Perhaps one of the biggest criticisms (and actually the only serious one) leveled against Cataclysm was that it had an underwhelming endgame. The expansion's first tier of raiding was fairly healthy, with a total of twelve bosses (plus a bonus boss for heroic raiders,) not to mention the VoA-style raids on Tol Barad. However, there were two major problems: first, even in a full complement of heroic blues, the initial raids were a huge leap in difficulty, which was quite a problem given that Wrath of the Lich King's raiding game started off with a very beginner-friendly Naxxramas. The other major problem was that after that first tier of raiding, the next two had a mere fifteen bosses between them. While tier 9 has the unfortunate distinction of being the smallest raid tier in WoW's history, tier 12 and 13 were a one-two punch of tiny raiding tiers.
As I've discussed in the past, while quality should trump quantity, a raid tier still needs enough bosses for the instance to have a difficulty curve. Tiny raids mean that if there is any curve at all, there needs to be a huge jump in difficulty so that the whole thing isn't cleared in the first week by most of the players.
Additionally, we get burnt out on tiny raid tiers quicker, and it makes loot distribution quite silly.
Raiding in Mists of Pandaria has largely fixed most of these problems. While I still think that "Normal" mode is a little too hard (something they are addressing with the new "Flex" difficulty) one cannot fault the expansion for a lack of raiding content. Even though there will only be a total of five raids, together they come to 44 boss encounters, plus one bonus boss and six (counting all the Celestials as one) world bosses. 51 boss encounters is totally on par with Wrath or BC, and leaves Cataclysm's anemic 31 (counting Sinestra and the TB bosses) as a dark age in history where it belongs.
Plus, LFR, which allowed us all to experience Dragon Soul, has made the entirety (save Ra-Den) of Mists' headlining raids totally accessible. I have no doubt that I will be able to defeat Garrosh Hellscream on multiple characters before the next expansion has come out. I can speak knowledgeably about every boss in Throne of Thunder, and I will come out of Mists knowing that, at least in some way, I experienced the whole of the expansion. I got my money's worth.
Yet there is an aspect of Mists that has been really left to twist in the wind, and that is the 5-man dungeon.
For a long time, the 5-man was the backbone of WoW. When it launched, WoW had only a single raid, Molten Core, and the expectation was that most players would simply enjoy leveling up and questing while running 5-man dungeons throughout that experience. BC's introduction of heroic dungeons made them a feature that could remain relevant throughout an expansion's life-span. Now, perhaps the dungeon grind became too much of a central thing. In Wrath, the need to farm up Emblems of Frost to get all the cool 264 gear as well as the 251 tier 10 sets made it arguably more effective to grind dungeons than to worry about raiding. Of course, raiding gave weapons and other items not covered by the Emblems, and ICC was fairly accessible, so raiding still occurred.
Emblems were replaced with Valor Points in Cataclysm, but still served a practically identical function. However, in Mists, the means to gain VP grew wider. You could get them from daily quests now, or even off items dropped from certain mobs (like in the Isle of Thunder.)
Plus, Blizzard has been pushing scenarios as the main "small group content." Scenarios are far easier to whip up, because they use locations and assets that already exist within the game world. Every scenario is set somewhere in the game's pre-existing world, except Battle on the High Seas, which is just over the water and uses standard ship models.
Mists has had plenty of scenarios, but unlike dungeons, there aren't any set loot tables here. You aren't guaranteed to get anything other than gold and valor points from them, and the gear you get has randomized stats, so you can't, say, run a specific one to try to get the piece you really want.
So Mists has only the dungeons that it launched with. Only six of these are brand new, while three are reworkings of old dungeons. Admittedly, I adore the new Scholomance, Scarlet Halls, and Scarlet Monastery, which are far more involved revamps than Cataclysm's Deadmines or Shadowfang Keep (which kept the same layout and environment and merely populated them with different enemies) but it felt as if Blizzard has simply abandoned the 5-man. In Mists, 5-man dungeons are just there to get you over the iLevel hump before you can run Mogu'shan Vaults on LFR.
Essentially, we've all been shifted to be primarily raiders. The accessibility of raids had left dungeons in the dust.
Now, Blizzard has realized that people miss running dungeons. I think that the Valor caps prevent anyone from feeling forced to run dungeons if they don't want to, but I would love to see dungeons appear as a decent alternative to raiding. Sure, you need lots of people running LFR to lower queue times, but I also think that dungeons are indispensable for people to learn how to play their class (especially tanks and healers, who can't rely on anyone to cover for them when they are the only one of their role in the group) with others before stepping into a raiding environment. We'll see how Proving Grounds goes, but dungeons have always been a good stepping-stone.)
My hope is that in the next expansion, we'll get a little bit of both. I think LFR is definitely a good thing for the game, and makes raiding far, far more accessible than even in the Wrath of the Lich King days (though I also hope that Flex will make pre-made group raiding more accessible as well.) What I want to see is an environment where you can still make some degree of progression through gear obtained in dungeons, even if the best stuff still comes from the raids. While the dungeons in early Cataclysm (4.0 and 4.1) were too hard for matchmaking groups, I think that the 4.3 heroics hit the perfect spot of difficulty and reward, much as the later-patch Wrath heroics did.
In fact, given the presence of LFR, the main fear of well-rewarded heroics (like the fact that End Time offered equivalent gear to Firelands) becomes a non-issue. By the time the next patch's heroics come out, most of the game's players will have already run the old raid many, many times. At best, they're going to get sidegrades or just fill in that last piece they were never able to find a drop for.
And if you want to make sure they experience the raids, just make an attunement, much as it works in Mists already. With LFR, attunements are trivial.
Blizzcon is in November, I believe, so we'll be hearing about the next expansion (The Dark Below?) before too long. By then, we'll probably have killed/defeated Garrosh on LFR. Wouldn't it be nice if we had some nice dungeons to run to tide us over.
(This might be the first time a final raid tier is coming out before the next expansion is announced. Hm... *begins writing next article*)
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