The game any better than it was right after cata?Follow

Pretty much quit playing shortly after cata came out when alot of people (myself included) was complaining about heroics taking too long and queue times being awful.

Just wondering how things are going now? Was anything ever done to improve the queue times (or are more people queuing for random heroics?)

They ever do anything to make healing/tanking better. Seemed like before Tanking and healing was really difficult. Just wondering if new gear or updates has eased the stress for tanks/heals any?

It depends. For regular heroics, queue times are shorter and runs can be done in as little as 15 minutes now. I'm not sure why the queue times are shorter for the regular ones, as I'd think that more people are running trolls, but meh.

For trolls, it's about the same. A fast troll run is going to take about 45 minutes, and queue times are just as long as ever. To be perfectly honest, there's not a lot that Blizzard can do to make people want to heal and tank. It's a general rule of thumb that most people are ********, and this is true in WoW too. Tanks and healers get more **** flung their way if things go wrong, and some people flat out don't like the stress.

Tanks do have an easier time holding threat though. I thinks Blizz boosted threat output by like 3x or something.

I think it is better now.

Starting a tank is easier than ever (if you don't mind a little work being put in your character in preparation) due to the fact there's several pieces of i-365 gear available from doing Molten Front dailies (and Thrall's "cape" quest), and more people that you see in the LFD system should be wearing purples, rather than blues which always makes a run easier, but you'll still run into idiots no matter what.

Hopefully, next expansion, Blizz would have learned from their mistake and make Normals give JP from the start. That's why Cataclysm had such a rocky start, there were scads and scads of players who were barely i329 avg (or they were wearing full crafted PvP) Qing up for Heroics because they didn't feel like playing the Lottery with Normal boss drops to get up to a full 333 avg before going to Heroics.

Edited, Oct 2nd 2011 3:00pm by Lyrailis

Okay, it must be getting better then. Granted I haven't done a troll heroic in about a month now. My priest doesn't need VP at all, and I've just been lazy about getting my mage and druid VP capped every week.

The wait time for a tank is zero. Healers < 7 minutes (Usually about 5). DPS is roughly 15-20 minutes.

The heroic times (To complete the instance) range.

Normal heroics are a lot shorter. The troll heroics take a while.

The bosses are easy - it's the trash pulls that will kill people. This isn't because the trash is particularly hard, it's more because people don't CC as much as they should.

Maz doesn't like the three tiered heals model that Resto druids were shoe-horned into. Combine that with the fact that Regrowth is the weakest "flash heal", and Maz hates the direction Blizz went with Resto. Druids in Cata use direct heals a lot more than HoTs, where we used to roll HoTs on everyone and occasionally cast Nourish.

Pallies traditionally healed solely with direct, single-target heals. Druids have taken a big step toward healing with direct heals. That's not to say I agree with Maz, all healers have some things in common now. There are a few things I would have done differently with Druid heals to try and preserve the HoT-style healing.