No, that isn't what I meant. I meant changing the number of players down, because the hard part of it was just managing a raid of 40. Not adding a new difficulty, except insofar as less raid/player management makes it easier.
But you yourself said offering a smaller version (MC20) with lower ilvl gear. That is a great idea and that is exactly what Blizzard did.
You're 100% right, getting 40 people together was a nightmare, that is exactly why MC wasn't puggable and why most guilds that cleared it didn't go back to it.
25 man naxx was just as easy as 10 man, they were both a joke. It wasn't a difficulty selector, it was just a mechanic to cater to multiple guild or raid sizes. This is the first I have heard of cataclysm being hard, I thought it was one of the easiest expansions so far, about the same level of challenge as Wrath minus the tough ulduar fights like mimiron heroic.
The mechanics were designed (tuned I guess) differently. I always found the larger scaled raids easier since you had more fluff, ie 40man you could lose a whole group (5 people) and still win, 25man same, 10 man lose 2 people and good luck (if it wasn't farm content.)
Either way, read up on the Firelnds fiasco. They nerfed the shit out of it to cater to their then raiding population. Why do you think Dragon Soul was a piece of cake. More guilds cleared Dragon Soul than Firelands.
That isn't really true though. In vanilla there were dozens of other things to do to gear up and make a given raid easier. In modern WoW, not so much, because gear ilvl is king.
Name them.
Thats odd. You just said "t was a road block. In Vanilla that's it, wrap it up we're done." Here you obviously realize that farming Molten Core is an option to get geared up and progress through BWL. Try to think ahead when writing your posts, so you don't contradict yourself.
In any case, you did run Molten Core before BWL was released, no? The content was still required, was not obsolete, you just happened to time your farming early enough that you were done with it when BWL was released, which is cool. This is different from modern WoW, where you can come in now today and just go to the final tier LFR and skip everything before. You couldn't do that in vanilla, a new player needed molten core and/or zg gear to really be geared enough for BWL.
My guild cleared MC (thanks to 24hour raid weeks) and when we were done, we were done. We had no reason to rerun it, we lost no members and thus it was no longer on the raid schedule when BWL launched.
Had a friend join our guild, who wanted to raid, but I couldn't get 38 people rounded to gear him up. Since, yes, MC was required ONLY because there was no alternative to him. Now here are the alternatives they've added:
1) go run these set of dungeons for similar (but not equivalent) gear.
2) go run LFR of the raid for similar (but not equivalent) gear.
3) let's get 8 people (instead of 38) and run a 10man version of MC for similar (but not equivalent) gear.
He was stuck in limbo. Couldn't pug MC. No catch up, yet you claim there is, by all means - name them.
It was an 11 month gap, longer than the gap between any vanilla raids.
Yerp, and this expansion in 11 months I got 3 tiers (5 raids.) That sure does seem faster than before.
You are listing tier sets instead of raids, that is funny way of looking at content. You also ignore the tier 0 dungeon set, and the tier 1.5 dungeon 2 sets, and the sets in AQ, and all the good offset gear.
Vanilla had Molten Core, Onyxia, ZG, AQ20, AQ40, BWL, Naxx, Azuragos, Kazzak, and the 4 green dragons. UBRS was also technically a raid. It had a lot more endgame content than ANY expansion after.
Okay, so Vanilla had that in the course of short under 4 years:
MOP in 11 months:
6 world bosses
5 raid zones
LFRs (these are technically raids)
3 new zones added
Again, we weren't arguing content (I'd assume the game out 3x longer would have more content), we were arguing content released faster.
I think it's also worth pointing out that the leveling time of vanilla was a month or more for the average player, unlike the couple days it takes to hit cap after a new expansion release.
Are we talking casuals again, or what? A couple of days for the "average" player? You kidding yourself?
That is an odd way of saying it has less content, but I'd agree, it does have less real content.
They changed one catch up mechanism for another. Sure, they could have just done like in WOTLK and Cata and rehash old raid content. But it really isn't adding content to the game, is it?
Based on what again? 11 months between dragon soul and panda raids, how exactly is the 8 month gap between MC and BWL longer than 11 months? Are you into that new age math?
/faceplam
MoP will be 1 year old in 5 days. 4 patches, 5 raid sets, 3 new zones, a handful of new factions, too many dailies for me to even care about...
In the same time period between two raid tiers of previous expansions.
At least you admit the truth. You just show up in the LFR and "get gear", you aren't even really doing the content. It's just a dumb time sink.
At this point I can't tell if you're trolling me. The whole game can be construed as a dumb time sink. My friends said I was wasting my time doing heroic content. My GF left the hardcore scene since it was a dumb time sink. We all infer different values on what we do.
I say let them have their LFR, it doesn't affect me one little bit. It seems to totally piss you off, however.
Of course you would be, LFR is the free epic button, obviously players are going to push that button as much as they possibly can. Not because it's fun necessarily, but because it's free epics.
And? Let them have free epics. Why should you care?
Contradictory statements.
Really? Look at what I said previously in this post. Gear != skill, but certain content requires a minimum of gear.
I ran MV LFR, both sets parts today, 4 minute queue and 5 minute queue. I'm practicing holy paladin. Odd, there were people doing it. I'd have figured based on your claims - it be a ghost town.
EDIT: I'd also like to mention the inclusion of Achievements and transmorg has actually given people a reason to revisit old content, as far back as Vanilla. So, not really buying the argument that old content is obsolete, it's gear isn't practical for any kind of use, but there sure is a group of people (at least on my server) who are pugging through them.
