Why are Cata heroics so different from regs?

[babylon]

as for the difficulty level, for first weeks/months of tbc you werent able to go to shattered halls hc without a pala tank and a really decent healer, and a reasonable cc, it wasnt something you could just pug.
same was with alcatraz, steamvault, the terrokar end one too.

later with some kara + early ssc/tk gear you were able to do them with guild with almost every group setup but still you werent really pugging those due to the difficulty level

saying that wotlk heroics were even close as hard as tbc ones is some joke, doing achivements in heroics was only kind of challenge

wtb challenging heroics and a reason to have sheep on pve action bar again

[Deleted]

After looking at a couple of TotalBiscuit (or TotalHalibut or whatever) I'm surprised by how drastically different the heroics are from the regular versions. I only got really into the game with WotLK and only experienced its endgame content, who's Heroics were just harder versions of the regulars, with little difference besides numbers. Is this how it used to be back in BC, with the heroic bosses sometimes having completely different mechanics, or is this something that's new to Cataclysm?

They made them so different because it'd be crap to grind normal to 85 and ten grind the same but slightly harder instances for points, people would get bored

[Askander]

See and I remember the same for WotLK, especially Azjol (dps race), UP (taunt aware tank) or HoL (AoE heal) and well Oculus. Ofc at the start before you had enough gear to beat it.

Oh I won't argue with ya there. Those pack pulls at the beginning of AN would sometimes 1 shot our tanks. I had an entire group fall apart when our tank kept getting one shot. We never got any further in the dungeon than that. Loken of course needs no further discussion. I remember a couple wipes in UP cause of that shadow dmg debuff cause some people couldn't be bothered to run behind the pillar. Occulus used to be the zone to avoid pre-nerf. Now with nerfs + overgearing it's just faceroll. I get happy to get it on a random now cause it means bonus badges. Actually I also think I never ran Halls of Stone till the dungeon finder went live. I just never ran into a group that wanted to do it.

[Littleraven]

After looking at a couple of TotalBiscuit (or TotalHalibut or whatever) I'm surprised by how drastically different the heroics are from the regular versions. I only got really into the game with WotLK and only experienced its endgame content, who's Heroics were just harder versions of the regulars, with little difference besides numbers. Is this how it used to be back in BC, with the heroic bosses sometimes having completely different mechanics, or is this something that's new to Cataclysm?

in short...yes, think of heroics as an early version of what we now see with hardmodes...nothing quite that drastic but in BC alot of the heroics were quite different than the normal versions. Some had an extra boss (like you see with nexus and gundrak now) while others had the existing bosses do different attacks.

[Deleted]

At the beginning of wrath I had to do hc UK,hc Nexus and hc DTK to get badge gear and those drops before i could do the rest. In BC I had to do hc slave pens (maybe some others) over and before I could do the others.
I thought it was pretty much the same tbh. I think it was just easier to gear past hcs cos Naxx was too easy.

More OT: I remember some different mechanics in hcs in BC yes, this isnt new. I dont think the boglord boss in UB did his roots move in normal (correct me if im wrong it was a long time again)

[pancakez]

A decent number of the heroics in BC had additional mechanics or bosses. In fact most of the bosses did something slightly different on heroic if I remember correctly, and even when you started to get raid geared they were still pretty hard until a bit into the expansion. Course it depended somewhat on how competent your group was and if you had any CC.

SL was allways hard...

[Askander]

SL was allways hard...

That was because of Blackheart. Stupid happy fun time was always interesting, especially if you had one or two really geared dps'ers. They could really mess up a party if they nuked your tank or healer back to the stone age.

[Astray]

TBC heroics were harder than wotlk's. In TBC the progression was Normal -> Kara -> Heroics 5mans at the beginning. Then heroics got nerfed and Kara-loot buffed to match the new progression.

Wrath-heroics have some quite nice mechanics but unfortunately most of them can be ignored by overgearing.

To keep the feeling of heroics being hard the mechanics should still work when you overgear them.

Example:

Utgarde Keep: Prince Lolelf the icetomb-Boss. Afair people can survive the tombs quite some time with more lifepoints. The consequence would be making the damage-tick inside the block deal a % of maxhealth, so even overgeared people die inside the blocks. Another way would be iceblocking the whole group if someone dies in an iceblock. What cannot be changed is that better gear -> more damage -> easier time killing the iceblocks, but thats okey imo.

Utgarde Keep: Ingvar the easiest Endboss:
This one was hard on nonheroic when you didn't overgear and/or knew how his shadow-smash works. On Heroic, that smash should kill instant. For a good player this would make no difference but it would make it impossible to ignore the mechanic.

