Sometimes I miss linear progression

Sometimes it's hard not to act like a grumpy old man, even when you're a woman.

I guess we all have those moments sometimes where we think that everything was better "back in the day" (both in WoW and in real life), but generally we realise that even at best that's only partially true, so we don't necessarily say it out loud. Many things are better now than they used to be, also both in WoW and in real life. But sometimes... sometimes it's hard not to be cranky.

I just came out of a normal Azjol-Nerub run with my draenei mage. We had a level eighty paladin tank in epic gear of a very high level: several drops from ICC ten-man and several pieces of emblem-bought ilevel 264 gear. I don't know what he was doing in normal Azjol-Nerub; I didn't bother to ask. Either way I figured that it should be a breeze as long as nobody got too cocky over having a level eighty in the group.

On the second boss the tank pulled Hadronox before he had a chance to web the tunnel entrances... and then kept spamming consecrate. The healer yelled at him to stop AoEing but he ignored it. A very slow and painful wipe ensued as the boss was endlessly healing himself for massive amounts with every add death.

As we ran back the tank asked why the adds had kept on coming. We explained. He seemed to think that our tone was condescending or something and told us not to talk to him as if he hadn't been here before. Um, he had just shown that he had no idea how the boss worked, hadn't he? "Anyway, the adds just kept on coming, there was nothing we could have done," he declared. Yes, there was. He could have stopped AoEing like the healer asked him to and we could have nuked down the big spider with single-target dps. He didn't argue the point any further - he seemed like a nice enough guy overall and the rest of the run was perfectly smooth, but I still couldn't help gnashing my teeth a little.

After the run I looked him up on the armoury. He had done Azjol-Nerub five times before, so there really was no excuse to not know the basics of the instance. Except, he also hit level eighty less than three months ago. I guess if you started running heroics at that point it wouldn't really teach you much, considering that you can largely ignore many boss mechanics these days. It's kind of depressing.

Back in BC (here it comes), if someone had gear from Black Temple, you could expect them to know their way around SSC and Tempest Keep too. If someone had the key to Karazhan, they weren't going to be completely clueless about the bosses in the Shadow Labyrinth. These days, none of it means anything. Someone could be in full ICC gear and get lost in Naxxramas. Or they might have hard mode achievements and die to something trivial and easily avoidable in a random heroic. I don't like it, because it makes something that used to have some meaning (level of gear) completely nonsensical and deceptive. Is it really that surprising that people go for silly requirements like "link achi plz" in search for something more informative?

I can deal with gear resets every so often, but if every other patch immediately pushes people into the newest piece of raid content, you can never expect anyone to have experience with anything but that content. And I think that kinda sucks, because I still like to enjoy the world beyond ICC as well.