Old-time raiding

My guild has a levelling group, doing Burning Crusade raids. We've been seeing dungeons at the appropriate level, and now we're at level 70, we've finished all the Burning Crusade HC dungeons, and started the BC raids, even though we're struggling to get a full team. We did Karazhan last week. I think we'd all seen that raid already, soloing it on our 90s for transmogrification gear at some time or other. But of course level 90s cut through these bosses like a hot knife through butter, usually totalling the bosses before they get a chance to show all their abilities. So we were excited to be doing it at level 70, to see it as it was originally meant to be seen.

Only trouble was, we couldn't muster more than seven or eight people. Karazhan, as you need not be told, is a ten-man raid. We gave it a go, anyway, and did better than we expected. Sure, we had a few wipes as we figured out tactics, but really, we were never blocked. We managed to get to the end of the instance in two nights (each of which included an awful lot of running about, lost, trying to find where our corpses were, or where the next encounter was). Finally we killed Prince Malchezaar (and his beautiful bow dropped). It seemed a little too easy, since we were seven at the time, but I put it down to our gear, which included some Northrend pieces and some heirloom pieces. Anyway, we had a great time.

To round off the evening, we thought we'd just quickly head over to Magtheridon's Lair, to get a foretaste of the problems we'd have in a 25-man raid. Not too bad, we survived the trash, and managed to get it all down, even though we were still only eight. Then onto the boss. A couple of wipes there, but then we found a strategy that worked, and we managed to kill Magtheridon! Well, that was definitely challenging. But really, it should have been impossible. Eight level 70s managed to get down Magtheridon? That's more than just better gear. What's going on?

My first thought is that Magtheridon has been nerfed horribly since his heyday. But then I noticed an article on the blog I like Pancakes wherein Saxsymage remembered that 400 DPS used to be common for level 70s, and she had 700 DPS in Karazhan back in the day. Our top level 70 damage-dealer had over 3000 DPS last week in Karazhan and Magtheridon's Lair. Sure, Magtheridon may have been nerfed, but the real nerf to content has been the buff to player stats.

This is something I hadn't really paid much attention to, before. Sure, I knew that new players were now complaining about the trivial nature of many quests. I put that down to an XP buff, not a stat buff. People were outlevelling zones before they'd finished all the quests in them; and out of a desire to finish a quest-line once they'd started, they'd find themselves doing trivial grey quests, just to see the story to its end.  In other words, they're doing quests designed for, say, level 70 characters, but by the time they do them, they're level 72 or 73. But that isn't the case with Magtheridon. He was originally designed as a challenge for 25 level 70s, and can be defeated by eight of them now.

Yesterday, though, we tried Gruul's Lair, and had our asses handed to us.