If you took a vote Karazhan would get the most votes as the most favorite dungeon. I know many of my current guild mates name it as their favorite. I'm the opposite - It is my least favorite and nothing else is even close.
My guild knew that the transition from 40 man raiding to 25 man raiding was going to be tough. What we didn't realize was that we weren't going to see even 25 man raiding for quite a while due to Karazhan. We tried to prepare by trimming our roster to about 35 members before Burning Crusade. The goal was to level, hit Karazhan, get gear, and move on to the 25 man content. We planned 3 separate 10 man Karazhan runs but we quickly realized that we didn't have enough tanks for 3 raids so we moved to 2. Then we ran into another issue. Our guild had a main raid leader and anyone that wasn't in his 10 man group felt they were on the B team. Many ego's got bruised and we lost 70% of our members over the next few months. Many people that I had grown close to from Molten Core to Naxx were suddenly gone and only a handful remained to pick up the pieces. The lowest point was about 2 months after the BC release when we realized we didn't have enough people for even 1 Karazhan run.
We filled our gaps and pretty soon our 2 - 10 man raiding teams started to make steady progress. About 2 months later we finally finished the instance. I didn't feel anything remotely close to the joy I did in Vanilla when we beat Ragnaros or Nefarian or would feel in the coming year when we beat Vashj/Kael/Illidan. Karazhan was an test for my guild and it was something to be endured not enjoyed. The bad thing is even though we had beat the place the defections meant we were so unevenly geared that that we were forced to form 2-3 alt raids every week. I know I did at least 2 full clears of Kara every week until we were deep into SSC/TK. The job-like nature of these runs stole any remaining fun in the instance from me.
I know many guilds/servers went through the exact same thing so I'm amazed the love that Karazhan gets. There is no doubt it has some fun fights and inventive mechanics. But I can never forget what that place did to my guild and the experience has left a bitter taste. It's over 3 years later and I've never run it since.
My guild knew that the transition from 40 man raiding to 25 man raiding was going to be tough. What we didn't realize was that we weren't going to see even 25 man raiding for quite a while due to Karazhan. We tried to prepare by trimming our roster to about 35 members before Burning Crusade. The goal was to level, hit Karazhan, get gear, and move on to the 25 man content. We planned 3 separate 10 man Karazhan runs but we quickly realized that we didn't have enough tanks for 3 raids so we moved to 2. Then we ran into another issue. Our guild had a main raid leader and anyone that wasn't in his 10 man group felt they were on the B team. Many ego's got bruised and we lost 70% of our members over the next few months. Many people that I had grown close to from Molten Core to Naxx were suddenly gone and only a handful remained to pick up the pieces. The lowest point was about 2 months after the BC release when we realized we didn't have enough people for even 1 Karazhan run.
We filled our gaps and pretty soon our 2 - 10 man raiding teams started to make steady progress. About 2 months later we finally finished the instance. I didn't feel anything remotely close to the joy I did in Vanilla when we beat Ragnaros or Nefarian or would feel in the coming year when we beat Vashj/Kael/Illidan. Karazhan was an test for my guild and it was something to be endured not enjoyed. The bad thing is even though we had beat the place the defections meant we were so unevenly geared that that we were forced to form 2-3 alt raids every week. I know I did at least 2 full clears of Kara every week until we were deep into SSC/TK. The job-like nature of these runs stole any remaining fun in the instance from me.
I know many guilds/servers went through the exact same thing so I'm amazed the love that Karazhan gets. There is no doubt it has some fun fights and inventive mechanics. But I can never forget what that place did to my guild and the experience has left a bitter taste. It's over 3 years later and I've never run it since.
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