasn't "easily" clearing anything there. Maybe if you had a good reroll guild they could do that if they spent most of their time in Naxx - we were really trying to finish C'thun.

C'Thun is indicative of many TBC encounters, though - every raid member must perform well or you lose. The Spider Wing of Naxx didn't require that, and that's generally what makes things easier.

Okay, Anub'Rekhan does require your DPS'ers to not die by standing in the wrong spots, but much of the fight is the Main Tank getting positioning down and a Hunter working out the kiting with the MT. And the healers as well, but that applies to every raid fight. Once they all get it down, your chance of success goes way up.

Faerlina: a ton of pressure is on the mind controlling Priest to get it right. After that, things fall into place assuming a solid strategy.

Maexxna: a bunch of "pressure" roles here, but still not requiring all 40 members of the raid to be on the ball. If backup plans and assignments are made, almost any occurence of key people getting web wrapped can be handled. Your MT will die, guaranteed, if your raid group lacks DPS, but even that can be handled by having a set offtank to pick it up.

And of course, Razuvious: if you have 2 Priests with the +spellhit gear and some ability, you win. Okay, you may wipe from time to time due to back luck on early MC breaks, but even those can be accounted for and handled if you have Rogues with good reflexes to tank for 15 seconds.

So in the case of my raiding group, we had the Spider Wing and Razuvious on clear before we finally got C'Thun - it's really a matter of what percentage of a raid group has to perform a function at near 100% to win. With C'Thun, that percentage was maybe 90% - Razuvious, on the other hand, is more like 5%.

And ultimately, that's how I judge a raid encounter's difficulty - what percentage of the raid group must perform very well in order to get a win? If you're in a raid group that's riding top-end content, you may also run into untuned encounters that add a luck factor, like Mother Shahraz currently has.

There's a reason why Aran got nerfed, and then nerfed again, and then nerfed again. He was THE blockpoint of Karazhan, because in his original incarnation, you needed all 10 people to play very well to beat him. You also needed a specific group composition. After various nerfs, you don't really need all 10 people to be great to beat him, although of course trying to beat him without any interrupts would be pretty fascinating to watch. Still doable, but it would be so much harder. But there's no coincidence that the fight that required superb play from all 10 members of the raid got nerfed multiple times. Its difficulty was out of whack to that of the rest of the instance.

-Bolty