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With gear heroics become WotLK style again. We barely CC anymore, or even communicate with each other while pulling - but yeah that's usually a guild group, pugs tend to go from very good to very bad. What bothers me the most is the time required to finish some of the instances. Some are a breeze while others take ages thanks to bazillions of trash, which is not hard at all, just takes time to plow your way through.

Well luckily Blizzard "fixed" the Deadmines trash, now it's time to look at other instances too, like SFK (courtyard & kitchen rooms before 2nd boss), Stonecore (cultists after 2nd boss) etc. Way too much trash. I like hard instances but trash doesn't make an instance hard, it just makes it 1hour instead of 30min to complete.

I agree with Fminus for the most part except I dont mind the time involved, nor the additional mobs. I look at it as yet another opportunity to practice while getting rep along the way.

Bad players are the main problem with cata pugs, not blizzards design philosophy- except, of course, that it is their design philosophy in the first place that made so many bad players during wotlk. Fortunately cata will be thinning the baddie herd, so many of them will be gone before too long because they, like the poster who started this "omg heroics are too hard" notion, will quit the game because they cant l2p.

Originally Posted by Slaggo

So, they said they won't be making changes to the difficulty of Heroic dungeons when Cata released, but now they're saying that they NEVER said they wouldn't make changes and will nerf?

I wish Blizz would just stick with what they say instead of changing their mind every week because players threaten to quit.

They said they'd wouldn't make "across the board nerfs to Heroics." That's a direct quotes BTW. They never said, we won't nerf any heroic, for any reason, ever. They'd be morons to say that. Let's play make pretend a moments. Let's pretend that there was, at release, a boss that more than 70% of groups wiped on consistently. Not once or twice, but consistently. Would a nerf be OK, then? What about 80%? 90%? "No one has ever actually beaten this boss"? I'm not saying there are any bosses like that, what I'm saying is that Blizzard deliberately never painted themselves into that corner. They knew they'd have to nerf a few a things, and buff a few things no matter what they did. Look at the changes that have been made so far. There's at least as many buffs as nerfs.

They only really "big nerf" was to trash in the Deadmines. I did Deadmines last night (and I've done it before the nerf). The difficultly hasn't changed. All the big pulls are still there. What's changed is that now there are only two pulls of Oafs instead of five or six, four reapers instead of seven, three packs of a single Evoker and three miners instead of six... They made it faster, because you have fewer repetitive kills. The difficulty is still there.

Originally Posted by Luminar

Maybe it's just my sleep-deprived brain but this kind of sounds like that they plan to make them after the first month or first few months of the expansion's release. Who knows, maybe I'm reading too much into it. Although, if they are considering making sweeping nerfs, I'll be a bit disgruntled. Difficulty is fine where it is, and they're fun now. Not just mindlessly mashing 1 button.

I suspect that they are, again, not painting themselves into a corner here. If, by tier 13, heroics are trivial like they were at the end of Wrath they probably want to option to cut down on some the annoying (Deadly now, annoying by then) abilities, like they did at the end of Wrath. By saying it this way, people won't be able to throw it back in their faces a year from now.

Originally Posted by tar01

Cata heroics are not playable. I've been in 3 groups yesterday that disbanded after 1-2 pulls. To be short cata is not playable. After you got all the gear from normal dungeons you can't do anything unless you want to play 4h+/day. Pvp is not an option as the pvp balance is still as bad as it was at lv80 in patch 4.0.

This is just silly. I've been PUGing heroics since the third or fourth day of the expansion. My guildies were slow to level so I used LFG. I've completed every Heroic Dungeon in the game just fine except Stonecore... and that's just it's RNG. Only gotten it once for some reason (and it was one of the few groups I've had that fell apart). In the month since release I've had maybe 5 or 6 groups fall apart. Maybe. Use CC, watch your aggro, use survivability cooldowns, kill bosses.

Congratulations to all! Love the Daily Blink title "Bitter Gnomes and Goblins" very creative indeed.

Magmaw tacs last!? You need to get some proper judges Well done everyone. GJ & Gratz to all of you.

Heroic Dungeons Difficulty
I don't believe we ever said we refuse to nerf Heroic dungeons. What we've been trying communicate is that it wasn't our plan to make sweeping nerfs to Heroics within the first month of the expansion's release. We will continue tuning dungeons, trash, boss encounters, and abilities. Some of those changes will involve nerfs. This act just shouldn't be misconstrued as us changing our minds, or a sign that we're unhappy with the general level of difficulty of all Heroics.

We don't think it was a mistake to start with the difficulty we did. We're happy overall with the progression path we have in Cataclysm. I think we've set an appropriate standard for this expansion, but we'll continue fine-tuning things (nerfs and buffs) to make sure the end game feels right as time passes.

