I’ve read/heard there’s been a lot of unhappiness with the Cataclysm update, on various sides of the coin.  Casual raiders were not happy with the Firelands raids saying it was too hard.  I rather enjoyed them.  Hard core raiders were upset when it was nerfed and quit over it because they weren’t as hard. etc

I really had no problem with the difficulty of ICC, Bot/Bwd, or Firelands. What is kind of getting my goat lately is progress on gear, particularly tailored items. When cata first came out you could buy the epic pants/belt patterns with a bunch of embersilk or dreamcloth. You could make steady self-made progress on those.

Then Firelands rolls around and the patterns are drops from the FL raid trash ONLY.  Did I ever see those drop? No. Did I ever get a pattern? No.  I bought the spirit boots rec from the AH once and flipped it for profit expecting more to show up, but then the drops were nerfed into nonexistence and I literally never saw that boot pattern again until it didn’t even matter any more. Maybe it’s because I didn’t want to drop 15- 30k on a recipe that would never, EVER recup the costs of itself. But I had no way to get that pattern myself.

Now with Dragon Soul we still have the same crap with patterns, but ALL tier is based on tokens, when previously you could get everything but shoulders and helmet from VP. Now you have to win tokens to get anything, or get lucky in BH. Add to that you cannot prospect epic gems from any ore, those also only come from raids.  I know people asked for gear and such to go back to BC standards which I guess were “fun” to some people, but I personally like being able to make progress to some degree outside of raiding, even though I’ve always raided. The cost of inferno rubies have gone way up too since most people are using those instead of a 2-15k gems from raids.  Anyway my point is, I like being able to make my own, even if slow, progress on a few things myself, and not having to require raids 100% to get every upgrade.