The unintended consequence of difficulty.

[melodramocracy]

The timesink.

When you factor in queue times, waiting for replacements who rage quit an instance halfway through, I'm seeing an average of easily 3 hours / day dedicated to just trying to land that days achievement points.

Hardly reasonable by any measure, frankly.

Lowering the heroic difficulty isn't really a satisfactory answer to the problem, but there most certainly is a glaring issue with how much time needs to be sunk into the game currently to progress. Nor is waiting a raid tier. The entire experience is rather frustrating.

[Kelmart]

Thats why I quit for a while. Too much of a timesink for me. I don't have 3-4 hours a night to do 1 heroic for VP and log on every day to do it. If that means I can't do the content b/c I have college, job, and friends then that's fine. I play this game to spend some of my free time. Not to get sucked into an endless pit of time to see wipe after wipe after crappy group. I've accepted that Heroics in all honesty aren't that difficult, me and a friend were able to pug 4 heroics to completions the first weekend with randoms out of the 7 we ran. It's the randoms that make it long and ruin it and not everyone is in a guild that is able to run everyday for that long. My guild especially has very similar time restraints to mine. But whatever, i'm over it. Just gonna come back in a few months and hope the pugs gear improves enough where they idiocy doesn't matter.

[Joeeigel]

I think the issue is simply the ease of Wrath coming into Cata. There needed to be a slightly slower ramp up with the difficulty so that players were actually prepared for the issues they'd face when running heroics in Cata after coming off of sleeping while running heroics in Wrath. That and player patience has dropped substantially since the introduction of the LFG system.

[Deleted]

Every day I do a heroic it seems to get easier, not just because of better gear on my end but everyone in general is now getting rep gear, crafted gear or epic pvp gear (which is as good, or in some few cases better than 346 heroic drops).

People are also getting more used to the instances and what the bosses do/what must be moved from and getting used to the idea that they have to look after themselves.

With these comes a bigger incentive for tanks and healers to use LFD, therefore lowering queue times in general.


These changes will get more prominant with time, and hopefully long before a new tier comes it will be alot easier to do a heroic without spending so much time

As for right now, if you are not raiding yet then there isn't a huge need for you to get VP right now so it might be worth trying some PvP/achievements etc.
Its not the best solution but it should be faster than waiting a whole raid tier and like you said, they can't lower the difficulty of heroics (completely out of the question imho).

[madmonkie44]

I think the issue is simply the ease of Wrath coming into Cata. There needed to be a slightly slower ramp up with the difficulty so that players were actually prepared for the issues they'd face when running heroics in Cata after coming off of sleeping while running heroics in Wrath. That and player patience has dropped substantially since the introduction of the LFG system.

Speaking of ramping up the difficulty. What if they sorted the dungeons by difficulty and you had to clear from the lowest to highest. Kinda like when they released FoS--PoS--HoR. Completing each one would allow access to the next.

Then again, people with time restraints dont want to spend their time doing a dungeon they dont want to just to get another.

[coldbear]

You're doing it wrong.

Get a steady group. Learn to build successful PUGs that are server only so you can run with the same people day after day.

Or just be lazy and click the little "halp me gets a group plox Blizz" and deal with the consequences of hanging out with random internet people.

[Gestopft]

I hear you. I enjoy the difficulty personally, but haven't gotten VP in four days. Two days ago I spent at least an hour and a half just on the first boss of SFK, never did get him down. And that was my second full queue I'd waited in that day. The first dungeon broke up on the second boss.

When people have better gear, know the fights more, etc. it will be easier, but it is really hit or miss right now.

[Blawkbuster]

I know I'm going to sound rude and maybe immature saying this but really, all that can be avoided by queuing with guildies, when I'm in a guild group we get through 3 heroics in about 3 hours, considerably less of a timesink and less frustration. I've been through all the rage quits and complete failures of heroics and i can honestly say I'm not queuing for a heroic without atleast 2 other guildies in my group, at the moment people ARE getting better but I not down for all that wasted time

[Ershiin]

I think the issue here really is a lack of patience.
Most of the time when I see complaints like this, I cant help but immagine that the people giving them lacked the patience to spend 10-20min coaxing a few guildies and some people from trade to join them in a properly set up group, and thus were punished by the lack of patience by being put into a group of completely random strangers with no inclination to neither be nice nor patient with their group and thus causing the run to take much much longer in total than if they had just spent that little extra time finding some proper people.

