The culture shock of 5-man heroics.

[Omedon]

P.S. How much do you wanna bet the people who keep saying tl;dr are the ones who will ragequit because the Cata heroics are too difficult? :P

I'd buy that for a dollar!! *maniacal laugh*

[Merganzer]

Great post. Excellent post. I agree 100%. I was PuGing 10 ICC the other day to help my buddy along with his group, and we had taken on a Rogue who was 71 points combat, had daggers, and didn't know what poisons were. He had every piece of epic farmable gear you could get out of Heroics, and with that, he had the appropriate Gearscore for the 10man Normal ICC.

Rogues are my red-headed stepchildren, too.

---------- Post added 2010-10-02 at 12:19 PM ----------

tl;dr

I would like to point you to the very first line of OP's wall of text. Idiot.

[Hypernetic]

We (meaning guild/allied posse) are currently seeing the Cataclysm heroic dungeon finder as a way to find an emergency 5th for our guild runs. It has its place as that, but I definitely see your point.

Which also makes sense in the context of the beta, since there are probably less players online at any given time than on most live servers (just guessing here from my own beta experience).

Would you really need to do that on live though? I know if I was looking for a 5th for a heroic, I could easily whisper a few people from other guilds and get a skilled/experienced player to join us (assuming nobody on my friends list was available). I think I'd rather do that than risk getting someone who didn't know what they were doing, or worse a griefer/rage quiiter/etc.

I mean, once people out-gear heroics it probably won't be an issue, but who knows how long that will take.

[Omedon]

Would you really need to do that on live though? I know if I was looking for a 5th for a heroic, I could easily whisper a few people from other guilds and get a skilled/experienced player to join us (assuming nobody on my friends list was available). I think I'd rather do that than risk getting someone who didn't know what they were doing, or worse a griefer/rage quiiter/etc.

Agreed 100%, that's how I define "emergency": none of my contacts are around.

[dysphoric4life]

I fully agree with this thread. I've been playing since about a month after launch, and I've seen the game through many changes, many I was happy with, and a few I was unhappy with. One of them was not using crowd control. I remember doing Scholo or Strat and you needed to use crowd control, it was absolutely necessary, even if it was a Shackle here, or a Polymorph there(Summoner room, ugh). The heroic dungeons in BC were heroic. They were difficult, and even a group decked in BT gear would get overrun and eventually die if they weren't careful enough(Heroic Shadow Labs /cringe). Now it's just pull and AoE.

One of my toons is a Prot pally, and even in heroics, I still mark sometimes, depending on the situation, like Runeshapers in H HoL, or if I'm in H HoR, everything is marked as it comes in, and people just ignore them and kill whatever they want. I just keep on marking, and when I heard about crowd control and set up for trash pulls coming back into play, I was super excited. After watching some of Totalbiscuits heroic runs and a few others via xfire, I like to see groups wiping over and over again. People are rusty on crowd control and are still working out the kinks.

In my opinion this is a much needed breath of fresh air.

Is it okay if I steal "team gogogogo"?

[Grimbold21]

It doesnt matter. The heroics you experience on beta wont go live. The first signs of nerfs are appearing. Just read the beta dungeon forum

[Omedon]

I fully agree with this thread. I've been playing since about a month after launch, and I've seen the game through many changes, many I was happy with, and a few I was unhappy with. One of them was not using crowd control. I remember doing Scholo or Strat and you needed to use crowd control, it was absolutely necessary, even if it was a Shackle here, or a Polymorph there(Summoner room, ugh). The heroic dungeons in BC were heroic. They were difficult, and even a group decked in BT gear would get overrun and eventually die if they weren't careful enough(Heroic Shadow Labs /cringe). Now it's just pull and AoE.

One of my toons is a Prot pally, and even in heroics, I still mark sometimes, depending on the situation, like Runeshapers in H HoL, or if I'm in H HoR, everything is marked as it comes in, and people just ignore them and kill whatever they want. I just keep on marking, and when I heard about crowd control and set up for trash pulls coming back into play, I was super excited. After watching some of Totalbiscuits heroic runs and a few others via xfire, I like to see groups wiping over and over again. People are rusty on crowd control and are still working out the kinks.

