4161

I don’t like Hellfire Peninsula at all, but I like several of the other Outland zones. Zangarmarsh remains a favorite of mine still. I’m slowly leveling a Tauren Druid, and since I think all druids should have the Guardian of Cenarius title, I find myself in the marsh again.

Still, I won’t be there long. I went to Outland at 58, have done a total of 31 quests, herbed a lot (since gathering gives XP now), and run a lot of dungeons, and the druid is already 63.

Also, I have noticed that my healer dungeon queues have gone from a few minutes down to instant. Doesn’t look like many people are leveling new healers anymore.

4162

Aaron - yeah, same for Enhancement. I feel for the first time that my box of tricks is actually damn useful at all times.

Just did heroic Stonecore with a guild group and one single pug DPS. Our tank hadn’t done it before and I was expecting it to be a hell of a lot worse than it was. We had one wipe, on Ozruk, and the only bits I didn’t enjoy were those bloody stone elementals with the crystal shards.

4163

I rolled a catbear specifically because of the horror stories about queue times for dps, so I’m all set, then :)

4164

Zarhym said:
Players were conditioned at the end of Wrath of the Lich King to mow through Heroics at lightning speed. Not only were they too easy to begin with, by the time Dungeon Finder came out players greatly out-geared the majority of these dungeons.

The reality is that it makes sense for Heroics to be a true and necessary stepping stone into raiding. They are more difficult at the beginning of this expansion’s lifespan than they were at the beginning of Lich King. We like it that way. We want you thinking and trying new approaches through trial and error in order to succeed, just as groups do while raiding.

As new tiers of gear are released and new raids open up, Heroics will naturally become easier, but that provides little good reason for trivializing them now. This is true even if some groups – particularly pick-up groups – lack the patience, will, or teamwork necessary to succeed.

We prefer that skill and character power provide the edge in Heroic dungeons, rather than supplying simple boss fights where mistakes are so easily forgivable.

Will it test you to play at your best and communicate effectively with your group? Certainly. Should Heroic dungeons be tuned down so failure is rarely a real possibility? That doesn’t sound like interesting design to me, nor would it act as a good catalyst for compelling, strategic, and social gameplay.

…

You might have to spend more time in normal dungeons than you did before if you want a very relaxing dungeon experience right now, before you jump into Heroics determined to succeed with ease. The difficulty of this expansion is on a different level right now, but it’s still nowhere near the gap between five-player dungeons and raiding which existed in the original release, and to a lesser extent The Burning Crusade.

If you expect a quick, mellow run through Heroic dungeons – which provide quite powerful gear given we’re on the first Cataclysm raid tier – this early in the entire lifespan of this expansion, you might want to consider collecting items and gear via normal dungeons and other means before regularly hopping into the Heroic queue. They’re not super-unfriendly toward casual players, but they do require casual players to exercise skill and proper social/leadership skills.

That’s pure love.

4165

What a self-satisfied dick.

I think these two statements contradict each other. In my Heroic fiasco last night, when we beat a boss, it was through trial and error … many trials and many errors. And after beating the boss, I did not feel more skilled in my playing than I had before. I didn’t learn anything new about gameplay, or how to use my class. All I learned was the “trick” for that particular boss. And all it took was an hour! Thanks WoW.

As for “character” - which I assume he means in the “good sportsman” sense - what a lame, wishy-washy word to use. In order to become better at Heroics, you need to build better “character”? What? This ain’t Little League.

Yes, of course. There’s nothing between “compelling, strategic, and social gameplay” and “failure rarely a real possibility”. No balance between the two.

Just for the record, the issue isn’t failure, it’s the time sink that failure generates. In no other game I can think of does failing mean hours of wasted time. In fact in any other game, we’d consider it a design flaw. But apparently that’s because we just don’t have strong enough “character”.

Man, fuck that guy. He says that a design goal is to make players wipe over and over until they learn the obscure boss tricks, and if you don’t like it, you’re just not patient enough?

I have only a few hours of game time a night, I don’t want to spend half of it running back from the graveyard. If that’s a character flaw, I’ll be happy to take my poor noob self to another game.

4166

You’re getting angry over nothing. They want the game to be more challenging right now. They succeeded. Back in 3.0, some of the Wrath heroics were pretty challenging too; I remember taking a long time to beat heroic Old Kingdom. During Burning Crusade, most of the heroics were ridiculously difficult until you were in Karazhan gear or the equivalent thereof.

If you don’t want a challenge, don’t queue for heroics. Run the normal instances. I’m sorry that you don’t want to learn new content.

4167

Yep, I will readily agree that right now I am mostly not running heroics because of the stress level, and tend to stick to normals when I want to run an instance. I have no problem with the difficulty level of the heroics, when I want a challenge, I run one (preferably with an all guild party.)

