Heroic dungeons dumbed down

[Gihelle]

You're taught the customer is always right.

That's what they want you to believe so you don't get lawsuits or bullshit like that. As a matter of fact, it's extremely rare for them to actually be right. Sadly you have to act like they are no matter how wrong they may be.

[Goatfish]

About challenge mode dungeons, The biggest question I have would be. "What are the stats being normalized to? How are they being set?" Because if they are just giving people x stats for the run, fine. Though that worries me a little because you are forcing someone into a play style depending on their class (ie the difference between a resto shaman that stacks haste vs one that stacks crit vs one that stacks spirit all play a bit different and use different spells). Secondly, is mainly to wonder if they are just giving stats a 'cap' so that you have to have some gear before you even go into that dungeon, or get certain gear sets just so you meet all the stat caps given. i.e: having a max secondary stat cap of an easily reachable number would require people who usually stack a single stat to get gear or reforge just for challenge modes to reach the other caps so they don't waste stats.

Overall I would like to see exactly how they do it, especially because just setting stats however they like can seriously mess with how someone has their statistics set up, especially when it comes to tanks. I mean I know they love putting shit tons of parry on death knight tanking gear where parry is by far the worst DK tanking stat because of their passive.

As for heroic dungeons being dumbed down. Why does this surprise anyone? Why does anyone care? You only have part of one patch where you do dungeons before getting raid gear where they are even worth anything except a daily dungeon for valor points anyway.

[Aqua]

Now as much as I was one of the purveyors of 'Yay harder heroics' when Cataclysm started, I'm with the other jaded people here now.

They need to be dumb, Raiding has to be where the shit gets real sadly.

Heroics give a Solid PvE and reward system for those unable or unwilling to PvP at the end game level and don't have the time or skill (it happens) to tackle anything with more than a few button presses. It's a false sense of achievement, but it is a pinnacle, and it drowns out whining. Raiders and Guilds who are raiding can tell the player they are bad at their own level of play, the game itself isn't being the bad guy or the gate telling the person they cannot achieve greater because they refuse to learn. Because yes, like petulant children, they will whine.

And I'm just so tired of it, Like Blizzard, I am defeated, Nerf heroics to the ground, just don't make raids go the same way (Doing periodic 5% debuffs to a 30% cap every month is fine after the top 100-500 guilds have cleared heroic, I don't care so much about that.) because they are harder, and the player has far more control on who gets to do it. Not the makers of the game. Yes it was born out of LFD, but that is just the way the game has evolved.

So yes. Make that shit as dumb as it has to be, Challenge modes are going to be Heroics for masochists like me I guess. Good thing I have 14 guildies who are also that eager for self harm. And no one can whine about having to nerf it because Challenge modes are not a gateway to raids at all. They are a side mission. Anyone crying nerf for challenge modes either has to have a legit reason or shut up and find some better people to run it.

[Niteynite]

True... I do believe it wasn't the whole reason either...(hell, I'm a vocal one on how much I hated the story-design of Uldum being 75% a lampoon of Raiders of the lost ark and all the other probs of Cata)...

Yeah, that Harrison Jones thing stopped being funny back in BC.

[RickJamesLich]

Which is sad. Contrary to the popular saying, the customer is usually never right, because they usually don't have the experience necessary to fully understand what they're talking about.

I'm pretty sure people who worked with CS will relate.

Definitely agree, there's normal customers and then there's customers that are complete morons. For example, at McDonald's, there may be a customer that complains because they forgot his fries... that's alright though. But then there's a customer that comes in with no shirt or shoes, takes a shit in the urinal, and acts like an asshole to the person working behind the counter - not alright. The big thing is nowadays, blizz has a lot of those shirtless and shoeless customers, the ones that roll need on stuff they already have and the ones that gem for intellect or stamina as a rogue doing pve and causes you to wipe 5 times, and blizzard actually changes the game to appease these people when really they should be asking them to leave lol.

