Regardless you missed my point.
You have 1 week of a tier to get aotc, before it becomes a “requirement” for more than half of pugs on heroic, and a not insignificant number of normal groups.
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Hard for me to imagine trying to pug heroic the first couple of weeks of a tier. You have my sympathies.
Then how do all these thousands of other people pug it months later?
I pug all the time. Most heroic runs don’t require it or they say they do but don’t check.
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The better question is why do you care enough about this to make a post basically complaining that it exists? It’s a difficulty level. Made for people who want to play at that difficulty. You dont want to? Dont. Who cares otherwise.
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Hey, you’re further than me. I don’t think I’m too bad of a player, not a magical parse-destroyer or anything but I can pull passable DPS and not die to everything. Which is why I don’t pretend to be a mythic worthy raider and why I stick to heroic. I got the AotC and I’m happy with that.
I think it’s fine the way it is. Most folks will realistically raid two difficulties. Either normal and heroic, or heroic and mythic usually.
Normal is not analogous to LFR for a few reasons:
First and foremost, Normal allows a guild to go in with 10+ players in a dedicated guild group. We used normal several times in BfA for new and returning players who were rusty. This allows inexperienced people to raid in a guild environment and become accustomed to dedicated raid team culture/playstyle. LFR does not allow for this, so normal cannot be replaced by LFR.
Secondly, Normal has a baseline of the boss fight that is more complete than the LFR encounter. The difference between the Normal encounter and the Heroic encounter is minimal, with only lowered damage intake and slightly less stringent mechanics. For example, Inquisitor doesn’t require a new team to kick the ball each round and your team’s mistakes do less damage, but the encounter is otherwise identical to Heroic. For our rusty and new players, Normal allows a learning environment that does not become an impenetrable wipe wall without sacrificing the rules of actual raiding.
Thirdly, Normal is an excellent way for small guilds like mine to offer alt nights that can clear the entire raid in one go. For those who like raiding on more than one toon, this is a plus.
Normal is just an option. If you don’t like it; don’t play it.
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I’m not complaining that it exists. I think it is not tuned in a way that maximizes the four difficulties. I think the game would be better served with a harder tuning for Normal and Heroic (and rewards that match that difficulty) because, right now, they are much closer to each other in tuning than Heroic is to Mythic, and that huge gap feels weird for a lot of us that do Heroic as our main mode. We end up clearing normal in one or two nights at the start of the tier, heroic in 3 or 4 weeks (or less), and then we end up going into mythic and it feels like we are slamming our willies in car doors.
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I 100% agree with this.
It’s the stepping stone for people that don’t necessarily play the game for loot and gear, but enjoy raiding and want to start learning.
LFR just allows the super casuals under the influence to smash bosses without thinking about much - along with some extra xmog color variants and to see what happens in the story.
Normal is where raiding mechanics start to kick in and learning can happen.
Heroic is where you want to take raiding to the next level.
and Mythic is where you’re a masochist and just enjoy smashing your face into a wall. 
How does removing normal or merging it with heroic going to help you with any of that.
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Oh ok. I misunderstood the reason for your post. I haven’t done any organized raiding for a bit. It’s the turning of it you’re not liking? Normal and heroic are too easy and mythic is too hard?
Are you serious? You have to be trolling… I mean for real…
Just because players call it a requirement doesn’t mean it is. There are pugs out there that don’t ask for it. Most pugs require you to link it before they will even consider inviting you. Why do you think there are so many guilds who sell heroic n’zoth kills…
Why do these questions exist?
I think merging the two with a better difficulty curve that gives a meaningful sense of progression, starting easier than current heroic and ending somewhere more difficult than current heroic, is one possible solution. Alternatively, leaving normal as it is and tuning heroic up could also work, something to create a clearer distinction between the two difficulties. Like I said, right now they are just too similar to each other.
I don’t think Mythic is too hard so much as I think Normal and Heroic are too easy. Mythic is really inaccessible, which is fine, except that the gap between Heroic and Mythic is such that you have decent players like we have in my guild that just plow through Heroic and run out of content, so we end up going into Mythic and it is just miserable.
As I’ve been posting and talking through this I think that is kind of where I have landed.
Well, OP explained why, and he has a good point.
Normal and Heroic are very close together. I disagree with OP about getting rid of Normal, but I agree with OP that Heroic should be tuned harder. Normal is fine where it is, IMO. It’s easy. It’s stress-free. It’s a reasonable intro to the “real” fight if heroic is your usual mode.
Our guild simply is not big enough to keep a dedicated mythic team with the rules that exist for mythic raiding. Since that is the case, we rarely get to even attempt mythic difficulty despite the fact that many of us are capable and interested in moving that way.
I’d like for Heroic to be more challenging, and I think OP’s point about the gap between Normal and Heroic being MUCH smaller than the gap between Heroic and Mythic is valid. Closing that difficulty gap a bit would be very gratifying to guilds like mine who simply don’t have the numbers necessary to hit mythic.
I don’t want to change the way my guild does things. We’re not hard core and we never will be. We like accommodating noobs who have to be shown how to download DBM, and we like challenging gameplay on the other end, as well. Heroic is fun for us, and it’s where we spend most of our raiding time each tier, but we are effectively capped there by the 20-man rule. Increasing the difficulty of Heroic would be good.
Because not everyone in the world is good enough for Mythic raids, myself included. I only do raids for the experience, and for a quest, so I don’t have a lot of skill in that area. I struggle with raiding, and I am SO GLAD Normal exists. (Please don’t hate, I am a casual.)
Why do you care?
If you don’t like it, don’t do it.
i mean to play devils advocate what is LFR there for then if not as the “first steps” by design is it supposed to be the cesspool it’s become?
Scroll up and read the thread.
I did say organized raiding. Some folks might not have a guild and LFR is there for them.