Heroics are meant to be hard. I personally only found one or two bosses in LK heroics to be difficult, other than that it was too easy. People have to get over the idea that you’re supposed to just start in on heroics at 85.

4168

Man, fuck that guy. He says that a design goal is to make players wipe over and over until they learn the obscure boss tricks, and if you don’t like it, you’re just not patient enough?

Interrupt spells that can be interrupted. Don’t stand in ground effects. Avoid obvious AoEs. Dispel obvious buffs / debuffs. Kill adds.

These are obscure boss tricks?

You clearly want a game without a failure state. Thankfully, Blizzard has decided that standing in fire should, in fact, be a failure state, and should kill you. Quickly. And wipe the group, if it’s Heroic Grim Batol.

4169

Eve Online, so well every MMO I’ve played at least.

4170

Motherfuckers should offer some kind of dungeon setting that’s easier. What a bunch of assholes. Poopsockers, all!

4171

After running all the heroics I think they’re mostly at the right difficulty. However, there is at least one boss that I think is too hard.

Ozruk in Stonecore is overly dependent on the tank executing perfectly. There’s no margin for error, so you might as well quit group if you end up in a PUG with a tank who doesn’t know the fight. I’d rather re-queue and spend 40 minutes fishing than spend two hours with a new tank learning that fight.

All the other bosses felt really hard to me a week ago, but after getting better gear and learning their tricks, it’s not so bad any more. In fact, all that CC doesn’t even seem so required now that you’ve got tanks with 175k health and healers who have re-learned how to heal after all the Cataclysm changes.

I imagine in a month or so we’ll be close to being back to the old Wrath style of plowing through heroics, though it’ll probably take 45 minutes instead of 15-20.

4172

Effects change between fights, chaos ensues, and there’s a lot of visual information to synthesize and parse, especially if you spend any time looking at your action bar. Some people have a harder time with that than others (especially only on their first or second try).

I think there’s no getting around that. One thing I noticed about heroics too, is at least in few boss fights I’ve seen, the time between the gimmicks/adds/whatever is very short. That makes it that much tougher to adjust.

It’s nearly short enough that I think sometimes they are bordering on action game mechanics and action games that have instant death tend to have a very easy reset after a failure state is met (well modern ones). Though, to be fair, it’s very easy to get back to bosses now… so much so that soul stoning the healer really isn’t worth it. Instead, I end up soul stoning the tank. Heh.

You clearly want a game without a failure state. Thankfully, Blizzard has decided that standing in fire should, in fact, be a failure state, and should kill you. Quickly. And wipe the group, if it’s Heroic Grim Batol.

I think one shot kills, even on heroic, is a little much… especially when you only have 5 players. I understand that sometimes that’s necessary to teach someone and that it may one of the few ways to successfully translate learning raid mechanics into 5-man dungeons.

Edit: Last couple of thoughts, camera placement is also really important. Helping players find proper camera settings for each fight could help some groups. A shifting camera and perspective can further frustrate the situation. I consider myself a B- or maybe B player and the only reason I’ve run the few heroics I have successfully is a friend has invited me into his guild runs. If we had all been B- or B players, I’d probably be way more frustrated than I am when discussing this.

4173

Yeah, I’m firmly on Aaron’s side on this one. So far we’ve managed to find good solutions for bosses without spending an hour wiping on each one. None of them have felt overly gimmicky, and only Springvale in SFK pissed us off till we decided to try pulling him to the passageway (we did get him down in the room itself but it was hard to repeat).

Of course, having done nearly all these bosses on normal first makes a difference. Normal gives you the baseline of what the boss does; heroic makes it a real challenge and can add a few new things in, but you shouldn’t be wiping for an hour till you “understand” what the boss does. If you’ve never seen him before (and it’s not SFK/Deadmines), then why are you in the instance on heroic mode?

4174

A punch in the face is a failure state I clearly don’t want, and that’s how the game feels to me at 85: a brickwall of ilevel and achi requirements, inflated AH gear prices, and constant LFD whine/wipefests.

By now it’s easy to have all the gear you may possibly want from quests, factions and normal instances, but still be unable to run heroics with any semblance of regularity or satisfaction. I mean, it’s been 3 weeks and I know casual players that are quitting already because there’s nothing more for them to do without a much bigger commitment to the game (amount of playtime, research and schedule).

