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World of Warcraft: On the Difficulty of Dungeons
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Since the World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion was released just over a month ago, there has been a lot of discussion among players about the difficulty of Heroic dungeons. Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has penned a new article discussing why the dev team made the decision to make those dungeons as hard as they are: In short, 'heroic' is supposed to mean something and that players need the challenge.
First, let me state that we do hear you. We understand some of you aren’t having fun and preferred the Lich King paradigm, or at least something closer to the Lich King paradigm. We greatly appreciate the feedback and it always makes us sad when players aren’t having fun. We're not ignoring you. We get it. We may not always agree on every point, but we understand where you’re coming from, and we want to try to help you understand where we're coming from.
The bottom line is that we want Heroics and raids to be challenging, and that is particularly true now while the content is new and characters are still collecting gear. They’re only going to get easier from here on out. We want players to approach an encounter, especially a Heroic encounter, as a puzzle to be solved. We want groups to communicate and strategize. And by extension, we want you to celebrate when you win instead of it being a foregone conclusion.
The balance of the article gives frustrated players a few tips to improve their experiences within the Heroic dungeons.
Read more here.
Comments
Sad. Once again Blizzard doesn't "get it". I unsubbed because I was bored with the endgame rep/gear grind which is worse due to time constraints on these heroic dungeons and the long queue times on the dungeon finder. I don't care how HARD they are, I care about having stuff to do in my MMO. WoW's weakness has always been the endgame. Too bad their only response is Learn To Play. Which tends to sound exactly like the caustic community you find in the game as well. Funny.
Obviously Blizzard DOES get it if they have been #1 for the past 6 years lol.
The reason you unsubbed due to being bored for endgame rep/gear grind is because you where ignorant to discover other aspects of the game.
Long queues on exist if you are the 9/10 DPS queueing. IT should be this way, because if queue times were instant, the game would be A LOT worse. You are supposed to Queue up, and go on about things in the game. Not troll /trade chat. WoW's STRONGPOINT IS the endgame, and not the weak point like you state. No other game has endgame like WoW and thats why they do this well. Maybe not to your liking because you can't do it or you didnt have the chance to experience but they do it well, i know this coming from a top guild of my server.
And there response "Learn to play" makes sense. Why should they cater to carebear cry babies who suck rather then the loyal fan base who actually CARES to try and learn how to play?
tks a lot for your clarification i liked you comments
Actually its strength has always been the endgame because thats why people play it.
I couldn't agree with the Blizzard article more. Last night we had a few wipes in a heroic, even a bit of guild drama!!
But killing some of these bosses actually feel like an achievement again. Also, I am only running heroics with guild members, so I am actually having more fun and the guild means something again
Difficult 5 man content is a blessing! 10 man is not too difficult to get up and running but 5 man can be soo much fun and easy to get people lined up.
I do totally agree however that there is a shocking lack of "normal" lvl 85 instances!
Well this is what happens when everyone complains throughout WOTLK that it was way to easy. Honestly its still less of a headache now than it was in vanilla.
Personally I like the challenge. The drawback is the dungeon finder more often than not gets you idiots. Running a heroic with a pug is like playing Russian Roulette with 5 of the 6 chambers with a bullet in it.
As a response to those that say there is nothing to do, level some alts, what I have been doing....
oh noes! now all the MMO noobs that play this game now actually have a challange? Shame on you blizzard!
I do think it is mainly because people have become to used of easy street and most players probably gets into it again after a while.
I'm glad that GC took the time to address the challenges some people have been complaining about. The problem is, the same people who try to tank or heal heroics in quest greens or blue DPS gear, are in that group of players who do not read the official forums. They are too busy to listen to players in their own group when we recommend that they run a normal dungeon a few times to get some upgrades before trying heroics. Why should they take the time to read a long post from GC?
10 toons at 85... on the only server I care to play on. Raiding on each... within the ffirst 3 weeks of release. each toon 85 ilvl 345+ spread throughout. all the new quest content ...done. hit 85 before you even get 3/4th's of the new content quest wise complete. grinding gear like we did in LK, and the rep grind for each toon.. and someone seriously states to "Level and alt" sure that may work for you, but that's also a problem to some of us more hardcore gaming people who supported WoW and seen Cata as a hopeful return of Vanilla. What we got was a ZG,AQ etc expansion, with new races - race/class choices - and some 5 mans with some raids. Sounds like an expansion right? not hardly not when it takes on one character less than a day to hit 85, and with a guild run for one day doing 85's then heroics(wich honestly are not hard at all, just need to reset your brain to vanilla, CC pulls and know boss mechanics) you can do all the heroics in about 8 hours normal old world raid time and that's for hardcore gamer yes I understand casual can't do that. but the game is still fast paced for a casual gamer if they're in a guild that doesn't make them pug. WoW seriously just made alot of money for content that was alot shorter than LK was. and that was one of the gripes at LK's beginning hitting 80 too fast, granted atleast you had 4 or more zones for quests left to go to and do. But Cata ya hit 85 after Vash/Hyjal/Deepholm/Half way through Uldum then boom ya got Uldum and the rest of TH left, with some fun little things around azeroth but not much else other than grinding for gear and rep.
