Originally Posted by
Eacaraxe
This is coming from someone who has played since vanilla, but never raided regularly after BC's release...but personally, I share the sentiment but for entirely different reasons. Something most players nowadays have never experienced, or conveniently forgotten, is that nearly all endgame content prior to the onslaught of 20+ player raids in response to the complaints of a very vocal 3-5% of players came in the form of 5- to 10-mans that could be PuG'ed by a group of competent players in greens.
By competent I don't mean "yeah, I just solo kited the end boss when the rest of the group wiped on pull," I mean "yeah, I can kite Drakk", which was the simplest role in what used to be the most technically-demanding encounter in the game*. This was prior to the random dungeon finder and cross-server dungeons, when a player could build a reputation on a given server for good (or poor) competency or conduct and as a result, groups were much more selective of who was invited to participate.
The post-BC design sentiment is overwhelmingly in favor of raiding guilds. Blizzard's been all over the place with implementing that, whether it's the harshly over-tuned BC-era raids which overrode their early attempts at genuine hybridization through reinforcing class roles and "raid optimization" that catered to no one but the "hardcore" 4%, the Wrath-era in which raids were little more than loot and achievement farms, or the Cataclysm-era which to this point seems to try to find a happy medium of the two yet somehow managed to create a harsher series of gear requirements and progression climbing than what was even found in the BC era. Through it all, the common factor is that once the player (very quickly) hits maximum level, the only progression paths are to join a guild and raid, run dungeons for VP/JP, farm gold and buy gear upgrades through the AH, or participate in PvP (which still at least requires pre-made groups and PvP guilds now AFAIK). Only one of those progression paths sees genuinely new, quality content released on a regular basis, let alone sufficient content for the game to stay fresh until the next release.
Personally, I wish Blizzard would dump the 20+ raid category for anything but novelty value or truly endgame encounters (the final boss of an expansion cycle or encounters with major lore characters, for example) and refocus on 5- to 10-man dungeons that focus on mechanics, coordination, and player skill above gear checking. That's the way the game was on launch, and honestly it's most engaging and enjoyable point despite its numerous flaws. As I mentioned before, Drakkisath was the most difficult encounter in the game at one point* yet a group of players in random drop greens could wipe the floor with him if they knew the encounter and their role.
* Up until AQ, anyhow. Exception made for certain fake-difficulty raid encounters which utilized random attributes or mechanics that were less about being a good player than not causing a wipe by being in the wrong place at the wrong time for any reason.