Heroic Five Mans in Cata.........Spot on

[cyqu]

:P Ok so you say i want Chelenge and i dont care for gear .. We see answer Cherenge mode .. And another answer thats not the same they dont give gear .. so whot in hell you ppl want??? first you say you dont need gear then that you need lol .Todays chalange modes ar on pare with TBC Heroics or even harder (yes they ar I did both ) and i dont wana know in whot horible grups you was in if you think Cata Heroics was harder then todays Chalange mode

You obviously didn't do pre nerf heroic mana tombs, Alcatraz, shadow labs.. And so on. The heroics that were out for only a month or so after launch that got nerfed were not the same heroics you were doing by the time you got to SSC and TK.

[schwank05]

Well, it was more 1 - 2 hours per heroic in TBC, 2 - 3 hours was even in those days a rather bad group.
The Badges of Justice I wouldn't compare with Justice Points nowadays anymore. They were a lot more like today's Valor Points. All items have been very good competitive Epics, which been on par with the gear from the raids.

Ad far as making heroics more difficult again. We've been there, at the beginning of Cataclysm, and the model failed brutally.
If you want it more rewarding and challenging again, do heroic scenarios. They may be a lot shorter, but they sure have a nice reward and are not really total faceroll.

I think the CATA Heroics failed so badly for 1 reason and 1 reason only. They didnt award Epics which were on par with current raid tier. Had they dropped Epics, they would ahve felt meaningful after the first week.

[orioxez]

No one wants to spend 3 hours in a dungeon.

it was 3 hours if you were god awful. the point is that it should be hard and should require CC. pulling everything and aoeing it down as the best strategy for every pull is just bad design on their part.

[Shampro]

Why is it that people that claim to want a challenge actually dont want a challenge?

Challenge modes just to bring an example, actually provide upgrades and not just cosmetic items. (which they also want to brag about, but they say is useless, what?)
How many times have you bothered to get into a challenge mode for some upgrades (itemlevel 516 better than LFR and normal heroics, not to mention the absurd amount of Valor), and actually experience and seek the challenge that you're looking for? None? 1 time?

There's my point. A lot of people want to force others to enjoy thier exact playstyle, regardless of what others think, but when they see a easier path, even though it provides SHIT rewards, compared to the challenge they ignore it.

Lets say blizzard introduced a Heroic difficulty for LFR, And it actually provided more loot and rewards than the easier version, I can garantee that the same people that claim to want a challenge would take the easier route.

Anyway, just to make my point. Cata Heroics at release were fun if you had a guild to run with or had a lot of time on your hands, With Random it just doesnt work, or it doesnt provide a satisfactory experience, rather frustrating. I liked them with my friends or guildies because we would get on vent and just plow through them, with random, that simply doesnt happen. Ah, I also remember how many times a close friend of mine got kicked on his warrior for not haveing any type of worthwhile CC, yeah great to go with randoms

[Frogged]

There is.

Heroics and Challenge Modes

There are two issues with Challenge Modes being used as an example here. The first being that they are short and generally don't require precise planning. It's just a zerg AoE fest where a few classes are better than others. I believe there are some people that want that strategic, planned feeling you get from raids, but within 5-mans. This used to be the case in BC.

The second issue being that they don't have any sort of reward that progresses your character power. A great many people don't enjoy LFR but still want to progress their character past 463s, yet don't have a guild capable of forming a 10-man raid. Blizzard would agree, and they're making Flex Mode to fit this void in content rather than 5-mans.

These aren't problems with CMs, as I think CMs are fine. However, what it does mean is that there is room for harder, longer, more rewarding 5-mans.

[Osmeric]

I think the CATA Heroics failed so badly for 1 reason and 1 reason only. They didnt award Epics which were on par with current raid tier. Had they dropped Epics, they would ahve felt meaningful after the first week.

That wouldn't have saved them for me. The problem was LFD + Hard = a black hole that sucks away all joy.

[announced]

end time was great but well of eternity was such a pile of shit. u had to wait like 10 mins for illdian to move his ass and for all the bullshit trash and roleplay shit to finish. there was no option to skip it and therefore it became my dungeon to instantly drop group in. hour of twilight would be ok if thrall moved faster with the gauntlet. ask yourself, will this dungeon still be fun after doing it for the 100th time? if no then you have a problem.

i did enjoy cata heroic 5mans though. they were quite fun at the start.