[Adlen]

Also, the other important side of this is this... and I say this often to people saying that Harder dungeons will bring players back. Weither harder dungeons caused cancelations or not... the fact remains that the harder Cata dungeons sure as hell didn't KEEP 2 million players from leaving WoW, did they? :P

Does that mean easy dungeons will bring people back?
Because we have herp-derp difficulty in 4.3 and well look at that. Sub numbers didnt change at all.

---------- Post added 2012-06-17 at 11:13 PM ----------

So yes. Make that shit as dumb as it has to be, Challenge modes are going to be Heroics for masochists like me I guess. Good thing I have 14 guildies who are also that eager for self harm. And no one can whine about having to nerf it because Challenge modes are not a gateway to raids at all. They are a side mission. Anyone crying nerf for challenge modes either has to have a legit reason or shut up and find some better people to run it.

WoW. Then why do i find myself firmly expecting Blizzard to do massive nerfs to Challenege Mode so players can "see the content"

[Deleted]

I'm confused after the first 2 weeks of Cata the heroics were already pisseasy...the only people who had a challenge from heroics were those people who did them the first 2 weeks.

This going to be Wotlk heroic easy or Cata normal easy in MoP?

Does that mean easy dungeons will bring people back?
Because we have herp-derp difficulty in 4.3 and well look at that. Sub numbers didnt change at all.

---------- Post added 2012-06-17 at 11:13 PM ----------


WoW. Then why do i find myself firmly expecting Blizzard to do massive nerfs to Challenege Mode so players can "see the content"

Indeed.

[Kickbuttmario]

- snip -

First: I didn't read your posts across the pages of this thread because the thought of you answering the question never occurred to me.

Two: You did it again bud. You did it again!! I asked you before! Why didn't people return in 4.3. Tons of people have asked this! You never answered them and I am getting annoyed that you keep doing THIS! You keep KEEP saying that Cataclysm heroics were one of the reasons why so many people left. Well, why haven't they come back. You said it was one of the main reasons.

Three: There are a ton of ways to implement a third difficulty for 5 mans. They could do what RIFT did and call their difficulty something like master mode, offer gear equal to the ilevel of the current tier raid instances, and have their difficulty above current tiers raid instance or err just above the normal easy raid bosses. RIFT master modes were also something players would do for mainly fun, since most of us were done tier 1 raid instances or were progressing through it, and not to mention, master modes are a bitch! OR they could do something they want to do, like make this third difficulty offer a token for their reward, which could be used to upgrade blue level items (for ex. 115) into epic (115), and the epic (115, earned from killing the final bosses in MoP 5 mans) could turn into epic (125). And since when does a third difficulty allow the raid instances to offer the same exact difficulty? Look at TBC! Raids offered only normal modes, while 5 mans offered normal and heroic. And wrath did the same until patch 3.2.

In all honesty, I can understand why some people like the 5 mans of wrath difficulty. Just easier to manage. You don't have to come home, stressing whether or not you can complete the difficulty. Now as I said before, I can admit the problems with TBC and Cata heroics, but I do know that the difficulty they offered were fun for me at least. It can sometime give a guy an adrenaline rush at times when you expect the impossible to be the possible. Such as clearing heroic Deadmines with a group of people for the first time, where all of them are doing bad dps, and tank just learning what to do and they are failing in these mechanics, especially at the third last boss where dps are having a tough time. You said you found wrath difficulty funner because you didn't notice the difference between cc'ing or saping. Likewise, I didn't find the healing changes from Wrath to Cata all that different since I raided heroic ICC and did heroic lich king attempts.

[coldfiredragon]

Oh boy, I asked for challenging heroics and I get speed races instead. That's like raiders asking for heroic raids and getting normals with a timer instead. Oh and for no extra reward except vanity gear. Yup, that sure does fill the niche we wanted, yessir.

Have you read about them at all? They have high tuned mobs, mew moves on the bosses AND its timed. What more of a challenge could you want?

---------- Post added 2012-06-18 at 12:11 AM ----------

Two: You did it again bud. You did it again!! I asked you before! Why didn't people return in 4.3. Tons of people have asked this! You never answered them and I am getting annoyed that you keep doing THIS! You keep KEEP saying that Cataclysm heroics were the reason why so many people left. Well, why haven't they come back. You said it was one of the main reasons.

