My assessment of Blizzard's new dungeon nerf. So much red!
I admit I rolled my eyes a bit when the Oculus pot was sweetened to bring in more happy business, especially since I’ve never had a PuG group really happy to be in Oculus, extra goodie bag or no. But I pushed down my vaguely troubled thoughts regarding the matter (was a loot incentive really going to solve the issues of people being uncomfortable with vehicle combat and the “silent speedy run” groups being unwilling to explain things properly?) and moved on.
When I read this latest development, however, I couldn’t stay silent. Per Zarhym:
With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn’Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters. In addition, a couple of the stagnant groups of bad dudes between the Befouled Terrace and The Desecrated Altar will be removed, while some of the roaming groups will have their pathing altered. These changes are not to make this instance easier, but rather to make it a slightly quicker run and more in line with some of the other Wrath dungeons.
I think you mean Anomalus. Yes, he will use his Create Rift ability less often.
What?!
So let me get this straight: People are trying to rush through heroics to get their Frost badges (or even farm Triumph badges) to get the latest and greatest gear. They get a “long” or “difficult” instance such as Old Kingdom, Nexus, or the Oculus. They drop group rather than deal with an ounce of difficulty or challenge. Blizzard rewards this nonsense by nerfing the heroics forever.
There are so many things wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to begin:
- First of all, the blue posts initially came in response to someone complaining about the random dungeon generator giving them Old Kingdom four times in a row. The complaint was more centered around how the RNG of the dungeon-picking system works than Old Kingdom itself, although the complainer did add that they were frustrated by the fact that many groups desire to do full clears. How does nerfing Old Kingdom solve the issue of the RNG giving players the same instance over and over?
- For over-geared people hunting for their Frost badge fix, most 5-man heroic bosses are tank-and-spank at this point, and even long instances can be completed in a ridiculously short amount of time. (Case in point, last night my healer slipped into her offspec and tanked Nexus – a full clear including Chaos Theory for the accompanying priest – in 20 minutes. 20 minutes!) Without a full clear, you can do Old Kingdom in an even shorter amount of time, skipping all bosses but Prince Taldaram and Herald Volazj.
- For those people who need the dungeons to gear up, dumbing them down to make it easier is not just insulting to the players, it undermines the very reasons for these bosses. Jedoga Shadowseeker took our fledgling 80s a lot of tries to down. Blowing cooldowns, our blue-and-green-geared group could potentially survive the first enrage, but then the cooldowns were spent! We ran back a lot. It required a lot of situational awareness and group effort. There was no facerolling involved, and we all had to be at the top of our game. We might be able to fudge one mess-up, but not two or more. Now, you can just roll in and beat the crap out of her. Mess up the first Ascend? No worries. There won’t be another. The Jedoga encounter currently teaches important lessons that eventually translate into raid bosses like Rotface (paying attention to where you’re standing, pre-emptive healing, knowing where and when to pour on the DPS, kiting the boss as a tank), which are now going to be dissolved in the “Everybody’s a Winner!” philosophy. Even if you don’t ever plan on raiding, these are valuable skills for all types of play. But if you do plan on raiding, they’re essential.
Zarhym claims this isn’t to make the instance easier – but that’s exactly what it does. For overgeared players, the currently-easy bosses are still easy and not much faster (thereby negating the let’s-make-it-faster argument.) For the undergeared or newly geared 80s, the whole challenge of dealing with the multiple Ascends/rifts is gone. Both of these bosses are burst DPS races – pouring in DPS at the appropriate time.
On top of which, most instances in WotLK have 3-4 bosses. Heroic Old Kingdom and Nexus have 5 bosses each. Shouldn’t they take more time? And why do we want to reward people for QQ’ing about their random dungeon selection? You chose to do a random – that means that sometimes you’ll get Violet Hold, and sometimes you’ll get Old Kingdom. Choosing to make the dungeon you get random is why you get the extra bonus of two badges. If Blizzard wants to make it so much quicker, why not just mail everyone badges every day?
My pally had an interesting suggestion on this:
Instead of focusing on offering more carrots, why not try the stick for once? Extend the debuff to an hour and set it up so that completing the last boss in a dungeon automatically clears the debuff. With an hour-long debuff if you drop group, more and more people will rethink walking away from these long dungeons. It’s even possible that people who know how to do the dungeon will help those who don’t (gasp! surely not!) in order to make the whole thing go faster. If you finish the dungeon in 20 minutes, the debuff is wiped and you can go on to the next. Undergeared players wouldn’t be abandoned so callously as much, and neither would Blizzard’s too-often-abandoned dungeons. Everyone wins!
