Are the MoP heroics too easy or is it just me?

[Saverem]

I hit 90 yesterday on my Monk and immediately delved into a MoP heroic. I was a little scared going in, never having been to that particular dungeon before and in full quest greens.


Not knowing the mechanics I just went for it and managed to down every boss. I had no clue what to expect. In the end I died once in a trash pull mishap, but we didn't wipe once.

I've done several more heroics since then with zero wipes.

Again, I just winged it, didn't know mechanics for any of the bosses.



So I'm thinking, either I'm a completely bad ass tank or the heroics are tuned ridiculously easy. I remember wiping repeatedly on Cata heroics upon going in and having to pay much more attention to the mechanics.

What's going on with MoP heroics?

[Playintrafic]

There not easy enough really. You can't solo some of the bosses especially shadowpan monastery. We were promised heroics you could drag 4 idiots through if you were the only good player in the group. Really tired of being wiped by idiot/bot dps and healers in spm and scholo

[Deleted]

As of MoP, heroic doesn't refer to dificulty, it only means that it is a level 90 dungeons. They made it that way because now you have LFR gear in the gap between dungeons and normal mode raids. They made the challenge mods to compensate for that.

[Resentful]

If you want something hard go do challenge modes, Nothing more needs to be said.

Cata heroic's were annoying and painful and I did not like being stuck there for like an hour or something stupid with pugs neverless

[Saverem]

If you want something hard go do challenge modes, Nothing more needs to be said.

Cata heroic's were annoying and painful and I did not like being stuck there for like an hour or something stupid with pugs neverless

Chill dude, it was just a question.

[Deleted]

I think they're fine, challenge modes more than make up for my thirst for difficulty. Hard heroics are just frustrating because difficult & the LFD system don't go well together.

[ClearlyConfused]

They are easy because all of you chodes kept saying Cata heroics were too hard. So, they dumbed down heroics and made challenge modes the untouchable ones (hopefully).

[Resentful]

Chill dude, it was just a question.

o.0 I wasn't trying to be mean there I apologize if my tone came out like that.

[Deleted]

I only ran a couple of heroics so far, but yes, I also found them a bit too easy. Things happended to me:

Tank pulls boss when 5th dps is outside the room and gets locked out. I think "at the current gear level, this is a sure wipe". No one dies, boss takes only slightly longer.

Then, tank pulls boss when I am at ~70% mana. As a mana-hungry Disc priest, I think we are doomed. I play along "just to learn the encounter". No one dies, I still have some mana at the end of the encounter -- the boss just did not enough damage to force me into going oom. Several CDs were not even used once, I found no need to. :-S

Coren Direbrew instead is a level 89 encounter, yet I find him much, much harder in comparison. Not that he is really hard, but there I have to chain heal, use CDs wisely, etc. and I often finish near-oom.

Initially, after having dinged 90, I planned to run normals only for several days to replace quest greens, gear up a bit, and learn the encounters so that I will not fail their mechanics in the "unforgiving" heroics. Then I found out there's no need to.

I guess the challenge now was moved to Challenge Modes and Raids. Time to rewire my expectations.

[XanderJS]

The heroics are incredibly easy. We were initially really disappointed but quickly realised they weren't really meant for us so farmed them for our gear and left them alone except for achi runs. I'm gland challenge modes are here and the raid difficulty is a little higher than I expected. I can focus on those and leave the hc's to those with a lower skill cap.

[Tinykong]

They are supposed to be easy. You're dragging 4 other potential mouth breathers through, do you really want to explain complex mechanics or pulls? If you want that experience, run it in challenge mode.

[KCguy]

Some fights can be tricky, but for the most part it's pretty easy. Don't think they're meant to be tough though. That's what challenge modes and raiding is for in Mists.

[roflmfao]

I like the degree of difficulty. Goes back to Wrath difficulty where the thought was that you could run a Heroic real quick on your lunch and still have time to eat lol

[XanderJS]

They are supposed to be easy. You're dragging 4 other potential mouth breathers through, do you really want to explain complex mechanics or pulls? If you want that experience, run it in challenge mode.

I think there's a middle ground to be had there. The potential to wipe is what generally makes things more interesting and makes you play the game. Making it too easy just encourages afking and being an idiot. The very least they could have done is add an extra ability to bosses, as it is they are the same as normals but with a bit more health. Dumbing things down just encourages people to be dumber...

[elmoe420]

The short answer to your question is yes, heroic dungeons in Mists are easy for a moderately skilled group of players. The experience with my guild has been that all of us (experienced PvE players) hit level 90, walked into heroics in greens and cleared them all fairly effortlessly.

The philosophy that Blizzard has applied when tuning heroics for Mists was that a player should be able to queue solo in the dungeon finder, get a random group and complete the dungeon without much headache. This differed from their tuning philosophy in Cataclysm which seemed to be that a player should be able to complete a dungeon without much difficulty in a organized group of guild mates/friends. If you look back to the way heroics were tuned in Burning Crusade you can remember that there was a pretty large disparity between the difficulty of the easiest heroic (Ramparts) and the most difficult ones (Blood Furnace, Arc, etc.). Blizzard was able to adopt a philosophy back then that freshly level capped players, or new less experienced players, could start by just running the easier heroics. Over time as players gained gear and/or experience, they could progress till they were clearing all heroics with relative ease. The new system of queuing for a random dungeon made this more complicated and hence expensive for Blizzard to implement.

