Why aren't these people running challenge modes if they want a 5 man challenge? Is it because their gear is scaled down and they don't get to see big numbers? Is it because they have to actually organize a group themselves?
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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.
A lot of people who think that difficult dungeons are the way things should go aren't terribly interested in a challenge simply for its own sake unless there's some loot associated with it. Someone earlier in the thread had the idea to change challenge mode dungeons to drop loot and that's not bad except for a couple of things:
1. Leave the timed runs as they are for anyone that wants to do that. Design them around the timed run in fact.
2. Clone the dungeon exactly, strip off the timed run part and add a loot table of some sort at the end. Loot distributed in the normal way though; not cherry-picked. That just leads to people not running them after the first time or two. You'd still need to have a pre-made group for this.
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.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
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.
Hey everyone
That would be good. If it is difficult and if CMs let me to gear from normals into tier 1 raid, then I don't mind not repeating them when moving onto next tiers of raids.
I did not do heroics in BC forever either. Before/during Karazhan/SSC/TK. After two raid tiers heroics were irrelevant to me.
I believe the CM reward cache will have a chance at 516 items next patch too. I don't believe they should ever offer gear on par with normal mode raids outside of the valor grind though.
90 valor isn't enough for people to run on a consistent basis. Blizzard says CM is the fastest way to get VP but that is 100% bogus unless you are doing CM under gold timer. Fact is, if you are simply going for valor, getting 4 ilvl 500+ dps + 1 healer and spam LFG will be much much faster than CM in terms of valor gained (assuming you don't know how to do CM gold run).
If you don't know how to do CM gold then you might be looking at 45min for a tiny 60 valor. What Blizz says about CM being best VP source is really only true for groups that have already done the gold runs.
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Most BC heroics were not that hard.
A few were.
People only did the hard ones mostly if someone needed a specific attunement quest there, otherwise almost every group did the same handful of the easier faster ones.
Good luck getting a group if your class (dps) had no proper CC, or "unconventional" CC like shadow priests MC.
Ah yes, the perfect system.