@ nightops
"how long" probably 'til the next expac
"its all broke" eh, the combines work, and the drops are adaquately rare, least in some minds, all that went wrong was the sheer power of the armor. perhaps the drops werent rare enough. in PoP the elemental bows were the best thing out there for alot of us, and those were really nice / expensive but they required the flagged zones to be able to farm the pieces for the bits. this go around there was nothing anywhere near the difficulty and scope of flagging for the elemental planes. the mmm key and crystallos key were things that could be done in a matter of days.
in that sense i think that they have lost out something they once did, giving raiders new xp zones to mess with, ashengate and frostcrypt were meant to be that sort of a thing and perhaps they can in the future stick more of those sorts of zones in.
it probably gets old being super geared out as you should be in order to be a good raiding guild member on teh cutting edge but then that serverly gimps the group content because its balanced against people who arent in raid gear. i think they need to give group content back to the raid people, challenging and rewarding group content.
but the other side effect was putting a real choke hold on ingredients for bows. if they locked ingredients behind raid - unlocked zones they'd've seen far fewer cultural armor pieces made.