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Do you like or hate the difficulty of the Cataclysm heroics?
Amarandes
Member Posts: 104
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2053469#blog
I have been reading this post for a while now and for every post that supports ghostcrawler, there seems to be 2 that opposes it.
The argument, here is that, by making heroics harder, they are alienating the casual playerbase. Their chief complaint is that they have to spend 45 minutes in the dungeon finder only to have the dungeon group fail due to incompetant players. They also complain that they have a life outside of WoW and do dont have enough time to spend in the queue and then 1+ hours in the dungeon itself. Yet another complaint is that the casual players make up the majority of the playerbase and that the hard dungeons only cater to the elite hardcore players.
Now there are you people here at MMORPG.com, who had complained for a long time that WOTLK dumbed down the dungeons so that it requires no skill at all to complete. In your eyes, the skilless casuals shouldn't even be playing MMOs. Blizzard's response back then is that the casuals pay the same subscription as the hardcores and therefore the casuals should have every right as the hardcores to experience the dungeons.
So where do you stand in this dungeon difficulty debate?
Comments
Trash mobs are fine, but I do believe that bosses should be nerfed a bit, because they all seem to be a bit overpowered considering the item level you have to have in order to run those dungeons.
After doing a few of the heroics myself I have come to the conclusion that the problem is the LFD, not the heroic content. BC heroics were harder than this but you didn't hear nearly as much whining because they were hardly ever pugged. Until everything is outgeared I really recommend just doing heroics in a premade group.
I'll bite.
I don't think that it has anything to do with whether or not "skilless casuals" should be playing the game. The problem is that a company with as many recources, both monetary and innovative, as Blizzard has should be reaching for that legendary sweet spot where a casual player can be involved in challenging content without being defeated by time or repeatedly unfortunate experiences (like the sort of parties people complain about in the random groups).
The problem is that simply making things more or less difficult is pretty much a slap in the face of everyone who was hoping for a real solution. All it does is take something from one crowd and give it to another. Blizzard should be working toward a new horizon rather than just messing with dials.
Doing heroics is easy in a guild group, but awful via the LFD tool. I have had some really awful dpsers from LFD quite a bit.
See this is where I take acception to this. Because I think gamers got lazy and complacent. Games USED to be hard you actually had to learn how to play even if it was casual. What rule book did some fat nerd make. That says just because your casual you don't need to learn how to play correctly. Wow isn't hard its back to the way it was vanilla. Where you actually have to use all your skills to dps and live. Know what that is called (playing the game correctly) I mean come on.
In proper progression in any rpg from first one to now. You have to build a little bit of gear to handle the next level. Part of the reason people fail now is soon as they get heroic level to go into a heroic. That's exactly what they do GO IN they dont bother to gear correctly gem enchant or even look up a heroic fight. So they basically come in there horribly unprepared and think they gotta faceroll. Instead the instance facerolls them into a 30 minute cooldown. That's not a designers fault nor the game. That's the lazy player not (playing or understanding the game correctly and wanting a ez mode)
Every single person whining and crying should take the time even casual. Maybe like 20-30 minutes to understand why some things work they be better off. Then coming into any public forum wanting a nerf because they can't develop brain cells to play a game thats not even hard. Challenge is good makes you a better gamer hardcore or casual Lrn2play. That saying never had so much meaning until now. And its obvious alot of people in wow need to learn how to play wow.
PS Hell the 30 minutes your stuck in CD for doing what I said above. Instead of going to a alt and failing all over again. Head onto EJ, You tube, ask a buddy who doesnt fail. How to handle it what gear balance you should have. Are you using the right rotations what CC should you use. Which spec is better for 5 mans. All of that takes less then 30 minutes to glance over and atleast head yourself in the right direction. Even someone who plays 30 minutes to 2 hours can do that so no excuses.
First of all what makes you think that the vocal minority from that WoW post are the most skilled players? If a majority of the WoW player base was as casually unskilled as people here on MMORPG.com would lead you to believe, then does it mean that the people complaining are dumber than a even the general playerbase? Or does it mean that most are actually trying to tackle the comtent before shooting off at the mouth?
