End Game RaidingFollow

My guild downed Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn tonight, making us the realm 5th, and ranked 277 in the world. Also, we passed Pigtails' guild. Just sayin'.

So, I'm pretty happy about that.

But honestly, it just wasn't that hard. We spent about two nights on the fight total, and we only raid for 2 hours a night. In addition, we only had one legendary in our 10-mans, where as most guilds are running with multiple.

I'm not saying this to make it seem like my guild is teh l337 pwnz. I'm just wondering - do you guys think things have gotten easier? I'm not talking the LFR tool, catering to casuals, etc. I'm talking cutting edge endgame, far past Blizzard wanting people to see the content. This is the point for serious progression and where the discussion about wellfare epics and the like is moot.

My question is, are fights now easier than they were in WotLK/TBC/Vanilla? Was clearing Naxx 40 a lot harder than H ICC, or H DS?

I know in this forum especially there's not many of us who have seen this content yet, but those of you who have, what's your opinion? I was just expecting something a little more intimidating than Heroic Warmaster.

You do remember me saying in the BDT that our best progression team jumped ship to Alliance because of the lack of recruitable Horde players, right? They were at 5/8 heroic well over a month ago.

You're a brat.

I've never been a bleeding-edge raider, but I think where things have improved is both in player skill (as was mentioned, we're used to the kinds of tricks bosses can pull) and in moving away from split-second fail checks. You'll die from standing in fire, but you get enough time to register that you're about to burn.

Looking at the Vanilla bosses they tended to boil down to straightforward mechanics (Geddon's bomb, Twin Emps not being near each other) with varying levels of punishment if you screwed them up (Twin Emps is basically a full heal if you ***** up for a split second), and then there were the ones that required specific raid compositions for particular skills (Instructor Razuvious with MCing priests, four Horsemen requiring unusual numbers of tanks) which make for interesting fights but generally artificial difficulty. "Do we have what it takes to beat this guy" should not mean "do we have a priest." 10-man Ulduar in particular seemed to hit the peak of this, with some fights requiring X ranged dps. Run a small guild where your class selection is who's logged on and it's all melee? Yogg-Saron just got a lot harder for ya.

That reminds me of one other factor: reduced numbers of people in a raid. Smaller raids means less fail tolerance, from MC's "10 competent people and 30 warm bodies" to Firelands 10-man "If someone dies you're probably hitting the enrage". Since there's more failure tolerance people saw more failure and thus assumed the fights were harder. Before my guild finally went into hibernation (folks'll be back for Pandaria) I had a hard enough time finding 9 other people capable of not moving through Flame Wreath, I can't imagine what the larger raids are like.