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Well, it took quite long to gear up a whole raid, indeed. But apart from the bad sides (slow gearing up, need to gather up 40 people, etc), having 40 players work as a team definitely felt extremely epic.

Ragnaros, Nefarian, they were truly epic.

I have no idea. My guess is that multiple tier pieces dropped off of the same boss on the same kill.

'having 40 players work as a team definitely'

Don't you mean 30? Since 10 of them were probably afk.

Sorry, too busy spamming my BoSalv key to do anything!

It took longer. A lot longer. Like, months of farming MC to get everybody decked out. We've got it pretty good that way in BC.

The thing that I don't miss about 40 man raids is that actually getting 40 people was often the hardest part. You'd wind up simply needing warm bodies. So unless you were in a top-tier guild that could leech players from other guilds, you wound up with this:

- 15 Great members
- 10 Good members
- 5 borderline
- 10 people who autoshot, and go AFK for ten minutes at a time without anybody noticing.

BC largely cut out the bottom fifteen, which I can live with.

Before I got into WoW - I avoided the game after hearing about raids from a friend. Mind you at the time I thought that was how the whole game worked.

He told me of the 40-person thing. He also mentioned that he had required hours of play, his guild restricted him to 3 toons allowed, used xFire to make sure he wasn't logged into WoW on another toon somewhere, or some other game, and of course - the rules about spec, gear, and so on.

Did -not- sound fun.

By the time I joined, a few months before BC, that kind of mentality was just about at its breaking point, and I think BC did a lot to improve things.

But having armory and guild banks and PvP-gear has also really upped the guild -drama wars- And while a 40-person raid was really rough to get organized, 10 and 25-persons really aren't much better.

25s, which the extreme gear they require to get in, are little better than 40s were. 10s, would be great but for the whole thing about stacking buffs and needing so specific of classes (or people thinking its needed) resulting in still a decent amount of drama and grind-festing to get to them. Better, but still needs improvement.

40 mans, while epic your first time, quickly became an evil, evil thing.

Its amazing how many people still believe the class stereotypes, even when they have been disproven. Not theorycrafted, disproven.

Try reading about felguard raiding sometime.
http://wowmb.net/forums/f106/17405-raiding_felguard_ssc_tk_hyjal_bt/

Nyarlathotep does a nice write-up of a felguard raiding SSC, TK, Hyjal and BT. The conclusion? "On average it seems demonology damage is higher than other warlock build damage."

Class balance? There really is never a class balance. IMO they screw up the premise of some classes. I still remember the days when dagger rogues could actually do some good. Now dagger rogues are like hitting with butterknives. Seriously, there are so many move specifically for daggers on rogues, yet now it's stupid to roll with daggers. TY BC. Still being a mage, (and prone to QQ) I have seen my class go down the drain since WoW's original Beta and am praying that Blizz finally relizes that we need help.

I switched from Affliction to Demonology a few weeks ago and probably won't look back for a year. My DPS about trippled immediately and my survivability went up.

But Demonology requires pet management, which a large number of WoW players can't handle.

I've seen Demo 'locks in Kara and badge gear top DPS charts against T6-geared raids. It's an amazing spec. Too bad Destro is so much easier.

Unless they pull an EQ where the latest expansion gives you access to the content of all expansions.

Blizzard's thought process must've been something in the sence of that the bad things outweigh the good things, one of which is the epic feeling.

And I have to agree with them. Good 25-man (and perhaps 10-man) encounters can still feel very epic, just differently. It just depends on one's preferences.