In Cata, at the start I think they got the 5 mans right.

[delus]

If it is about tearing your hair out in 5 mans even when you already progress in raids already, the timed runs in TBC probably were your thang...

TBC timed runs were much easier than getting silver or gold in a challenge mode because you could outgear and faceroll through them. I know I did.

[killidan]

Oh you forgot the best one, BRD!

I loved that place! I used to still go and clear it as solo in WotLK, then I think Cata messed it up.

[melodramocracy]

I think Mists got it best.

Burning Crusades were too hard, time-consuming or too finicky on comp (paladin tank, lots of CC), Wrath's were so easy you did nothing but AoE which wasn't especially fun. Cata's were better than either of those, but I think too difficult before we overgeared them. I especially hated them as a healer; the mana changes coupled with the high damage of NPC abilities on fresh 85s meant that we got to be the undeserving scapegoats through a lot of bad groups. Mists were really the best balance for me.

I'm not looking for challenging from five man heroics. I dislike ones that are long or time consuming. I would rather burn through five mans quickly and have a good (but relaxed) time doing it, and move on to the real challenge in raiding. I know it's a delicate balance between brainless zerg and overly difficult but the best example of my preferred balance is this expansion.

Mist 5 mans are even more pants on head than Wrath ones ever thought of being. They're the very definition of forgettable filler content.

[killidan]

They are never going to get that genie back in the bottle without pissing off the majority of the playerbase. Thunderforged is the best they could do.

They could always gradually create a difference between the 10man and 25man loot. Doesn't have to be sudden and piss people off.

[delus]

They could always gradually create a difference between the 10man and 25man loot. Doesn't have to be sudden and piss people off.

One ilvl difference and the community would rage hard. What they're doing now is having 25s have a better chance at dropping the best loot, giving 25 man raiders a higher overall ilvl. This is the best they could do without having the community go into a huge uproar.

[Tziva]

I honestly feel bored during it, I understand how you could feel relaxed but that kind of stuff is boring to me, I don't feel a sense of adventure/progression. BC hit the nail on the spot with that, heroics were end-game for many (I've state this a couple times) and if you made it past that after a few months or so then you had your next end-game adventure which was raiding etc.

Well, the yardstick is going to be different for everyone. I certainly had a ton of fun in Burning Crusade, but many of the heroics were way too long, too hard and I hated that group comp was such a huge factor in how smooth the run went, to the point where many players felt obligated to bring random players of the Right Class™ over friends of the wrong one.

Mists was nice to me because it still had some mechanics you couldn't ignore, and it had a mix of big AoE packs and smaller single-target packs where I could practice my normal rotation. I appreciate when there are things that need interupted or special mechanics to observe (break the shield with bombs, or kill the deathgrip orbs, etc), but I appreciate that it has a generous margin of error that prevents them from being brutal with PuGs. I don't like spending an hour plus in a dungeon, and I don't like wiping a lot. There is a place for that in the game, but five mans are not that for me. Their role in my gameplay is a fun thing to do to break up questing while leveling, and a fun way to gear up quickly for the first tier of raiding.

And certainly any heroics, no matter how well tuned, are boring as hell after you've done them eleventy million times. I think this is a bigger factor than tuning can ever be; people often mistake the loss of novelty for a design problem when the reality is that boredom is inevitable eventually when you've been there a bunch of times on a bunch of alts and now you overgear the place and are only there for some obligation VP.

[Venziir]

Only the general architectural style was similar.

The layout of the dungeons were worlds apart, they did NOT look the same; mobs, which are part of a dungeon, did NOT look the same. Architectural style looked similar, I'll give you that, but that's all.

Which was my exact point.

[Crashdummy]

Aren't people leaving MOP at a way faster rate that Cata? MOP dungeons are a disgrace and an insult imo.

Not because of dungeons. More because the lack of them, since Blizzard has stated they wont make any more of the, a decision they are probably already regretting (but wont admit untill the end of the expansion).

MoP dungeons along with Wrath have been the greatest dugneons ever in WoW.

What is an insult and a disgrace is MoP dailies and scenarios.

[Duronos]

Well, the yardstick is going to be different for everyone. I certainly had a ton of fun in Burning Crusade, but many of the heroics were way too long, too hard and I hated that group comp was such a huge factor in how smooth the run went, to the point where many players felt obligated to bring random players of the Right Class™ over friends of the wrong one.

