Cataclysm

[Lantyssa]

Now that GW2 has shown us how, just allow (by user choice) an automatic de-leveling to match your quest/zone level.  Give rewards that are of benefit to your current level.  Now old content has a purpose.

[Tannhauser]

Meh, they tuned Cata for the hardcore and then were shocked, SHOCKED when people got frustrated and fled in droves.

So they drunkenly swung their nerf bat and now if you kill an orc you gain five levels, a purple and a blowjob from Jaina while Thrall cups your balls.

No offense at the hardcore, their playstyle is as valid as mine (cheetos-stained fingers and bitter tears of loneliness).

[Paelos]

I'm perfectly happy is they cater to the hardcore at their level (which is heroic raids).

Stay the fuck out of 5 man dungeons. That's facerolling time while I watch sports.

[Hutch]

He shows up in 1-60 content as well; an example would be the quest in Badlands where the 3 characters tell you their memories of what happened on the day he woke up. The getting burninated thing was much more common if you were leveling through the whole level range, too. He didn't seem to hit the zones that 80+ people were in much at all, but I got burninated several times leveling up my hunter.

I'll take your word for it. I did get a goblin to the level cap, but more importantly, I ran through all of the zones on my main, to get the neo-Loremaster achievement. So I must have seen the sub-60 stuff, and I just don't remember seeing DW.

I only got burninated a couple of times, but both times I was in Uldum :)

[caladein]

Either make it non-stepping stone (ie - people can jump immediately into raiding without it), or don't make it difficult.

There's nothing in what you quoted that blamed players.  The only possibility is the implication that the author might like things that other people don't, which of course you're constitutionally incapable of doing.

But I want to focus on that last line.  There's nothing wrong with making play at a "higher" level (and raiding is, unfortunately, given the gear rewards) require that the the player show competence at "lower" levels of play.  WoW players need to level to cap, level reputations, get some gear in group play, get money for expenses, and farm for consumables.  That's always been a part of the game.  The advance, in my opinion, has been the increase in those non-raiding requirements to be in machine-matchmaking group play and not out soloing.

Also, no difficulty setting is intrinsically wrong.  (Even easy!  Which I play almost all SP games on.)  But, there was an objective failure in the managing of expectations going into Cataclysm.  Part of that was overestimating how much players would pick up on the more complicated leveling game, including the number of quests/mobs that featured "raid mechanic training".  Another part was that even vaguely hardcore players like myself saw that Wrath of the Lich King's difficulty was a bug, not a feature.  And I still feel justified in that opinion because so many of the systems that contributed to that lack of difficulty were, on their face, not well thought out: infinite healer mana, defense tables, armor penetration, Paladin rotations, Death Knights in general.

Lastly, that a number of classes had gameplay that was slightly less engaging than working in a Chinese CAPTCHA-solving sweatshop.

[Nevermore]

The revamped leveling content was a necessary evil. Their churn is still such that new people are trying the game, and the old crappy starter zones had to be a huge detriment to retaining new players.

I thought they did a good job with the revamped 1 - 60 in terms of leveling experience, but where it utterly failed for me was the feeling that my chosen faction was there for the sole purpose of getting constantly kicked in the nuts as part of a never ending "Look how awesome the Horde is!  The Horde is so AWESOME!  Oh, and by the way the Alliance are incompetent twits" mantra. 

That's when they even bothered doing anything at all for the Alliance.  That same lonely Draenei dude still hammering away at his forever unfinished hut at Forest Song even after the entire zone was revamped and goblins were able to terraform an entire zone is the poster child for the "Horde YEAH! Fuck the Alliance!" attitude it felt like the game had when leveling up in Cata.  The entire Gilneas experience being nothing more than a giant retreat to a single tree in Darnassus and the giant FUCK YOU that was Andorhal were the sprinkles and cherry on that shit sundae.

Yeah, I'm a story whore.  It's why I still like TOR, liked TSW much more than I thought I would and found whatever 'story' was in GW2 sleep inducing.

[Ingmar]

I'm sure they cut the corner on the draenei and friends because that was already 'new' leveling content with rewards at a better standard, etc. Same reason Dustwallow didn't really change.

They *really* should have taken the opportunity to split Ashenvale into 2 zones, there's far far too many quests there now.

[Nevermore]

Forest Song is in Ashenvale.