In my opinion this is a much needed breath of fresh air.

Is it okay if I steal "team gogogogo"?

NOTHING makes me rage in heroics more than people that don't respect the runeshaper room! Skipping pulls with no vent to communicate how you're doing it is SUICIDE in that room!

And feel free to steal!

---------- Post added 2010-10-02 at 12:25 PM ----------

It doesnt matter. The heroics you experience on beta wont go live. The first signs of nerfs are appearing. Just read the beta dungeon forum

From what I've heard (again, not in beta) even nerfing the everloving crap out of NPC damage and such won't change some of the difficulty aspects of these heroics. Some mechanics just hit for "WRONG!", and I'm confident/hopeful that these will remain.

[Viradiance]

Well written. I like it. Also, I beleive heroics SHOULD be hard. The players need to nut up or shut up; Blizzard doesn't need to Nerf 'em any.

But they will. It'll be a lot like Heroic Occulus, except Heroic Occulus will instead be every dungeon ever.

[Deleted]

Great post. I hope that your vision for what heroics should be is indeed the vision held by Blizzard.

Two things to note:

> It's typical of Blizzard to go over the top or overtune things while in a development stage. My fear is that following the beta feedback, they will nerf too hard. I'd ask anyone in beta, to leave POSITIVE feedback for anything that's hard.

> doril33t and vesseblah must be part of team gogogo!

[Oweena]

Very very very nice read brother.

You see exactly how the game should be and hopefully blizzard also realises their mistake from wrath. This game is not supposed to cater to people who put 0 effort in the point of a MMO is to challenge yourself. It's hardly roleplay if the only role you play is sleeping through instances.

Also.. the final 2 lines made me laugh out loud.. touche!

[Deleted]

I can remember the same things being said about the heroics in WotLK. All the "zomg, our group had a tank in full sunwell gear and we got wtfpwned by the trash" posts. After a while people get to know how their class has changed and most importantly they learn the instances and which mobs do what and its not a problem.

I raided and did heroics with my T6 epics as a druid tank.
Somehow i felt like there was something seriously wrong with the WotLK difficulty, aka, it being too easy.

Hopefully this isn't going to be the case in Cataclysm, I don't want to do heroics with my Wotlk gear or questing greens. I really want it to be like TBC again, where jumping right into heroics from leveling was absolutely impossible.

I had an argument with a guildy last night, he claimed he liked the way Wrath 5mans worked, because he as a shadow priest had the most horrible chance getting into groups because TBC it was all like "LFM dps, Need mage for Ramparts heroic".
I had several points which completely destroyed his point of view, which were:
- Every class in Catalcysm has some sort of CC, shamans can now CC elementals and hex mobs, while in TBC they couldn't do either.
- The dungeon finder, you will not have any problems getting into groups because it is an automated system, and this is also the reason why blizzard are giving each class some sort of CC, so you wont have matchups that are completely screwed.
- CC is supposed to make the trash easier in my opinion, not impossible if you don't have any.

[Deleted]

Amen, Brother.

I have to say that this was one of the better posts ive read in a while.

I'm inclined to agree. Awesome, pal.

[Omedon]

- Every class in Catalcysm has some sort of CC, shamans can now CC elementals and hex mobs, while in TBC they couldn't do either.
- The dungeon finder, you will not have any problems getting into groups because it is an automated system, and this is also the reason why blizzard are giving each class some sort of CC, so you wont have matchups that are completely screwed.
- CC is supposed to make the trash easier in my opinion, not impossible if you don't have any.

This is very very pertinent. IF any nerfing is going to happen, it likely will (hopefully) be around the "any comp should be able to do this" front. Beyond that, balls to the wall.

[Sulika]

There are an awful lot of things that add to the percieved difficulty of an unfamiliar instance.

