Did GC really just say Cata Heroics were hard?

[Ronduwil]

The only fight we found difficulty was Commander Springvale. I remember our first kill and it felt awesome having that cape as it gave me a small sense of achievement. The heroics were hard but they were meant to be exactly like that. Once you had raid gear, the heroics weren't any issue even with pugs.

Until everyone cheesed the fight by pulling him into a different room so that his adds became a non-issue. You also addressed another issue. Heroic dungeons were for non-raiders in WotLK but suddenly they became incredibly painful unless you were raid-geared, in which case they became relatively easy. That's not a great design. They should have been painful in 333 gear but easy in 346 gear. Instead they were tuned to be painful in anything less than 359 gear.

[syphil]

I dinged 85 on my priest ... I jumped into LFD .... mana running low...

i see what happened. There are times i think blizz had the right idea in BC with reputation and attunement.

Are you implying I should have spent several days stacking up on gear (which I would have obtained from where...?) so that the tank and DPS could have ignored the mechanics?

[Deleted]

But when night after night you see group after group fall apart because one player (the tank) fails to grasp the fight's mechanics, it's a measurement of too hard. I understand that if three people derp the group should wipe (and that's where MoP fails), but the entire group shouldn't be repeatedly punished because of one person's failure either. That's what made those fights (and heroic raids) so frustrating.

That's more of an issue with LFG and badge-over-gearing than with difficulty. In my personal opinion, LFG and badge-gear was a bad addition to WoW. Yes grouping was faster and especially in LK it didn't matter how shit your tank was, because even if he never pressed a button you could manage the heroics. But the majority of the people severely outgeared the instances after a few runs and never ever experience the real game.

There is also the insane scaling of healing and tanking. At the start (of gearing up) you are(were) in those specs utter shit and it was quite an effort to to stay alive / not run oom within 2 casts. Then you get 3 upgrades an suddenly it was cake, especially boosted in LK with all the badge gear and the guaranteed epics at the end of the dungeon.

Even tho I have played most of the time during Vanilla/TBC (and the whole time I played LK) as dps in raids, I went to heroics as a tank and if anyone asked me to tank a couple of heroics for them I did it (as long as he wasn't on my list of baddies). Once LFD came into play it got worse (and nothing in LK heroics was hard, beside HoR because of a retarded design and LFD). You couldn't build any bonds anymore, it was anonymous and it didn't matter if you just tagged along leeching or keyboard turning or just let your cat run over your keyboard - stuff got done (and this was BAD).

See I can emphasize with anyone thinking that Heroics are too hard, but only if there is no progression path to actually gain gear and experience. As we know stuff in Cata got hard when someone died to the avoidable one-shots. Guess what, its avoidable and experience lets you avoid it. When I switched to my Shaman again (pre-nerfs I think) I actually made an effort and farmed normal dungeons first for gear and then went into heroics, but "Oh behold" that's too much to ask for a green-geared casual that has no time but still has the entitlement to get everything in the game. Now I was at the same time a semi-casual raiding twice a week for 2 hours each with a bunch of other semi-casuals.

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Are you implying I should have spent several days stacking up on gear (which I would have obtained from where...?) so that the tank and DPS could have ignored the mechanics?

There were a couple of level 85 dungeons that dropped gear better than quest rewards, crafted items and reputation rewards (hoo tabards). Obviously that doesn't help with retards, but that's again a LFD/Social issue - brought to you by them dearly GC

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It doesn't matter. The 1.3m sub loss didn't come in the patch with LFR either, it came after 2 quarters of nothing but DS.

Wow always had a long streak of no content at the end http://www.wowwiki.com/Timeline_(World_of_Warcraft) The majority of the players wouldn't have had issues if stuff was scaled accordingly. (Incoming 2% sunwell and naxx40 flames)

[OrcsRLame]

I don't think a 6-hour clear of all tbc heroics was even remotely possible - just travel and bio (unless everyone catheterized) would be over an hour, possibly much more (think coilfang, cot, netherstorm, ). some of those heroics were quite unforgiving of error even in better gear.

I think it would have taken real coordination by quite a few players to get full clears in a single lock-out. folks who didn't play then wouldn't relate - even in t6, assume 30-45 min avg as best possible?

Yes, it would have taken real coordination. I'm not talking about average or even good players attempting this, I'm talking about the best players.

