Some folks might think that it’s making things easy for the casual player, and they would be absolutely correct. However, Blizzard appears to have learned a very valuable lesson. It is not cost-effective, in the long run, for them to design all of this great content that only 5-10% of the player base will ever see. When Burning Crusade went live, guilds that were more casual never gave Zul’Gurub, Ahn’Qiraj, or Naxxramas a second (or even first) glance. That is a lot of time and effort (read: product) from Blizzard that customers never saw, but paid for anyway.

This time, while the end-game guilds have moved on to Sunwell Plateau (or even Northrend, when Wrath of the Lich King is released), the average casual player will have had a chance to experience more of Burning Crusade’s content. This gives an expansion more value to the casual player and makes it more likely that the player will not leave WoW power leveling for any of the new games coming to market soon. Giving players more content to experience is a very profitable proposition for Blizzard, and making "not-quite-leading edge" content available to casual players requires no wow gold or development time on their part. The top end guilds will move on to the newest content (Sunwell), and casual players will have plenty to do while waiting for Lich King to arrive.

Let’s say you hand me a list of guilds that play regularly on my server. With a small margin for error, I have a decent idea of the progression level of most of those guilds. I know that the Alliance side of my server has a number of MH/BT guilds, including 2 of the top guilds in the US. I also know that we have a few guilds on Horde side working on Black Temple as well. After this patch, I will still know who those guilds are, and what they accomplished. I will still know that Risen cleared Black Temple first on our server (Even if they are Alliance, you still have to respect that). No matter what my guild, or any other guild does after this patch, what came before still remains.


That is where "welfare epics" come into play. While understanding that the term "Welfare Epics" originally applied to PVP Arena rewards, the term is easily applicable here as well. Instead of farming tier 5 and tier 6 gear for an entire guild, you can leapfrog ahead by running heroic instances or mastering trade skills and have the gear required to experience tier 5 and tier 6 content without the massive (no pun intended) learning curve or gear farming experienced by most end game raiding guilds.