4401

I have the same problem. Never went to those two normal Cataclysm dungeons while leveling, choosing to do the outdoor zones instead. And now they’ve disappeared forever from my LFD panel.

I guess if people whine enough, Blizzard will eventually let folks queue for all Cataclysm dungeons regardless of level, like in WotLK.

As for all the dungeons in the game, well… it would be nice but honestly, you can solo most of the old content at level 85. I just miss the WotLK heroics because of the achievements I never got (which would be super easy now).

4402

You can still do the achievements - some of them at least. I was soloing Gundrak heroic for a laugh yesterday.

4403

I’m sure somehow linking this is verboten but it’s funny as hell

4404

WoW should add a built in Failbot to call out people who stand in fire, to prevent people from just blaming the healer for their deaths.

4405

This I can agree with. I think some kind of smoother progression between leveling and heroics would be nice, especially since crafting anything remotely worth equipping is fuckoff expensive at 85.

Something like having “easy mode” leveling dungeons, “normal mode” level cap verisons, and “heroic mode” elder versions would be ideal. I totally agree that Cataclysm has too few normals at 85.

Fair enough, but I’d raise the counterpoint that a lot of “bads” are perfectly capable of being competent players if one has the patience to show them how to not be bad. Crap that’s not intuitive (which you’ve brought up upthread, like the beam stacks in H BRC) does need to be explained.

In particular, I can think of a couple people I’ve played with in the past who would get ragekicked out of many pugs but who have been able to be coached past their limitations into a solid if not spectacular performer.

Players that are smart enough to gear up and learn fights before going into Heroics are probably good players. The people that rig 333 ilvl with inappropriate gear, have ground effects off, and think “oh I’ll figure it out as we go” are the problem ones. They think they’re cut out for heroics and aren’t going to take any advice to the contrary.
The few people who are truly uncoachable will remain so, of course. I’ve never had a problem quickly identifying them and booting them out of my groups. In all my Cataclysm dungeoning, I’ve probably had to do this five times. I don’t buy this is as some kind of intractable problem that means LFD or the dungeon design itself needs to be dramatically altered.

The c) option, I think, is to design the content assuming at least 1 person is going to be totally terrible. The d) is to turn off LFD for Heroics.

There’s really no clean solution to the problem. You can design the content so bads can do it, but then the good players are bored. You can design the content so bads can’t do it, but then you have a situation where most LFDs fail to make it to the end of the dungeon and only desperate DPS is left queuing.

Right now we’re obviously operating under the latter, but part of me thinks the former might be the lesser of two evils.

c) means that the content will be absolutely trivial for a decent group. I’d argue that a lot of current heroics are tuned to that standard anyway. I can’t tell you how many bosses I’ve killed with someone dead from ten seconds into the fight. d) is…yeeaahhhh.

The bolded bit is odd to me. I pug dungeons all the time and complete them. Granted I tank and mark CC and explain pulls and bosses and all that, but I’d say 8/10 pugs I’m in finish the dungeon. I just don’t think that this apocalyptic scenario you’re presenting is so widespread that Cataclysm must be deemed a failure.

4406

Another thought I’ve had re: difficulty over the last few days is that healers on the whole have gotten a lot better than they were fresh at 85 while they were feeling out their new mechanics. I mean, yeah, I’m a competent tank in full 346+ gemmed and chanted gear, but still – healers have been having a waaaaay easier time keeping both me and the group up and managing their mana at the same time. Part of it is DPS (and me, heh) getting better at not standing in the fire, sure. Part of it is the healers themselves getting better gear, absolutely. But I’m of the opinion that the biggest difference between now and three weeks ago is that healers know how to play their classes about 100% better.

(And I don’t mean to bag on healers for being bad at all. They got the rug pulled out from under them with the Cataclysm redesign. I’m sure I’d be in the same boat if I were healing at 85 on my old druid main.)

4407

It doesn’t matter where you place the mob, you still cannot stop people from hitting tornadoes if they are retarded. If you hit 1 tornado you tend to get chained in to another and it cascades from there.

Tanks can’t stop stupid as much as we’d like to.

4408

The best part about Altairus is that as a DK I can literally tank him without heals for at least three minutes.

He’s no Ozumat, but still.

4409

You completely didn’t read what I wrote :(

Getting chain-cycloned is unfortunate. Avoiding cyclones completely is actually pretty hard given the nature of the graphics and the way they move. The closer to the middle you are, the less likely you are to get knocked off when you do hit a cyclone.

4410

The majority of heroic pugs are successful for me, and healers are definitely getting better. Part of that is better gear, because of the way regen works. But experience with the fights also makes a big difference. For instance, a new healer might try to heal the group to full after each asphyxiate, whereas an experienced one knows that the group can stay below half health for most of the fight.

It seems Blizzard also deliberately made the end bosses of heroics relatively easier, so they can be completed. The tougher bosses like Springvale, Beauty without CC, Dragha etc are often skippable. Altairus the pug-killer and Ozruk are exceptions though.