I see two potential solutions to making heroics more challenging given the fact that they must be balanced around the use of the dungeon finder. First, Blizzard could implement non heroic level 90 dungeons which can be queued for separately from heroics and non heroic dungeons which are below level 90. This would give them the ability to have a whole first tier of dungeons that are the difficulty of the current heroics. The heroic versions could then be tuned to be more difficult and offer correspondingly greater rewards. Another solution is to have a sliding scale of difficulty for heroics, but have an ilevel threshold that is set on a per dungeon basis. The drawback of the former solution is that Blizzard now needs to tune yet another difficulty level for dungeons, which takes non trivial resources (each level 90 dungeon would have to be tuned twice as opposed to once). The drawback of the later solution is that Blizzard now needs to tune each heroic to a potentially unique ilevel which sounds like it would be an even bigger drain on resources.

I think what Blizzard is actually banking on here is that LFR fills the gap that the more difficult heroics did in past expansions. The benefit here is that really Blizzard never has to make another heroic dungeon for this expansion. They just tune the raid content they have already created for a third time which is significantly less investment of resources on their part. No longer do we need new heroics (read: brand new content which is expensive to create) to help recently level capped players leap frog into more recent raid content. Now that there will be a LFR version of every raid, these can act as the stepping stones for gear progression that were often filled by the successively difficult heroic dungeons in recent expansions. The real problem that I see which has yet to be resolved is how long it takes to reach the 463 ilevel needed to queue for LFR for the first tier of Mists. I understand the requirement is relatively high because even though LFR will be trivial in terms of difficulty for an experienced player, just like the dungeon finder, since the group is randomly assembled you need some sort of safety net in place to ensure success. However, myself and many guild mates are finding this frustrating particularly since you can't queue for specific dungeons which drop upgrades at the frequency needed to really farm that gear. While we can just grin and bear this for now as we'll be getting all the upgrades we need in normal raids shortly, I think this could be a really negative player experience later in the expansion. Imagine two tiers from now that a new player hits the level cap. They are anxious to gear up and leap frog into current raiding. Unfortunately, there are no pick up groups for past tier normal raids due to the advent of LFR. So they are stuck in the same waiting game we all are now, grinding heroics for a long time to try to hit ilevel 463 while their friends continue to enjoy the content of the current tier. The frustration of this process could have a material impact on new subscribers or customer re-activation later in the expansion.

[XanderJS]

Blizz will lower the ilvl req for Lfr not long after its been out. They've already done it with the hc's and its only been 2 weeks. Plus people with have jp and vp to build their ilvl by then.

[johnkimble16]

If you want something hard go do challenge modes, Nothing more needs to be said.

Cata heroic's were annoying and painful and I did not like being stuck there for like an hour or something stupid with pugs neverless

A million times this. I laughed really hard when everyone kept saying the Cata heroics were fine, L2P, etc... yet most failed to realize that with randoms the difficulty increases tenfold. It's a cake walk with an organized group but a nightmare with people who have no clue wtf they are doing.

If you want difficult 5 man content then hit up Challenge Modes. I never EVER wanna spend more then an hour in a heroic dungeon. Thank you Blizzard.

[Tovarish24]

Cata: They are too hard. MoP: They are too easy. I think they are fine as is. They have fun mechanics, you wipe if people are literally not doing anything they are supposed to, they're fast, but not "short." They feel great IMO. Challenge Modes are meant to be hard, so the 5 mans can be a little easier. Trust me, you won't be worried about "hard" when you try out challenge modes.

[johnkimble16]

I only ran a couple of heroics so far, but yes, I also found them a bit too easy. Things happended to me:

Tank pulls boss when 5th dps is outside the room and gets locked out. I think "at the current gear level, this is a sure wipe". No one dies, boss takes only slightly longer.

Then, tank pulls boss when I am at ~70% mana. As a mana-hungry Disc priest, I think we are doomed. I play along "just to learn the encounter". No one dies, I still have some mana at the end of the encounter -- the boss just did not enough damage to force me into going oom. Several CDs were not even used once, I found no need to. :-S

Coren Direbrew instead is a level 89 encounter, yet I find him much, much harder in comparison. Not that he is really hard, but there I have to chain heal, use CDs wisely, etc. and I often finish near-oom.

Initially, after having dinged 90, I planned to run normals only for several days to replace quest greens, gear up a bit, and learn the encounters so that I will not fail their mechanics in the "unforgiving" heroics. Then I found out there's no need to.

I guess the challenge now was moved to Challenge Modes and Raids. Time to rewire my expectations.

The reason Coren is much harder then a heroic boss is that Blizzard has no intention of changing the Coren encounter for next year. He's this way for good. I do think he could use a little fine tuning tho. Regardless the game is in a much better state right now. People get their awesome challenging 5 mans while others (like myself) who solo queue in the Dungeon Finder get our fast and painless runs. Anyone opposing this system is just being silly.

[elmoe420]

Blizz will lower the ilvl req for Lfr not long after its been out. They've already done it with the hc's and its only been 2 weeks. Plus people with have jp and vp to build their ilvl by then.

Unfortunately because of their ilevel, even after the buff JP rewards do not help in acquiring the ilevel needed to run LFR. VP could be used for this, but Blizzard seems to have made VP rewards from heroics intentionally small to prevent people from easily farming VP through heroics. Also the amount of time required to acquire the faction reputation needed to purchase these rewards, even after the buff, still really throttles a new player's progression towards LFR. I think you are right that they may drop the ilevel requirement on the first tier LFR. It is hard to say until we see exactly how easy first tier LFR will be for your average player with little to no PvE experience. Regardless, I think something must be done to prevent player frustration as the expansion ages.