Hello, MMO-Champion community,
I have a proposition to make that I feel would go a long way towards solving the problem that blizzard has come up against with the new harder-style 5 man content in Cataclysm.
First, I will describe my take on the problem.
For most of Wrath of the Lich King, and to an extent from the start, 5 man content was a complete breeze to one-button-spam your way through once a day for badges/points. People outgeared them pretty quickly due to the wide avaliability of iLvl 200 epics, and not only didn't need to run them often but when they did run them could do it on almost auto-pilot. Blizzard recognised that this was a bad model, as it gave little to no preparation for whatever raids the newly geared new players would end up in. There is a strong arguement that raids were too easy as well, but that is not something I wish to discuss although I will later refer to it in passing.
In Cataclysm, Blizzard decided to (and rightly so) make 5 man content an actual challenge, and a preparation for raiding in more respects than just gearing up. People had to know how to play, or you wouldn't kill bosses. It was that simple. They have now come to the decision that they have perhaps overtuned it. Not all players are active enough to belong to a guild that regularly runs 5 man content, regardless of how bad or good that player is, and so to an extent the content has to be doable by a random PuG of 5 people. It doesn't have to be easy as such, just not so much of a challenge that the AVERAGE PuG can't clear it without wiping more than say 4 times.
I agree with Blizzard on this point; content does not need to be as hard as raiding in order to prepare you for raiding. If it does, then logic dictates that you need something to prepare you for the heroics, and 5 man normals were not close to hard enough to preform this role. You can have fight mechanics, such as Corborus's burrow phase, that have to be avoided without making them difficult to avoid. Provided the new players learn that there will be stuff to avoid while focussing on other things, the Heroic was a success. And so, heroics are being - almost accross the board - nerfed to an extent.
However, the problem with this design is that it makes Heroic 5 man content trivial to any compatent group of 5 people who have know each other for years and took down Lich King 25 Heroic together. Blizzard can't make something equally challenging for them and Random pugs at the same time, while those two groups are fighting the same fight. So why not let them fight different fights?
Here is my proposition: Nearly every boss in 5 man heroics has some sort of achievement attatched. Why not let these achievement criteria serve as hard modes? Say you are on your daily heroic run. During that run, for every fight where you meet the achievement criteria for that boss (whether or not you already have the achievement), you add an extra 10 valour points onto the total (base 70) that you earn for completing the run. This would offer an easier, normal mode for random PuGs to go through, that it would be considered unreasonable for an elitist player joining to expect the group to be able to do, while premade runs would have a harder content to clear for a well increased (but hopefully not totally OTT) reward?
If this post is well recieved here on MMO champ, I will make a thread on the same topic and the same content on the Blizzard forums. I just wanted to see here first what the overall community response could be.
I'm not going to do a TL;DR, not out of spite but because I simply feel that you need to have read the thread in it's entirety to understand my viewpoint.