Got the Karazhan key!

After 2 weeks of trying I finally succeeded in getting the Karazhan key in my 13th attempt. Woot! As several people suggested, taking a shadow priest into the group did the trick. Good that I did that now, but apparently shadow priests are getting nerfed this week, with their Vampiric Embrace getting reduced in efficiency considerably. VE was such a help in Black Morass, as it saved me tons of mana for healing the non-tanks. I only needed to dispel and heal the tank.

But having finally done it does in no way alter my opinion that this encounter is far too hard for a mandatory attunement quest. I did it so often that after finally getting there I am now revered with Keepers of Time, which gave me the key to redo the thing on heroic mode. Frankly, I can't even imagine that anyone will ever be able to beat Black Morass in heroic mode, not before another raise of the level cap. In my opinion all the non-heroic 5-man content in the game should be doable in a pickup-group (and BM most certainly isn't). If you want ultra-hard content, switch to heroic, there is no need to have places where the average player can't succeed in normal mode.

Nills wrote an excellent comment on yesterday's thread, which I'm going to quote here:

1. Blizzard freaked out at the idea of the hardcore raiders completing all the content in 6 months, and tuned the entry endgame too steep. Indeed, over on the hardcore forums the opinion is that Kara (and BM) are tuned just right, but there is a complete brick wall in difficulty after the first 25-man boss. Somewhere under 100 guilds are able to progress at all, and a couple bosses have only been killed by 2-3 after weeks. It was particularly dumb for blizzard to worry about the uber-hardcore because they never quit through months of waiting for content before. Make em wait a few months in the middle of the year, then patch in BT, make em wait a few months at the end of the year. Problem solved. This perspective can also be seen in the lack of current limits on consumables for 25-man raids (=tuning around consumables= farming 1/3 of your playtime).

2. Blizzard took the wrong approach to solving the gear gap issues. Rather than carefully introduce new gear tiers/content that let non-raiders/pvpers/arena pvpers stay even with or just a tiny step behind cutting edge raiders throughout the year, they totally nerfed gear progression in karazahn and beyond. The carrot is not what it used to be.

3. Blizzard fell into the dichotomy you most commonly see on the forums, casual vs. raider. They really needs to understand that in between the 40% who play <10 hours a week, "casuals" and the 5 % who play >30, "hardcores", there is a large pool of MMO enthusiasts, "semi-casuals" who are enthusiasts and for whom MMO play has more or less replaced TV. These people are more reliable long-term subscribers than casual players, many of them pull several friends along with them, and they do not burn through content at the speed of hardcores. The first game that is built entirely around this group will be a big success.

So what we got now is an end-game which is harder than the previous version, has less lure of "phat epix loot", and isn't suited for the 95% of the population which are casual or middle-class. Lots of Naxxramases, no UBRSes. Bad idea, both from a game design and from a business point of view.

So now I'm attuned to Karazhan, and if I'm lucky I'll get a raid spot and get to see the place. I'll give it a fair try, and see how it develops. But if it turns out that the end-game still revolves about wiping 12 times to succeed some minor step forward in the 13th attempt, I don't think I'll do that very long.