By pointing out that some fights were “brutally hard”, regardless of their position, means that the content is getting harder and harder. If it wasn’t, those blocks wouldn’t exist.

If you are in a serious, 25-man progression guild, then it seems to me you should be passionately supporting changes that get more people into “raiding.” (Obviously, Blizzard should have different difficulty levels so nerfing their content is not nerfing your content.) This is especially true of Cata where changes in classes, heroics, guild perks/progressions have lost a number of raiders. If 90% of the 7/7 HM raiders left the game and idk 5%? 10%? 1%? of the never defeated Magmaw players decided to stay subscribed, then it would be increased revenue for Blizzard. ATM, serious progression content is being funded by people not doing it.

I suggest that referring to bosses as ‘hard” or “easy” is not relevant and just provokes some epeen posturing. The issue is that if x% of people did Noth or LordM in the first month and x-20% did a Cata boss; it does not matter whether you think the boss is hard or whether you think it should be hard for others. It is what it is.

This is not a F2P game where some hardcore players spend thousands of dollars and casuals spend 0. The person wiping on Magmaw pays the same as the person in Vodka.

On my server alone, I can name for you a half dozen guilds that were deep into heroic ICC, and exploded when they staggered in T11. Fates Hand, Full Circle, Semi Serious, Midnight Vanguard, Great Men in History, Crypt Friends, Wrough from Ruin, Entropic, Reading is Fundamental, and I think I’ve gone past the half dozen. Some had to drop down to 10 mans as they bled raiders operating as a shell of their former selves, more often though, they just faded away.

Nef is a different style of fight than Rag. Nef is less of a throughput check, and more of a coordination check. Rag is a pretty tightly tuned gear check. If they hadn’t of emasculated the encounter, Nefarian normal would be wiping groups in T13 gear that couldn’t figure out how to coordinate the interrupts, or have an add tank that isn’t capable of kiting properly. Time will not be so kind to rag. On normal, there’s many mechanics that you have to respect on rag because of the damage output. But the only real Pass/Fail mechanic is the meteors, and as DPS rises, people spend less time in phase three, fewer meteors spawn, and groups can DPS their way to freedom. Skilled groups in the next teir, or even this tier if the nerfs resemble the T11 nerfs, will be able to completely ignore the meteors because they’ll push to 10% before the first meteor even spawns.

I believe that the difference between the perspective of yourself and myself and Rohan is the quality of the groups. You’re in a serious progression group that clears all content while current. Rohan and Myself are in guilds that reach heroic content, put in work, but rarely clear a tier while it’s still current. As Rohan once put it, you’re in the Royalty, we’re in the aristocracy. In groups like yours, coordination on things like interrupts, and kiting adds is second nature, so your only major concern on Nefarian is throughput. Whereas groups like ours take a little while to figure out who’s interrupting what, what’s the timing on the shadowflame barrage. Further complicating the matter is that groups like ours took longer to get there, so we’ve farmed up more gear, and with gear throughput issues naturally correct themselves. So for us, the hard part of Rag nerfs itself.

As for the difficulty problem, Rohan actually did a very interseting couple of posts that addressed that issue wonderfully and are a great read if you’ve not seen them yet!