Mists was nice to me because it still had some mechanics you couldn't ignore, and it had a mix of big AoE packs and smaller single-target packs where I could practice my normal rotation. I appreciate when there are things that need interupted or special mechanics to observe (break the shield with bombs, or kill the deathgrip orbs, etc), but I appreciate that it has a generous margin of error that prevents them from being brutal with PuGs. I don't like spending an hour plus in a dungeon, and I don't like wiping a lot. There is a place for that in the game, but five mans are not that for me. Their role in my gameplay is a fun thing to do to break up questing while leveling, and a fun way to gear up quickly for the first tier of raiding.

And certainly any heroics, no matter how well tuned, are boring as hell after you've done them eleventy million times. I think this is a bigger factor than tuning can ever be; people often mistake the loss of novelty for a design problem when the reality is that boredom is inevitable eventually when you've been there a bunch of times on a bunch of alts and now you overgear the place and are only there for some obligation VP.

I think part of it also is how progression works, I just don't feel like I'm achieving anything and I know what it feels like to achieve something and MoP just isn't doing it for me and that's why I'll always say BC is better. Right class didn't really apply to me I guess considering I was a rogue, we've always been good and I never really played any alts.

[nekobaka]

Yeah, but in TBC you mostly ran your daily heroic and that was it, with "grind" I mean run shitloads of dungeons to quickly gear up blowing up everything, this philosophy wasn't there before Wrath. In fact the only way that Blizzard has found to bring back some challenge in dungeons are Challenge modes, i.e. removing the need of grinding completely.

Most of WotLK players still kept the amount of dungeon grind within a day fairly down until LFD came out. LFD would of not done so well had the lockouts stayed in place and it did not reward for random queues. It really did facilitate the possibility of burn out and overall faster content consumption for more casual player. Players who maybe ran two dungeons at most a day could now run five without stepping out of a city.

I really did like the Cata launch five mans. I thought they was well designed and fairly forgiving. I did it both solo queue as a resto druid and a warlock. In terms of tuning I noted it getting easier by the time I was half way in heroic blues and by the time I had full blues it was a large difference from when I first stepped into them with Cata quest gear. I felt like the one shot mechanics was for future proofing in terms of overgearing to keep the fights from becoming mindless tank and spanks by the expansions end. I did like that and it also did help relieve some of the blame that players placed on healers. There was not much blaming towards healers compared to WotLK in my experience and players dieing to oneshot mechanics and blaming healers got told by the rest of the group that its their own fault and not the healers. My success rate while solo queuing as both a healer and a dps was fairly high.

I dont think I went into any Cata heroic knowing previously how the fights went with the exception of ZA because of the original. Most of the groups I was with talked if needed and if everyone was fresh then we all figured it out together. Sometimes there would be tanks that said mark your own CC and CC. Players did not complain. Despite all the QQ on the forums most of the groups I was with was quite cooperative with the lemons being in the minority. I did have a number of groups where players did get carried of sorts and we did fine.

The vast majority of my negative experiences which was still a minority overall with the Cata heroics was not from "hard cores" but from the "I payed my 15 bucks. I dont need you to offer me advice. Shut up and carry me," type of players. No interest in working together as a team, would often break CCs, stand infront of cleaves and overall was a negative nancy that did not look like they wanted to be there at all. These are the kinds of players who would of gotten a bad reputation on their realm for being jerks and would of had issues getting groups without LFD. What is worse is these players got to hide behind the "casual" name and make other casuals look bad.

This is why we cant have nice things.

Overall the Cata launch heroics was fun and engaging for me. It was not tedious or felt like a job. I do think that not offering max level normal mode dungeons was a mistake by Blizzard. They did it because they did not want to split the queues and sadly the players had to pay for Blizzards greed of trying to shove players into the RDF system.

Not because of dungeons. More because the lack of them, since Blizzard has stated they wont make any more of the, a decision they are probably already regretting (but wont admit untill the end of the expansion).

MoP dungeons along with Wrath have been the greatest dugneons ever in WoW.

What is an insult and a disgrace is MoP dailies and scenarios.

Its already been said that at launch MoP could of used a bit more dungeons especially while leveling. Blizzard wants to add more dungeons while at the same time they dont want to add only two because they feel like players get burned out from it. Then there is the other aspect which we know is that it will pull players away from LFR queues. So in the end those who like five mans gotta suffer and get nothing.

[killidan]

Not because of dungeons. More because the lack of them, since Blizzard has stated they wont make any more of the, a decision they are probably already regretting (but wont admit untill the end of the expansion).

