The following is a response to Does World of Warcraft need to be more difficult?
There are a few points in here that I think are right on the money, but part of it gets lost in the discussion of difficulty.
Learning Curve - Many of us are quite familiar with basic encounter design at this point and certainly that plays into how raiding feels and how hard it is. The trick is how do you design content for the new people and veterans? Not to mention that this leads to ecounters with way too much stuff going on. Ever tried explaining Omnotron to a new player? Agreed that it's important not to underestimate how this affects our comparison of older content to now, and realize how it affects the game currently.
Learning as Content - Agreed on this part entirely. For all of Wrath I played in a guild that didn't read strats and it was glorious. About halfway through Cata that proved to be a problem, the ecounters had just become too complex to figure out in a timely fashion. I think they need to rethink the Beta testing of raid encounters and maybe only release the journal entries in raids slowly.
Accessibility - WoW is going through the process of splitting the "I want to see it all" group off from the "I want it to be x difficult" group. In the end I think that's a good thing, but there will be growing pains along the way. Some people were only "suffering through" raiding in order to see stuff, and now with the LFR, that's not longer required. All raiding guilds are dealing with the fallout of that.
The Journey - This one is tricky. I too felt defeating Deathwing on normal felt less special because I had already defeated him so many times in LFR. I imagine people heroic raiding have felt that way about normal for a while now. The first way to "fix" this is to not require multiple versions. LFR gear was useful to people decked out in Firelands normal gear and normal mode is required for heroic mode. That should probably change. My only other idea is maybe to release LFR a little slower? Hold it off for a week or release one boss a week or something.
Difficulty - "It's not simply a matter of the game's getting considerably easier" "In Cataclysm, the bosses presented didn't pose enough of a challenge" I think Sinestra, Heroic Rag, and Heroic Spine would like a word with you. Much of heroic raiding, pre-nerf, from the numbers I have seen, was plenty hard. Paragon said after killnig Sinestra "All in all, this tier of raiding in my opinion has been the hardest tier of raiding overall." Heroic Raiding is the successor to 25 man BC raids, so remember to compare apples to apples.
Time to kill bosses - "The months that the video above discusses, between the release of The Burning Crusade and the first kill of Kael'thas? That doesn't exist anymore." Sure but part of that was due to attunements and remember Sinestra wasn't killed until 1.5 months after Cata release. Did the first tier of Wrath fall too fast? Possibly, and Blizzard later admitted Naxx was likely too easy. Let's try to keep all that in mind.
Change in Philosophy - Raiding (non-LFR) is at a cross roads. No longer is it the way to see content. It is there as a way to complete something difficult as a group. That's it. As such, a few adjustments should be made. Normal mode raiding should have a way of becoming slowly easier over time. Not through nerfing, which feels forced, but through gearing. To do so, enough gear needs to drop early, and ecounters need to not have one shot (or prett much one shot) abilities. Cata has been hit and miss here and missed more than it hit. For heroic raiding, there needs to be a way to compete on difficulty. Change it from I beat it on x date, to I beat it at 95%, or 105%, or 125%. Or maybe take the challange mode route and do time based runs. Give those who crave the difficult competition an outlet.