Instead, Blizzard has decided to make permanent changes to make heroics even easier than they already are so that groups can save a few minutes. Guess what, Blizzard? Your carrots-for-all policies aren’t that effective. People still hate the Oculus, even though they now have a chance at shinies at the end. And people are still going to try to avoid longer dungeons when all they want is a fast, silent run. On top of all that, people are still going to be pissy when they get the same dungeon four times in a row! /facepalm
All these latest instance changes are doing are hurting the undergeared or at-gear-level players who were supposed to get a big boost out of the whole LFG randoms.
End rant.
I had a tank drop group from a heroic AN as soon as he zoned in.
The entire group sat there scratching our heads in confusion as we waited for a new tank. Best we could figure was he mistook the loading screen for OK… AN’s probably THE fastest heroic available!
Yeah, I’m not sure it was the wisest idea to nerf stuff based on players dropping…
Someone used the tank to get to the head of the queue.
1) Group up with any of the ‘tank’ classes (Warr/Pally/DK/Druid), the don’t even need actual tank gear.
2) Join Random-LFG queue with them indicating they can tank.
3) Get instant invite to an instance.
4) The ‘tank’ leaves and the group waits for the next (real) tank to join the queue, groups inside an instance get priority.
5) Enjoy quick, easy epics.
I hear some tank classes are charging small amounts of gold for this service.
Fantastic post Taz. And, yes, it’s *pathetic*.
Sorry to get all “in my day rar rar rar” about it, but we’re creating a culture that respects neither the content nor each other.
I think Blizzard have accepted that nobody is going to enjoy grinding heroics so they’re trying to make it as swift and painless as possible – that strikes me as treating the syptom rather than the problem.
Thanks, Tam. I, too, was trying to shy away from the whole “in my day” bit, but, sadly, sometimes the circumstances call for it.
Normally I like to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt on these things, but I really can’t see how this helps them or the players at all.
Hell yeah, for sticks! 1 hour debuff that drops by 15 minutes for each boss you kill.
The main reason I drop when I see occulus (even after the “fix”) is that I don’t want to spend all my time getting to the end to find out the rest of the group has no clue how to do last boss. 5k+ GS or no, most people never did this before, and they don’t want to learn to do it now. They just want the emblems handed to them.
10 minutes to get to last fight in occ only to wipe multiple times will not be sweetened by extra emblems. Hit me with a 1hr debuff, I might at least try.
Hooray for sticks!
Now if only Blizzard would get on board with the whole thing…
[...] at Wild Growth is being brilliant (as ever) on the subject of the incoming heroic nerfs. And on the same topic, there’s some gigglesome, worryingly “actually this might [...]
The 2 biggest take aways for me…
1) Blizz says they should be faster.. therefore no more oobs & only chain pulls please.
2) If you are learning the instance and the moves for later on.. please put your primary ability on the “1″ key, go stand in the green and press it repeatedly.
I guess they are paving the way for guilds in Cataclysm.. no one will run pugs in another months time.
A friend once suggested the ultimate faceroll – macro all of your abilities to randomly proc on one hotkey and just keep pressing the key over and over again. I’m sure it’ll be superleet deeps.
“The Jedoga encounter currently teaches important lessons ”
Or rather it would teach important lessons if Blizzard hadn’t implemented the matching-algorithm in a way that tries to mix players with good and bad equipment. How is a new healer supposed to learn anything if he gets a tank with 40k HP? How is a freshly minted DD supposed to learn anything if the other two DDs are doing 4k DPS each?
Why Blizzard did this eludes me. Those instances were already cleared by casuals in blues and now Blizzard ensured that not even someone in blues will enjoy them anymore.
Sadly, in a random group, this is completely true. If you’re leveling with a group of friends, you have a *chance* at learning something from this encounter. But since the latter rarely happens anymore…The whole thing is a bit of a mess. Of course, I fully expect that we’ll be going through this whole thing with Cataclysm all over again:
-Set up instances that are interesting and difficult.
-As more and more raids are released, instances are nerfed so people who are overgeared can run them faster.
-More blog posts decrying this practice.
And the Circle of WoW Life continues.
(And, despite my complaints, I imagine I’ll still be along for the ride!)
I’m just waiting for someone at blizzard to decide to nerf Heroic Halls of Reflection. I think that this is the ONLY heroic that I now find challenging in a pug, largely because if I’m the healer, the tank usually is the weakpoint; if I’m the tank, the healer is the weak point, and if I’m the DPS, its a bloody crapshoot.
