Originally Posted by
eschatological
Of course this affects the medium-core raiders the most. We're 13/16H, but we only raid 9-12 hours a week depending on our schedule. Considering it was mid-November when all bosses were finally released and heroic modes were available in everything, it'll be about 4 months for 16 heroic bosses, even with this extra week added on. Now granted, you could have been up-to 6/6H before that 4 months started because of the gating, but even if you only had the 10 heroic HoF and ToES bosses left, that's a little over a week of raiding per boss to stay on pace. And most of these medium tier progression guilds weren't 6/6H. IIRC, we were 4/6H when heroic modes were available in HoF/ToES, so we had 4 months to do 12 heroic bosses. Maybe you think "Hey, it was done in a week, you should be able to do it," but a lot of these bosses took 50/60 and up to a couple hundred attempts for some guilds. It'll take us slightly less, maybe 40 or so, but even so, they knock out the 50 attempts in one 12 hour night, we take 2 weeks to do it so we can clear farm as well beforehand.
It is easily one the largest tiers ever, in one of the shortest amounts of time. Only ToC was a shorter tier time-wise, only T8 (Naxx + Sarth + Maly) was longer with 17 bosses, even though most people stopped doing Sarth/Maly at some point.