It's a tie between TBC 5 man heroics and Cata heroics pre nerfs.
It's a tie between TBC 5 man heroics and Cata heroics pre nerfs.
its surprising that almost none mentioned MOP,they really must be horrible
I really loved the ICC 5mans, and the end time 5mans.. sucks so bad that they won't make new ones and go with those god damn suckfests they call scenarios
ive only really done 5mans in wotlk, cata and mop and out of those i liked the early cata ones the most, challenging at the start but easy when you outgeared them.
In terms of challenging: BC>Cata(Pre-Nerf)>WLK(at the end)>=MoP>Cata (HoT hc's)
BC was great due to it being challenging and required to be done due to attunements and I liked most of them EXCEPT the ones in zangarmarsh (Ugh...) Same thing in cata at start, they were fun and challenging. Required lots of communication and coordination else wise you'd wipe and it was better to drop blues than epics from 5 mans. Wrath at the end and MoP well... They weren't that great IMO its more of aoe and go but I loved the style in northrend how they were done with the dungeons but in MoP thankfully you get to skip once ur ilvl is 460(which could be achieved by crafted blues)as I don't like most of them (not a fan of asian theme). Cata za/zg was just a huge rehash which I didn't like but in terms of difficulty at start they were kind of difficult but for HoT do I need to explain? Anyone was able to faceroll through them even so that I went as a iLvl 365 tank with abit of bad gear and managed to clear all 3 of them. and even the design wasnt THAT nice
Last edited by enchanted; 2013-06-29 at 01:30 PM.
... you know the HoT dungeons were designed to be cleared with roughly ilvl 350, right? Facerolling them with 365 doesn't say a lot. Especially as tank, considering you could hold aggro against Jesus with just autoattack.
OMG 13:37 - Then Jesus said to His disciples, "Cleave unto me, and I shall grant to thee the blessing of eternal salvation."
And His disciples said unto Him, "Can we get Kings instead?"
I like MoP heroics from a design stand point, I think they are some of the more enjoyable heroics. As far as an 'era' of 5 mans I still factor in difficulty/challenge, to which MoP heroics certainly aren't.
If we are including challenge modes into the equation (because they ARE 5-man) I would put MoP 5-mans as the best.
If someone says anything other than TBC then I have no hope for these forums.
My vote is for vanilla. Those dungeons were a huge part of the leveling process as well as learning the game to raid. Plus the dungeon tier gear. They were long dungeons that mattered. Would I want them to be that way now, of course not. But they were great in the infancy of this game.
As far as the poll goes I'll vote for TBC. Loved them!!!!!
I also really liked how Blizz added 5 mans to their previous expansions as well to match the end of this xpack (Magisters, IceCrown, and End Time). I loved those 5 mans for the story and for the "catch-up" on my alts. It's too bad scenarios are what they have chosen in MoP.
Shadow Lab HC and Magister's Terrace HC are my favourite 5 man dungeons I have experienced. Murmur and Priestess Delrisa will always have big place in my memory.
"Ubi sementem feceris, ita mettes."
Why can't people say anything but TBC? I've been playing this game since the beginning and I can't think of an era of 5-mans that was worse than TBC ones. I did those 5 mans when the reward was awful and they were tuned terribly. Yet, I was forced to do as a handful of them were REQUIRED as part of the gating mechanism to do some of the early T4 raiding content.
Were they challenging? Yes, but it was all artificial and frustrating challenging in my eyes. To me there is nothing really challenging about approaching these instances in the TWO ways you could do them. If you had little CC but great kiting you could group kite mobs. If you had a lot of CC it would be slow, but you would just stack a composition that has heavy CC and slowly whittle your way through packs. Why would you do that? Because the mobs were boring and not interesting at all, the difficulty was the absurd damage they did. Doing heroic shattered halls and having the hound master packs 2 NON-ELITE dogs one shot our resto shaman with a 8k hit wasn't what I call difficult, I call that frustrating.
Many of the people I know will still claim until they die that TBC heroics were downright difficult, but these very same people would run 5 man groups with 2-3 hard CC options which would make any of TBC heroics very easy. At that point the difficulty was removed, and the only problems you could run into were people not being patient. It wasn't difficult as much as it just setting up the same boring CC routine for every single pack. It was like downloading Garr_Target back in MC but applied to a 5 man setting. Not hard, just fucking tedious.
