Originally Posted by
eschatological
We raid 12 hours a week and are 9/16H. We're obviously not top 100 with those numbers, but we'll be finished well before the new patch comes out. If you assume 48 hours a month for 4 months, that's 192 hours, which isn't much compared to what my 7/16 normal mode friends do on a different realm. Not much time does not automatically translate into "inability to progress," and it hasn't meant that for awhile.
For example, we got a late start on this xpac. 3 weeks ago, we were 4/16H. 2 weeks ago we finished H-MSV. Last week we practically annhilated bosses 2, 3, and 4 in H-HoF. This week I wouldn't be surprised if we killed H-Vor'lok, H-Ambershaper, and maybe H-Lei Shi. At our pace, our gear progression helps us take down bosses that just one month ago were near impossible - it's a fine balance to maintain design wise, and I think Blizzard hit it right on. The guilds with time and skill hit it in the first few weeks, the guilds with skill but maybe not time hit it in the following few months just from natural gearing up, and the guilds with time and less skill hit maybe 75% of it before the new tier comes out. The middle group (which I'm in) is probably most efficient in their killing because they benefit from the work the top guilds put in and have similar skill to execute it (or enough, at least, no heroic raider really things heroics are mind-bogglingly tough especially when Blizz rolls out nerfs like they do on near-impossible mechanics like H-Vizier and H-Sha p2). But the latter group is surely more inefficient than the first group.