It doesn't really encourage teamwork when encounters are designed around 20% of the team not pulling their weight.

I agree that Cata raids were too difficult, especially for the x.0 tier, but I disagree that fights should be tuned so 2-5 people can be carried or covered for. In fact, that's the reason I couldn't stand 25 mans in Wrath and play strictly ten man: everyone has some level of responsibility. Being one of those last 3-4 dps in a 25man was boring, I felt I could go barrel off a cliff or go get a sandwhich and 90% of the time it wouldn't matter.

Were a lot of these Cata fights quite unforgiving on the individual level? Very much so, the individual margin or error was very small and it often only took one goof by one person to wipe it for everyone. That being said, I don't think that taking the fundamental idea away or tuning the fights to allow people to be carried is a good fix.

Individual responsibility is good, it adds depth and allows every player to feel like they command the fate of the fight (for better or worse), it just needs to be implemented in a way that if your average raider ever gets within 10 yards of someone or is two seconds late on an interrupt or movement it doesn't wipe the entire raid.

I'm so baffled by the "T11 is hard" talk... Our guild has never been hardcore in any way, and in fact for cata we've gone even more relaxed (most of us never log in except for raids, etc) yet somehow we've ended up at 8/13 heroic and #4 on our server (#2 10 man behind a guild that got 13/13 in Feb). So I've always thought "if our scrub guild can do it, why can't everyone else?"

Anyways, I suppose the nerfs will help get more people involved in raiding, which is always nice.

Individual Responsibility.... Interesting choice of words FOR A GAME. Seriously. This is a game for most people. Sure, it may be a "serious" game for half my raiding guild, but not the other half. They just want to have fun with their friends and slay internet dragons, not wipe on Cho'gall for 4 weeks. I spend all day making games for a living. I want to come home and goof off and kill a big dragon, not feel creeping frustration and anger because the difficulty is tuned so tightly a casual guild in nearly all 359s can't down the bosses after 5 MONTHS.

And it's not just people not being bad, or not standing in stuff. It's when we wipe and it takes 15 minutes to get back and buffed because ONE of the healers dc-ed. When one dps lags a bit and gets caught by an ooze and it wipes all the ranged because he just happened to be running through the group away from the oozes? When we have a wipe on Cho'gall because the mage and the hunter, who are our ONLY slows on the bloods BOTH happen to get the conversion and the bloods munch everyone?

Tuning with the idea of having 20% "carried" isn't to allow for carrying (though it does allow for it, that's not it's intent) it's to allow for mistakes and bad rng to not completely ruin an attempt. It's to allow for your top dps to be the one who does interrupts and you can still down the boss without his top dps being quite as amazing. It allows for cats jumping on keyboards, kids being put to bed, phone calls, players who are nice but aren't going to bow to EJ and spec a way they don't want to play. It allows everyone to see the end, even if it takes them 5 months to get there.

Cataclysm killed my guild's 25 man raid that had been together from late Vanilla. We were semi-casual, with two 3 hour raids per week, with somewhat unpredictable attendance. In other words, probably a pretty typical 25, excluding the 10% of hardcore raiders. We had managed to clear every previous tier of content. Not nearly as fast as some guilds, but we always progressed steadily and eventually got there.

Cata was just too hard, and precisely for the unforgiving mechanics described above. In my experience, you have to assume that 1-2 players in a 25 will have something go wrong in each attempt -- DC, angry spouse, frozen screen, what have you. Another 1-2 will have a brain fart and stand where they shouldn't. We've all done it, lots. So I agree that there has to be some room for error built into each encounter.

Over and over, we had people stop raiding because they were finding it stressful. Players felt that if they screwed up once, or DCed, or whatever, the attempt would fail because of them. So when we began to get stonewalled, the pressure mounted, and players simply stopped showing up.

I agree that part of the fun of raiding is the challenge, but it has to be a manageable challenge. Insta-gib mechanics, where one error or untimely technical problem will doom the attempt, aren't fun. They just make the game stressful. And I get enough stress at work.