To clarify, when they added those 2 or 3 Draenei futilely trying to build a settlement I'm pretty sure they didn't add any actual new quests at the spot.  They just changed the quest giver from the 1 or 2 Night Elves that used to be there to the Draenei.  Hell, they couldn't even be bothered to add a vendor to sell shit there.

Edit #2: and they did change Dustwallow in some pretty significant ways despite having already been revamped, like that huge new bridge/road and the trail that lead up to Thousand Needles.

[Ingmar]

Yes I know. The commonality is that Forest Song and Dustwallow were both revamped much more recently than the other old world leveling content.

[Rasix]

Ashenvale was really sloppy form a Horde perspective.  I'm glad that zone was more of an aberration than the rule.  I enjoyed the new 1-60.  Outland still needs to go. I'm not sure I'll come back until it's able to be completely bypassed (I don't care how short it is). 

[Simond]

How often did Deathwing show up?

- once at the beginning of the Hyjal chain, to set the tone
- once in the middle of Twi Hi, to fight the Red queen
- Dragon Soul, to get shot in the back by green Jesus wielding the Dragon Lazer
- randomly choosing a zone to burninate, but some still maintain this was a myth ;)

What am I missing? This can't be it. Was he so unmemorable?

The best quest.

[Paelos]

There's nothing in what you quoted that blamed players.  The only possibility is the implication that the author might like things that other people don't, which of course you're constitutionally incapable of doing.

Oh, I guess he obviously wasn't calling players idiots when he said stuff like:

"I was also disappointed to learn that such "thinking fights" had no place in WoW's new world of random group finders that encouraged dropping whenever something went wrong or players didn't understand a mechanic because it was their first playthrough."

See, the problem I have with the mid-tier-wannabe raiding community is the inherent belief that the rest of the population is completely stupid. I don't really care if you like what you like when it comes to raiding. What I do care about is the exclusionary bullshit that usually follows from the community, because if people have what I have it's "welfare epics" or some nonsense. Nevermind the fact that the reason you even have a functional game is because of those masses, who absolutely must be supported or else you get EQ sub numbers.

Again, I don't give a shit about what the hardcore do, because they usually confine themselves to their heroic raids. It's when they start fucking around in the regular people's sandbox, whining about easy dungeons which they honestly don't even have to run except for their min-max badges, that I roll my eyes. You already have your fun elsewhere, stop worrying about the entry level stuff. Fuck off with that.

[Simond]

I cannot wait for TotalBiscuit to start bitching about casual players in whichever MMO he's in next. 

[caladein]

Oh, I guess he obviously wasn't calling players idiots when he said stuff like:

"I was also disappointed to learn that such "thinking fights" had no place in WoW's new world of random group finders that encouraged dropping whenever something went wrong or players didn't understand a mechanic because it was their first playthrough."

See, the problem I have with the mid-tier-wannabe raiding community is the inherent belief that the rest of the population is completely stupid. I don't really care if you like what you like when it comes to raiding. What I do care about is the exclusionary bullshit that usually follows from the community, because if people have what I have it's "welfare epics" or some nonsense. Nevermind the fact that the reason you even have a functional game is because of those masses, who absolutely must be supported or else you get EQ sub numbers.

Again, I don't give a shit about what the hardcore do, because they usually confine themselves to their heroic raids. It's when they start fucking around in the regular people's sandbox, whining about easy dungeons which they honestly don't even have to run except for their min-max badges, that I roll my eyes. You already have your fun elsewhere, stop worrying about the entry level stuff. Fuck off with that.

The most important word in that sentence in one you didn't bold: encouraged.  The matchmaking system, which is a huge positive otherwise, does encourage players to bail on a run that isn't perfect.  If one was stuck in the ass end of Scholomance or Botanica, they put up with a lot more because replacing someone or getting a new run for themselves was a chore.  Now, players can just bail, wait out any penalty, and get back into the dungeon with no repercussions.

Secondly, there are legitimate problems caused by gear resets that have nothing to do with snobbery.  Gear resets disincentivize going back to do older content.  As a result of that, everyone gets shoved into the latest raid instance, so they need to be all things to all players.  The entirety of a progression cycle has to get squeezed into one raid instance's worth of assets over a few months instead of over several instances over the course of two years.  That requires some level of compromise which can in turn make the high-end game worse.  Even the snobbery has a tiny amount of merit as exclusive rewards encourage some players to do things they wouldn't intrinsically enjoy for the extra status or whatever, which helps support the high-end game with fresh meat.  I think that the benefits of gear resets outweigh these issues though.