You don't know which enemy spells can be ignored and which need to be interrupted so the dangerous ones do a lot of damage.
You don't know which mobs will run to the tank and which ones will stand still and cast meaning there will be a tendency for the tank to leave one stray ranged mob when once he knows the instance he will pick it up immediately.
You don't know which mobs spawn adds so the tank will often not have an AoE ability ready to pick them up when they appear.
You don't know which mobs heal / dispel / fear / cc people / randomly target etc meaning any that do tend to be very effective.
You don't know what the patrol routes are so you tend to aggro adds a lot more than you will in a familiar instance.
You don't know what the boss abilities are so you will wipe a lot on things that should be avoided / interrupted / otherwise prevented.
The healers don't know the damage profile of the fights, they dont know which are the high damage parts and which are low damage parts, if they guess low when its high the tank dies, if they guess high when its low the healer goes oom.

Then there are the other factors that don't help.

It is almost impossible to get crafted gear on beta since nobody is really bothered crafting things to sell on AH for a character that will be deleted in a few weeks and those that are are only doing so to charge 10,000 gold per item and see if anyone will pay it.
Similarly, gems, enchants, glyphs are all almost impossible to come by since they are unavailable on AH and pretty much nobody will respond to you if you look for a crafter to do one.
So instead of a group of people in decent crafted blue gear, with the new gems and at least the cheaper versions of the new enchants you end up with a group full of people in quest greens and blues, unenchanted, gemmed with lvl 80 gems.

Throw into that mix a situation where nearly every class has changed hugely, where all talent trees and most abilities have been changed so people are not playing nearly as well as they should. DPSers don't know their rotations, tanks don't have a tanking rhythm for their new abilities, healers are unfamiliar with their spells etc and it is no surprise that heroics tend to be pretty hard work at 85 right now.

Last but not least, there is a sizable portion of the player base that are utterly unwilling to try and figure out how a fight works. It is almost a certainty that if you join a group for an instance on beta and wipe, for any reason, at least one person will leave the party. I am sure you all have seen the same sort on live, if things go well it is because they are so skilled, if things go badly it is because the rest of their group are noobs. Finding replacements on beta takes a lot longer than it does on live since it is basically a small pool of realms. You also often find weird bugs that prevent people zoning back into the instance or someones PC will crash repeatedly for some obscure reason. This is all part of life on beta but some people adjust to it and tolerate it a lot better than others.

Give it a few months after release and we will all be laughing about how easy it is and reminiscing fondly about how we wiped on boss X in full T10 gear five times in a row the first time round and now our alts in greens are facerolling the same boss.

[Omedon]

Give it a few months after release and we will all be laughing about how easy it is and reminiscing fondly about how we wiped on boss X in full T10 gear five times in a row the first time round and now our alts in greens are facerolling the same boss.

It's very possible you'll be right. The caveat I add to my "this alt stays in regular instances" ethic comes with a "wait and see" stance as to gear inflation. I'm hoping, as stated above, that some mechanics will remain impossible to ignore. It makes my soul weep every time a tank says "ya, I don't know or bother with the whole run away/come back stuff, just heal through lightning nova" without asking the healer if they're comfortable with that. I still ask, every time.

[Peta]

It's all fun yada-yada. Well written.
Now...in the end it all comes down to numbers. Next year will be a year where new next gen mmos will be launched. Blizz in a commercial company. If a massive rage-quit is the result of these changes mark my words how fast they will be undone. In the end you tailor to the bigger market.

[Omedon]

It's all fun yada-yada. Well written.
Now...in the end it all comes down to numbers. Next year will be a year where new next gen mmos will be launched. Blizz in a commercial company. If a massive rage-quit is the result of these changes mark my words how fast they will be undone. In the end you tailor to the bigger market.

The bigger market being happy players that bring their friends.

I contend that the damage "team gogogo" does to the community is measurable in dollar signs as well.

[Deleted]

i made an account just to post in this thread.. you win sir.

[Needonboots]

This thread deserves mass approval. I give it mine. Thank you for such a well written and well reasoned post, and I hope your thread on the beta forums can get enough notice

[Deleted]

Can we get a link to the beta forum thread?