They stopped leaving. It gave the ones here something to do that didn't make us want to beat our heads against the wall trying. Of corse they didn't come BACK, why would they come BACK at the end of the expansion? 4.3 was to keep more people like myself form leaving. It was not to get people back. MoP will get them back.

[roahn the warlock]

It does seem like with the lower number of dungeons.. and some of these dungeons have three bosses, that loot tables in dungeons are going to be very very big.. of there wont be enough gear

[mvaliz]

First: I didn't read your posts across the pages of this thread because the thought of you answering the question never occurred to me.

Two: You did it again bud. You did it again!! I asked you before! Why didn't people return in 4.3. Tons of people have asked this! You never answered them and I am getting annoyed that you keep doing THIS! You keep KEEP saying that Cataclysm heroics were one of the reasons why so many people left. Well, why haven't they come back. You said it was one of the main reasons.

/facepalm

EDIT: I'll respond later to the others... my stupid browser just effing refreshed while typing it out (a bug in it when I boldface something and hit "enter"... it's annoying) and I'm out of time.

Impatient god-damn jackass. I have a life outside of answering your limited idiotic questions... you know! The post prior I had to go because I was leaving to see Prometheus (I liked it, but can understand why other's don't quite easily :P). And I only had a chance to respond to the one above because I was prepping dinner for (Gasp!) my father on Father's day. Try to get a life and a family jackass and MAYBE you'll know why my holiday's aren't spent appeasing some crybaby forum poster's dribblings...

Having said this... I'll NOW respond to your stupid question in my next post (I actually did write it... but the browser AGAIN reset! And right now I'm in a VERY foul mood because of it coupled with your god-damn impatience acting like people are deliberately going against you... I'm done being polite with a jackass like you...

[Kickbuttmario]

Have you read about them at all? They have high tuned mobs, mew moves on the bosses AND its timed. What more of a challenge could you want?

Several people here have stated that they will nerf these challenge modes. And don't worry, they will nerf them. And just because they say its going to be hard doesn't mean it is going to be, its hard. The guys that can't stick to their own guns.

They stopped leaving. It gave the ones here something to do that didn't make us want to beat our heads against the wall trying. Of corse they didn't come BACK, why would they come BACK at the end of the expansion? 4.3 was to keep more people like myself form leaving. It was not to get people back. MoP will get them back.

Well I am sure people came back for 4.3 for the end of the expansion but remember, 100k subs did leave after all. Even with this patch. And people didn't leave at q1 2012 because of all the promotional stuff.

[mvaliz]

Why didn't people return in 4.3. Tons of people have asked this!

1) No... ton's didn't ask it. Just you. I'm getting sick of your obvious exaggerations, and I imagine everybody else is too.

2) Unlike idiots such as myself and you who stay here on forums AFTER we quit the game to complain to get the game back to the way we love it, casuals tend to quit a game and (gasp!) go play something else... ESPECIALLY when it's been a FULL YEAR after the changes get implemented! People like me who stick around on forums for THAT long are extremely rare.

You might be aware that many games have cropped up since then. Skyrim... Rift... this one game called D3 that got released... and there was this little game with some hype called SW:ToR that came out the EXACT SAME WEEK as 4.3... but I KNOW you are aware of that but CONVENIENTLY choose to forget that little fact. It started with 2 mil... and though it's shrunk down to 1.3 mill... I guarantee that MANY of those were still former WoW players.

Tell me, which part of Skyrim tells ex-WoW players that the THIRD content patch in a crappy expansion MIGHT'VE brought SOME of the things back they liked? They have to LOOK first in order to find out IF the game was even going to change... and I doubt people ever considered it was ever going to go BACK.

Let me give you an example: I had a friend who couldn't understand why nobody is playing EQ2 as she thought it was absolutely amazing. I then asked her "How come you aren't playing Final Fantasy XIV?" She said "Are you kidding!? That game is total CRAP!" I said "How do you know?" She said "You KNOW why, I was in the Beta!". And I responded... "That's correct - the beta...over a YEAR ago. Has it ever occurred to you the game MIGHT have improved since back then? Were you NOT the one telling me that EQ2 was crap the day it came out to compete with WoW? A LOT can change in a year, but people don't know that because they just remember how crap it was when they played!"

