Has the pace of Cata dungeons increased since the start of Cata?

[calinass]

I only played for the first 3-4 weeks of Cata iirc. I remember dungeons being incredibly slow paced and every pull was deliberate. Is that the case like it is when I hit 80 on my monk? I'm at 79 now.

All dungeons I've had save for BC ones I made every pull essentially carefree, as long as I had aggro and had a feel for what the healers capabilities were. I'm basically asking were cata dungeons nerfed and normalized to what others are like?

[Linkedblade]

If you are talking about the Cata regular dungeons, they were always pretty easy and simple. It was the heroics that had any form of difficulty and that was only early on in the expansion.

[calinass]

Definitely harder than any heroics from wotlk. Maybe not harder but slower. Much slower. And we're the heroics easier because people got geared or it got nerfed?

[Darsithis]

Yes and no. Normal dungeons, since you won't have epics from Wrath anymore, are a little more difficult that you might expect if you're at the min item level required. Heroics were very difficult at the start of Cata due to two things: one, healer mana mechanics changing significantly, and two, many more trash mobs that hit very very hard and were designed to teach people to use CC in dungeons. Of course, people were used to wrath-style group chaining and would wipe again and again, so at first it was pretty bad for all those involved. For the first two months I did only guild groups because random pugs were just awful.

Then Blizzard slowly started to nerf the dungeons. Many of the bosses were returned slightly and a lot of trash mobs were dropped. One particular and notable change was the trash mobs in Deadmines Heroic - 5 trash groups between the two final bosses were all removed outright. Same with Shadowfang; more than one mob set was taken out. Finally, people started gearing up in regular raid gear and that eased healer requirements considerably. These changes affected normal mods as well (except for heroic-only dungeons)

So no, Cata dungeons are not nearly what they were, but you should still be careful. Some pulls will require CC or a lot of dps, such as dual/triple caster groups with healers.

[Hotasianchick]

i have been running dungeons on a new healer. well heroics and as i was lvling recently it was mildly intense healing nothing major in dungeons, but so now im in heroics i have to heal even less then the regs it feels like there was a big nerf happened i had a monk tank in full greens well with a blue ring no issue healing him it has been so easy. I know part of it is a general knowledge of the fights but seriously it had to have been nerfed. It feels like my job is reasonable for a heroic dungeon as a healer. I can't fall asleep but im not having many omg moments which really shouldn't happen in heroics. Feel good about hit 90 now and going smoothly into heroics. And evan with some weak dps it moves along nicely.

[Simulacrum]

When I leveled my monk a few weeks ago, as a mistweaver, I just ran through everything spamming spinning crane kick and fistweaving on single targets. I even tanked, as the healer, a few packs with the single-target healing from SCK alone. You never need crowd control and you never need to be careful. We (and I'm talking about random groups here), as things happen, usually pulled the entire room in stonecore prior to ozruk, and it was just SCK, SCK, SCK, mobs running around everywhere, attacking everyone, and nobody dying anyway.

I did in fact manage to wipe 3 times, in 3 runs, to Karsh Steelbender in blackrock caverns, because none of the tanks I did it with initially understood how to handle the fight's mechanic and invariably ended up simply tanking him inside the lava waterfall until everybody died, but that's a testament to the average level of competence displayed by these groups more than anything else; we couldn't deal reliably with the only difficult mechanic in any of the instances, but all the mechanics that don't just wipe you outright when you fail them can easily be brute-forced in leveling greens/blues and/or heirlooms.

Cata heroics were mildly difficult at the launch of cata partly because of how little mana/regen some healers had available to them at that point of the expansion (hpaladins laughed at the puny heroics even in greens), but mostly because so many of the mechanics in them would, if you failed them, simply kill you in one hit or a few seconds, which isn't a problem in normals, where you can let coral mutate all her minions without issues, or take orzuk's aoe to the face laughing, or chill out above corborus' unburrow just fine, etc, nvm. the exclusion of many instant-fail mechanics.

They're still a lot harder than any MoP content, though, but that's not really saying much... the majority of leveling dungeons are much harder than all mop dungeons. Strikes me as very counter-intuitive to have the content get easier as you level up, rather than harder, but that's mop for 'ya I guess.

The biggest reason cata normals are easier now is probably just that most the classes have recieved massive buffs since back when they were contemporary.