Since a couple of days ago I wrote a post about many of the problems that came with the first expansion of 10-player raiding and trouble Blizzard had properly balancing encounters, especially the heroic version of Lich King, I can now say that I am happy to see that the encounter has finally been beaten by a 10-player strict guild.
I'd been ruminating on my distaste for the way that the 10-player heroic Lich King encounter was balanced for quite some time. After finally getting it out there, however, I think I was able to see more clearly over the past couple of days why 10-player strict guilds hadn't been able to take it down.
Top end 25-player guilds raid 40+ hours a week. They had more practice against heroic Lich King when they took him down at 10% or 15% than my guild has against 10-player heroic Lich King to date. They earned their kills through literally hundreds of hours of practice. We might be near or just over the 100-hour mark for Lich King.
Almost everyone who plays this game wants the game to be balanced so that things are a challenge for them but that they can ultimately take it down. Encounters, however, have to be balanced to a set of numbers, which means there will be those who don't find them challenging and those who will never win. Blizzard made a very accessible final boss for the expansion in normal difficulty Lich King. He's no push-over, especially not for a non-heroic boss, but a lot of guilds have been able to beat him and see the final cinematic, and presumably more will follow. They decided that for heroic Lich King they would put in a fight that no one in the world would say was too easy, and they did it.
I just want to be clear that for all the problems of 10 player raiding in this expansion, and there were many of them, if I can't beat this fight, whether because I'm not willing to put the hours in to do it properly or because I'm just plain not good enough, that's not anyone's fault but mine.
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