Hey, if you played durring the Ultima Online/Star Wars Galaxies days - you just have to look at these forums who, when asked if they want player housing, instantly attack saying "There's NO PLACE TO PUT HOUSES IN WOW, I DON"T WANT MY WORLD CLUTTERED WITH HOUSES!" when Player Housing hasn't done that in almost a decade... it's all instanced today, but people who haven't experienced new PH in MMOs wouldn't know that.

How about another phrase? Once bitten-twice shy?

How about this? Maybe SOME of them DID come back (like me!) and replace SOME people like you?

How about this? MAYBE they're just waiting until next expansion? Why play a crap expansion they hated (and probably don't trust at this point when people say it's improved) when they can just wait until everything changes in Pandaria?

How about this? Why haven't they gone down in 2 QUARTERS!?

I mean, how MANY ways do you want me to answer this? There's a TON of reasons why 2 million didn't flood back on day 1. One of those reasons also happens to be that it's 2 MILLION people!

I mean... If it took a FULL YEAR to get 2 million people to leave... why do you suddenly expect ALL 2 MILLION to return in ONE QUARTER!?

Seriously... just stop it.

---------- Post added 2012-06-18 at 01:02 AM ----------

Why didn't people return in 4.3. Tons of people have asked this!

Part 2: The second reason? Because THEY HAVEN'T brought back Wrath-dungeon designs fully yet!

Sure, HoT 3 dungeons are more wrath-like in difficulty... but there was MORE to why Wrath LFD was fun than its difficulty... and you KNOW this!

1) Design: Lets face it... HoT dungeons aren't dungeons... one is a down-sized raid and the other two are just reskins of Dragonblight using pre-existing character models.

2) Variety: 3 dungeons... THREE! Compare that to queuing with 15 dungeons. You can get VERY burnt out with 3 dungeons VERY quickly. Hell, I'll admit I'm burnt out of them and haven't played them in weeks! And that's coming from me, a Wrath LFD fan! Why am I burnt out? Cus it's THREE dungeons ONLY at that difficulty! THREE... In wrath, I could play 3 dungeons a day for 5 straight days and MAYBE get 1 or 2 repeat dungeons during that time. That lends the dungeons to huge longevity as there's TONS more variety. That's a big difference between seeing the SAME dungeon 3x a DAY.

I've actually made a forum post to Blizz saying they should REMOVE the separate queue of the HoT dungeons because all the well-geared players are ONLY playing HoT and getting burnt out, while the non-geared players are slogging through the horrible Cata-launch dungeons. If even ONE well-geared current-tier tank went into a cata-launch dungeon, that could spell the difference between a 2 hour wipefest and a 30 minute action packed funfest.

[gibbie99]

I welcome back wrath heroic, the start of cata 5mans were bad. The last thing i wanta do is come home from work and spend 2 hours in a shitty 5man to get BLUE gear. I wanta get on do a few 20min 5mans then raid. There is a reason they are adding Challenge Modes yet you still bother to make these posts.

Yeah i agree with this completely. THe wraith heroics are okay but dear god the trash, and the end what do you get? Some shitty blue gear and JPs. And it really is about time, i can't spend 2 hrs on a dungeon with next to nothing as a reward. In wraith i loved the 15 min dungeons and the only reason I am still playing is bc I can gear up to get to the 4.3 dungeons pretty easily and after that it's gravy. I was able to gear up my druid from blues in about two weeks with really not that much effort, a few normal heroics then alot of cash for BOEs then straight into the new dungeons, then LFR. I'm already in 4 piece tier gear (got really lucky), so yeah i like the gearing now, unlike start of expac where the best you could hope for was all blues.

