Instance Design in Wrath

[Swiss Mercenary]

I wish I had a solution. I like the idea of gear resets so that people aren't locked out of content, but that causes as many problems as it solves. Unless you're in bleeding-edge raid guilds, you're not going to get to fight Algalon 25. Not because it's too hard to get to, but because of a general malaise of "why bother?" from a sizable portion of your raid force. When badge gear from the next raid instance beats the "ultimate" gear from the "super-ultimate" boss of Ulduar...where's the reward for most players? Why would they even want to bother beating Northrend Beasts heroic when the first boss in Icecrown will drop better stuff than in all of heroic ToC?

Gear's replaced, but Proto-Drakes are forever.

At least, that's the opinion of two of the guilds on my server. My GM is getting somewhat motivated to go back to Ulduar if we can't make headway on Anub 25 Heroic, but I wish he'd do that faster. And by faster, I mean - on nights where we cut progression short.

Personally, I have a lot of problems with the difficulty levels of Tier 9. I think that the Ulduar approach of slightly, but steadily nerfing the hard modes as time goes on is best. I bet we would have seen more of that, had Tier 8 not been cut short.