I "whine" about easy dungeons because that's what I care about.  What I want from an MMO is difficult, contemplative, small group (3-6) content with things like crowd controls, puzzles that you can't just look up the answer to, and bosses that require me to use every tool my class has at its disposal.  And it helps if it doesn't take an age to do and is repeatable.  Heroic 10-man raiding isn't not fun, but even with the classes that integrate most tightly with the group, I don't find it as fun as a Moria-era 3-man or a launch-period BC or Cata heroic in a vacuum.  They're fundamentally different games.

And WoW still offers the best possible wrapper/quality-of-life around those experiences so I'd quite like it if I could get my hard dungeons in a game that like... works and stuff.

[Rokal]

"I was also disappointed to learn that such "thinking fights" had no place in WoW's new world of random group finders that encouraged dropping whenever something went wrong or players didn't understand a mechanic because it was their first playthrough."

See, the problem I have with the mid-tier-wannabe raiding community is the inherent belief that the rest of the population is completely stupid.

You're reading too much into the article. He's acknowledging that complex or pass/fail fight mechanics don't have a place in anonymous, randomly-formed, no-consequence, no-patience grouping. He's right. It's the same reason complex mechanics are a bad idea for LFR. Nobody wants to spend 10 minutes explaining the fight to someone that they don't know and will never play with again.

This is why challenge mode dungeons or even normal raids aren't hooked up to the group finder. It's not because people that use the group finder are bad, it's because group content of any size with complex or challenging mechanics only works in a group that is willing to communicate and is at least somewhat invested in playing together.

You already have your fun elsewhere, stop worrying about [our stuff]. Fuck off with that.

What's funny is that this is the exact same rhetoric the elitist exclusionary raiders you always rant about use to argue against easy raid content. Just as "You already have 5-mans, stop worrying about raids" would be a stupid argument, "you already have raids, stop worrying about 5-mans" is as well. Some people like challenging content, some people just want something to do while they watch TV, but both camps are justified in requesting content that appeals to them in any group size.

Challenge mode 5-mans and LFR give WoW the opportunity to serve both types of players, which makes the obnoxious "us vs them" attitude that has often characterized your posts on this sub-forum over the past 2 years all the more pointless.

[Paelos]

Eventually we outgeared those instances, and Blizzard shuffled them out of sight by rerouting properly geared players to the recycled troll instances to avoid complaints that they were "too hard" for players used to Wrath's dungeons. Quietly, Blizzard's returned to the short, accessible model of Wrath of the Lich King's dungeons in what I presume was an effort to retain subscribers, reaching its pinnacle in the three quick, unchallenging Hour of Twilight dungeons released last November.

Guys I'm not reading into what he's saying. He specifically says he hated the simple dungeons of Wrath, unequivocally WoW's most popular era. He's saying Blizzard caved to the masses. He wanted harder shit, but he admittedly outgeared the stuff quickly. I'm not reading into a guy putting quotes around "too hard" and using phrases like "thinking fights" when waxing nostalgic about classic WoW. It's the same collection of subtle digs I've heard for years.

The developers desperately wanted to crank up the dial on the game, and they will look for a reason to do it. Hell, if it was economically feasible they wouldn't have changed anything about Cataclysm's dungeons. They latched onto the few complaints they heard about easy dungeons at the end of Wrath, and they turned the game up to 11. If they aren't constantly reminded of the fact that their bread and butter is absolutely the huge base of casual players that want no part of this shit, they will ruin their game of their own design. Cataclysm's abject failure at the subscription table was a harsh reminder of that fact.

And Rokal, we've said over and over we don't give a shit about heroic raids. If people complain that raids are too easy and never even do heroics, fuck off. There's an entire tier waiting for you to show us how big and bad you are. Go to it. What they are really saying when they do that is they don't want other people to have what they have. If you think heroics are too hard and the gap is too big, say that. Don't put it on a "here's a protip raids are simple noobs" mentality. A huge group of people in the game really don't even give a shit about raids much. What they like is to play with their friends and not put their dick into a blender for 1.5 hours because they wanted to run a 5 man. Just as they should stay out of conversations for heroic raids, the raiders should stay out of their dungeons.