GC and the dev team has stated time and time again that they follow server trends, track player playing habits and adjust gameplay elements based on statistical data gathered from that. Not from what 1% of the loud-mouths post. But if for some reason the data happens to back up the claims of the vocal minority, then all of a sudden they think they're running the show. Kinda like how in the movies you see the comedy relief standing up to and taunting a small army and you suddenly see the eyes of everyone from the small army go wide and turn tail. But the guy with his back to the bigger army standing behind him doesn't even know that that's the real reason they ran off. Clueless.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
I am not against the notion of more complex mechanics and careful planning in dungeons. That being said, to the people who do their research and do what they can to be a skilled player, the end result is just more time spent dealing with said dungeons in order to get their badges, (points, but badges sounds more nostalgic).
For the casual gamer, it means more wipes. For the serious gamer, it means headaches in LFG. Then again, we're comparing our experiences with the speed of wotlk heroic runs when everyone already had ICC gear. If cata heroics are still tedious 6+ months from now, that's a problem.
Hate.
That kind of difficulty should be limited to Raid Dungeons.
I still consider Heroic Dungeons as part of the casual part of the game.
If they have to be so hard at least they should drop the same gear as the Raids, just in smaller quantities of course.
Instead at the moment they give lots of hassle for very little rewards
Perfect answer, as heroics are right now the LFD system is completely useless. You could spend hours in a heroic and not even complete it with the LFD system. The first heroic I did was through this system, my group went through 7 members in the course of 2 hours. Doing a heroic through your own server is fine though.
Unfortunately the LFD system is now almost useless and it was such a great system for casually logging onto WoW to do a heroic casually.
Personally I would rather heroics be made easier and keep raids at their current difficulty. But that is just me.
Well, to me it was not "tactic" or "brain use" dungeons, as many people posted about.
Cata HC, IMO, are more reaction type of exercise, so more depending on your own dexterity and/or i-net connection, computer speed etc as tactic. I noticed, you can know tactic as much as you want, if you don't have enough reaction speed (no lag, should not try if you are tiered), you gonna fail.
For such type of game I would prefer not to pay month fee & play by my own on console.
Beside Cata HC is time consuming by any means & all this for like nothing, as we don't get great rewards out of it. For gear points (and loot) is better to go for raids, for JP is better to spam WotLK HC, or even use PvP gear as it has better stats (funny but true), and honor points are way easy/faster to get.
So for my part I stopped HC runs & found I have nothing else to do.
Best of luck to all who loves Cata HC, I'm ready for Rift, so stopped WoW sub.
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Cat dungeons are not hard...if people are decently geared and know what to do. In that; they are a failure due to the LFD system. These dungeons were not tuned for PUG's, but for guild runs in halfway decent, to better than average gear. In a PUG you get a mixed bag of players of all skill levels, and with all kinds of gear - this tends to make Cat dungeons extremely time consuming and difficult to finish via a PUG.
Blizzard botched their own game up good. They introduce a cool tool for finding people to play with. In the same instance they created content that is not meant for the very casual player or a guildless player. They cannot co-exist. This has come back to bite Blizzard in the arse.
I agree with many that its not really about the dungeon - Its about the Looking for Dungeon Tool.
Blizzard has failed to implement a system in Cata - where this tool is beein effective in creating good and fun teamwork / co-op gameplay. Alot of ppl were counting on BLizzard to actually create content that would scale with diffrent classes and specs working together + scaling of itemlvls to balance the real "challenge" or "difficlutly" in dungeons. They did not. Far from it.
Im very dissapointed with Blizzard design of the Cata dungeons. Not because Im a casual or a nub or because Im a hardcore elitist. Just because atm the dungeons are not enjoyable for all sets of diffrent players in the game. And then there is obvoiusly something wrong.
The best solution in curretn state of the game is to give Justice points for normal dungeons bosses when you run in full pug group. Not the same amount as in Heroic - but enough so that those ppl that are not quite skilled enough - or not geared enough - are not pushed into Heroics pugs and are potentally causing their groups to suffer.
Most of the sandbox preachers here would get their ass handed to them in PVP. I've played most of the MMOs out there and WoW's attracted more hardcore gamer gamers than any of the niche MMOs ever did. Their combat system was not designed for people who want to chit chat with guildies while they're fighting.
All new PVE content seems hard when you haven't had time to learn the encounter patterns and everybody isn't wearing epic gear and raid drops. When people figure out how to solve the stuff and start gearing up everybody will go back to saying WoW is easy mode, etc etc.