4175

I haven’t played any of them yet (my priest is stuck in Dalaran, and everything I’ve heard about healing makes me less than enthusiastic about that whole aspect of the class anyway, and the new Warlock that I created a few days ago feels almost exactly like playing Shadow, but better), but I’m tentatively with the “too hard” group based on what I’ve heard. Blizzard created expectations about Heroic dungeon difficulty in Lich King - they’re supposed to be the thing that you do after you run out of quest content, and trying to incorporate raid mechanics into something that they’ve gone to great lengths to make accessible to anybody (Dungeon Finder alone means that tons of people who might not even bother because they don’t want to organize a group are in) runs completely counter to that goal. I’m being encouraged to go with a bunch of strangers to a weird club I’ve never heard about where there’s a roughly 70% chance that somebody is going to pull out a ball gag and ask if she can stand on my balls during sex. And then do it, regardless of my opinion on the matter. It makes no sense. I’m sure that the guys at Blizzard would like it if more people did raids, and I’m guessing that’s one of the motivations here, but I think it’s entirely wrongheaded.

4176

I haven’t actually done this boss on heroic, but it doesn’t sound that hard. What is the problem exactly? It sounds like a fairly standard mechanic. The last boss in Azjol-Nerub did the exact same thing (although at a certain point it started bugging out and you couldn’t run away from it because he’d keep facing you). Slightly more broadly, “run out at a specific time” is fairly common, though perhaps more in raids than heroics.

The worst fight for tanks, in my opinion, is the Forgemaster in H BRC, where the tank must carefully drag the boss through a certain area, as briefly as possible, without letting a debuff fall off the boss. This is not a kind of tank thing I’ve ever seen before. Although they did nerf this fight a bit, so perhaps it isn’t so bad any more.

Anyways, for people who find heroics too difficult, run the level 85 normals for a while. You get rep and upgrades out of there. Things will settle down soon. A lot of the problem is you see tons of people who just barely have the ilevel for heroics queueing for them. This is especially bad given that it takes into account PvP gear (I think) and offset gear. If you really have head-to-toe 333 gear, spend your hour a night doing some research on bosses instead of playing. It shouldn’t take that long to make some basic notes on every boss. In fact, you can just look at the Cataclysm heroics cheat sheet posted on this blog and get little summaries for each boss.

4177

Ozruk is much more unforgiving in Heroic and 1-shots the tank if he misses running away from Shatter.

Damage is 150k or so.

Also, he paralyzes the group right before he shatters so the “trick” is people have to put a DoT of some sort on him right beforehand so it gets reflected to them when they get paralyzed, waking them up. I don’t have a DoT as a paladin so the other alternative is to get into melee range to get a whack or two which apparently puts a DoT on you.

Naturally with no margin for error do this, it can easy be multiple people going splat insta-death which leads to super frustration.

Heroics also introduce “crap on the ground” that doesn’t go away plus additional mobs that heal boss/wipe raid which all adds up to frustration.

4178

Also the debuff is supposed to not be removed, which I’ve done by accident out of habit a few times leading to DPS going splat.

Erudax (last boss heroic Grim Batol) is also a big pain with TWO adds that heal compared to regular. Last boss of H-Stonecore is much more painful with her rock throwing being an insta-kill.

Even with my group of regulars, I had bad luck and could not finish/start both heroics I tried to go on yesterday. The DPS was just too low and I ran out of mana 1/2-3/4 into the fight on:

-Erunak in heroic Throne of Tides
-Ozumat in same
-Ozruk in H-StoneCore

2 weeks earlier with 20k less mana, I ploughed through H-ToT easily (“easily” is relative since it was new content and my first heroic and everything hit so damn hard, we took 3 wipes max on each boss as we learned it) but the difference was DPS was a lot higher. Yesterday the DPSers were alts of my buddies and their output was unfocused (no focus fire so targets weren’t going down, it was all scattered) leading to only 5-6k DPS average.

With a good group of 333-346 ilevel DPS (it seems hunters/ranged dps have easier time than melee with those ground debuffs) they do 8-10k dmg on average.

4179

Right, but the adds are the only difficult bit. It’s a simple thing to do - you know when he’s going to spawn them so you make sure your DPS moves into position and uses all those slowing abilities to get them down before they release the eggs.

Last boss of H-Stonecore is much more painful with her rock throwing being an insta-kill.

But trivially easy to avoid, given that the spot where the rock will land has a nice big graphic on it for some time.

Yesterday the DPSers were alts of my buddies and their output was unfocused (no focus fire so targets weren’t going down, it was all scattered) leading to only 5-6k DPS average.

With a good group of 333-346 ilevel DPS (it seems hunters/ranged dps have easier time than melee with those ground debuffs) they do 8-10k dmg on average.

I’m assuming this isn’t a complaint. I have no problems with things like focus fire being a basic requirement.

4180

I’m just going to wait for heroics. In 6 months everyone will have the routine down, and they can just tell me what to do and we can move on :) In the meantime, I’ll do normals.