It's pretty sad when the lead designer has to write a wall of text with tips and tricks on how to play the game he basically designed. What's even more funny is that the people who would benefit the most from reading that text most likely aren't the types (lolwut? imma uber dps) to go read long posts on some forum to begin with. It also doesn't change the fact that there's a group of people who aren't against the increased difficulty per se, but have issues with the fact that things now take a lot longer than they used to.
Basically, the post boils down to L2P or take a break and come back when the next raid tier is released in 4.1.
I'm a big ol' fluffy carewolf. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
What Faelan just said, I guess the truth always hurts :P
That said I've only completed one heroic so far, which ofc was with guildies. We even managed a few achievments (which I personally don't normally bother with).
Still, as I mentioned in the Rift forums, wow will start to hemmorage players to easy mode games for a time at least.
yep needs to be hard makes the game more fun and make pepole learn how to play there class right.
no point running through a dungeon on easy mode no fun at all.
What it has come to is "GEAR" - it is always about gear. They balanced the dungeons around people in top gear. Is it any wonder that heroics are a frustrating mess for players just getting to them. Blizzard swung the pendulum to far to one side and now they are having to back peddle. Are the new dungeons fun...sure..once you have great gear and people have ran them a few times and understand them a bit better - but before that they are a fucking nightmare. Even normals are a bitch. I dunno what happened between beta and release but some of the normals went from hard to outright nearly impossible to finish.
Ugh...Blizzard named their x-pac appropriately...it is a Cataclysm.
Its probably because on the whole LK was pathetic in difficulty, with few exceptions. I'll miss the days of coordination and difficult fights, but you can tell by this fleeting attempt at difficulty and with the response, Blizzard will soon water it down in time for its new content 6 months from now (as before). Rinse repeat.
I have no problem with difficulty. WoW has always been easy relative to many other games, which is one of the things that made it so popular in the first place.
Having said that, there's nothing 'heroic' about a hardcore dungeon that you've done 9 times already. Each repitition makes it less and less heroic. If it's meant to be heroic, make it heroic. You do it, maybe even twice, and move on. Unfortunately the game isn't built that way. You're meant to rinse and repeat these things till you have enough gear to do the raids. It's like watching Return of the King and seeing what seems like multiple endings. A story that keeps having the same climactic scene over and over.
Some people have some really odd ideas about what is epic and heroic. Make the shit hard, and make it heroic or epic...namely once or twice.
As far as content, Cata (the expansion itself that you buy) has the least amount of content of any expansion. Keep in mind that a new player to WoW gets the shattering already. That is the new vanila for them. If you start a new character and level it to 80, you then think about what more you get when you pay for Cataclysm. You already have the world as it is under the shattering - the new 'old world'. At that point, buying the cataclysm gets you a couple of new zones, 5 more levels, several new dungeons (two of which are removed from the LFG when you hit 83 or 84, unlike in wrath where all normals were available through 80), two new races. Buying cataclysm doesn't get you a whole new redesigned world. You already have that.
The big change will be seen if Blizz decides that they are going to release more content than ever before throughout the expansions lifetime as opposed to front-loading it. I suspect they 'might' do this.
I wonder if Cata will be seen as Blizzard's own NGE in time.
they do cater to people that cant play the game lol. The game will only get easier now because they always listen to cry babies
If you think its to hard then you should just quit because this game is easy...
You are what's wrong with MMOs.
If your trouble is that you have the attention span of a gnat, and need something mindless to hold your attention every second of every day, I would suggest you give Farmville a look. It might be the sort of thing better suited to your caliber of game-play.
Content Writer for RTSGuru.com
And overall bitter old man.
The only reason I've lost all interest in WoW's endgame is the sudden shift from Wotlk to Cataclysm in terms of dungeon difficulty. Groups fall apart so easily.. it still happens alot and there was no buffer.
I unsubbed 3 days ago because I was sick of sitting in que for 40 minutes to just be booted, lose a tank, constant wiping, horrible healing, non-communicative group, etcetera etcetera..... While I am up for challenge, and thinking about pulls and communication, I just can't bring myself to play a game anymore that promotes vitriol and hatred in PUGs.
ur right who wants to wait 45+mins to get in a grp anymore...GW2 will fix it for blizz. Some of us dont have all day to play and just want to log and play for a hour or so. Making things harder so people are not wanting to queue in for a silly little 5man will kill this game.
I can guarantee you one thing, if peoples quit "en masse" Blizzard would change their mind and revert dungeon back to what it was in WOTLK.
I resub (after almost a year off) just to check out Cata. I level up my druid to 85 and i just unsub from the game again. Would i ever go back ? I highly doubt it. I'm not leaving for the single reason of dungeon difficulty but for a combinaison of factors, including this.
For me the 85 end game right now is WAY worst then hit was at 80. Tol Barad is a huge joke, the dailies are aweful and dungeon finder unelss your a tank or healer is an 1 hour wait only to get 90% of the time into a group of idiots. Add to that the crazy HP scaling, now everyone has 100k+ health and healing is so broken it's like you need epic gear before you can even start these dungeons.
Fighting in these dungeons is now like a complicated dance, if you do 1 mis-step you wipe, you have to have the perfect rotation of damage, CC and healer or you wipe. I like challenge but man this is like they expect a a bunch of 4th grader (WOTLK raiders) to act like someone with a university degree overnite. Anyhow i'm not happy with the wa they turned this game from casual to hardcore overnite and they way they just telling us to learn 2 play after 6 years.