Agreed, agreed, agreed. After a long time in a very casual guild where normal-mode progression was the main goal, I switched to a hard-mode-oriented guild, and was amazed at how small a sense of accomplishment I felt at my first hard-mode kill. It just wasn't special enough to justify the time and energy: I quit raiding altogether shortly thereafter.

While I agree with your points, I believe what you are suggesting (7 easy bosses, 7 hard bosses, with no heroic modes) goes back to the very model Blizzard was consciously moving away from in the first place, due to accessibility issues.

Imagine the Deathwing raid follows that model, and the Deathwing encounter is tuned to be on the harder side of things (think Illidan Stormrage pre-nerf), we go back to only having ~1% (whatever the figure is) of the raiding population successfully downing the boss. I don't believe it is reasonable to have such a small population actually experience the demise of the end-boss of an expansion.

I have to agree with what you state as a problem and disagree with what you state as a solution.

In agreement: I don't feel like hard modes are a worthy accomplishment. We did some in ICC, and it was sorta fun, but they were lackluster.

Disagreement: I really, REALLY like that my raid team can fight the final boss of a raid instance. Taking down the Lich King, finally, was one of the best things ever.

I don't want Blizzard to EVER go back to the model where most bosses and encounters couldn't be seen by everyone with some effort. One boss like Sinestra or Algalon is okay, as long as they're the Epilogue boss... the climax still needs to be Cho'Gall or Yogg-Sarron.

There are plenty of us out there that love this game, work hard on our gear, love our raid teams, research bosses... and still have trouble with normal mode raids. We're the JV teams of WoW. Our passion for the game and raiding is no less than the elite players', but there's just some amount of talent we lack. We're not casual, and we're not stupid... but for whatever reason we're just not on par with the better guilds.

With enough time and effort, we eventually conquer those bosses. We may be the 20th guild on the server to do it, but we love the accomplishment. If Blizzard puts those bosses out of reach, we get stuck waiting for nerfs and later tiers that trivialize the content to where it's not a challenge (even for us) any more. That's not a compelling experience at all.

So, until they figure out something better, I still believe hard modes are the way to go. Maybe they need to be triggered in more interesting ways than the toggle, but we JV players really want to down the boss too.

Although I can see your point, the less hardcore majority of the wow player base WILL complain if they cannot see all the content, they already complain that Heroic modes get better gear?! their claim is that they pay the same subscription fee, why should they not be able to experience all the content.

I can see both sides of the argument but as a non-raider I don't really have an opinian.
but if I was a business.. I would be trying to cater to the largest amount of people and people already complain about Cata raids being harder (even on normal) than the raids in Wrath

This is where I really feel the Ulduar hard-modes fit in, Really you could have a dozen bosses that have much more organic and logical reasons for making them harder and it gives a stronger impression that you're challenging yourself than Heroics which just feel like a natural line of progression, that and Algalon-type bosses are a great way to reward the hardcore while still remaining accessible.

To nopunin10did:

I understand your desire to want to be able to see all the content that the game has to offer, and support it. But I do think that the current model is killing the endgame for just about everyone. Even though I no longer play, I have friends in highly-ranked progression guilds and more casual normal-mode guilds, and they're all having trouble with attendance, drop-outs and recruiting. Every week that goes by with failed raids or missing players just makes it that much harder for the guild to keep going. It's NOT just a matter of hardcore vs. casual, but a problem of everyone feeling like something isn't right for the play style they prefer.

I don't have an answer - maybe there needs to be only one difficulty mode but with a progressive buff as in ICC. If so they really need to get away from the "raid seasons" model of current/old content and make tiers available/relevant for longer periods of time so that more casual players can get enough of a helping hand to see the content. Maybe they need to separate normal and heroic modes more distinctly (i.e. have heroic mode fully designed as such, and not just a scaled up normal mode). And who knows what they will do about raid size. But if they don't do something, there will be more collateral damage to the game's ecosystem from departing players and dissolved guilds, and once that spiral starts, it's hard to ever stop it.

@stormwalker:
I understand your point, I'd call the issue the Naxxramas problem. The last content in the 'old mode' was the original Naxx, and despite being in one of the cutting-edge horde guilds on Eldre'Thalas we had only just started Naxx. I thought it was crazy, at the time, that they would spend all that time designing and tuning content that was so hard only a vanishingly tiny % of the playerbase would ever see it, particularly just before an expansion.

That was the old model - that there was simply content that was hard to handle. There was no 'heroic' mode to MC or BWL - there didn't have to be. To be toting around loot from those places (even if, like me, you sucked, and the credit properly went entirely to the 35+ guys who kicked butt, got the places down to a farming status, and then generously let nubs like me accompany them...) was huge epeen.

But, Blizz recognized the wasted effort in Naxx, and moved to the normal/heroic model in TBC. Some might say that this was trying to pretend that heroic content was 'additional' content - I'd disagree. Blizz never pretended that heroic content was anything more than something to allow those willing to work a little harder to get better loot.

Of course that was before the 'point' system that allowed people to get near-final-instance quality gear by sheer persistence, which sort of obviated the original point of heroics.

Personally, having seen both systems develop over time, and with the point system in place, now I think it WOULD be time to go back to the original model, where there is simply content that you're not going to see unless you're quite good. There's nothing wrong with having goals that force you to stretch or that you simply can't reach without a further real investment in time, practice, and work. That's what generates the feeling of accomplishment that people are missing.

I like the Ragnaros model of normal-vs-heroic difficulty.

In normal, you sort of just beat him down and scare him off. You still "win" the encounter, but the job isn't really done.

Then later on, you come back in heroic-mode to really kill him.

With that model, the normal-mode raiders get to beat the content, and the heroic-mode raiders still get the feeling of accomplishment when they finish it all on heroic.

What if each boss was similar?