Early dungeons a complete failure for player training?

[Krom2040]

So I've been leveling my druid lately starting from level 1, and after about level 15, I've predominantly just done the Dungeon Finder. As one who played Classic very extensively, I've generally been pretty pleased with the structural changes they've made to the low level dungeons; they've generally been improvements.

But overall... I'm completely appalled at how ridiculously easy these dungeons are these days. Granted, I'm in a ton of heirloom gear, and most of the players I'm playing with are also in heirloom gear, but that's just how things are these days. That is, in itself, no excuse for practically every boss to be down in 15 seconds, and many trash packs to be done in 5. That's not generally even enough time to get through a single cooldown!

I feel as though Blizzard is getting themselves into a situation where the dungeons are so woefully inappropriate preparation for the high-level content that (a) newer players are going to suffer an inordinate shock when they get to that content, and (b) more experienced players are going to have to suffer through a bunch of people with no idea what they're doing.

Just yesterday, I was healing UBRS on my relatively poorly-geared paladin, and the tank was a relatively poorly-geared druid who I don't think was even aware of his mitigation cooldowns like Savage Defense, based on how much more damage he was taking than other tanks I'd healed there. I proposed that we cut down on incoming damage by attempting to CC, and people reacted like I had just lost my mind and started talking up the good qualities of Adolf Hitler or something.

This definitely didn't used to be how it was; CC may not have been incredibly abundant, but people were usually at least aware of its existence and willing to do it if the situation called for it. Blizzard's made it even easier to use by not having it cause aggro most of the time. So why is it so hard for people to understand its value now?

Does it seem to anyone else like the dungeon designers are potentially digging a hole by making everything so easy to smash through?

[Deja Thoris]

The dungeon designers didn't make early dungeons easy. Over-gearing them / power creep from class changes made it easy.

Its past the point where its worthwhile to go back to vanilla stuff and re-tune it.

It's a problem whose only solution is "Get better fast at max level or gtfo"

[Krom2040]

The dungeon designers didn't make early dungeons easy. Over-gearing them / power creep from class changes made it easy.

Its past the point where its worthwhile to go back to vanilla stuff and re-tune it.

It's a problem whose only solution is "Get better fast at max level or gtfo"

I definitely see *how* it got to this point, but they've obviously spent a good chunk of time going back and making fairly sophisticated additions and modifications to old dungeons; how hard could it be to figure out how many hit points to give the mobs? A lot of this stuff feels like incoming damage is actually fine and even pretty high, so they apparently tuned that or at least made sure it wasn't broken, so why can't they just double or triple monster health accordingly? Again, it feels like it would just be a completely linear increase in most cases, to at least bring bosses up to the point where they last for 60 seconds or something rather than flopping over dead on contact.

The current state of things isn't really even fun. Tearing through monsters is only fun for a little while, and only when you somehow feel like you're more powerful than usual when doing so. When that's just how things are all the time, it feels super grindy and pointless.

[Polarthief]

It's a problem whose only solution is "Get better fast at max level or gtfo"

Or just kindly ask someone who you know is good, or google something on your class rather than getting defensive when someone tells you to improve.

Even absolute shit sites like Noxxic can improve an LFR player to at least Normal. Granted, the forums here or a Heroic/Mythic player could easily improve you more. People are simply too scared or too dumb to ask for help nowadays, or they just flat out don't care.

[Krom2040]

It's true that there are countless ways to improve yourself, and I think it's also fairly self-evident that game mechanics right now are very sophisticated (in a good way) and allow for very challenging encounters.

The problem is that players who start right now will have spent something like 50 or 100 hours or even more playing content that is really not designed to be possible to fail. And being comfortable with the *idea* that you'll have to improve yourself and learn new tactics and approaches in order to be successful, that's an important quality. I'm concerned that Blizzard isn't really instilling in players any notion of the fact that they'll have to learn new things and adapt their playing in order to beat content.

In my mind, it's fine if dungeons are sometimes frustrating; it gives players a little bit of time to think about what constitutes "playing well", as well as little stories to remember about a time when they really had to work through something. Some of my best memories in early WoW involve really having to struggle a little bit to think about how to get through a dungeon.

Granted, I don't think the game has to really punish players or anything like that, but it's worthwhile to keep in mind that for leveling, players can always choose to go quest if they get annoyed with a particular dungeon. It's not an insurmountable obstacle.

Contrarily, right now they'll just smash their faces against heroics at level 100.

[Gumboy]

Some of the early dungeons seem EXTREMELY unbalanced... the chain throw in SH normal they do to the non tank can easily one shot people if two go off at the same time, its ludicrous.

[Krom2040]

Some of the early dungeons seem EXTREMELY unbalanced... the chain throw in SH normal they do to the non tank can easily one shot people if two go off at the same time, its ludicrous.

I agree that right now some dungeons have a lot of spike damage, which is a holdover from when healing was more about efficiency and less about throughput. But Shattered Halls was always one where you were *supposed* to CC rather than suck up the damage. It wasn't really even possible for most classes to spam tank everything back then.

So there are a few cases where they probably need to reduce the incoming damage. But I think it's overwhelmingly the case that things are dying too soon for anything to be interesting.

[madmanx]

Did we really need another thread about how easy low level dungeons are when you have BIS gear in every slot and have played the game for 10 years?


...of course it is easy! It is about as easy as it is to figure out why it is so easy....how come you can't do that?

[Krom2040]

...of course it is easy! It is about as easy as it is to figure out why it is so easy....how come you can't do that?

I *think* your implication is that gear is the only reason why it's easier now. Is that what you're saying? That it would it be equally challenging if only people went in with strength/spirit greens or whatever your preferred example of "bad gear" is?