There wasn't that many tactics in TBC heroics and trust me, I did them all. The same difficulty was apparent throughout ALL of them. Mobs have HP, could be CCd and do a stupid amount of damage. Throw mechanics and strategy MOSTLY out the window but the only strategy you need is to CC/kite as many as you can and tank the rest. If CC and focus fire is what defines difficulty then raid encounters like Garr are probably your cup of tea looking back to Vanilla.
These heroics aside from a few of them had massive design flaws too. It's the reason they tried to open up WoTLK heroics from a design stand point. The long hall ways with no spiraling paths or dungeon feel was a common complaint during TBC and was the inspiration for a dungeon like Nexus in WoTLK. Also many of them had very little background or story, aside from few lead ins.
I think everybody is entitled to their opinion and it's largely going to be based on WHEN people were introduced to the game, but trust me, there are valid opinions beyond TBC heroics. I feel like Cataclysm heroic difficulty was a far better showcase of what heroic difficulty should be like. You were punished for not using CC or pulling too much like TBC, but there was also a heavy emphasis on mechanics and individual showcases of skill. The difficulty wasn't about juggling mobs that were tuned around one shotting you.
Again I started in Vanilla and I'm not going to layer in my own dose of nostalgia by claiming Vanilla dungeons were the best (although it's odd they aren't even listed in this threads poll). The one thing I will say about Vanilla dungeons is that they certainly, more than any other era of 5-man content had the actual feel of a dungeon. That doesn't mean they didn't have their own problems, but they weren't linear/steam lined dungeons. When you entered many of the 5 mans in Vanilla it felt like you were entering an actual dungeon and from an adventuring standpoint that was a cool feeling.
Vanilla - True dungeon feel. Scope and sense of a raid, but in 5 man format.
TBC - Difficult, but mostly because of trash.
WoTLK - Great story, moderate dungeon feel, but easy.
Cataclysm (pre-nerfs) - Good difficulty, good mechanically.
MoP - Too easy, great mechanically
Challenge modes are somewhere between TBC and Cataclysm difficulty, but timed. I feel like they take more from TBC in terms of difficulty as a lot of the difficulty of them stems from the trash. Still good on mechanics, but I figured there would be a step-up from MoP heroics mechanic wise. Still great for their first attempt at them, but I would shift more difficulty to the bosses themselves.
Every era had something going for it, I just feel like TBC had the least going for it. WoTLK dungeons while pathetically easy introduced a difficulty by adding the glory of the dungeon achievements for the first time. Some of them were difficult and they did extend the life of them a bit.
Last edited by Tojara; 2013-06-29 at 05:22 PM.
I'd say Wrath.
BC dungeons, while being nice... and actually I really enjoyed them, the problem was waiting ages to find a group. Everyone talks about needing CC in those heroics, but aside from the start of the expansion, CC went out the window when Pally tanks became ubiquitous. I played a holy priest back then and they turned into a spam-fest of greater heals and renew on the DPS with drinking nearly every pull (depending on how well geared the tank was)
Wrath dungeons were pretty well made, all things considered. I liked the relative ease and PuG friendlyness of them, and the introduction of dungeon finder made 5 mans viable content for playing alts.
Why they've completely moved away from 5-man content I'll never understand. "Oh, we know the majority hated how hard 5-mans were at the start of Cata, so we made MoP 5-mans more Wrath like. But we also made them pointless."
Last edited by Dirgon; 2013-06-29 at 05:19 PM.
the wotlk normal heroics era was the best era
mgt was my favorite 5man
Over half the people here have said something other than TBC.
Anyway, what's "non-artificial" (whatever that means in the context of an entirely artificial setting) difficulty? Cataclysm's mechanics that would oneshot you if you didn't avoid them, just like TBC's mobs would oneshot you if you didn't avoid them? I don't see a difference, other than that almost every mob was this dangerous in TBC, rather than the occasional one in cata.
