Vault of Archavon, aka Carrot on a Stick

Vault of Archavon is a new type of raid dungeon introduced in Wrath of the Lich King. It's only available to the faction that controls the (also new in Wrath) outdoor PvP zone.

The bosses drop tier loot -- loot equivalent to the "tiered" armor sets available in raid dungeons. There is one wrinkle -- raid bosses drop tokens that can be used by several classes, while VoA bosses drop the class-specific pieces themselves, presumably to avoid loot fights among the PuG groups that are doing VoA.

Whenever a new tier of armor comes out, Blizzard introduces a new, harder boss to the raid dungeon, and this new boss drops the new tier of armor. Which is a problem.

Now, it's great that the new armor is now available, in tiny chunks, to people who are not raiding with a serious guild. The serious raiders get more gear and they get it quicker, but people who just want to PuG VoA also have a shot at some real loot.

But the bosses getting harder is kind of a problem. This raid that is technically nice for casual players is not actually nice to them. My up-and-coming warlock, for instance, has more than enough DPS to take on the first two bosses, but not the third. Since you are saved to a raid ID with other PuG raiders, there's a big incentive to finish the raid in one sitting. So there's zero incentive to take any player who doesn't have the DPS to finish off all three bosses.

But I am getting close, I feel. I'm getting close to being able to take down that third boss. Except. Except that patch 3.3 will be out in the next month or so, and it will be introducing a ... new harder boss with new tier loot. So since the 3.2 patch came out I've went from 1.5K DPS (2.5k short) to around 3K DPS (1k DPS short). Soon though, patch 3.3 will bring a new boss to VoA, probably requiring 5k-5.5K DPS. So I'll be back to where I started, only much more angry about VoA.