Not only do I think that's false, but I think it's unrealistic but that's generally not how most LFG dungeons actually go. If there's a problem with the fact that heirloom gear is drastically more powerful than everything else at that level, then they need to fix that by re-configuring old gear or nerfing heirloom gear at low levels.

At this point I've run nearly every dungeon from level 1 through level 80, and I can't think of a single example where it didn't feel like everything was dead in very short order. Heirloom gear is definitely not appreciably different from any other gear by the time you reach level 70 or so, so I really don't think there's any real relationship.

I don't know why there's this desire to hand-wave all the level 1-89 (soon to be level 1-99) content away with a curt "who cares, that's not supposed to work right anyway" dismissal. It seems to me that there are obvious consequences to that, which I described in regard to my recent experience.

[TheShultz]

Heirlooms ruined low level dungeons more than anything.

[krelios]

Even absolute shit sites like Noxxic...

Really? Noxxic is one of the better sites out there for that sort of information. Between Noxxic, Icy Veins, and Ask Mr. Robot, people should be able to perform well enough for normal raiding at least--even moreso if they're just doing LFR.

[nekobaka]

The mentality has become to make random queue stuff especially things that are just an early grind to be utterly trivial and nearly soloable so that newbies and griefers dont ruin other players ability to get things done.

[Cinnamohn]

Low levels are by far the most imbalanced thing in the game right now. Most notably that I've found thus far are Brewmasters are the equivalent of a tank and 3 dps, Guardian Druids can barely stay alive in most cases yet can push out more damage than their dps counterparts by mashing one button, every fucking healer seems to have trouble keeping the tank alive because they're stuck with 1 or 2 poorly tuned spells until 60+, and consistency in dungeon difficulty is pretty much nonexistent.

Actually, thinking back, they've never given a single fuck about low level balance. Guess I shouldn't expect things to change.

[Chickat]

Honestly they should go back and re-tune them on a basic level. Deadmines should be able yo wipe your group if you are in greens or under. Boa groups should zoom through, but by 60 even boa groups should need to start doing mechanics correctly or wipe. WoW does a terrible job of training anyone before max level. It gets a bit better in Cataclysm dungeons, but its still too easy for that level.

[Garkanh]

i just leveled a holy paladin from 1-90 after the 6.0 launch.

and it had gotten a lot harder.

mechanics now actually kills people, even heirloom geared people, if they fuck up. tank accidently pulls an extra pack of mobs? high chance of wipe. dps don't move from shit? too bad, you're dead.

the main issue atm that makes low level dungeons a lot harder than pre-6.0, is that most tanks are just bad. especially monks. They keep running, keep pulling, without giving the healer a chance to catch up. with less instant heals, it's impossible to keep up a tank who keeps sprinting ahead, not using his defensive cooldowns, and often actually being to only person in the dungeon who does not have agro from anything.

especially those monks who just spam spinning crane kick.. god i hate.. them... so.. much! Had one tank get 1-shot 3 times from the slam from 2-nd boss in the vash'ir instance, because he didn't move, and blaming it on me... tanks these days man.

i like druids and paladins though. they seem to be able to mitrigate damage the best, while also being some of the best at holding agro.

[Chickat]

^ That was because they screwed the squish up. Leveling is easy again.

[endersblade]

The issue I forsee is with my 84 twink pally tank/heals. I was spam healing myself standing in town, and my crit heals were only about 5k. I have an HP pool of 30.1k. Before the squish, my crit heals were pushing 200k, being far more than what a normal tank at this level has. How well is this healing going to work in a dungeon? I feel like I'm going to have to sit there and spam heal the whole dungeon, and might actually have to stop and drink >.>

Also, as far as tanking, I have an old 'unhitable' macro that used to tell me I was at 89.69% unhiyable. Now it's around 40%. That hurts >.<

[BabelOn]

It's a hard balance to get right since the dungeon has to be doable by a group of new players in quest greens. With heirlooms you are equipped with essentially BIS at your current level in those slots, sometimes before there are regular drops for those slots at all.

But I hear you regarding CC or really any strategy at all. I was running Azjol-Nerub over the weekend as a disc priest and a 10 minute dungeon turned into a 30 minute ordeal due to 4 or 5 wipes on Hadronox. The first tank was of the zerg chain pull go go go never stop don't bother to watch where the healer is variety. I had stopped to do the egg quest and he'd pulled and died and complained that I wasn't there. Then when I got there he proceeded to run down, pull all the mobs, then stay pulling all the extra mobs that just run down the tunnel if you leave them alone. Then proceeded to run further down the tunnel instead of waiting for Hadronox to come up on his own. When he died again he complained some more about how hard everything was and how it took too long and dropped group rather then bothering with strategy. We got a new tank and ended up wiping a few more times because nobody would listen to me about staying up near the top of the room, pull only the adds necessary, and wait for the boss to join us. Eventually there was a group of people willing to listen and lo and behold we downed him and moved on.

[powerstuck]

Honestly they should go back and re-tune them on a basic level. Deadmines should be able yo wipe your group if you are in greens or under. Boa groups should zoom through, but by 60 even boa groups should need to start doing mechanics correctly or wipe. WoW does a terrible job of training anyone before max level. It gets a bit better in Cataclysm dungeons, but its still too easy for that level.

But by that standard...

Level 1 to 19 should be grays.
Level 20 to 39 should be whites.
Level 40 to 59 should be greens.
Level 60 to 79 should be blues.
Level 80 to 99 should be epics.
Level 100 legendary/orange.

[Tenjen]

hear comes the dps cycle choo choo train! say sinister strike! say sinister strike *slips spoon in* YAAYAYYY ! you did it!

no seriously. the early dungeons are adequate and are only easy because of the reasons stated above. They introduce you to getting used to the basics of your class within the realm of group dynamics. that is all that is really needed.