[Eranthe]

Why is it that people that claim to want a challenge actually dont want a challenge?

Challenge modes just to bring an example, actually provide upgrades and not just cosmetic items. (which they also want to brag about, but they say is useless, what?)
How many times have you bothered to get into a challenge mode for some upgrades (itemlevel 516 better than LFR and normal heroics, not to mention the absurd amount of Valor), and actually experience and seek the challenge that you're looking for? None? 1 time?

There's my point. A lot of people want to force others to enjoy thier exact playstyle, regardless of what others think, but when they see a easier path, even though it provides SHIT rewards, compared to the challenge they ignore it.

Lets say blizzard introduced a Heroic difficulty for LFR, And it actually provided more loot and rewards than the easier version, I can garantee that the same people that claim to want a challenge would take the easier route.

Anyway, just to make my point. Cata Heroics at release were fun if you had a guild to run with or had a lot of time on your hands, With Random it just doesnt work, or it doesnt provide a satisfactory experience, rather frustrating. I liked them with my friends or guildies because we would get on vent and just plow through them, with random, that simply doesnt happen. Ah, I also remember how many times a close friend of mine got kicked on his warrior for not haveing any type of worthwhile CC, yeah great to go with randoms

You're thinking of heroic scenarios, which serve their purpose pretty well, not challenge modes, which serve no purposes other than cosmetic rewards, prestige, and valor. (the cosmetic rewards are removed from the equation once you get all golds, which takes a serious group no more than a couple days)

Challenge modes are a good addition in the game, but they don't fill the role of heroic mode dungeons, which provide heroic quality loot and require heroic ability to differentiate good players/group from bad, and to help you gear your (alt) characters up faster and more efficiently.

I'm not sure there's enough development time to fit everything I'd like into the game, but I'd like to see an expansion that includes:


Normal Mode Dungeons (10min to 1hour) to collect gear for LFR
Heroic Mode Dungeons(25 to collect gear for raiding
Scenarios (10-20 min) fill a similar role as they do now, telling story and providing filler gear in between dungeons and heroics
Heroic Scenarios(10-30 min), same, but in between LFR and raids, or possibly between raids and heroic raids
LFR to give everyone a chance to see the bosses, with watered down versions of the loot (ew)
Normal Raids (1-X hours/week) for those who want to see the content as it was envisioned/designed for the gold standard in loot, epics.
Heroic Raids (X-Y hours/week) for those who want to kill the hardest bosses for the rarest loot.

[JohnBrown1917]

Cata HC's(pre-nerf, with everybody in leveling greens/blue's) where hell for healers(or was it just paladin healers?). Having mana breaks all the time got rather annoying.

I have less mana breaks in raids than I had in dead mines.

[nekobaka]

That wouldn't have saved them for me. The problem was LFD + Hard = a black hole that sucks away all joy.

So you was forced to solo queue? As someone who solo queued as a resto druid and a warlock with a vast majority of runs not being a hell hole as many others describe I start to wonder if my battle group(Ruin) was just a whole lot better on average. Most of my runs was fairly smooth with bumps here and there with a lot of fairly nice players. If someone died from standing in bad then it was rare that the healer got blamed compared to Cata. I have even had groups where tanks would tell players to mark their own CC and chat was filled with players stating their icon. Now if I did hit a group with players that had the ignore all the mechanics mentality and dont tell me to get out of the fire mentality then I made the reasonable choice to leave group. Not hitting VP cap was not a big deal to me, its a game and when dealing with people then shit will happen. If you dont want to deal with the random human element then form your own group, the rewards are the same and you have control over what you call a black hole.

I also did not look up all the fights before hand and yet did just fine. If the whole group did not know a fight then someone would go take a moment to look it up or the players would try to figure it out. The impatient jerks in the dungeons was not the raiders, it was the wannabe dungeon heroes. Was I really just that lucky with my random groups?

[Osmeric]

So you was forced to solo queue?

No, nor was I forced to continue to subscribe. I left in early Feb. 2011 and didn't return until December. For the rest of the expansion, I didn't do a single heroic 5 man, LFD or not.

