Removing casual content

I love 5-man dungeons. So I am excited to report on the upcoming 1.10 patch notes and accompanying explanations in which Blizzard promises us 3 new 5-man-only dungeons, and one new dungeon for 10 players. The names of these dungeons are:

Stratholme: 5 players
Scholomance: 5 players
Blackrock Depths: 5 players
Blackrock Spire: 10 players

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HEY! WAIT A MINUTE!

Blizzard is about to totally screw the casual players, and remove a lot of high-level content from their reach. A 10-man raid to Stratholme, Scholomance, or BRD currently is one of the few ways to get decent blue gear for a casual player. Raiding these places with 10 people is relatively easy, thus it can be done on a casual play schedule and with the average pickup group containing a few of the usual bad players. Your chance on winning loot diminishes due to the loot being shared by 10 people. But for many people that is still preferable to doing these places in 5-man groups, because that is really hard, and even one bad player can repeatedly wipe the whole pickup group.

Blizzard obviously observed that many hardcore players are not visiting these dungeons any more, because raiding them is no challenge for the power gamer, and there isn't much decent loot to be found there, compared with Molten Core or Zul'Gurub. So they simply redecorated these dungeons, added more and better loot, added some bosses, but lowered the cap by 5 in all cases. Thus now these dungeons are more interesting to people like me, who are in a well-organized guild, who like the challenge of a 5-man group, and who will now be rewarded with better loot.

To make these old dungeons even more interesting, Blizzard introduces a new series of quests for all classes. *IF* you have your first blue class set of equipment (e.g. Valor for warriors, Devout for priests, etc.), you can now do these quests to upgrade the set into 4 stronger blue items and 4 epic items. Getting the class set is done as it always was in these 4 dungeons, and now you can return there for the upgrade quests.

I *am* looking forward to doing these places, although on average there are 2 pieces of class set gear dropping per trip, so a group of 5 people needing 8 pieces each will need to go 20 to 40 times (discounting pieces that are not for their classes or doubles) before they got their complete class set. And then they will need to go some more for the upgrades.

But Blizzard had announced these new class set update items as being for casual players, in response to criticism on them only adding content for hardcore player. And that is an outrageous bait and switch marketing ploy. A casual player who has just hit level 60, and who doesn't have a guild with lots of better equipped and more experienced guild mates to help him to run through these 4 dungeons, will have a really hard time succeeding a 5-man group to Scholomance, for example. And while before he had the *option* of doing these places in 5-man or in raid, now Blizzard is taking this option away from him, forcing him into the harder variant, and effectively removing content from the reach of the casual player.

And this isn't even sure to work to renew the interest of the hardcore players in the old dungeons. Many of them have done these places already so often, they are completely bored of them, and a new coat of paint won't get them back in there. I would have loved if Blizzard had really introduced 4 new dungeons for small groups, but taking easy content away from casual players to make it more attractive for the better organized guilds is just not right.