6 Hours isn't that long of a time to not take a piss. I've seen people go without bathroom breaks for 12+ hours when marathoning, so that's not an issue. Travel could have been mitigated by having other characters logged out at the summoning stones. 2 People log to alts, summon the other 3, log back to their mains, get summoned by their 3 party members. There'd be virtually no travel time and no bathroom or food breaks. And no one would make mistakes, because I'm assuming a theoretical optimal run. Invisibility potions would also be used where optimal.

I think you could do 6 hours with plenty of time to spare.

[Osmeric]

But didn't LFR come out with those too?

Two kinds of easy content came out together, and there was no mass exodus.

[Divinewrath]

The heroics were mainly not LFD friendly I know I got alot more clears in a guild group than solo cue and even in guild group it was not a walk in the park (alot to do with the healer having not near enough mana) if you did something wrong alot less forgiving than than WotLK where there was certain fights that sucked not pretty much every heroic

[Deleted]

Yes, it would have taken real coordination. I'm not talking about average or even good players attempting this, I'm talking about the best players.

6 Hours isn't that long of a time to not take a piss. I've seen people go without bathroom breaks for 12+ hours when marathoning, so that's not an issue. Travel could have been mitigated by having other characters logged out at the summoning stones. 2 People log to alts, summon the other 3, log back to their mains, get summoned by their 3 party members. There'd be virtually no travel time and no bathroom or food breaks. And no one would make mistakes, because I'm assuming a theoretical optimal run. Invisibility potions would also be used where optimal.

I think you could do 6 hours with plenty of time to spare.

While in theory you might be true, wasn't the statement about the start of TBC, which clearly was not possible or at least none had done it. For once they didn't have the gear to chain pull stuff, then the dungeons were filled with mob packs. Look at the longer dungeons Arcatraz, SH, SL, Dark Portal, Old Hillsbrad, Mana Tombs, Botanica all of them took quite a while to finish. with 15 dungeons in 6 hours that's an average of 24 minutes non-stop dungeon runs. Even with drums of speed, swift pots, insane gear and instant summons once you kill the final boss that would close to impossible

[HeedmySpeed]

Two kinds of easy content came out together, and there was no mass exodus.

Didn't the annual pass come out right before it too?

You're originally said that there was no mass exodus because of easy dungeons but as you can see there were two other major factors as to why players didn't leave.

I'd say the annual pass was the biggest factor but LFR probably get players going for a month or two. And when that started to lose steam they started nerfing the rest of DS.

Also, who's the say the majority of the rest of the 10 million players weren't happy with harder Heroics?
Since apparently we're usingo this mentality: "if you quit, you didn't like hard content. But if you keep playing you support nerfs."

[OrcsRLame]

While in theory you might be true, wasn't the statement about the start of TBC, which clearly was not possible or at least none had done it. For once they didn't have the gear to chain pull stuff, then the dungeons were filled with mob packs. Look at the longer dungeons Arcatraz, SH, SL, Dark Portal, Old Hillsbrad, Mana Tombs, Botanica all of them took quite a while to finish. with 15 dungeons in 6 hours that's an average of 24 minutes non-stop dungeon runs. Even with drums of speed, swift pots, insane gear and instant summons once you kill the final boss that would close to impossible

I didn't read the original statement, I just read the post of the person that said that clearing all heroics in TBC in 6 hours was impossible. So I assumed BiS Sunwell gear.

[Stuffs]

They were hard until people whined & they got nerfed to the ground.

What always threw me off was how Ghostcrawler said Heroics were supposed to be hard, and the next day we had nerfs across the board

[Deleted]

The heroics were mainly not LFD friendly I know I got alot more clears in a guild group than solo cue and even in guild group it was not a walk in the park (alot to do with the healer having not near enough mana) if you did something wrong alot less forgiving than than WotLK where there was certain fights that sucked not pretty much every heroic

But wotlk can not be the metric, I did a HoL as the single heroic before clearing Naxx 2.0 10man and afaik those that leveled up earlier than me in the guild did 3 more heroics (and we didn't get any server firsts for that matter).

[Celista]

I don't know about everyone else, but I hated the 4.3 heroic dungeons. They were way too easy and I found them really boring. The only reason I didn't cancel my subscription after 4.3 was the annual pass and because I was looking forward to Diablo III.

I tanked them a number of times -- as blood DK -- in DPS gear and got kicked only once, and not because I was taking too much damage or because I was making the healer's life harder, but because one of the DPS said it was inappropriate for me to be tanking in DPS gear (my tanking gear was gathering dust in the bank). And he only noticed I was in DPS gear because of my DPS. Before I was kicked I asked the healer if I was taking too much damage he said no and that he didn't even notice I was in DPS gear.

