Aversion to Progression

So, this is something that I have observed lately, and find it baffling.

People who like to call themselves the hard core raider, don't actually like to do progression fights.  Oh, they love seeing new content, they just don't want to have to work with a steady group of people on learning said fights.  They would much rather the encounter be nice and smooth, without a learning curve, and get angry if any mistakes are made.

Myself, I love the challenge.  Our first two Heartbreaker (25) kills, were post enrage, with me healing wildly, popping all my CDs to keep people alive for that last 100k damage to tick and get the kill.  Those kills were damn exciting, and a lot of fun.  Our third kill was finally pre-enrage, with 24 people left alive at the end of it.  The fight was no where near as fun, since it was no where near as challenging once everyone knew what to do and where to go. 

Now we are progressing into ICC25.  Our first raid night, we ended up having to sit a couple of people, simply because we had such a turn out.  Everyone wanted to see the new content.  We downed Marrowgar after a few of the new people got used to the mechanics, then moved on to Lady Deathwhisper.  This was as far as they made it last week during my move. We wiped a few times as people were again getting used to the mechanics of the fight, and learning to CC the MC'd target's not kill them (I took to cycloning them, as it kept them out of the mix, and prevented people from killing them).

Next we move onto the Gunship Loot Machine, and one shot that, although a bit sloppily.  The sloppiness was to be expected, since a number of people hadn't even seen the encounter yet.  We move to Saurfang, but only have about 30 minutes left in raid at this point.  We get three attempts in and try to change things up a bit with what we learn from each attempt.  There was a little progression in the attempts here, but ultimately we ended up with Saurfang still up. 

That was Wednesday.  Yesterday, we log in at raid time, and there are 17 people online, we end up having to pug 8 people, and even have to do free roll for loot.  Worse yet, there is no way we are taking 8 PuGs to ICC25, as it would simply be an exercise in futility.  Thus, we find ourselves in 25ToC, and proceed to one shot all the encounters, in a truely boring and Farm like matter.

The point of all that is I find it interesting that people who pride themselves on being raiders, will come to the nights that easy fights are going to occur, and suddenly have shit to do on the real progression nights.  These are the same people who will constantly guild jump.  As soon as a brick wall is hit, an actual challenge for the guild, they will jump to another guild that has the encounter on farm.  I can see the logic in jumping guilds if your current one is full of slackers that can't get their shit together.  I don't see the point in missing out on the guild first kills, just so you can have an easier time in getting your purple pixels.

What about you?  Do you find the joy of the game in getting the gear upgrades? Or in the challenge of the raid, and the thrill of the close kills?

As a side note, I finally got Vezax hard mode done on 10 man, and got my Rusted Proto-drake on Ditto.  Now to get the drake on Becoming, and the Algalon key for Ditto.