Casual Epix and the End Game.

It is important to understand that World of Warcraft is divided into two basic phases - The level grind, and The End Game.

The level grind contitues the bulk of the game for casual players. It starts when your character is level 1, and ends when your character reaches the max level (70 at the moment, and 80 for Wrath characters) and completes the available world quests.

The End Game is a confusing place for casual players who spend much of their time questing and levelling. Its not entirely obvious what to do when the quests run out. The end game si about gear progression. Not character progression. The gold standard of gear progression are the sets of gear available to raids. Raid gear is ranked into tiers according to which raid dungeons the gear drops in, and the general expectaion (and balancing) of each progressive dungeon is that, in order to survive in the raid instance that drops Tier X+1 gear, most of the raid members need to be equipped in Tier X gear.

WoW Classic's endgame - at level 60 - was: Run Stratholme, Scholomance and Lower Blackrock Spire in 5 man groups to get Dungeon set 1. Quests in the above dungeons, and Dire Maul, would upgrade this to Dungeon Set 2 which was the original Tier 0 gear. UBRS was run to attain Tier 1. Molten Core Tier 2, and Naxxramus was the source of Tier 3 gear.

Then Burning Crusade came out, and by level 64, most of the tier 3 epic items had been replaced by green drops from Outlands quests. The burn. The terrible burn.

Burning Crusades end game - consists of a Tier 3.5 set of items available from Heroic Dungeons, and then an amount of 10 to 25 man raid content yielding Tier 4 items from raiding Kharazan through to Tier 6 from Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau.

In Burning Crusade there are also what are called "welfare epics". Which are called welfare because casual players can get them without comitting to a raid schedule. Welfare Epics are obtianed via crafting, PvP and doing heroic dungeons and are usually rated in terms of the equivalent Tier of raid gear. For example, the Engineering crafted epic helms are regarded as being T4 or even T6 equivalent

For a casual player, finding out how to progress through the welfare epics gives a lot of motivation to play an end game otherwise entirely targetted at hardcore gamers.