Sure it does as it impacts the entire discussion. The entry level to raiding 10 man/normal was always designed to be easy.
Heroic 25 mans were always hard and were always only achieved by a few people. All this change does is punish people who participate in the lower difficulties.
Shouldn’t be an issue for anybody doing normals. Maybe if you are talking Heroic content they might have some close fights.
I remember the first night of each wing in ICC though and it was ridiculously easy. Considering how skilled players are today it will not be a problem.
You remove running ToC on 4 different difficulties, SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE you didn’t want people to feel forced to run that many raids every week…
but also want to nerf the ilvl of the gear that drops, to force everyone into running ulduar over and over, even during the ToC tier…?
Not buying it.
The far more likely scenario, is the lead dev is a sell confessed GDKP shill and he wants another viable raid to sell carries in every week. Something that is less likely to happen if ToC gear entirely invalidates Ulduar… That’s the thing about GDKP degenerates, they always want more.
As per my thoughts on it:
-Yes Ulduar is a great raid, and yes, ToC kind of sucks… but I’d argue that one of the better things Wrath got right is that you aren’t compelled to keep running older tiers over and over and over and over for some asinine uber rare drop.
If you really want to encourage people to do older content, put transmog into the game, and add Naxx 40 back into EPL… Ulduar in particular has some of the entire game’s best xmogs, and chasing appearances alone will get plenty of people running all sorts of outdated content.
The changes are getting more invasive. They are at the point where they are screwing with gear progression paths now.
You are also right about the doublespeak they did about merging h and n lockouts but at the same time thinking of strong arming people into running ulduar longer.