If you're getting hit in the face by an untanked mob in TBC, then you're doing something even more wrong than someone chilling in corborus' rapezone in cata.
And you were not punished for not using CC in cataclysm, dude. Nobody who had a clue used CC there. When I did randoms on my healers, ev en on my shaman, I'd go out of my way to deliberately break all the CC I saw, because it contributed absolutely nothing useful to the run, only serving to slow everything down. Maybe you used CC if you pulled 3-4 packs at once or something, but even then that was more the time for a few cooldowns than it was the time for something as outrageous as CC, and even that was only really a big problem if you had lots of unavoidable mechanics or ranged mobs doing damage to someone other than the tank.
TBC heroics weren't just about CC/kiting, it was also about properly coordinated group play; managing who does what, when they do it, what mobs to attack in what order, how to pull them properly without getting adds, where to fight them safely, what packs to safely skip, how to deal with the abilities of the more dangerous adds, how to most efficiently do damage without pulling aggro, how to keep mobs off others if the tank did lose threat for whatever reason, and - of course - the properly coordinated CC, if you had any; it being useful enough that you'd bring out that soccubus, or curse of exhaustion that feared mob that you deliberately aggroed then pulled to an area where it could run around safely, etc. Incidentally, you only really needed one "hard" CC; one good hunter, rogue, warlock, or mage could deal with everything you needed, any more was a crutch. To say that it was 'tedious' is to imply that this process took more than a couple of seconds for each new group, after the first pull, unless you were doing something crazy.
Today, as has been the case for a very long time, heroics go like this:
Enter
don't say a word to anyone
pull EVERYTHING between you and the next boss (or pointless and tedious RP event), ideally in one huge pull
SPAM AOE
repeat
leave the instance without having said anything to anyone
It's at the point where you wonder why other people are even needed in the first place. TBC heroics were "artificially" difficult to such a degree that you couldn't have done everything that needed to happen at the same time yourself; the other people there actually did useful things that sometimes even required intelligence to pull off. These days I feel like if my class had a few more abilities then I could solo every instance without even needing to pay attention, and the same went for almost every other heroic since TBC too.
At least cataclysm had those idiotic achievements, I guess (now there's something I'd be comfortable with using the term "artificial difficulty" on), and occasionally featured mobs that made pulling entire rooms in one go impractical, and abilities that could kill people in seconds if they didn't deal with them correctly, but even those are long gone now, little dubt because people found them too frustrating.
Not gonna say that TBC's instances weren't mechanically much simpler than anything that has come after them, but that very simple gameplay still produced much more engaging player activities than what today's does. Back then, with exceptions naturally, a large number of pulls required individual tactical approaches depending upon how your group was composed, and how competent your players were. But in the last few years, every single instance has played exactly the same all of the time. You either do your single-target 'rotation', or you do your aoe 'rotation', with the only practical difference being how the mobs *look*. Even challenge modes are essentially this, unless you're going for the absolutely best times achievable; not just gold.
oh well
It's pretty clear by this point that they're deliberately designing instances so that the players won't have to actually think in any way, engage with the content meaningfully (as in, in any more complicated ways than as if they were fighting bunched up worldmobs that don't fight back), or communicate with each other. It's supposed to be this "lunch break"-thing that takes no effort to participate in or complete, and I guess the days of heroics that lived up to their name died with the Stonecore. I liked that place. Still didn't need CC, though, and you could basically have the dps tank 1-2 mobs by themselves without being in any danger at all... but it required some actual player interaction with the game environment, which is always good.
Then we got those awful time travel heroics with packs that could be soloed and didn't need a healer to survive even for tanks without any raidgear
guh
"Quack, quack, Mr. Bond."
I have fond memories of TBC heroics before they were nerfed. Hard content that was meant to separate the good players from the bad was extremely satisfying to beat. Doing the timed event in Shattered Halls heroic back then was one of the most exhilarating and rewarding 5-man content ever.
TBC were the best dungeons period IMO. Classic is right behind. Then wrath came along and took the good social aspects away from the game and now i cant stand the boring monotonous heroics in the game. They really need to make the mobs smash you in the face. CC should be required most pulls or the mobs wipe you. LFG should be removed from the game.