Super-guild has already cleared Naxx

[Bolty]

Intro-content is intro-content. Experienced raiders steamrolling intro content is news? Experienced players findng normal 5-mans easy is news? Try more pugs and see if the normal stuff is as easy as it looked with you and your trusted friends.

Right on!

I'm not seeing what the problem is here. Content will either be too easy or too hard, depending on a ton of factors:

1) Your skill level
2) Your gear level
3) Your party/raidmates skill level
4) Your party/raidmates gear level
5) Logistics (ability to get 25 people together, or 10, or 5)

A recent blue post made just a day or two ago stated that according to Blizzard's compiled statistics, the majority of active World of Warcraft players do not yet have a level 80 on their account. These are the people Blizzard is aiming at - the majority.

If you're posting here...heck, if you're READING here, you're not the majority of WoW players. And this isn't even Elitist Jerks or anything. If you regularly read that site, you're already in the top 1% or 2% of players just due to the knowledgebase held therein.

Perspective is a rough thing. To some of us, this content is a joke. Try joining a PuG and seeing if it's still a joke. I heard from a guildie that his alt joined a 10-man Naxx pug and the Heigan fight took over an hour because 8 players died and it was just him and the tank up. Meanwhile, I had the Safety Dance achievement done on my first try. Does this mean I'm awesome? No, it means I win at being with 9 other players who don't die in the dance phase. Go me! Woo!

For players that are in high-end guilds, sure, the content is a joke. But Blizzard put in achievements to make it a little more interesting, and I'd say it's working. Grand Widow Faerlina too boring? Try killing her without dispelling her enrage and get the achievement. When you've been farming KT for a month or two, the place is boring. Try fighting KT when you have no deaths on any of the other encounters and you can get The Immortal achievement, and suddenly it's a rush. Sartharion with three drakes up, now universally considered the hardest raid content in the game at the moment, is something only a few guilds worldwide have done and the rest of the hardcores are chasing.

Meanwhile, Joe Q. Casual who doesn't have a level 80 yet will get to do all of this someday, assuming he/she succeeds at factor #5 above. They will get to have fun seeing raid content and, better yet, get to learn more about raiding. We all started somewhere. What, were you an uber raider when you first started? No, you sucked, and got better.

How quickly we forget the failure of the TBC launch, with raid content that was so blown the other way towards insane difficulty that players burned out left and right. Hardcore, high-profile players were quitting the game in protest over the stupidity of the original Gruul and Magtheridon encounters, which, if never nerfed by Blizzard, would have NEVER been beaten by a vast majority of the playerbase, even with all the gear upgrades! If you were a player with no raid experience, where were you going to learn how to raid?

Blizzard's said publically that later raids won't be this easy, but I doubt the curve will be that steep, really. I think they'll maintain an easier pace to the game in general, and put in achievements for the hardcore guilds to chase. The difference between the difficulty of Sartharion, Sartharion with 1 drake up, 2 drakes up, and 3 drakes up is dramatic. Time will tell where Blizzard goes with this.

Don't forget that PvE gear needs to scale with PvP gear as time goes on. Blizzard may be trying to keep the two curves fairly even between difficulty and time investment. Which would mean that to get super uber PvE gear, you may have to do super uber PvE achievements - while those who just want to check out all the content in the game remain happy they get to see it. There's a bit of precedent in the game right now with Sartharion's loot table changing as you leave more drakes up.

Right now, it's all conjecture. But if the difficulty level in the game now gets more people into raiding, I think it can only be a good thing.

-Bolty