Blue Post - WoW, Dungeons are Hard!Follow

I'm a bit out of touch becuase I did not try and pug many heroics. I just run the daily now with my longtime online friends for VP. And honestly I have to say all the heroics are getting faster and easier already.

We had a lot of fun digging in and figuring them all out in the first couple of weeks after dinging 85. Some of those runs included many wipes and some pretty long runs. But it was still really fun.

I think many people are starting to figure out the mechanics by now, or at least I hope so. But I may still stick to running heroics with guildies/friends on my alts for a while. My faith in the intelligence and social grace of the general population is pretty low.

I'm starting to notice much less crappy PuGs, and it's definitely not just a factor of people learning or stepping up their game.

I've healed 3 heroics today with 0 deaths - a feat not accomplished by a healer without notable effort and knowledge from the entire party. The goodies have learned every encounter (including trash) - have learned their limitations and their roles - and are able to figure out how to solve the puzzles of every encounter with the group given to them.

The whiners went home. More and more people who refused to learn to play have stopped Queuing. This is obviously not 100% true but it is shifting more and more in that direction every day.

This difficulty level here is quickly becoming the norm for players who are interesting in advancing their characters as well as their own play skills - I'm very happy about all of this. Very happy, indeed!

The only thing that made WOTLK heroics too easy was updated gear. I remember when I first started doing them. HOL and HOS were both a pain to get through. Remember ton of wipes to the first boss in HOL, and the Bronzebeard event was very challenging at the time. They were not as difficult as heroics are not, but they were plenty challenging. I am sure Cata dungeons in 2 years will be pretty easy as well, not sure what the problem is. Like saying Karazan is too easy when running it at lvl 85.

I disagree with his statement that basically said he thinks people should run heroics with friends/guild members. I am sure I am not the only person who plays at odd hours. Didn't mind having to be on at X time every week to do a raid thats why when my hours changed my raiding went downhill, but hey NP there was plenty of other things to do and the occational PUG raid that I could join. Now I am supposed to make a point to be on at a certain time if I wanna run a random heroics? Why even have a LFD tool if that's how you want things to be? This wasn't an issue before, why does it have to be an issue now? Running heroics is about the only thing to do at 85. Yea there are daily quests but those get old quick and you can't exactly spend all day doing those. Running regular dungeons is almost pointless once you have 333 gear other than the big 70jp you can get once a day and a handful of rep. Heroics don't need to be geared so difficult that people are scared to death to do them in PUG's. The fact dps queues are 50 min shows there is a problem. Queues were never this long at any time to my knowledge before Cata hit. Few people want to tank or heal due to the difficulty. Its great people in good guilds are having fun, not everyone lives a lifestyle that allows them to be on the same time every day in order to do this. I have a few in-game friends but times that we are all on at the same time are few and far between.

My time runs out in a few days and I am seriously thinking about taking about a break from the game despite having a 60 day gamecard sitting right beside of me. I haven't been this unhappy with end game content in this game since I started playing and I started playing around the launch of BC, I was lvl 70 quite awhile before WOTLK came out. Had no issues with max lvl at 70, nor at 80. Yes WOTLK heroics were faceroll stupidly easy at the end, thats no excuse to make them so frustrating now. Other than a handful of dailies I don't hardly play my lvl 85 anymore. I can't take joining heroic queues and wiping over and over again to the first boss because 1 person don't do something right (first boss in H SFK for example only takes 1 person ******** up to wipe everybody). Most of the time tank/heal leaves after 1 or 2 wipes anyways blaming each other for lack of gear and/or skill then there goes my 50 min queue that I waited in down the drain with nothing to show for it other than a repair bill.

I think healing 5 mans is very fun. I'm also enjoying raid healing a bit more then I have been, although it's still frustrating not having tools to deal with certain situations. Hopefully this patch will help fix that a bit.

It can be boring at times, but at it's worst it's way more fun then hitting rejuv over and over.

Edited, Jan 11th 2011 6:54pm by Xsarus

Yes, I wish there was the ability to add in clutch heals some of the time. In 5 mans it's there, but in raids it's really not.

Druids at the moment do not I feel have the tools to properly aoe heal people up. It's too slow and weak. Efflorescence is close to useless and WG, while nice isn't super awesome if you need any kind of burst. I'm hoping that the mana reduction on rejuv will allow us to deal with this a bit. I found that I could deal with damage much better using rejuv but that it was so expensive it usually wasn't a good idea. Of course now I'm worried that given a bit more gear and mana regeneration druids will become way too powerful and just start hitting rejuv again.

Edited, Jan 11th 2011 7:01pm by Xsarus

Why all the Recount hate? Yeah, there are bad DPS that hump meters, post their DPS total between trash pulls, and make general asses of themselves. But, anyone with three brain cells wired together can look at some basic stats from the last wipe and tell the rogue he wasn't DPSing the adds enough, tell the mage he's taking too much damage from standing in the bad stuff, and tell the Holy Priest that he's wasting a lot of mana overhealing with Greater Heal instead of Heal. It's a tool, and a damn useful one, so I think we can get beyond "Wah, DPS aren't paying attention because they're flexing their e-peen, break their toy nao!".