Halls of Lightning: Loken - Boss a NOVA?: The hard thing about him was never the nova but his aura. Forcing the mechanic into the battle could have been done by making the nova oneshot everyone and disabling the aura 3sec before and reenabling it 3 sec after the nova. In a world where every healer is a group healer, this would not be needed.

If you look at all wotlk-bosses, most of them have some kind of more or less unique mechanic, but most of them can be ignored now. Its no problem if something is easy if you overgear it, but its a problem if you can do all 5mans and getting all T9 without even really understanding what happens in a single Boss encounter.

[Curmudgeonly Miser]

Interesting thread. Can anyone cite specific examples of how heroic mechanics are different than normal?

I happened to do Grim Batol yesterday on beta on both difficulties. The examples that stick out most in my mind are the gronn boss and the final boss.

In both regular and heroic the gronn boss has three different "weapons" he uses. One is a shield which blocks all attacks from the direction he is pointing. In regular he just blocks the attacks; in heroic he spits out fire in front of him as well. Another weapon is a mace. In regular the tank kites him to avoid getting nailed for quite a lot of damage (hit me for 102k as fury warrior during this phase on regular); in heroic the mace drips molten lava which causes puddles on the ground which need to be avoided. His third weapon choice is dual swords. He does significant damage to the tank during this change and seems to do an additional frontal damage attack on heroic (not 100% sure about this).

As for the final boss, the only differences I can clearly remember are he spawns 2 adds instead of 1. Also, he does this giant AoE attack which requires your party to go to a specific location. In regular you got a speed buff when this happens and I didn't see that same buff in heroic. Additionally, he knocks back the tank in heroic and I don't remember him doing it on regular (though I could have just not noticed it).

Edit:
Have to say killing the final boss actually gave me that feeling of having really accomplished something that I haven't had since pre-BC. I do feel that the achieve for the boss is too easy, though.

[powerstuck]

In BC there was heroics that anyone could do (Remparts anyone ?) in Wrath that's Violet Hold much like.

But the big difference is that in BC there were also heroics that you needed to do with specific classes...ones that could CC (Shattered Halls anyone ?) or it was nearly impossible to do. Right now, in Wrath, there is no heroic that a fresh lvl80 could not do (except HOR).

People wanted harder heroics, so Blizzard is giving harder heroics. They've said it many times. They don't want Cata heroics to take 2 hours to clear, but they want even less a 8 minute heroic run.

[kingmob]

They are usually slightly different because it adds complexity to make things harder.
If you take the same boss and just tune up the amount of damage done all it does is mean you need a higher level of gear, it doesn't make it more difficult to do.

That's not entirely true. It can also mean you have to actually execute / perform better.

[Shamslam]

There are actually more regular -> heroic differences in WotLK than in BC. There are 2 (or 3) heroic only bosses and many of the bosses have a unique ability only in heroic. TBC really was just a massive rampup of damage and health when going from regular to heroic.

But the big difference is that in BC there were also heroics that you needed to do with specific classes...ones that could CC (Shattered Halls anyone ?) or it was nearly impossible to do. Right now, in Wrath, there is no heroic that a fresh lvl80 could not do (except HOR).

This stupid argument needs to die. CC was never, ever needed to clear TBC heroics. It simply made it less challenging.

[kingmob]

TBC heroics were harder than wotlk's. In TBC the progression was Normal -> Kara -> Heroics 5mans at the beginning. Then heroics got nerfed and Kara-loot buffed to match the new progression.

Wrath-heroics have some quite nice mechanics but unfortunately most of them can be ignored by overgearing.

To keep the feeling of heroics being hard the mechanics should still work when you overgear them.

Example:

Utgarde Keep: Prince Lolelf the icetomb-Boss. Afair people can survive the tombs quite some time with more lifepoints. The consequence would be making the damage-tick inside the block deal a % of maxhealth, so even overgeared people die inside the blocks. Another way would be iceblocking the whole group if someone dies in an iceblock. What cannot be changed is that better gear -> more damage -> easier time killing the iceblocks, but thats okey imo.

Utgarde Keep: Ingvar the easiest Endboss:
This one was hard on nonheroic when you didn't overgear and/or knew how his shadow-smash works. On Heroic, that smash should kill instant. For a good player this would make no difference but it would make it impossible to ignore the mechanic.

Halls of Lightning: Loken - Boss a NOVA?: The hard thing about him was never the nova but his aura. Forcing the mechanic into the battle could have been done by making the nova oneshot everyone and disabling the aura 3sec before and reenabling it 3 sec after the nova. In a world where every healer is a group healer, this would not be needed.

If you look at all wotlk-bosses, most of them have some kind of more or less unique mechanic, but most of them can be ignored now. Its no problem if something is easy if you overgear it, but its a problem if you can do all 5mans and getting all T9 without even really understanding what happens in a single Boss encounter.