Remember that each server has tons of people logged on at all times. Very rarely does it take longer to form a group and complete a dungeon than it does getting into a random and completing a dungeon.
And if it does, it is more than likely because the group is being formed at some ungodly time of night where it still takes longer getting a random group... That or just a lack of social skills when trying to recruit people for the group.

The Dungeon Tool is not the go-to method of forming groups.. Its the last resort failsafe method of making sure that you eventually WILL get a group. However since its put together by a program and not the people in the group themselves, there are no guarantees for the success of said group.
And in all honesty its quite unfair to expect such.

Its the same reason reality shows are so successful with their drama.. Put a bunch of random people together in a group and put a challenge with random rewards in front of them, then watch the mayhem as one screws up and everyone rants at him, another feels sorry and starts ranting at the rest, a third secretly starts plotting to snatch all the rewards for himself, a fourth gets frustrated with the infighting of the others and quits, while a fifth just does his best to keep the group together so they can win the prize.. After which he gets booted as the first due to being a threat to the goals of the third.

[Knarg]

I'm with the OP. I have a guild and we're all good friends but our schedules are sufficiently varied that none of us have the four consecutive hours every night that is required to suffer thru a Cata heroic.

[Kelmart]

Yep, I know what you mean Knarg. Everyone is like "STFU and get a guild". A lot of us have guilds with friends and we aren't leaving, and people get shitty with us for complaining about a broken system that rewards only a small percent that have guilds with similar schedules or LARGE guild pools.

[Verdris]

Imo, make Heroics harder.

[Syronicus]

Imo opinion blizz tried to kill pugs with the new guild system and harder heroics. Simple answer is join a guild and don't pug.

[Quotidian]

I understand where you're coming from, especially with pugs. As far as heroics, until later down the road I'm not touching them through the lfg system. My guild has a couple nights a week set aside where we all get online and hit up heroics because we can communicate and strategize. That and we're less likely to get pissed at eachother and run away like whiney little girls. It is difficult, but for me I'm starting to get to the point of it still being challenging but genuinely enjoyable.

Or I'm just happy that I had the smoothest, most beautiful run of Heroic Shadowfang Keep and a slightly bumpy run of HTotT and I'm still all giddy about it.

[sicness]

The length of queues has less to do with the difficulty of the heroics compared to the actual time it takes to clear them. It's not due to the heroics being hard, just long and somewhat time consuming. You can't clear a heroic in 20 minutes any more and is why the queue length is roughly the time it takes to clear a 5 man with a good group on most battlegroups.

[Deleted]

ok... Blizz tuned the heroics for what the majority wanted, which was harder heroics, this have made the heroics longer(although it's getting better over time) im the same as the OP, i have a job, goes to uni and dosn't have 3 hours a night, but heck it's only 1 out of 5 times i get into 3 hour pugs.

mostly it's around 1½ long, but well i switched to PvP completely(always njoyed that more.)

summing up:

- get a group of online people who's "always ready"
- shift to PvP
- "suck it up" and just enter the dungeon and do your best, explain tacs before the boss(macro it if neccesary) it helps alot.

[awake283]

I know this is cliche but you HAVE to find a guild. You HAVE to adapt. You CANNOT continue the ways of Wrath. Be friendly, be social, make friends! Use said friends to better your PvE experience! The sooner you quit relying on pugs, the LFD tool, etc etc, the sooner you will enjoy Cata! Again - Cata is not Wrath! You must adapt!

[Marxman]

I agree with a previous poster: the problem is not the difficulty of 5mans and heroics in Cataclysm, the problem is the difficulty compared to the incredible lack of difficulty in WotLK 5mans. Cataclysm 5mans aren't hard, not at all. They ARE somewhat challenging though, and you have to at least sort of know what you're doing to be successful. That was absolutely not the case in WotLK. You could gather pretty much any 5 people in any gear and faceroll WotLK heroics all day with minimal trouble.

I also agree that these runs take too long even without any issues. I'd much rather they take 30-40 minutes than 45-60 minutes on average. Deadmines, HoO, Grim Batol, and SFK are especially lengthy. I'm glad to see some of the trash in Deadmines get removed though, because there was just way too much of it.

[awake283]

the problem is the difficulty compared to the incredible lack of difficulty in WotLK 5mans.

I totally agree with this!

[deftones]

This isn't World of Guildcraft.
You shouldn't be forced to find a guild in order to play the game the way YOU want to play it.
(inb4 ur doing it wrong, etc.)

Everything you do now seems to be focused around being guild-related... heroics, rated bg's, achievements etc.... lame.