Originally Posted by
Dracodraco
Late february early march is way off. Add another month to that. Your approx means that in 3 weeks, they need to test the remaining 10 man normal bosses, 25 man normal bosses, 10+25 heroic bosses, tune classes (they stated that they hadn't really begun to tweak DPS yet), and test the new forge-thing that's supposed to make us raid-worthy weapons. Late april, early march is a much better approximate, considering the above factors.
One thing that I'd like to remind you, is that five months is a LONG time before they even touch the encounters - consider Dragon Soul, where you could kill the first heroic boss the 7th december, and the 5% nerf was activated the 31th of january - there's two months between the release and the first gradual nerf. They left these bosses untouched for more than double that. And contrary to dragon soul, these bosses all have a gradual upwards curve in terms of difficulty - not just "faceroll, faceroll, faceroll, faceroll, dps check, stand in / dont stand in check, wall/classstacking, faceroll".
Firelands opened in the start of july, and had an instant 20% nerf to everything put into place halfway through september - one and a half month.
ICC in all of this is a "Bad" example due to extremely heavy gating. But consider it for a moment - no guild downed the unnerfed Lich king untill they were in BiS gear and went back and turned the buff off, just to prove that they could. The first kill was at 5%. But consider the fact that the first sindragosa and putricide kill was done feb 11 and 12 respectively, and the 5% buff came out just two weeks later...
Giving us 4-5 months to do this tier without touching anything but glaring oversights/clear overtunes (garajal flower-power V2, Spirit kings and Zorlok RNG anyone?) is a godsend, and plenty of time for everyone to get everything down if they really want to see the unnerfed content.