MoP dungeons along with Wrath have been the greatest dugneons ever in WoW.

What is an insult and a disgrace is MoP dailies and scenarios.

I know! Only 6 new dungeons and 3 re-hashed heroics. I wish they had released more 5-mans for MOP. At LFD difficulty it gets consumed uber-fast, so I guess they do not want to put the time and effort in something that will not be seen by players more than a week.

---------- Post added 2013-05-17 at 01:41 AM ----------

Run challenge mode dungeons then. They are basically the same difficulty as cata heroics with a timed element.

Is it not like another zerg mode when you are racing against the timer? I liked slow strategized pulls, where we knew each mob's abilities and prioritized them. We discussed pulls sometimes, marked the mobs, cc'ed, kept them cc'ed, kited, killed them in order and so on. Those dungeon runs were highly strategized and slow. There was no timer, except very very few timed runs.

Challenge modes give no loot. Without incentive why would I run them? If I put in the effort and I succeed, I expect a proportionate reward, loot. Hell, casuals want and get the loot all the while they put in little time, even less effort and you suggest I do challenge modes and get no loot. The answer is "No.".

[Keoren]

And there you go: increased difficulty and some sort of reward. No clue whether or not this would catch on. My suspicion is that it wouldn't really unless they updated the loot tables for every new tier. Which I suppose they could do if it was popular enough.

I am at least interest in the potential ways in which the instances could be made more attractive.

Personally I would greatly enjoy running the challenge modes for some purpose, or rather would have in the beginning of the expansion. After completing the timed runs the instances become obsolete unless you start doing them for other people or are after the higher rankings. I am also not a fan of the timed runs in general (and I trust many others aren't either) and would like it if there was a bigger reward for simply completing the instances. This would further mean that the groups wouldn't be as inclined to worry about the setup, reset the instance in the case of a wipe, and rush through the place.

Ideally the rewards would be something that wouldn't make the people feel forced to run them. This translates into something that does not increase one's character power or can be obtained in an alternative way.

Mist 5 mans are even more pants on head than Wrath ones ever thought of being. They're the very definition of forgettable filler content.

I don't know. I honestly remember rushing through most of the WotLK heroics in greens with even less issues than I had in MoP. The difference might have been that I wasn't going for the meta achievement straight off the bat, but I still felt that most of the heroic trash and even bosses were very faceless.

[Durandro]

I agree. Cata heroics were in a bad state towards the end of the expansion. It says a lot when dungeons are harder while leveling up, and when you hit 85 they suddenly become a snorefest.

Of course this is due to gear inflation to some degree, but the nerfs the original 5 mans suffered should have been reverted once Dragon Soul came out. Heck, the inflation part was even true of the three DS heroics, when they first came out they were reasonably challenging, but within a few weeks they were AoE fests just like the rest.

And Zul Gurub and Zul Aman were still utterly brutal. Funny how the two 'rehashed revamps' were the most challenging 5 man content for a long long time.

Also, MoP definately needed more dungeons, especially while leveling. Or have lower level versions of the Scenerios. It makes no sense for them to be max level only content!

[TirielWoW]

I really enjoyed the 5 mans at the start of Cata, looking back...I thought they did decently well.

Looking back even further, Dungeons like Strat, BRD and Scholomance I really loved. They had there own personalities, lots of cool quests and very farmable for a long time.

I am at a loss of why they (Blizz) have the current model of gather everything up and nuke in a pile. Does anyone seriously like the current model? Forget about Raids for a moment, what would you like to see in 5 mans? Either brought back, an added feature, difficulty levels, gear for starting normal raids, rep grinding etc?

It's very simple. Challenge is great...until you're trying to do the challenging content with total strangers who don't give a shit whether you get through the dungeon or not. They don't care enough to gem and enchant. They may not even care enough to wear the right type of armor (like the Hunter I ran into in H Stonecore dressed in an Intellect robe). They certainly don't care enough to use the proper CDs and get out of the fire.

The first few weeks of Cata actually caused me to quit playing for 3 months. I never want to go back to that. While I agree that dungeons should be a sort of endgame for the super casual, the difficulty caused by grouping with total strangers is just over the top. If we were queueing as groups, that's one thing, but it was fucking ridiculous dealing with randoms.