4411

I do think there is an element of that. I did basically zero instances from 80-85. The first run was a great big WTF did I just forget to allocate talent points or something? experience and the next couple didn’t get much better as I both relearned my rotations (goddamit, don’t LB anyone other than the tank), mourned the loss of Tree of life and watched everyone else figure out how the instances and their role in them worked too.

While all that was going on I’ve added 50k mana, several hundred spell power and haste to my stats as has everyone else in the relevant areas. Wooo Last boss grim batol normal with a normal geared tank and 2 DPS plus myself and one other technically geared for heroics and I didn’t use Innervate, tree of life or a mana pot during the fight. Massive progress.

Healing is still boring in Cata though ;)

4412

I’d also throw in my anecdotal evidence (from doing many heroics, mostly through pugging). About 90% of my PUG heroics have been successful (sometimes we lose a person and have to get a new one, but that’s not really a problem). I do tank and make sure to ask people before each boss/explain the mechanics if necessary, but frankly why would you trust people to understand the mechanics of the boss? Most WoW players, contrary to popular believe, are not so stupid that they can’t follow basic instructions. As people learn the mechanics and get better gear, heroics will continue to be smoother and easier to run in PUGs (I’ve already noticed this in the last week).

The last thing Blizzard should do is nerf content because every group can’t do it 100% of the time. I don’t want challenge-free gear grinds (Wrath heroics).

4413

Healers are definitely getting better, and as DPS improves every instance is getting easier. If you have two DPS doing 10k and another being competent (7k+), you don’t even really need to bother with CC.

4414

Wrath heroics were only challenge free because everyone was in raid gear. And not beginning-of-the-expansion raid gear, either. When I came back to WoW, pre-Ulduar, people were most definitely challenged by many fights and most people wouldn’t even run Oculus or Gundrak.

4415

This has been my experience as well. There are some truly awful and painful pugs, but at this point there are also always people who are paying attention and willing to learn even if they’re kinda bad at first glance. Puggers can and will surprise you if you manage to preserve some faith despite the bad eggs.

I’m still convinced that heroics should not be nerfed, but there definitely is a problem with the main populace of WoW trying to tackle them. I just think that the problem isn’t that the WoW populace consists of brainless mouthbreathers, it’s that the game is terrible at conveying its mechanics before max level. If Blizzard wants to present some 5man content that requires knowledge of the game, then it actually needs to convey that knowledge instead of sitting back and expecting people to google it themselves.

Not an easy thing to ask for, but it’s never been more necessary and it’s not like they aren’t swimming in money hats by now.

4416

Does anyone else really hate the term “bads” or “baddies”? I see someone use that and immediately dislike them as an elitist jackass.

4417

Honestly, I have very little problems with Heroic Dungeons.

My first couple of PUGS were nice enough to pause before the run to iron out some details. Alright, we have CC, so Shammies take square and diamond, mage takes circle etc. Dungeon guide decides on target, tank or not. We also pause before each boss to strategize, and then again after to regroup. So far, so good. It’s still a challenge, and they’re kinda fun.

I’m not saying they’re hard; they’re hard, but they aren’t impossibly so. I’m barely geared, scraping by the iLevel requirements by equipping PvP gear into the dungeons, but then again, I’m DPS, I shouldn’t be getting hit in the first place. Yeah, there are bunch of extra mechanics and more often than not, Heroics are more of a stamina test than a mechanic test. We just have to last longer in the boss fight than in normal, with one or two extra mechanics. Do some of these kill you? Yeah, but those are generally the mechanics we got familiar with in normal.

Heroics are hard, but they’re fun. They’re even more fun when I get together with guildies and try for achievements instead of just running it for loot and JP.

4418

Bugged Heroic Deadmines where 1 member of the group died during run to the Ogre boss (through ice and fire) during Vanessa’s nightmare phase. We fought and killed Ogre triggering the gobby with his spiders but when the 1 straggler rezzed and ran through again the Ogre came back to life.

So we were stuck with 2 live bosses, 2 phases at once there. Had to give up.

4419

We spent hours on Heroic Shadowfang Keep the other night. Wiped about 4 times on Baron Ashbury, doing nothing wrong other than trying to figure out the right combination of interrupts to use (ie: which will not be in cooldown at the appropriate time). This was a guild run, everyone in vent communicating well. It was 3am by the time we were done. I was a walking corpse the next day.

The only reason I was able to spend that much time on a dungeon was because it is the holidays. Now that I’m back at work, I won’t be able to do them anymore. Which is a shame because better gear does make them easier. Just a few pieces of ilevel 346 gear has made my healing noticeably easier.

So I maintain that Heroics are still take an amount of time that is prohibitive to the casual player. I don’t want to think about how that run would have gone if we had tried to do it with a PUG that didn’t know the fight.

4420

We spent hours on Heroic Shadowfang Keep the other night. Wiped about 4 times on Baron Ashbury, doing nothing wrong other than trying to figure out the right combination of interrupts to use (ie: which will not be in cooldown at the appropriate time). This was a guild run, everyone in vent communicating well. It was 3am by the time we were done. I was a walking corpse the next day.

you only really need to worry about 2 spells, stay of execution and mend dark flesh or something.

Unless you guys are like running with all shadow priest(without silence talented)/priest/pally healing, you shouldn’t have problem with interrupting.