People were running heroics prior to and inline with KZ even at the start. In large part if for no other reason then people were waiting out on all the guild drama over going from 40>10 that happened in bc.

I absolutely 100% agree with you about the overgearing issue and how proper scaling of effects would be the proper solution to outright ignoring mechanics.

---------- Post added 2010-09-29 at 03:47 PM ----------

This stupid argument needs to die. CC was never, ever needed to clear TBC heroics. It simply made it less challenging.

Fair point. You just needed a paladin or a warrior with carpal tunnel. :-/

[procne]

sometimes tuning numbers may result in totally different encounter as well. if in normal version one boss ability did so low damage that it could be easily outhealed then in heroic this damage may become so high that avoiding it through some encounter mechanics is the only way. Those mechanics may be available in normal version as well, but not really needed.

if i remember correctly - first boss in steamvault did low damage with her storm ability on normal, but on heroic you had to run from it or you died.

last boss in steamvault was spawning some barrels which had to be destroyed on heroic, but on normal they could be ignored. I might be wrong with this one tho...

iirc first boss in botanica spawned adds which had to be killed on heroic, but on normal could be ignored.

[Deleted]

See and I remember the same for WotLK, especially Azjol (dps race), UP (taunt aware tank) or HoL (AoE heal) and well Oculus. Ofc at the start before you had enough gear to beat it.

Sorry, but the Wotlk heroics were fairly easy, you just had to wipe a few times in pugs before getting used to the boss mechanics (and therefore kill it). The Bc heroics the other person was refering to was close to impossible, and couldn't be pugged before people the nerfs and some Karazhan gear/BoE gear.

About the topic, sorry I can't help. Simply can't remember how Tbc normals worked, however all the boss abilities were tuned very high and made them much more noticeable on heroic mode compared to normal. Also on heroic mode trash worked a bit differently (cc imumnity and other stuff). THe only real difference I can remember is the extra boss in Shattered Halls.

[Deleted]

Crowdcontrol I´d say, Crowcontrol.

[Deleted]

I can say as somebody who as played since vannila, IT'S BECAUSE THEY ARE GOING TO BE... HEROIC AGAIN!!!
W00T!!!!!

[Andaja]

Even thou I played in BC I couldn't remember them very well.
After checking Wowwiki it seems that mostly bosses got either some sort of aura (or some sort of aoe alike spell), adds or charge of some sort. Only very few gained completely new mechanics (few if not less).
But what really was the killer was the increase in damage and the fact trash hurted and were in big chunks, which coupled with the fact aoe tanking was harder then it is nowadays. Right now you could outgear heroics in nax, ulduar gear.Back then you could bring tk or ssc geared mt and still be raped.
So all in all, itll be alittle harder then it was in Bc.

[eflow]

i only did H Hoo and Lost city. At least those, they are not that "OMG ITS INSANE" thing. They are very doable (i did with a lfd group).

BC had some extreme heroics that were very, very, very hard to do early on. They were nerfed at some point, but in the very beginning some heroics required an extremelly good group to be completed. Like people said, they were a bit too hardcore because you had to actually do KZ before doing heroics, which was quite stupid.

On wotlk heroics were always easy. Always. One or another heroic had an specific boss that was a bit more challenging, but thats it. And i'm not talking about overgearing. My DK dinged 80, 2 days later she have achievment of 3-4 heroics completed, and the next day, the other herois. Also several of them i cleared the 1st time doing the achievments. In ~10 days of 80 i already had most of the heroic dungeon achievments (eflow - skullcrusher .. check the dates of my achievments if you dont believe me).

Heroics on cata are a bit in the middle ground now. They are not as hardcore as tbc heroics, but also not as retarded as wotlk ones. I think we only wiped once on Lost city trash because of a lock pet that pulled extra mobs .. wiped once in the 1st boss, once in the 2nd, on shotted the 3rd (kinda close tough), and wiped on the last boss 3-4 times.

Same on Hoo, one wipe on the 1st because we didnt know about the cast time on the switches, all others were one shotted, and the "fire marrowgar" boss we just gave up .. not sure if his fire aoe is tunned properly. But overall it was about that .. a wipe here and there if we got caught up offguard ... but they are very doable. But they are obviously MUCH less forgiving than wotlk. We used CC .. played smart etc. You cant simply aoe them down. It's good to have a bit of challenge back.

[powerstuck]

This stupid argument needs to die. CC was never, ever needed to clear TBC heroics. It simply made it less challenging.

As much as the argument is stupid...unless you were decked in full tier6 the CC was required to kill all bosses in more than one TBC heroic. Only paladin tanks or overgeared warrior tanks were able to tank a 8 mob pack without any CC and succesfully clearing it.

Your way of doing...or making it less challenging included 10 wipes per heroic which is a good win-lose ratio I guess.