Alternate Instances

[Verdandi]

Has anyone considered making alternate dungeon makeups that may not require a dedicate tank or healer roll, but instead focus on tactics and mechanics? Say, a time trial with set and various goals? This might would allow Tanks, Healers, and DPS the opportunity to work together differently... a more blended "spec" might even be preferable... so that you dealt moderate damage, able to self heal or mildly group heal and take varying amounts of damage from varying sources depending on the goal of the instance.

I'm a tank, and as such the new reward system is appealing. But I also play alts, and they're DPS. From both sides of the coin there are strong, valid and reasonable arguments as well as the rather lame crying nonsense. 5 man instances server their purpose but considering the development of duo or trio instances could supplement the existing system. There are strong theme possibilities as well to play off of... A class theme example could be say a duo of rogues goal is to pick pocket X number of patrons of a bar, and implement game mechanics to make the situation challenging. You know... the RPG part of MMORPG. You might consider these mini instances, taking 15-30 minutes to complete depending or just instanced advanced quests. But anywho, I'm putting the idea out there.

[Lesovaren]

This could actually be really cool if they did it well. I do not think it should be there as an alternative method of gearing a toon however, heroic 5 mans are a stepping stone to raiding and if there was same quality gear available through something like you're suggesting they would not get done any more, which is a bad thing. I think a better option would be to implement something like this as a kind of midway point between solo daily questing and running 5 man heroics. Make it fun but challenging, and as you said, not reliant on the standard tank/heals/3dps group setup.

They would have to come up with just the right amount of reward for it, if they are on par with heroic gear then heroics would not get done anymore, if the rewards are horrible then it would just be more bloat that everyone forgets about after a month on live servers. Perhaps an instanced daily quest chain that changes from day to day in the same way that TB dailies do. You complete a series of quests that reward gold/rep/gems/whatever and completing it gives you some sort of progress towards a single really nice item relative to the heroic 5 man drops at the time. People would not be able to gear their character completely through this system, but they would be able to pick up say a raid quality weapon after progressing towards it. Think back to Quel'Serrar from vanilla and Quel'Delar in wrath.

I dunno, would need a lot of work to make it fit and actually have people want to do it, but could be really fun