[Mormolyce]

I personally really enjoyed launch heroics, but by the time the first wave of nerfs came around your average group outgeared it to the point that you could pretty much AOE your way through just like in Wrath. Then ZA/ZG came along and were really rough until DS when it was completely outgeared and became an AOEfest again. People exaggerate the difficulty of Cata heroics, a lot of it was the culture shock of everyone being undergeared after almost a year of ICC where everyone was geared like 4 tiers above what the heroics were tuned for (almost double that actually because 10 and 25 had different ilvls).

I think the current solution - easymode dungeons for VP grinding plus hard CMs for organised groups - is pretty good, I personally would like the Heroics a bit harder still but they can fix that next expansion. It's all irrelevant once you're geared, you know.

Yeah, but in TBC you mostly ran your daily heroic and that was it, with "grind" I mean run shitloads of dungeons to quickly gear up blowing up everything, this philosophy wasn't there before Wrath. In fact the only way that Blizzard has found to bring back some challenge in dungeons are Challenge modes, i.e. removing the need of grinding completely.

Didn't they just spam Mechanar constantly because it was the "optimal" heroic, and back then the Badges were attached to bosses instead of anything like a random dungeon bag to encourage playing different dungeons?

---------- Post added 2013-05-17 at 05:44 AM ----------

It's very simple. Challenge is great...until you're trying to do the challenging content with total strangers who don't give a shit whether you get through the dungeon or not. They don't care enough to gem and enchant. They may not even care enough to wear the right type of armor (like the Hunter I ran into in H Stonecore dressed in an Intellect robe). They certainly don't care enough to use the proper CDs and get out of the fire.

The first few weeks of Cata actually caused me to quit playing for 3 months. I never want to go back to that. While I agree that dungeons should be a sort of endgame for the super casual, the difficulty caused by grouping with total strangers is just over the top. If we were queueing as groups, that's one thing, but it was fucking ridiculous dealing with randoms.

I remember spending over 4 hours in Deadmines in a single group once. But you know what? Those heroics I did in the first few weeks might have been brutally hard but they were some of the best groups I'd ever been in in LFD. People realised it was hard and did their best to work together. And I guess a lot of the jerks and trolls hadn't finished leveling yet. I can't think of a single time I had a really toxic group in those weeks.

Maybe I was just lucky but I did quite a lot of those Heroics since I had a few alts and wasn't raiding much at first. I don't get where people are coming from when they say the groups were bad. I've had far worse experiences when the heroics were easy (late Wrath, late Cata, MoP...). It's just the dungeon that was hard.

[dope_danny]

i LOVED launch cata instances, they looked great, you didnt get nonstop vortex pinnacle and the need for cc and strategy was a welcome change to wraths "i guess ill watch tv and barely look at the screen" difficulty.

that said the cc did get old since it basically reduced all the fights to "HUNTER TRAP THIS, SHAMMY HEX THAT" with absolutely no variance which is dull and monotonous in its own way.

[Tatsh]

I think that the Cataclysm Heroic 5 mans were pretty awesome, although I can see why a bunch of people really dislike them. The shocking transition from "aoe everything down" in most of the WoTLK 5 mans to the "holy shit tons of damage/mechanics/cc" that Cata brought must have turned off a bunch of players who were expecting the Cataclysm Heroics to be the same thing as the ones in Wrath.

Also, can we all agree that having to run ZG/ZA endlessly in 4.1 was pretty much the worst thing in the entire world? I didn't play during BC, I'm sure many of those heroics were indeed harder, but the sheer agony of it being a Tuesday and having to do ZA/ZG seven times on a main and then another infinity times on however many alt gave me PTSD. I still wake up at night, terrified, sweating, and screaming; the endless unheard cries of "TANK IT ON THE FUCKING CHAINS!" still ring as clear as they did back then...

[Volitar]

I think cata was the perfect difficulty. They were pretty challenging first week with no gear but they weren't soul crushing like the BC ones. I had tons of fun when I first hit 85.

[lunchbox2042]

The current valor model is awful. The system really needs to die as does this lucky coin stuff. People feel forced to do dailies and heroics for valor and charms, which shouldn't even exist in a game about loot. I liked BC's badge model where vendors contained items from previously relevant tiers. At best, valor gear should be the same ilvl as lfr gear.

[Yuuki Asuna]

I just didn't like getting kicked from the group because of my supposedly 'bad' dps back then. The dungeons sometimes took longer than a raid night if you had a poor group. Nothing against the groups. It was just harder for those that were new to not be a liability.