Edit: I'm not trying to pick on Maz, I see people wanting Blizz to break Recount in a lot of threads, here, on the o-boards, at MMO-champ, etc.

Edited, Jan 11th 2011 10:07pm by AstarintheDruid

This is true of every class/archtype/role. All Ranged DPS feels strangely similar, all Melee the same, all tanking is very similar and all healing is nearly identical. I mean, yes the specifics of what each spells/abilities do are different, but when all the abilities and procs are put together its frustratingly similar between all classes.

One nice thing about DPS - especially ranged DPS - is that there's always some room to improve: You may be doing great but theres always some way to boost your DPS just that much more. For heals and tank, this isn't the case. There is no difference between being good and being great - especially when your group isn't making huge mistakes.

In this way I could not agree more with your complaints. In saying healing is balanced, you concede that you are given a certain amount of potential to reverse or correct mistakes made by your group and that is all - it is not balanced in the way that heal is nearly as important as any other class now - at least when playing at a competitive level.

There are a number of fights I tank in which I'll ask the Healer if they have a DPS spec since they will not even be needed. There other fights that, when I heal as a Disc Priest, I never have to stop HF/Smiting and the entire group is ending 100% HP and I'm ending 80%MP - how much better could I get and why?!

I know I'm not nearly in your league. I get that. Trouble is, most people aren't. I think this is where the varied viewpoints of current content come in.

I am not running with nearly the same sort of people you probably are.

For me, healing on my pally has now become nothing *but* urgency from zone-in to finish. Two seconds after the first pull and I have a tank at 30% and 3 dps dropping down already. Every run I've healed so far has been a constant heal spam from start to finish. Somebody, usually multiple people, are taking damage ALL the time.

In Wrath it didn't matter. Regardless of whether anybody was interrupting or standing in X, I could just keep hitting glyphed HL and hover at 90% mana while keeping them all up. There was no urgency there at all; if somebody died they probably got 1-shotted which I couldn't fix anyway. Everybody was nearly always either 100%hp or dead. Now they are all hovering somewhere in between which means I have far more to worry about trying to keep them as close to full as possible while keeping enough mana to keep going.

I'm sure if you get to run with capable, awesome people then things get obviously easier. From where I sit there is plenty of urgency on tap.

(I don't necessarily dislike the changes as a whole, but it is definitely different and challenging.)

I pug, alot.

I have been doing BRC and Stonecore daily since Mid December + Heroic Daily. I have to run with a lot of fail, though to be fair I know a couple simple tricks around the deserter debuff and I am also aware enough to call a bad group fairly quickly I can bounce out before I get locked or deserter and avoid the worst of the worst when it comes to mouth breathing and be back in a dungeon within 5 min. So I am sheltered from the worst of it and I have had to work to carry some bad groups through the dungeons.

It is still not fast paced, dynamic, tense or energetic. It is me casting spells with 100% longer cast times than WotLK to heal bad dps. If the dps is epicly bad and not just learning I let him die because at least it entertains between 2 second heals.

Don't you remember how we called out bads back then? Not by analyzing statistics from an addon, but by watching them. It's not like it's difficult to spot that Rogue standing in the fire. If nothing else, the healer can tell if someone is taking too much damage. As for DPS, you can't really tell who's not performing well, and that's my point. The guy who isn't top of the meter might have saved the tank with healing or emergency CC. Recount doesn't tell you that.

And what good does having Recount do if you're running with bads anyway? You know who to vote-kick, or what? There's no way of knowing if the you vote-kicked had low DPS because he was bad, or because he was busy saving someone's ***. With Recount, you'll judge people based on statistics. My Warlock can turn statistics into crap, with 10% of all healing done by Drain Life and Fel Armor.

Recount is a nifty tool in the right hands and for the right situation. In average day dungeons, however, it is my opinion that it does more harm than good.

I could probably deal with it by removing Recount and making a macro response to the DRUID TAKE F*CKING FORM whines that are sure to follow.

Edited, Jan 12th 2011 11:59am by Mazra

The queue time issue has cropped up because of the difficulty of the new heroics. It encourages people to join a guild or do dungeons with a premade group, just becuase it's much less stressful and easier generally. I find it pretty hard to judge just how challlenging they are because i play a holy pally and by all accounts i'm pretty powerful, plus i haven't pugged in weeks, preferring to do guild runs and take out some of the heroic achievements. Sure, some trash hits really hard and if a pet freaks out and pulls two packs, i'll barely have the globals to pop cooldowns to keep the tank alive but it's much more fun that Wotlk healing. Hitting flash of light over and over while watching youtube videos in windowed mode.

I know. Wishful thinking is still wishful.



And we're back to the 'execute, pause, repeat' playstyle which is just downright boring.

I've never been a fan of min/maxing, because it always boils down to how fast one can hit the right keys in the right order. You take what would be an otherwise fluid gameplay and put it into a build order (to use SC terms). Execute <ability> at <time>, etc.

Sure, jumping around and tossing heals and stuns left and right isn't optimal, but it's fun.

Silly me, wanting video games to be fun.