Slag Mines is really a bad indicator of dungeon difficulty in WoD. It's leagues easier than anything else since it's the intro dungeon. Try SMBG.
What worries me is that heroic dungeon loots look way too inferior compared to new timeless / garrison loot stuff. How loot distribution will be handled is still to be determined, but I am just worried that the new timeless stuff and garrison loots (which would probably be faceroll easy to get, in terms of difficulty) would be too good and given out faster than H dung ones.
They probably won't do that though, as it will kill LFR, but still possibility.
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I played MoP from day 1, and heroic dungs were faceroll with everyone on full greens (well you can't pull everything in the instance though).
Well why didn't you tell that to the whiners who couldn't tough it out in raids, pre-LFR?
While I enjoy raiding, it's just not worth the time and effort anymore. I liked progressing through an instance and progressing through tier gear because it was the only means to.
Now I have LFR to see the instance, and Normal(Flex) for tier. I'd only be raiding Heroic(Normal, which is probably a joke since it's flex scaling?) and Mythic for pure encounter enjoyment.
But we all know what it's like to join a semi-hardcore raiding guild for the hardest content, don't we?
It was justified then, isn't justified now.
Given that the classes aren't remotely tuned, it's hard to say what the difficulty of the heroics really is. That being said, I had a pop at heroic UBRS and it seemed alright. The last boss in particular had mechanics that will keep it sufficiently challenging in low gear. It's nothing like the original heroic dungeons of TBC, but they will never come back. Heroics are now part and parcel of the daily valor (sic) point grind and Blizzard can't sensibly block them off to the majority of players.
Just throwing this out here:
Anyone who was part of the MoP Beta will recall the MoP dungeons early on having the same problems. Temple of the Jade Serpent, which we all know today as being a total and complete face roll fest, was actually mind-boggling difficult in it's original iteration on Normal. Peril and Strife absoluted demolished groups if you were so much as a few attacks slow and they got into their Over Powered state, and the Sha of Doubt's debuff would happily one shot people if it wasn't immediately dispelled.
Beta is, indeed, Beta. Watcherh as even said that WoD Normals are designed with pugging in mind, and are not tuned to be difficult. They want to stress that especially when people coming in with 14/14h experience testing them, and claiming they're too easy, and need to be buffed.
When WoD launches, the difficulty is going to be much closer to what MoP Heroics are like today, with WoD heroics liekly only being a small step above that, as Challenge Mode is still being designed as the heavy, pre-made only difficult mode for those that actually want challenge, and not just shiny epics (though they're getting those too).
Who cares how difficult normal and heroic dungeons are. They're just a stepping stone for levelers and fresh 100's. I'm just hoping raids will be more challenging, that and CM's. I find it a little ridiculous how many mediocre groups can get away with 3 or 4 manning CM's for absurd prices atm. I thought CM's were meant to be exclusive to players who actually commit and work at it. As opposed to just those who shuffle all day or whatever. The fact that it doesn't have to be really 5-manned and gear is adjusted is just absurd.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think people were doing that at the beginning of the expansion. Maybe people just didn't care about CMs that much then, but I think people being able to 3 or 4 man them now is more a product of increasingly more optimized gear for them, as more sockets have appeared on gear and there was a wider selection of pieces so you can build a set that stacks your best stats for your class. Even if WoD CMs do end up relatively more difficult than the current ones, by the end of WoD they will still have gotten easier because of more optimal pieces being available from multiple raid tiers.
That's true - for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they changed how sockets work on gear during one of the later tiers in WoD. They want to avoid the point with gear now, where there are sockets all over the place, but the reason for that is that each tier from the start of MoP had progressively more sockets on them, along with better socket bonuses/colors. If they start WoD as they are planning, that won't really be the case, so then if in T18 or T19 they start introducing sockets on gear outside of being a tertiary bonus, you won't have the arms race in the # of sockets that we have now. Of course even if they did that they could still keep the whole "sockets don't count" for CMs anyway, which would keep the original intended difficulty much better throughout the course of WoD.
Normal mode dungeons are supposed to be easy enough for LFD groups to complete without frustration. Heroics this time are going to be hard again, and they will not be necessary to progress into LFR.
Early beta.
I imagine they're more concerned with getting the mechanics functioning correctly right now. Balancing will come later on.
Early Beta or not, they have to make them doable for LFD groups. We will never again see the glorious days of wiping like we did in Early Cata, or those instances that made you think "wow, I'm really not geared for this".
You can't expect any real difficulty from a 5-man. They're either easy/normal or they're improperly tuned. This will almost certainly never change and it's all because it's very difficult to balance a 5-man when you have 11 classes, all with different strengths and weaknesses. If 5-mans were "hard," it'd mean that some classes would have it easy and some classes would never get invited.
Grand Crusader Belloc <-- 6608 Endless Tank Proving Grounds score! (
Dragonslayer Kooqu
Leveling normals will be easy. Max level maybe a bit tougher. Heroics should be quite hard as well since the gear dropped is for normal mode and heroic raiding. CM's could drop raid level epics.
There's LFR in there as well which I believe they've said will be about as difficult as a heroic dungeon.
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