Well Nerfs or not the fact of the matter is that people are complaining "It's to hard please nerf it" , and i for one would like them to remain difficult. Being a Vanilla beta player and playing through all the content, This expansion has been challenging and I love it. The First bos in Herioc SFK is a pain in the rear, but after you get a difficult dungeon or Boss down there is that sense of accomplishment and the next time you are back in said dungeon or fighting said boss it will be a little easier for you. With Blizzard saying that"Some of those changes will involve nerfs" just means to me that they are afraid to lose player base because they have made the game "to hard" so to speak, but I say to the whiny QQers, Get off your butt get the gear that the hard core to semi hard core people have and then run those heroics. Heroics are suppose to be challenging and difficult. Not "ok it is the start of the heroic lets just AOE everything and be done in 30 mins, and then on to the next one. So leave the heroics Heroic and if you can't do the dungeon cancel your account and go play Hello Kitty Adventures for an easier game.

ARGH! SO MUCH QQ ABOUT HEROICS AND NERFING! What the blue said, translated to me was: When we released the heroics, they weren't necessarily perfect or intended to be as easy or hard in some places as they are. So therefore if it needs to be nerfed or buffed, it will be nerfed or buffed and we're not scared to do it. But time will tell.

It does not mean they plan to do sweeping nerfs of heroics, it's a game that is constantly updated to put the game at where THEY feel it should be. It's not static, and that's just how it is. Go play something else if you can't handle that they will buff some things and nerf others. I think they will put it at where the majority of the community needs it to be without sacrificing too much integrity.

After getting gear, Heroics are quite easy with a guild group but they probably want it to be doable with PuGs too.

It's the normal Blizzard double-speak bafflegab.

What they mean is "herp derp , the subs are going down, we gotta do something before next quarters statement"

I honestly don't see the problem with heroics. In all my pug we normally finish was no wipes, its actually rare they I get into one that cant finish the instance or wipes a lot. Are they much harder than lich king instances? Yes. The only problem I have with some is that the have insane amounts of trash in some of the heroics, which was one of the things I hated in vanilla was that there was so much trash.

I do agree with the people who say its 5 man raiding, but that's just to prepare people for the 10/25 man raids since the bosses there are like evolved version of multiple heroic bosses / trash mobs put together. I also happen to find the bosses this expansion much more fun, so I'm liking this Xpack so far.

The intro raid guide is extremely outdated and no one that is going into the raid scene now should use that info. The daily blink was great . You don't need the "right" composition to defeat heroics, we do it with a pally tank (no cc), fury warrior (no cc), frost DK (no cc), feral druid (woot root / sleep), resto shaman (yay hex / bind elementals). Its an all melee group that I heal. We have easily defeated all of the heroic and gotten well over half of the achievements so far. We rarely (and I mean RARELY) do more than 1 heroic a day.

Originally Posted by tar01

It's more like 50% not 90%. Anyway about half the guild I'm in tries to do heroics the other half kinda gave up on them.

The problem is that heroics have to be done raid style if you want to actually finish them. If you try lfg pugs, 4 out of 5 fail before the first boss.

Basically it's 5 man raiding. You need the right team mix, everyone to be ready at the right time and so on. This is not good for me, not for heroic 5 man dungeons. Cata is now hardcore and you need 4-5hours/day if you want to do something.

You couldn't be more wrong. I've been doing nothing but pugging heroics. They have been all kinds of various group combos. Some have failed, yes. Most have succeeded. I don't have hours to play. I have a very hectic work schedule. Yet I am able to complete heroics and still have fun with the game. I've never understood why people who are so unhappy with a game continue to stick around and pay money to play it.

Eh...pls don't nerf 5man dungeons?
They are easy now as they are with mediocre -> good gear and standard common sense...
Atm they 're not even fun anymore with a guild group since we are storming through them ... Nerf the trash to make em take less time if that is the problem - yes ... Nerf the bosses - Hell no. I'd even like harder bosses ...
Cheers
Zoulis

If the slowly nerf them over the course of T11 content, so be it. I'm just thankful I hit 85 and didn't find myself dozing off steam-rolling easy ass heroics, but instead the opposite.

Thank you, Blizzard.

Originally Posted by bloodwine77

Blizzard is doing double-speak yet again. Heroics will be jokes soon enough, it sounds like.

I don't mind little tweaks such as trimming the trash in Deadmines. That doesn't affect the difficulty of Deadmines, it just makes it a little faster (that place takes forever even with a competent group).

Also, I have noticed that heroics have already gotten a little easier now that more people have 333, 346, and even 359 gear. I've had less issues with pugs this past week.

There will always be bad groups, but I think the heroic difficulty is just fine as it is.

---------- Post added 2011-01-08 at 09:11 AM ----------



They did do something wrong. They made the game way too easy and braindead in WotLK. Players have gotten used to zerging everything with minimal effort.

