Why so insecure? How does the gear someone else is wearing lessen your enjoyment of the game? An UBER 10+ HOUR A DAY RAIDER from the BC era would probably be doing heroic 25 man, where the deepest shade of purple gear drops. Honestly though, you know that heroic difficulty raids drop the best gear right? Heroic difficulty, that you can't do in LFR? Saying the game is less enjoyable because a less deserving player has gear with its name in the same color is a laugh. Take a stand! Complain! More people can get worse gear than you! Whatever.
People like BC because it was the first. It kept most of the same mechanics, added a little bit of new stuff, and bumped up all of the old stuff. It was the excitement of watching it all unfold, not that somehow blizzard pulled out all the stops and made it the magical "bestest ever". Blizzard didn't screw it up because they didn't really change anything major relative to the basic structure of how the game was played. Armor tokens were a nice streamline though. Did it make you mad that people didn't have to suffer through watching some random set pieces get sharded because there was no druid in the group? Back then gear from the rep vendors and heroic 5 mans was considered the welfare gear, and people liked to rage about anyone wearing it. The good old days.
I'll tone down my angry voice from yesterday and be more civilized but lets try to explain this.
Hypothetically speaking I ran a guild and wanted to kill a hardmode 25 man boss but needed a Rogue. Now in BC I would have needed to recruit from another raiding guild of the same tier or, yes, run all the attunements and pray I got a good player after all that time invested. No fun. I agree. So now we have all this purple gear everywhere and there's no need for attunements or gearing up in the traditional sense. The problem though is that you can get all this great gear but have very little experience in the game or real skill in the game. It's not very hard so the difference between what is called hardcore and casual is really not that great. Yes they might play more but for the most part the big difference is reading up on a boss fight, understanding the mechanics, having your addons setup correctly, and not standing in things that can kill you. I can pretty much simplify that to watching a youtube video, understanding it, and not standing in fire. So when I recruit that fully epiced out Rogue and he does 20% of the dps of my other Rogue, dies to fire, and expects to be given the hardmode dagger that drops off the boss when he dies despite us having to 24 man the boss you can see where I might be frustrated. In the end I end up recruiting from other guilds regardless. I can't waste my time picking up a welfare epiced out player who has all the boss checkmarks on normal mode and even some on hardmode from the previous tier because he did them after the nerf. I need one who knows how to play the game. This became harder and harder as 25 man guilds started disappearing. It got to a point where there were only a few 25 man guilds, we weren't poaching from each other, and we were all forced to recruit off server. Thus people having to spend more money for server transfers and faction changes.
I would never suggest bringing back attenments. I thought they were ok in the beginning but in the long run they were a problem. What I would suggest is simply not giving away all that epic gear and giving people a false sense of skill. I started Kara in blues, Naxx in blues, etc. It's not a big deal.
If someone wants epic gear there literally were instances that dropped them like candy. That 5 man in Sunwell for example. The gear was really good too. We all ran it for the trinkets. How crazy is that? I ran the sunwell 5 man so that we would have trinkets for Brutallus. It continued from that point on.
At the end of the day in order to be able to properly do a raid instance you have to have some semblance of organization and skill. The gear is really not that big of a deal. I can put a casual player side by side with a hardcore player in the best gear and the casual player will at best do 25% of the output of the other player. Not knocking them but we saw this happen when we tried to just bring a body in.
If you're good enough to be able to do a raid instance you can do it in blues, enjoy the epics that drop, and then progress from there. Entering it with full epics, not being able to do it, waiting for the patch, and applying to another guild to waste their time does nobody any good.
Elitist? Maybe. It was reality though. You can call me elitist all you want but I'm not the one asking to see all the content. I was perfectly fine killing what I could kill and letting the rest stand. I couldn't kill hard mode Lich King 25 or clear Sunwell, Ulduar hard mode, etc. Why can't everyone be content to just kill what they can kill and not tone down the level of the game so that everyone can see everything and get all the gear?
If you don't want to learn boss mechanics and learn how to avoid things that can kill you in one hit there are 5 man instances.