[Merusk]

I wouldn't agree they should stay out.. but they certainly shouldn't be bitching about blowing-through a dungeon they overgear by 100+ item levels.

[Paelos]

I wouldn't agree they should stay out.. but they certainly shouldn't be bitching about blowing-through a dungeon they overgear by 100+ item levels.

I mean stay out of the difficulty tuning discussions, not the actual dungeons. 

[Rokal]

Guys I'm not reading into what he's saying. He specifically says he hated the simple dungeons of Wrath, unequivocally WoW's most popular era. He's saying Blizzard caved to the masses. He wanted harder shit, but he admittedly outgeared the stuff quickly. I'm not reading into a guy putting quotes around "too hard" and using phrases like "thinking fights" when waxing nostalgic about classic WoW. It's the same collection of subtle digs I've heard for years.

You are reading into it too much because "I liked harder content" and "Blizzard catered to players forming dungeons via LFD" does not = "Blizzard catered to bad players". You're seeing insults where there aren't any.

And Rokal, we've said over and over we don't give a shit about heroic raids. If people complain that raids are too easy and never even do heroics, fuck off. There's an entire tier waiting for you to show us how big and bad you are. Go to it. What they are really saying when they do that is they don't want other people to have what they have. If you think heroics are too hard and the gap is too big, say that. Don't put it on a "here's a protip raids are simple noobs" mentality. A huge group of people in the game really don't even give a shit about raids much. What they like is to play with their friends and not put their dick into a blender for 1.5 hours because they wanted to run a 5 man. Just as they should stay out of conversations for heroic raids, the raiders should stay out of their dungeons.

I don't understand how this is what you got out of my post. I didn't even mention heroic raids: I said all raids. The example would have included LFR and normal.

Asking for all content of a specific size to be catered only to your desires because "X group already has plenty of content (of a different size) without shitting up my content" is crazy. Casual players already have plenty of 5-man content in MoP? Not a solid argument for why there shouldn't be raid content balanced for them as well. There is no legitimate problem with LFR existing in the game to cater to casual players that want to experience raid content balanced for them, just as there is no legitimate problem with challenge modes existing in the game for more serious players that want to experience 5-man content balanced for them.

I happen to like 5-mans more than I like raiding. One isn't an acceptable replacement for the other.

It's an issue of balancing development time and nothing more. Challenging raids or 5-mans (or easy raids and 5-mans) are fine as long they aren't to the exclusion of all other content.

In Wrath the pendulum swung too far towards easy 5-mans, to the exclusion of all challenging 5-man content.

In Cata the pendulum swing too far towards challenging 5-mans, to the exclusion of (almost) all LFD-friendly 5-man content.

Hopefully in MoP we'll finally have a reasonable balance between the two.

[Paelos]

I reject your premise that Wrath swung things too far. I think the Blizzard staff would love to unring the Cataclysm bell and go back to that pendulum if they could.

However, I'm not against the difficulty stratification of content and I never have been. One of the reasons Wrath was so popular is because it initiated that stratification process with 10 and 25 man options, as well as the heroic raid introduction. One of the reasons that Cataclysm didn't succeed was because they didn't further extend that strategy. I'm always going to be in favor of more modes and options for the players if they aren't seen as necessary steps to the next level (ie - a good player can't skip the easier modes to get to their desired level due to gear restrictions).

[Khaldun]

I think Fabricated put it about right for me. I've played since launch, I used to be in a guild that spent four nights a week trying to get through AQ40 and Naxx back in vanilla. I stuck with that until a bunch of my friends and colleagues starting playing in BC and I had much more fun doing that, we were much more casual. There was still stuff to do, and eventually we had a partnership with another semi-casual guild and did Gruul's and Mag and Tempest with them. Karazhan was the most fun my guild had, and I still think it was the best balance between design and challenge they've had, for the most part. Then we did Wrath and enjoyed it well enough, and it was certainly easy enough to hop on a 5-man heroic when you couldn't find guildies and have a bit of challenge and maybe gear up a bit too. But I started to get pretty bored when the guild made a serious run at progression through ICC-25 to the Lich King, and a lot of the other grown-ups my age were feeling the same. Too slow a development cycle, too many of the same tricks.

