Cata Dungeons are not hard. There is a big difference in something being hard and something hard to do. Let me try and explain what I mean. Blizzard recently came out with a blog post entitled ‘Wow, Dungeons are Hard’ and then tried to explain how and why. This is clever marketing, distracting us from the truth, it’s the kind of thing u would not expect them to just come right out and say, u would expect them to say something neutral or non-committal. Instead they want to get it out there that there game is a challenge and admit there hard and then encourage players to take up the challenge and thus keep our subscriptions going. There are 3 things that make the game hard and very little has anything to do with how hard blizzard make the dungeon encounter mechanics.
The first is knowledge, knowledge of ur class and it’s abilities. Knowing that if A happens u respond to it with H, If D happens u respond to it with F. Then knowledge of the encounter ur trying to defeat, does the mob/boss have AoE, does it teleport somewhere, does it put stuff on the ground etc etc.
Second is gear, ever gone back to a lvl 70 raid encounter and found that all those mechanics and strategies u need to do get the boss down can be completely ignored or become trivial? Better gear means better stats, better stats mean more dmg, more healing, more threat and more health and mana. Naff gear means things will be harder to do.
Third is the cornerstone of MMO gaming, other ppl. Its what makes it great and what makes it terrible all at the same time. Have someone in the party that aint got a clue what there doing, have terrible gear, don’t know how to play there class yet? Have someone in ur party that thinks they can take on the world by themselves cus they do know what there doing and have great gear? It can go either way, but the end result can be the same, that player makes it harder for everyone else.
There is a forth and its called bad luck, this has nothing to do with gaming we have it with us all the time and anyone is prone to it so shall say no more about it.
What I am trying to get at is it don’t matter if the boss spins around, fly’s in the air and after 5 secs one shots everyone, it don’t matter if every 2 secs it puts something on the ground that u should not step in or if it needs u to pat ur head and rub ur stomach while reciting the alphabet backwards. There is a way to defeat it and it is always easy to do, it can be hard to achieve, but that’s not because of the encounters mechanics, that’s because of who else ur playing with and ur own lack of knowledge and gear.
The things that make current heroics and normal’s difficult is not that the mobs/bosses have harder mechanics to beat then in Wotlk, its simply that blizzard completely nerf’d all classes from wotlk coming into cata. If they had not increased everyone’s stamina so dramatically I would have been able to heal the normal 5 mans and heroics with my lvl 80 better then I can in HC gear at 85. Every lvl I gained while lvling, my performance got worse in 5 man normals. My flash heal took 1.13 secs to cast, cost 587 mana and did about 10k healing at lvl 80. With Best in Slot HC gear it now takes 1.36 to cast, costs 5765 mana and does 16k healing. This is where the hardness comes into the game at the moment. This is where the true battle is. Blizzard gave us really easy dungeons and boss fights and masked the easiness with screwing with our spells and instead of making us more powerful as we went from 80-85 they increased the numbers on gear but decreased dramatically the effectives/power of those numbers when calculated to our actual power and abilities. The end result was I went from 30k mana to 80k (80-85), while also increasing the cost of my flash heal spell by 10x. At lvl 80 I could cast 57 odd flash heals on the mana I had, now at lvl 85 with BiS HC gear I can now cast 13 odd flash heals, the same is true for every other spell I have with similar results the only spell that don’t make me go out of mana is my Heal spell and that constantly feels like ur trying to heal with one hand tied behind ur back. This is why cata is hard, and its not just my healing or class this has happened too, it happened across the board.
Ppl need to forget Wotlk, they need to figure out how to deal with being less powerful then they were in wotlk, realise that the encounters are not hard and learn to survive with stat numbers to actual power ratios being dramatically reduced and figure out how to perform better with this new found non-power. The game has changed many things that make the encounters harder, the encounters themselves though are not actually hard is my point, if anything they are easier then they were in Wotlk, we are the ones who have changed and that’s what makes it harder.
I really enjoyed the challenge of lvling and 85 HC’s, it was much more interesting then the snooze fest wotlk had become. I just wish they decreased our power over time not in a couple of lvls, I also wish they had actually made the encounters harder and come up with some new mechanics, not cobble together 3 or 4 of the old ones and call it a new boss.
Now I have got HC gear and a few epics the HC’s are starting to become more like the old Wotlk dungeons either a snooze fest or the healers propping up the rest of the group which I feel is a shame.