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I've played WoW since Vanilla. Everytime a new dungeon or expansion comes out, someone always complains about it being "too hard". Then three months later the whiners say it's too easy. That is the normal pattern I've noticed.
I personally never have been a fan of the cross server LFD tool. No personal responsability to be a good player when you probably won't see the same people ever again. Atleast before cross server, if you pugged enough you know who's good and who's not most of the time. It's a smaller world playing at specific times. You'll generally see the same 30 to 50 people in a particular time slot till they out gear the content. Not so with cross server.
I think GC is going in the right direction with the difficulty as it helps to foster community via regular group members. Cross server LFD can't provide this, so it's failing atm.
I don't think anyone that doesn't have 2 hours to spend in a single sitting on an MMO can hope to get anything done. Which is still better than Vanilla WoW(dungeon dependant) or EQ where if you didn't have 4 to 5 hours to play you stayed the hell out of dungeons.
Those dungeons are not really hard if you are geared accordingly. If you have gear from top tier non heroics, plus 2 crafted epics, plus some items from reputation that its easily doable with a group that can communicate.
Sure if you try to do heroics as soon as you reach lvl 85 and you are undergeared, or you play with two left hands it is difficult.
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Have to disagree with ya,
If you can farm 5 man heroic for gear that is on par with raids then what is the point of raiding? even with smaller quantities you would become well geared,(JP system proves that)
My mentality is: You do normal Instances until you are geared and proficient for heroics. you do heroics to prepare for raids.
Its a perfect self check system. if you cant handle "easy" content how will you fair in harder stuff?
Does anyone remember the attunment system?
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5 man dungeon gear is not on par with raid gear atm.
Attunement system was great IMO. What Blizzard fails with current set of dungeons is that there is no progression (in terms of difficulty) from one dugneon to the next. There are two lvls... easy - and hard. But the actual difficulty within these normal and heroics is HUGE. Some of the instances are joke (for certain setup) or unpoosible for other setups. Again - thats not great design of a game.
The question we need to be asking ourselfs now - how can we improve the LFD tool? Or should we just remove it. The first thing that has to happen IF lfd tool is gonna be supported for highest tier of dungeon in herioc mode - is to balance difficluty versus rewards.. Atm - pugs are probaly the harderst content in the game cause there is actually a pretty high chance you end up in group that has ZERO chance of getting a dungeon done. And considering the rewards... Thats not acceptable.
And btw - the point of raiding is to have fun - improve your skills and work as a team. Its not about epics. And neither are 5 man dungeons.
I don't want to come off as an elitist but i would like to elabourate abit more on my experiences.
I play a protection palladian tank, I found the higher level Normal dungeons to be very difficult(lost city for example) and heroics nearly impossible at one stage. I died lots, I was called lots of very choice names by many pug groups. but i persisted, learned from my mistakes and can now tank heroics with great precision.
Half the battle was positioning and group communication. Every time i go to throne of tides i can bet that the group will break the CC on one of the 2 healers, and expect to be able to out dps them and win. this goes on long enough for me to have a quick brb and do what ever and come back. I personally cant see whats hard with ccing a mob and interupting heals on another? I don't think that there is a single group setup that could not preform that task.
Each class has the tools. there just not getting used. as for the DFT i've found it always atleast puts in one class with CC capacity.(name a configuration if u think it cant be done.)
I don't run raids yet. why? because i know position is much more important than how good my gear is. if i stand in the "fire" i will die. these are things i must learn before i tackle them.
Oh no doubt a game should be fun. but when your tackling high end content with concept names like "heroic" and "Epic" Don't you think it should represent the difficulty?
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I just don't see it I guess.
I don't find Cat Heroics that difficult; now I certainly wouldn't consider myself casual but not hardcore.
Here's what I do know... Herocis and Raids in Cat now require players to have a somewhat basic knowledge of your class, what the classes around you can and cannot do and a little about the encounter. Overall, everything is a little more reactionary when compared with WotLK Heroics and Raids.
Change is a bitch... and sometimes you just have to roll with it. Not exactly something the WoW populace is good at doing.
