Six weeks into WotLK...

Oh hai all!

A combination of flu and the festive period have kept me away from this thing.

Well ok, that's not strictly true, flu, festivities and a growing sense of boredom with the game.

I had unreasonably high hopes for the 10-man game when the 10/25 man switch was announced. I hoped we'd get challenging, fun fights like later Karazhan was when you were still mainly in blues, or hell how Zul'Aman was to anyone not entirely geared in T6 epics.

Naxx10 is a joke. We've managed our second clear now and the only boss we didn't at least two-shot was Heigan the Unclean, and that's because it's a fight you can't bruteforce. That said, when you have 60% of your DPSers averaging under 2k DPS mark on a run, you can't really say your force was that brute.

In the new year, we're going to start on the Dragons. We're aiming to kill Magylos and possibly start with Satharion + 1 drake and see how it goes. After they're dead, then it's a long boring farm of the same old content until they release Uldar. Given the fact that Uldar isn't on the Public Test Realms and they normally like to have raid content sit on there for two months at least, I'm not expecting to see Uldar until mid-March at the earliest.

I'm torn. On the one hand, Blizz have made it easier than ever to take your first steps into raiding. Heroic drops are on a par with 10-man drops and Heroics can be completed by a group of lvl 80s who possess at least one functioning brain between them. Even if that's too much, you can get a bunch of nice level 80 drops from craftable items and a few quest chains alone.

On the other, for the proportion of people who have raided and know their way around a boss encounter, there's very little for them. Fifteen all-too-familiar bosses in Naxx, some unchallenging heroics and two stand-alone boss encounters. The big guilds can have the special privilege of clearing out the above content in both 10 and 25 man mode, so they can get sick of it in half the time.

I can appreciate why Blizz have made the choices they have, but I can't help but feel they've failed to learn the lesson from Warhammer Online and Age of Conan's launch this summer. They made the journey to 80 fun and rewarding, but they simply didn't leave enough content there to keep their rabid fanbase amused until they could release the next instance.

Q3 profits aside, I can't help but feel if they'd delayed release until January and brought Uldar out at launch it would feel more satisfying. As it is, it looks very much like we have at least 2-3 months of time-killing ahead of us before the first ray of new content.