I've been on and off playing with a friend currently level 25 - its so rewarding playing it how it was. I forget how easy retail is these days.
So my priest is 60 and raiding. Honestly I am not enjoying the raiding part. Mainly because we have a lack of healers and I have been "asked" to heal (However I cant roll on heal gear and shadow gear is Warlock priority). Also while our guild is referred to as Semi Casual, it honestly doesnt seem to feel that way and well the raiding is very strict. That said MC on farm, three BWL clears and only the middle one was really really bad. While the game itself is great its lost something of its soul. Its been my experience that whilst we do have vets that have resubbed or switched from retail, the vast majority are folks that have been playing private servers all these years and really push very hard. Whilst my guild is full of nice people that I like, it feels hollower then vanilla. I think also given that I am not one of those types that plays the game to death and not immersed in it all I am loosing out. Folks that did the research have invested and are running the market. i.e. things like major mana pots and Protection potions on my server are very very expensive (5G+ and 14G respectively). I dont have the time or inclination to farm hard to keep up with these costs per raid... I am looking forward to TBC classic if it comes. That was the pinnacle experience for me, BUT I get a strong feeling that it again wont be the same given the way that the guild is.
MC and Bwl are about as far as most guilds will go before issues begin to brew, by the sounds of what you typed they already are. If I was healing and not allowed to role on heal gear I would probably leave the guild, every guild wants a healer You think raiding is expensive now wait till AQ40 and Naxx need about 300g for repairs and about 1k in mats for pots a week at a minimum vanilla is a lot more time consuming due to pots and flasks and limited income / retail you can get away with so much less play time
My plan in leveling the druid is to make him resto. That way priest can go back to shadow and I can flip depending on what's needed on the night. Spriests are not really in demand so I do need to adjust. In all honesty, in vanilla I didn't really raid a huge amount. MC I used to get to join alt runs irregularly. Outside of that zg a handful of times and then naxx just once on an alt run. No expectations around consumes, though to be fair I was being carried. I think that's why tbc is such a fond set of memories, I remember lots of Kara, and a few MH runs. All main runs, but none felt like I had to grind like this.
They changed TBC after launch once TK and vashj raid launched and stopped all the flask and pot stacking to bring things back in line I know the things we did for progression including everyone making a warlock for soul stone, TBC was the last time I played high end, mostly due to what they did with final raid, 1 year wait for a raid killed my enthusiasm for more of wow
So we finally got enough healers in and I was "allowed" to go back to shadow. 2:15 bwl raid, one wipe on chromaggus, which was due to the dbm timer bugging. Only consumes required are mana, runes, GFPP and GSPP. My parses weren't great and I was dispelling as we only had two priests. Ironically I also picked up 2 pieces of T2 healing gear! Actually looking forward to the MC run, missed last week but from the logs it was a nice clean run! Druid hit 41 and is ticking along. Currently feral, considering respec at 42 and just heal my way to 60 whilst farming my pre raid bis.
Bit of necro but I'm curious if anyone else is playing. About the end of march I stopped. Work imploded and I didn't have the time to put it. Guild is still going and clearing aq40 is just under 2 hours. I have pretty much November off so will be going back in then. Am excited at the idea of TBC as that's the time I enjoyed the most, depends on what patch level we get. I dunno if I'll have a raid spot or if my gear will be good enough to join AQ, so for now the plan is to level the druid and shaman in prep for TBC.
I gave in a while ago and moved to ESO - seems like you can get a fair bit of stuff done on that with short play times without an inevitable burn out!
