Hi.
I am wondering about how YOU think players should progress through raids. Should everyone be able to jump straight to the last or next last tier of raiding? Or shold everyone have to work their way up, starting with the intro raid of the expansion? To illustrate what I mean, I'll use some examples:
In Classic WoW, only a very small percentage of the playerbase were able to raid, so I'm going to exclude it for now.
In TBC, we saw a perfect example of the second option. There were lots of raids, including both single boss raids and long-ass raids that took ages to complete. However, just about every raider went through Karazhan before any other raid. Then, there was a middle tier with Tempest Keep and the small raids. Finally, there were Illudan and Kil'Jaeden. This way, just about everyone who were raiding Black Temple or Sunwell Plateau had considerable raiding experience and probably good gear. However, many remained stuck at Karazhan throughout the whole expansion.
In Wrath of the Lich King, we started pretty much how TBC had started: Naxx was the intro raid, and we had several small raids in OS, EoE and even stuff like VoA. Then, when Ulduar came, we were suddenly introduced to the new way things worked: Badges from Heroics were buffed, so that you could now get Ulduar-level gear without even touching Naxxramas. This trend continued through ToC and Icc. Even though the 25 mans and ther HC versions always remained a notch or two above the HC gear, it was now much easier for the general playerbase to access raiding content. Blizzard hit a new record in number Subscribers, but many "hardcore" raiders complained (complainS) that Wrath was too easy and noob friendly.
There are many opinions, and they are all biased.A new expansion is coming up, and only Blizzard knows what system will be used. What do you want for Cataclysm?
What do YOU think?
tl;dr What kind of raid progression system should be used in the future?