[mvaliz]

Three: There are a ton of ways to implement a third difficulty for 5 mans. They could do what RIFT did and call their difficulty something like master mode, offer gear equal to the ilevel of the current tier raid instances, and have their difficulty above current tiers raid instance or err just above the normal easy raid bosses. RIFT master modes were also something players would do for mainly fun, since most of us were done tier 1 raid instances or were progressing through it, and not to mention, master modes are a bitch! OR they could do something they want to do, like make this third difficulty offer a token for their reward, which could be used to upgrade blue level items (for ex. 115) into epic (115), and the epic (115, earned from killing the final bosses in MoP 5 mans) could turn into epic (125). And since when does a third difficulty allow the raid instances to offer the same exact difficulty? Look at TBC! Raids offered only normal modes, while 5 mans offered normal and heroic. And wrath did the same until patch 3.2.

First off, to use a page out of your book... "then why isn't Rift at 10+ million players?" :P

Now, seriously, I answered this question but apparently you don't like the answer. It's not a question of CAN they... it's a question of WHY. Adding tier-difficulty options is just adding aggravation to casual players as they feel they'll need to run them. In a happy smiling world of people like you, who are clearly from the 16-bit era of gaming, wouldn't understand this as difficulty modes does not equal content to today's gamers. Hell man, you just need to glance over at the Diablo 3 forums to see all the shocked new players going "WTF... I just beat the game. That's IT!?" The concept of "now try hard mode" died out in the 16 bit era and Diablo 2. As I said to a friend of mine... "I'm betting of the 6 million players, only 10-20% of them even know what Diablo is all about - BE READY for the forum assault!". and sure enough - they came.

Yeah, all those Rift options sound wonderful and great... and probably piss off half the casuals doing them and send them packing off to another game. Hence why Rift can't break the 2 mil mark.

[Nobleshield]

Weren't master modes in Rift meant to be a true alternate progressions style? I never got to do them (there were only two, anyways, and only one until Caduceus Rise came out with.. 1.6 I think? Whatever patch added Ember Isle) but my impression is they were meant to be sidegrades to T1 raids; something you could do to help fill gaps between raids or something to do if you didn't have 10/20 people to do raids with (although again back in that time there was only one master mode dungeon, although it had like what 10 bosses or something)

[mvaliz]

In all honesty, I can understand why some people like the 5 mans of wrath difficulty. Just easier to manage. You don't have to come home, stressing whether or not you can complete the difficulty.

And I see how a test-of-challenge can be fun for you too (hence Challenge mode, btw! :P)

Now as I said before, I can admit the problems with TBC and Cata heroics, but I do know that the difficulty they offered were fun for me at least. It can sometime give a guy an adrenaline rush at times when you expect the impossible to be the possible. Such as clearing heroic Deadmines with a group of people for the first time, where all of them are doing bad dps, and tank just learning what to do and they are failing in these mechanics, especially at the third last boss where dps are having a tough time.

And you have to recognize that Wrath LFD has changed a lot of people's standards... least of all mine! I used to be like you, very methodical and hardcore with games. Hell man, you're talking to a guy who beat Super Metroid on SNES 100% on ONE SAVE in one sitting! I get the thrill of challenge. :P

But, again, people's standards have changed... and a TON of players realize it's NOT worth several hours worth of wiping just for some Justice Points, Valor points and MAYBE some enchanting dust.

You said you found wrath difficulty funner because you didn't notice the difference between cc'ing or saping. Likewise, I didn't find the healing changes from Wrath to Cata all that different since I raided heroic ICC and did heroic lich king attempts.

...I think I found the problem here... you're deliberately editing in your mind what I wrote to say something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

I said I find no difference between Spamming an AoE button and spamming my Backstab button. Where the heck did you get CCing and sapping out of THAT!? Sapping IS CCing, one I occasionally use at the start of a pull... and I hardly call that "skill" or "fun". :P

Both AoE and Backstab are button spamming... but one I do for an hour while often standing still and the other I'm perpetually moving and getting a quick adventure.

[Deleted]

Mm, I'll partly agree here, I did them as a premade 5 man group with a decent geared priest and a tank in 335 or something + 3 dps (including me) who barely reached the requirement. The first time we did SFK and ToT with that group we instantly cleared the achievements with no sweat aswell.