Cataclysm is hopefully retraining people to use their full abilities again.

No Blizzard did something wrong, not the players.

We have forever been told that Raids are where you go for challenges, Heroics and Regular Instances are for those who either did not like to raid, could not raid because of outside reasons, or just could never get down the mechanics. Now the guild I am in is fairly large, we have over 100 regulars (counting accounts) with prime time peaks of 40+ on. We have all sorts of people. The number that just are down on this expansion is amazing and it all is from one source, they do not like the new instances, worse outside of a handful none will even bother with heroics , they just level alts. I can't count the number of formerly great healers (good people, behaved and did what was needed etc) who are now doing alts. When the class you enjoy saw its ability decrease each and every level as you went up it makes the game no fun. People don't like feeling inadequate and making healing spells cost four times their original amounts does not make a class fun. Blizzard said challenge, well the only class they nerfed to accomplish this was healing specs. Sorry, that is just lame.

People pay to have fun. Fun is not sitting in an instance for an hour or more. Before some elitist p comes back and says "they all take 30 minutes" well sorry they don't, we don't just run a select group of people. Being part of guild means we try to have everyone participate. We have to autistic children in this guild, they have a hard time understanding some of the mechanics used in the newer complex boss fights, even when guided on vent. So they are screwed even on regular runs because they don't react as fast.

Blizzard failed to maintain the fun with CATA. The elite players can have Raids, leave the instances and heroics to the average player. Leave those players alone. They help make our guilds fun. They keep it lively. Yeah, occasionally we took one or two not good players on raids, but that when we had them on farm. Now we have to spend too much time helping them through regular runs.

Maybe I'm a bad person, but I am so grateful they made Heroics as difficult for bads as they did. These are the same people flip-flopping from FotM class to FotM class. Short of giving these people epics just for logging in, they'll never be happy. Good riddance.

The CC guide should have won the whole contest, really. Everyone needs to read it!

I don't think that they plan to nerf heroics. If you read the original thread instead of only that comment you can see that the comment is only the response to someone who said that blizzard promised that they will not nerf the heroics. It seems that this tier heroics will stay the same.

However no one knows what will happen when patch 4.1 is live, I think not even blizzard knows, it depends on how many new 5 mans there will be, the impact of new crafts etc, they will want progression from fresh 85 to complete raiding on heroic to take the same time as it takes now so if with this difficulty+ whole new tier it takes more time to progress there will be nerfs. Even if those nerfs will be only to make orbs tradeable.

This issue has more than 2 sides to it apparently from all the posts I am reading. multiple views here but what i think personally is:

The queues are ridiculous
Some of the content is crappy OP or cheap easy, all it needed is fine tuning
Its not "too" hard.
Some accommodations must be made, that don't involve nerfing or dumbing down the challenge.

Originally Posted by ZEROWASHU

No Blizzard did something wrong, not the players.

We have forever been told that Raids are where you go for challenges, Heroics and Regular Instances are for those who either did not like to raid, could not raid because of outside reasons, or just could never get down the mechanics. Now the guild I am in is fairly large, we have over 100 regulars (counting accounts) with prime time peaks of 40+ on. We have all sorts of people. The number that just are down on this expansion is amazing and it all is from one source, they do not like the new instances, worse outside of a handful none will even bother with heroics , they just level alts. I can't count the number of formerly great healers (good people, behaved and did what was needed etc) who are now doing alts. When the class you enjoy saw its ability decrease each and every level as you went up it makes the game no fun. People don't like feeling inadequate and making healing spells cost four times their original amounts does not make a class fun. Blizzard said challenge, well the only class they nerfed to accomplish this was healing specs. Sorry, that is just lame.

People pay to have fun. Fun is not sitting in an instance for an hour or more. Before some elitist p comes back and says "they all take 30 minutes" well sorry they don't, we don't just run a select group of people. Being part of guild means we try to have everyone participate. We have to autistic children in this guild, they have a hard time understanding some of the mechanics used in the newer complex boss fights, even when guided on vent. So they are screwed even on regular runs because they don't react as fast.

Blizzard failed to maintain the fun with CATA. The elite players can have Raids, leave the instances and heroics to the average player. Leave those players alone. They help make our guilds fun. They keep it lively. Yeah, occasionally we took one or two not good players on raids, but that when we had them on farm. Now we have to spend too much time helping them through regular runs.

It all gets fine after you get past the first hurdle which is gear - the game becomes fun as hell. I'm a holy priest myself and was struggling at the start of this xpac, but when I finally collected some gear with millions of wipes and such and we really rarely wipe now and I barely run out of mana on anything dungeon related.

And don't bring autism into this debate, it's a game for the masses not minorities. Just because someone is missing a foot, doesn't mean they should stop selling shoes in pairs.

I think they should go back to normal being like childsplay and keep Heroics... hard.