I read this Tobold's post with somewhat mixed feelings: Mind you, I'm viewing the situation from the point of view of lv70 prot warrior and lv55 holy priest disc priest, with no raiding experience.
In general terms, if there was a new game in which to incorporate this feature, I would suggest that the levelling game should be taken away and replaced with an interactive and interesting tutorial. However, in WoW the situation is already such that the levelling game is being effectively killed by Blizzard itself. In a way, the Old World is void, empty and full of unused questgivers, and the whole development is focused in making more candy for the end game raiding scene.
Which itself is already splitting in different sub-classes which are served with a) new, harder content and b) nerfing the previous harder content. Oh, yes, and c)by making the gear progression easier to move from one to another, even if you do not want to cannot play up to the standards of the raiding guilds. Like Gevlon so nicely put it. And I fully agree on his opinion in that post.
However, in terms of learning to play the class, the current situation in the raiding scene is unbearable. Like I have earlier posted, the /2 -trade channel that is- is filled with the LFM-announcements for people with the achievements for the instance they are going into. It's a Catch-22-esque situation: you have to have the instance completed to get to complete the instance. So the PUG way of learning to play the raiding game is effectively closed and as such the door to the reasonably progressive raid guilds is closed.
My question actually is, how can you learn to play the end game, if there is no way to learn to play the end game as such? And how can you apply for a raiding guild without having the proper (achievement proven) raiding experience, which you cannot get without being able to raid in meaningful way?
I liked Tobold's idea of having a raiding tutorial to teach the people entering the end game the basics of raiding. The problem with that idea, however, is the fact that most of the current mid- and high-level raiding guilds are already so far in the progression that there is neigh possibility for the newcomer to get into that game anymore.
The game is already separated into three classes of players: those still levelling (and probably never entering the raiding game), those who have entered the raiding end game (and are putting time and effort to it) and those who are in the high end of the raiding (raiding the hardest content Blizzard can toss to the players). These three are separated by /played, time available for playing and -like it or not- earlier progression in the end game content.
The guides on how to break into the raiding game released pre-WotLK are already outdated.
There is no way anymore, because there is no way to learn to play the game.