The problem is ofcourse that the dungeons should work out for people queing for the dungeon finder. Even now I still skip the dragon boss in Grim'Batol just because people keep dying on it. Same for the beam boss in BRC, so looking at the dungeons like that I kinda welcome the WotLK level of difficuly I guess. Challenge modes should be around the difficulty of cata HCs in 329 gear, so they'll be challenging and probably won't be doable with an average (as in atleast 1 semi leecher) pug.

Cata launch DUNGEONs were very doable, as long as you didn't have brain-dead people with you, even before the 5-15% dps/hp/hps LFD buff.
I'd rather blizz moved the damn valor reward to normal mode DUNGEONs, and have the derp LFD crowd go there, and leave heroic DUNGEONs hard and rewarding (loot wise), instead of moving heroic down to normal and having the challenge mode drop cosmetic gear only. Otherwise there'll be a missing step between derped "heroic" DUNGEONs and (non-lfr) raids.

As it stand you'll go:
*ding* lvl 90 -> derp LFD heroic DUNGEON -> derp LFR runs ---(good luck)----> unnerfed normal mode raid -> Hc raid
Wich in turn will only make derps realise the skill gap between lfr and normal mode, QQ, and rush the raid nerf even faster.

I mean, do you really want to raid with people that CAN'T do BRC beam boss ?

[edit] happy ?

[jbombard]

Several people here have stated that they will nerf these challenge modes. And don't worry, they will nerf them. And just because they say its going to be hard doesn't mean it is going to be, its hard. The guys that can't stick to their own guns.



Well I am sure people came back for 4.3 for the end of the expansion but remember, 100k subs did leave after all. Even with this patch. And people didn't leave at q1 2012 because of all the promotional stuff.

I think the reason why people left was not directly because of the difficulty. They left because the community had turned to crap. The difficulty of the heroic dungeons had a toxic effect on the community at launch. This compiled with the changes to healing and tanking made DPS queues > 40 mins, tanking generally meant you had to know the cc priority and mark all the mobs every damn pull, healing at launch was so tight that melee weren't worth the effort. So we were in a situation where wrong CC = fail, which resulted in classes being kicked simply because of their form or lack of CC. Heals that didn't want to deal with melee were kicking to just try and get a ranged. DPS were kicking tanks and heals because they didn't have any patience left after a 40 min queue. People were often fighting even before the first pull, and every death and wipe after. People then after leaving, getting kicked, or even properly finishing a heroic took their rage into trade chat, and sometimes guild chat. It got old really fast. Over time people started getting geared and this went away for a bit, until ZA/ZG were released and it happened all over again. I had completely stopped doing heroics outside of guild groups, because I was sooooo tired of all the BS that went on. And then I decided to take a break and cancelled. After a couple months off I came back for 4.3. It feels like a ghosttown on my server. I imagine a bunch of people will come back and give MoP a try. If the same crap happens in MoP that happened in Cat, I have a feeling these people won't be coming back for whatever is after MoP.

[leaks]

Cata launch donjons were very doable, as long as you didn't have brain-dead people with you, even before the 5-15% dps/hp/hps LFD buff.
I'd rather blizz moved the damn valor reward to normal mode donjons, and have the derp LFD crowd go there, and leave heroic donjons hard and rewarding (loot wise), instead of moving heroic down to normal and having the challenge mode drop cosmetic gear only. Otherwise there'll be a missing step between derped "heroic" donjons and (non-lfr) raids.

As it stand you'll go:
*ding* lvl 90 -> derp LFD heroic donjons -> derp LFR runs ---(good luck)----> unnerfed normal mode raid -> Hc raid
Wich in turn will only make derps realise the skill gap between lfr and normal mode, QQ, and rush the raid nerf even faster.

I mean, do you really want to raid with people that CAN'T do BRC beam boss ?

I know we're not supposed to comment on peoples spelling here but the word is: DUNGEON. Only pointing it out cause it made your post hard to read and understand at first. Plus, you know, it's right in the title of the thread.