Cata was what happens in diku-muds or even PnP where there's been a Monty Hall DM who gets dethroned--you can't get out of the design hole you've made with some genuinely new ideas, so you just throw the difficulty dial over to the other extreme. I think when five of us in the guild hopped into a heroic 5-man after hitting 85 and gearing through running each of the normals and spent hours and hours trying to get through it (we did, but it was frustrating) all of us were saying, "fuck, who needs this?" The questing experience was ok, nothing great--but just generally there really felt like there was no possibility of a new idea. I also think the world itself in the game has become increasingly more sterile and roller-coasterish...there just feels like there is nothing spontaneous, surprising or unplanned going on any more. It feels sometimes like a hugely super-elaborated version of Dragon's Lair: joystick left, joystick up, right right right down LEFT. The long-time flaws of the game were magnified by Cata and there were no compensatory innovations or virtues introduced. It made it easy to stop playing and when people stop playing, it loses the social connection that might keep you there.

[Sheepherder]

1. There were exactly three dungeons that gave you ilevel 333 loot.
2. Dungeons fit into two categories:
   a) random wipes (hahaha, you have to pet tank the javelins, you fucking noob!)
   b) hour long ordeals.
3. People like winning loots, even if they aren't incredibly upgraded loots.
4. The death penalty needs to go if you want people to slam their heads against walls rather than quit and re-queue.
5. Following from #4, the corpse run serves no useful purpose that a simple timer could not also achieve.  It is, however, much more annoying.

[Merusk]

On #5, it serves a small purpose if you've ever died someplace in the middle of a respawn or underground.   Yes, there's ways around that but I don't think that sort of out-of-the-box thinking is going to occur to this group.

[Rendakor]

The corpse run in an instance is fundamentally different than the corpse run out in the world. While in an instance there really is no reason it doesn't just spawn you INSIDE the dungeon (or the location of the last boss death, or something) instead of outside, an arbitrary distance away. BRC is the most annoying of these, particularly because the dungeon is kind of hard to find.

[Zetor]

The revamped leveling content was a necessary evil. Their churn is still such that new people are trying the game, and the old crappy starter zones had to be a huge detriment to retaining new players.

I thought they did a good job with the revamped 1 - 60 in terms of leveling experience, but where it utterly failed for me was the feeling that my chosen faction was there for the sole purpose of getting constantly kicked in the nuts as part of a never ending "Look how awesome the Horde is!  The Horde is so AWESOME!  Oh, and by the way the Alliance are incompetent twits" mantra.  

That's when they even bothered doing anything at all for the Alliance.  That same lonely Draenei dude still hammering away at his forever unfinished hut at Forest Song even after the entire zone was revamped and goblins were able to terraform an entire zone is the poster child for the "Horde YEAH! Fuck the Alliance!" attitude it felt like the game had when leveling up in Cata.  The entire Gilneas experience being nothing more than a giant retreat to a single tree in Darnassus and the giant FUCK YOU that was Andorhal were the sprinkles and cherry on that shit sundae.

Yeah, I'm a story whore.  It's why I still like TOR, liked TSW much more than I thought I would and found whatever 'story' was in GW2 sleep inducing.

I pretty much agree with all of this (except I like the gw2 story :p) - the 1-60 stuff is varied and fun, but someone(s) has a massive hard-on for the horde (horde-on? I slay me). Even next to the usual lol metzen Thrall stuff.

Edit: this was also pretty apparent in the 80-85 zones when levelling my orc lock vs. my alliance toons. Somehow the horde is always attacking and the alliance is (desperately) defending. 'Course it doesn't matter when everyone levels in instances anyway 

[luckton]

You don't level in instances from 80-85...takes too long grinding that out because of the curve.

AFAIC, Cata was worth coming back when HoT/DS was released.  That was a good enough 'mea culpa' for me, and I still had time to catch up on the previous content and stuff.  If MoP can capitalize on what 4.3 did, it's a step in the right direction. 

[Ingmar]

Forest Song is in Ashenvale.

To clarify, when they added those 2 or 3 Draenei futilely trying to build a settlement I'm pretty sure they didn't add any actual new quests at the spot.  They just changed the quest giver from the 1 or 2 Night Elves that used to be there to the Draenei.  Hell, they couldn't even be bothered to add a vendor to sell shit there.

Edit #2: and they did change Dustwallow in some pretty significant ways despite having already been revamped, like that huge new bridge/road and the trail that lead up to Thousand Needles.

