They're making a mistake, methinks, in trying to both take away the grind / keep the single-player heroic experience AND keep 25man raids in. They tried that in the early WoW design and very very quickly ditched it for the raid-focus. The problem is that raiders don't actually enjoy raiding, apart from the few that get the pleasure of commanding the raids and working out the strategies. For the monkeys following vent instructions, they're doing it for the epeen. Which means raiders have to have a gamebreaking gear advantage or they won't do it.
Look at the old balance arguments in WoW. The raiding guilds basically said the same as what I just said. For them, gear progression is the game in mmorpg, and most of the raid leaders hate PvP b/c balance means stuffing up raid gear progression, and utterly freak at the idea of non-raiding gamestyles getting equivalent gear ('they didn't 'earn' it').
And early WoW showed that raiding guilds are much MUCH louder than the non-raiding players, will actively lobby, are the guys that go to the tournaments and the blizzcons, and get invited to events and give ideas for game design...regardless of their % of the playerbase, they're the ones whose voice gets heard.
Bioware was onto a novel thing earlier, when they said that you just have to ignore all the noise coming from that group, and focus on the majority who won't blow through all the content in one 100hour-straight sitting.
Not that I'm saying the raiders shouldn't keep their mmorpg genre. They're the ones who like the genre, they're the ones who actually stuck with it rather than having a short-term addiction, quitting, then bitching about how much they hate it. Moreover, I feel some sympathy due to how singleplayer rpgs have been screwed over - I can understand them going 'this is OUR genre, don't you FPS-players and single-player guys ruin it for us!'. That's basically the same thing we've gotten pissed about with our genre.
But if Blizz really wants to break the mmorpg mold, they need to forget about attracting the raiding guilds. It's just a mutually incompatible style of game, due to conflicting objectives: the raiders want gear progression that reflects their raid progression, so that they are undoubtedly more powerful than anyone who hasn't matched their raiding progression, whilst those wanting something new from mmorpgs don't want to feel like their funding someone else's game whilst getting a gimped character in return for preferring other gamestyles to raiding. Can't please both, and all the voice-overs in the world won't change that.
