From the new “Dungeons are Hard!” article on the WoW website, with the same “seriously, we wanted it to be hard” song we’ve heard before cut out:
(all emphasis mine)
We’ve seen a few threads that suggest that we’re too proud to admit mistakes. I find that logic strange, because we do it all the time. Example one: we reverted the 10x honor from Tol Barad pretty quickly. It was a mistake. Example two: Heroic Strike is too dominant an attack for warriors. That was a mistake. Example three: the Lich King Heroic dungeons (and Naxxramas) were too easy to zerg, setting up an expansion-long expectation that purple gear would come easy and often. In retrospect, that was a mistake. We don’t at all view the Cataclysm dungeon and raid balance as a mistake.
However, I can name at least three things related to dungeon difficulty that we either did wrong or could do better. We’re our own worst critic, and we are very hard on our own decisions.
First, item level is a necessary – but not sufficient – hoop to jump through when using the Dungeon Finder for Heroics. We should have also made sure players had at least seen the content on normal mode before. Maybe we should have had Burning Crusade-like attunements.
deep breath
DERP DERP DERP. You’re just now realizing this? You go back to Burning Crusade heroic difficulty and don’t revert to Burning Crusade mechanics to get into them.
Frankly I would have loved a faction grind to get into Heroics. My friends had tons of fun doing that and it really added some legs to maintaining our interest in the game. It made heroics a reward, not a given destination.
Maybe we should have made the item level requirements pretty relaxed if you’re going with a premade group and much stricter if you’re going with a pick-up group. We’d love to implement (and have some long-term plans that include) better ways to detect if you know what you’re doing other than just the gear you’ve accumulated. Overall, we just needed to state more clearly that Heroic dungeons are intended as a destination, not a first step.
Cool, but knowing Blizzard’s turnaround time on their “long-term plans,” I have a sinking feeling that this will be too little, too late. We’re all going to be geared by the time this change rolls around, and AOEing groups down might once again be possible and in vogue.
Second, there are only a few level-85 normal dungeons. For a level-85 player who isn’t ready for Heroics but wants to run dungeons, these can get old pretty quickly. Perhaps another way to handle it would have been to have introductory Heroics and harder Heroics. We’ve also flirted with having three difficulty levels before, but that does add an extra level of content to develop and complexity to explain.
It’s been suggested, yes, but I never thought that’d being a good idea unless you have faction grinds/flagging for Heroics too.
Third, the game could do a better job of telling a group why they failed so that so much blame doesn’t fall at the feet of the healer. We talk a lot about not standing in fires, but equally important is the number of bosses that spawn in adds that must be gathered up and/or burned down quickly, or in some cases ignored. We’re also asking a lot of DPS or tanks in those situations, but that information isn’t always conveyed well except through trial and error.
The healer? Huh? DPS and Tanks fuck up fights just as bad.
In Conclusion
We do understand that some healers are frustrated and giving up. That is sad and unfortunate. But the degree to which it’s happening, at least at this point in time, is vastly overstated on the forums. We also know that plenty of players like the changes and find healing more enjoyable now. Both sides need to spend a little less effort trying to drown out the other side claiming that everyone they know – and by extension, “the majority of players” – agree with their point. You shouldn’t need to invoke a silent majority if you can make an articulate and salient point.
Pretty jarring transition. It’s all about Healers now? What does that say? I interpret that as, well, healers are quitting/respeccing in droves (at least compared to other roles). The beautiful “the forums overstate it” followed by no hard numbers about how wrong the forums actually are makes me raise an eyebrow.
As always, we’re keeping an eye on things. There are a few bosses that seem responsible for more wipes than the others: Commander Springvale, Beauty, Altairus, and Admiral Ripsnarl perhaps. By the time you read this, you might have seen us implement Restoration druid buffs intended to keep them competitive in raids. We also just tend to nerf content over time because the original players hitting that content have moved on, so we want to open it up to a wider audience.
Remember how we said we were happy with the difficulty and won’t be changing it much? Well, we’re unhappy with the difficulty and will be changing it every patch.
It’s already begun, after all. Deadmines is almost completely different from how it was a week ago. So many pulls have been made totally CC-able, or just plain easier, and not a word was said about it. Abilities like “Motivate” have been grossly nerfed. Ripsnarl’s vapors are now easily controlled.
I don’t blame Ghostcrawler for the double-speak. You have to write “we’re nerfing heroics” in a subtle enough way to not offend bads and hardcore alike, but also not to come out and say “we totally fucked up healing by making it a miserable chore.”