Gearing to 359 is trickier right now and I think player are expecting to stream roll Heroics in ilvl333 gear, which just doesn't make sense. Maybe it is an issue that that Heroics are just not PUG friendly when you're in barely there heroic gear but in guild runs with half decent communication and players who try to be semi present and aware... they're really not hard at all.
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My only real issue with Heroics is that they are not dropping gear worthy of their difficulty.
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They went from the obscenely easy to the somewhat more difficult. Many fights are re-used mechanics, but usually require faster reaction times and more work for the healer; Overall they are harder, but with gear should become similar to those of BC's time (insane to rather easy). What ppl don't remember is the diffculty of the original heroics, the shadow lab pulls of 6+ mobs with random assassins attempting to gib the healer, etc. Just like then, now it takes "situational awareness" and good reaction time (and CC /gasp) to go throughout the dungeon without a hitch.
My man complaint is the excessive damage if you do screw up, more so than in previous years. There are more "1-shot kills" in some heroics now than there were in entire raids maybe even expansions previously (not including enrage timers). There used to be more lee-way when you got nipped by a shatter or stood even stood in a doomfire...but now its almost guaranteed death or a huge stress on the healing to the point of wipe.
Overall I like the difficulty because it gives a reason to progress and you can actually visibly see the progression (i.e. this boss once destroyed us and now is rather easy)...but it doesn't feel as gratifying as it used to.
And an aside, alot of ppl don't realize you can leash almost all bosses now (saving some peoples repair bills) and in general PUG as minimal amount of people as possible, especially a tank or healer...the difference between heaven & hell.
I voted for "liking the difficulty'. I ahve run every heroic with a PUG group because my guild is casual and doesnt have enough geared members to run heroics. The only heroic I thought needed to be fixed was the Ozruk (sp?) fight in (H) Stonecore. All classes except hunters can put a DOT on the boss to get reflected break out of the paralyze. If you have a healer that doesn't understand this and doesn't dispell then you lose one of your dpsers right off the bat. I have run with more good groups than bad groups. I think the learning curve is good for the players to ahve to go through, especially if raid content is going to be mroe accessible. The lessons learned in the heroics will allow for better raid performance where the mechanics are compounded.
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In the end though, the heroics will get nerfed. The drama caused due to it being hard has happened previously (i.e. many, many people not being able to finish SSC/TK for vials) and will get nerfed accordingly. Like others have stated, its to extend the life span...so they will milk the difficulty till people start quiting noticeably (reason for quitting "too hard", etc) and then it will be just in time for a new patch and new 6 month grind of content.
Its a re-usable business model thats been in effect for years, they've just taken some time to maximize it. Their ability to make $ via simple mechanics is quite surreal.
I love that you can't just roll over a heroic. i started playing wow 2 months prior to cata coming out, and had lich king down in less the a month from character creation. it was a joke. now you pug a random heroic and people have to work. i was going to uninstall wow if cata was the same way, but thankfully that didn't seem to be the case. you need skill to complete these 5 mans now and it's great. i don't want to be a dick, but seriously, if people are failing at these runs, and it's their fault, they are bad players and wow is now letting it be known. the 1 shots when you screw up.. hell yes! you don't get to screw up over and over and pretend you're still a decent player.
here's what i think about the heroics and the gear. the 346 gear is good enough to get you into raids. you can easy do the dps, heal or tank while in 346 gear. np at all. going to be a lot easier in 359 crafted gear of course, but for the sake of arguement, lets just say that the heroic gear is there to prep you for raiding. Now, on the other hand you have the 333 gear and quest rewards that you get prior to running the heroics. these pieces of gear are more then enough for the average player to go out into the world and gather up some mats, farm some random mobs for drops, etc etc. what i'm getting at is that the heroics are there to prep you for raiding. if you don't have the time or skill to run heroics, you don't have the time or skill to run the raids. time is a commodity in these types of games, and people who think they can come in, burn through a heroic in 20 minutes to gear up to run icc are needing to rethink what they want out of these games. raiding and end game gear go hand in hand. in order to get this you need to have the time and skill. i'm so tired of people, in all games i play, think that they can be a half ass player and still try and be a pro player. there is nothing wrong at all with being casual, there's just something wrong with people who aren't serious about their gameplay wanting to be on par with players who are.
Your'e right Daddydazzle!!! The game is super easy! Reaching 85 is a cake walk!
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