You can be assured I told Blizzard why I was unsubbing when the crying orc peon came up. It looks like they listened to me and many others.

[lockedout]

For me, the heroic five mans in cata patches firelands and hour of twilight were the perfect gear progression for casual players and a great lead up to a slightly more challenging LFR raid than by todays standards.

And for me it was heroic 5 mans in TBC.

[Deleted]

I still remember my shock on the second day of Cata. First day of I dinged 85 very early, 20 minutes after dinging I was queueing to random HCs I used cloth/leather/mail gear in my bags to get up the needed item level to queue as a tank, so probably had 10 or so item levels lower than "required". I queued up and got into groups and was pretty much the same for everyone, on average the groups had 10 item level lower than the requirement due to cheating the requirement.

Even so, we steamrolled every single dungeon, not a single wipe, just quick zerg clears aoeing everything down, completed probably 10-20 heroics before going to bed after having not slept for entire 80-85. During this time I was grouped with several people from Ensidia, Method etc simply because it was so few people at 85, even less with gear to join the dungeons.
The next day I queued up again, at this point I was probably 10 item levels above the requirement. My shock when we were getting annihilated. My entire group died on everything, I had to heal myself and the group, the dps was so low and only died. It was just horrible, I had to solo the instances, good that probably 50% of the bosses was soloable as a tank, otherwise I would probably have given up completely. Day 2-7 ws just horrible since all the 'bad' players had reached level cap and tried to do HCs. But bringing 1 friend made it so much easier.

I still think that the entry level cata heroics was good, but there was just something about them that felt wrong. Maybe it was just the colors in the dungeons but something felt boring. The difficulty was definately not to high, it was perfect. Each boss fight included one or two simple raid mechanics that was very easy to deal with. It was the perfect way of preparing people for raids. People learned communication, patience etc. I still found it kinda boring how easy the heroics was, 2 weeks in and it was already WotLK zergfest again. The major difference between WotLK and Cata was not the difficulty of the bosses, it was the health. The boss fights lasted longer in Cata which made them harder. I think Cata HCs with challenge modes to have some hard 5 man content would be a great dungeon design.

ZA/ZG was brilliant designs. I did not really play at level cap in TBC since I started in mid-TBC but did not really do anything at max level until WotLK released, so cant comment on those dungeons, so for me from a a WotLK - MoP perspective, ZA/ZG has been the best dungeons so far. They felt fun, a lot of shit to do, funny bosses and pulls. 5 mans felt like mini-raids, just as they should. But, I think having ZA/ZG designed dungeons for an entier tier would be to much work for blizz, so likely not happening.

[darkwolfe]

The cata heroics is what drove myself and my family to leave wow for the rest of cata.
I know we ALL let blizzard know why in our exit questions.

[Eranthe]

The cata heroics is what drove myself and my family to leave wow for the rest of cata.
I know we ALL let blizzard know why in our exit questions.

and yet here you are 2 years later telling us about it. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but there's like WAY more to do in this game than heroics.

[Osmeric]

and yet here you are 2 years later telling us about it. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but there's like WAY more to do in this game than heroics.

It's almost as if some people come back after the thing that drove them away is changed.

[JohnBrown1917]

and yet here you are 2 years later telling us about it. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but there's like WAY more to do in this game than heroics.

For some of us, heroics is all we did in the PvE end-game(before LFR/not including dailies & farming mats).

[Nobleshield]

The HoT ones were fine (barring the trash before Murozond. Ohgods). Outside of the clusterfuck that was Jin'do, I didn't mind ZG and thought it was a neat concept with minimal trash and minibosses. ZA however can die in a fire. The launch heroics weren't TOO bad (exceptions being Deadmines and Grim Batol) but I hope Blizzard learned a valuable lesson: With LFG and pug expectations, you can't have long and challenging dungeons.

[Illiterate]

Cata troll heroics were a good length and difficulty. The shit that is mop scenarios and dungeons is just as boring as dailies

[Eranthe]

I just don't understand the mentality that because something is too hard for me and 4 strangers that may or not be even looking at their screens, we need to fix it so that it's convenient for us to clear in a timely manner, as opposed to making people turn off the tv and actually pay attention to the game and improve if neccessary.