Nah, there were a bunch of new quests added to Forest Song when they started that Draenei settlement. All the stuff with the demons, for example, was new.

[Azazel]

The corpse run in an instance is fundamentally different than the corpse run out in the world. While in an instance there really is no reason it doesn't just spawn you INSIDE the dungeon (or the location of the last boss death, or something) instead of outside, an arbitrary distance away. BRC is the most annoying of these, particularly because the dungeon is kind of hard to find.

I agree in general terms, but I find the HOT dungeons worse in that the caverns of time are a big mess at the best of times and when afflicted by the death glow.

[Rendakor]

Ahh I forgot about the Caverns of Time; I haven't played much in 4.3 and I think I only did the new 5 mans once each.

[cmlancas]

The corpse run in an instance is fundamentally different than the corpse run out in the world. While in an instance there really is no reason it doesn't just spawn you INSIDE the dungeon (or the location of the last boss death, or something) instead of outside, an arbitrary distance away. BRC is the most annoying of these, particularly because the dungeon is kind of hard to find.

I agree in general terms, but I find the HOT dungeons worse in that the caverns of time are a big mess at the best of times and when afflicted by the death glow.

If I had a nickel for every time someone got lost in there...

I'd like to see less dismounting from ghosts because there are a few places where it's impossible to find a good place to land to get your corpse.  Setheria's Roost in Hyjal comes to mind as an intensely frustrating place to CR.

[Pantastic]

-People didn't dig the new (rather good IMO) 1-60 experience as much as Blizzard expected and did not spend nearly as much time on it as Blizzard expected.

I'm not sure why Blizzard would expect people to spend more time on it when they made it zip by blazingly fast - on alts with little heirloom gear it was common to level halfway into or past the 'next' zone just by going through. There's a lot of amusing stuff to play through, and hitting all the zones on both factions does take a while, but the zones are really made to burn through once and never go back, and are almost completely linear. They're good for a new person to level up quickly, but they're not really great for altoholics to replay endlessly and really lack a 'wandering through the world' feel. I think it's going to hurt them on future new players trying to get through cataclysm too.

-Heroics were made grindy, difficult, long, and gave generally shitty rewards while still being required to raid.

I think think "long" was by far the biggest problem with Cataclysm heroics. If you're only investing 5 minutes to get to a hard boss, or 15 minutes to get to the end boss (like WOLK dungeons, maybe double that for a really slow group), you can just see if your group can handle it and if they can't, just bail and try again. When it takes you an hour of grinding out trash (and laboriously setting up CC) just to find out if your group can handle the bosses, it's extremely frustrating to get a 'no', especially since for a non-hardcore player you probably just blew the entire evening. I think they could have gotten away with  hard bosses that you can quickly say 'these guys have no chance on', but making someone waste their whole night on a failed dungeon just pisses them off.

Blizzard seems completely unwilling if not utterly incapable of cranking out quality content on anything but a glacial timescale.

I really don't understand why it takes them so long to come up with new raids and dungeons, especially the stuff that's lightly tuned and that uses 'slightly bigger than the one you hit while leveling' art assets.

[cmlancas]

We got heroic Blackhorn finally last night, since I know so many of you care.   

Oh, and for all of the forum posters on WoW official that say heroics in Cata are too easy, they're just wrong.  The mechanics (even with the nerfs) are hard.

[Khaldun]

They're completely wrong. I did one last night for the first time in a while and it was a pain in the ass. "Hard" isn't quite the right word. Unfun is more like it.

[cmlancas]

They're completely wrong. I did one last night for the first time in a while and it was a pain in the ass. "Hard" isn't quite the right word. Unfun is more like it.

Many of the encounters are cockstabs.  Yor'sahj is one that's just a stupid design.  Here's a really stupid boss, now here's random shit that happens.

I love, love, love Zon'ozz on heroic though.  It really feels like a truly heroic fight.

[Feverdream]

I'm in an 8/8 Heroic guild but you know, I'd never touch this stuff if my guildmates weren't fun to play with.  I'd never do heroics with people who get too totally serious about it all.  There's a fine line between having fun while tackling challenging content together versus turning raiding into some sort of bizarre second job.  I won't run with people who can't see or respect that line.

If MoP can offer raid content that feels about like the DS raids, then I'm all in.

Cmlancas -  Congrats on Blackhorn!  And my sympathies on doing Heroic Spine next.  bwahahahaha.