Takes a majority to vote kick you, so likely the healer thought you were taking too much damage and didn't say anything, otherwise if he/she was OK with it they would have spoken up. I tell the grp I'm ok with it when healing because I could care less what the tank is wearing as a heals unless the tank is really just trolling with his bad tanking, and because my raid gear carries everything.

Tanks in dps specs pisses me off though, even in low level dungeons. Just pay the gold for dual spec or queue in the correct spec, you do more damage in tanking specs anyway and you'll actually learn how to tank instead of just cheesing it with your crappy ret/whatever spec. It's the principle of the thing...

[Deleted]

I didn't read the original statement, I just read the post of the person that said that clearing all heroics in TBC in 6 hours was impossible. So I assumed BiS Sunwell gear.

Even then I would call it impossible. I had a geared Prot warrior (and a rerolled ele shaman) and believe me, you do not do those dungeons in 24mins on average (or seriously unlikely)

[Stuffs]

The heroics were mainly not LFD friendly I know I got alot more clears in a guild group than solo cue and even in guild group it was not a walk in the park

It helped a lot if you leveled ahead of the curve, since a different type of person to be blunt about it generally had the initiative.

I've argued before that the simplest way to deal with puggers screwing up mechanics would be DPS losses, and obnoxious spell effects, instead of dumping the load on a pug healer.

[Osmeric]

What always threw me off was how Ghostcrawler said Heroics were supposed to be hard, and the next day we had nerfs across the board

That's what happens when stupid and wrong ideas about game design collide with actual customer response.

Still surprised they haven't fired anyone over it.

[Deleted]

Tanks in dps specs pisses me off though, even in low level dungeons. Just pay the gold for dual spec or queue in the correct spec, you do more damage in tanking specs anyway and you'll actually learn how to tank instead of just cheesing it with your crappy ret/whatever spec. It's the principle of the thing...

Totally agreed! Especially when shield slam still scaled with Block Value . There were times tho, were you had to exchange gear to dps slots once you outgeared the instance, so that you could actually build aggro. Low level dungeons always have been sketchy at best tho, because you barely got enough rage to be able to tank properly.

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That's what happens when stupid and wrong ideas about game design collide with actual customer response.

Still surprised they haven't fired anyone over it.

I'd like to know how many of those people that actively played during Vanilla/TBC are still playing and what has been the fluctuation ever since. I slightly remember, that there have been like 40m people been subscribed or so (none knows how many of those have been bots tho)

[OrcsRLame]

Even then I would call it impossible. I had a geared Prot warrior (and a rerolled ele shaman) and believe me, you do not do those dungeons in 24mins on average (or seriously unlikely)

You gotta understand, I'm not talking about an average group of players. I'm talking about top raiders, all in full BiS gear, with a fully optimized group comp, using invisibility potions on an absolutely flawless run with no mistakes.

[Deleted]

You gotta understand, I'm not talking about an average group of players. I'm talking about top raiders, all in full BiS gear, with a fully optimized group comp, using invisibility potions on an absolutely flawless run with no mistakes.

I totally get that and since I had the gear (and maybe the ability, not me to judge) back then, I'm confident to say that it was not possible. Especially considering the original statement, but even without that. When sunwell was still current (and not the walk-through it was after 4.0), there is no way you could have cleared each dungeon in 24 minutes

Edit: Go into any of those longer dungeons now and walk through them and look at the time it takes. I'd guess it takes you already close to 10 minutes just to run to mumur without fighting anything. (But we are clearly getting off-topic here)

[Alconds]

What always threw me off was how Ghostcrawler said Heroics were supposed to be hard, and the next day we had nerfs across the board

That got me too, I was happy when he said there would be no nerfs because I really enjoyed the content.

[Deleted]

That got me too, I was happy when he said there would be no nerfs because I really enjoyed the content.

Oh I think I remember that quote, if anyone could dig that out that'd be swell!



But here is a real question to all those saying it was too hard:
Was it un-doable hard or was it just quite challenging. If you say un-doable did you actually farm non heroic 85 dungeons or jump into it right away? Do not get your views overshadowed by bad players, rather see the over all experience. (Because I do not count un-enchanted, un-gemmed, itemlevel cheaters as people that should be in instances "at the start")