At least the randoms usually have the gear required to complete the instance, even if they can’t complete their role to save their lives.
I really do hope that they do NOT nerf HHoR. Its the only heroic challenge left.
Even though seeing the load screen for HoR always makes my blood pressure rise a little (since it never seems to show up when I’m on my main…just my poor, defenseless little alts!), I agree that it is the only real challenge left. And as such, I actually enjoy doing it.
Here’s hoping they leave it alone (although they’ve already adjusted it once…)
It’s an absolute joke to nerf heroics. If anything, I think Heroics should go the other way and become more challenging. They could provide more rewards, Frost Emblems for Occulus and OK, for example. Somewhere in-between what they are now and raiding. Even though I take advantage of the current system, I would appreciate the challenge.
A one hour debuff for deserting would be great. If you’re not willing to accept a RANDOM dungeon, don’t queue for a random, put in for a specific one.
I went into a random heroic HoR, we got to wave 9 and wiped. Within 3 seconds everyone (except me) quit the group. Blizz should add to the debuff an unalterable title of “QUITTER” for the duration of the debuff AND flag the person PvP and port them to the opposing faction’s capital city (AH or Bank, someplace highly populated) so they get the crap beat out of them over and over. Then they would have to deal with rez sickness, title, and defuff. Teach dem quitters a lesson!
I like the idea of making the heroics more challenging…but then where would the *yawn-just-give-me-my-emblems-already!* crowd get their kicks?!
And it’s sad that quitting has become such a norm, although I don’t know if I’m all for the shame-them-in-the-enemy-capital route…although it does make me giggle.
Do we want in our H HoR group someone that just graduated from easy mode heroics?
As Blizzard steers the game towards the mass audience (children and solitaire players), more and more complaints surface. Maybe they can avoid these complaints by making WoW regular and WoW easy. They’ll make more money from WoW easy but Wow regular ensures their reputation is not tarnished by the focus on $$$.
I devote a lot of time to the game, but don’t raid or arena. So I play with imbeciles a lot, you know the ones that herd in the middle in WSG or roads in AB. For triple the honor of someone playing by the objectives, why would they ever want to learn. These people need 1 BG called the animal farm where the only objective is to herd together and kill each other and of course queue bots in. They can gain honor and gear only useable in the animal farm and that way everyone would be happy.
This is why I’ve always had difficulty with BGs…I tend to feel more like I’m playing old school Warcraft towers games (in terms of the people I encounter) than WoW.
And I like the idea of “Animal Farm”.
[...] lot of talk on how Blizzard is nerfing the lower tier content to become easier. Take, for example, this post on some plans to streamline current Wrath heroics. (or this more satirical version, which [...]
I disagree.
The problem with the bosses that do X at every Y% of their health bar, is that the encounter becomes a farce when your party DPS hits a certain point. The bosses were designed around a certain amount of incoming damage, such that the abilities/phases occur with a given frequency and last for a certain portion of the fight, such that the encounter overall was deemed entertaining.
When the boss spends one-tenth of the time being a boss and nine-tenths spewing lines we long ago tired of (“Who among you is worthy?”) whilst invulnerable, the fight is no longer entertaining. It’s just irritating. Anyone been a melee DPS on Sorrowgrave with a well geared and competent caster or hunter? You get to kill the adds occasionally! Wooo!
It could be argued that Blizzard should have designed those encounters with rapid scaling of damage in mind (although by all accounts the introduction of hard modes screwed their predictions up anyway), but they didn’t and the fights are now ridiculous. I’d rather they slapped a quick fix over it than have the fights as they are, because I don’t much care how long the run takes as long as it’s not irritating me. I enjoy the game a lot, but have limited patience for things which are needlessly annoying.
Hence I still drop group every time Oculus loads. I’d do it if the debuff lasted an hour, too. I have alts, you can’t hold my time hostage to force me to go through that joyless place
I do agree that dungeons should be places where your class/role skills are tested and allowed to grow, and where basic mechanics are learned. I think they do a far better job of this when you’re levelling through them than at level cap, because the encounters just don’t scale with gear and gear resets occur frequently.
This is an interesting point. However, I would argue that if you are in a group with powerful DPS, leaving the fights as they are really doesn’t take that much more of your time.
The question comes down to: Is wasting that 10 seconds of your time (as an overgeared-for-heroics player) worth taking away the potential for valuable mechanics/skills lessons from people who are not overgeared, or who are crazy enough to run dungeons as freshly minted 80s?
I feel that it’s worth the minor time-waste for overgeared 80s, but I do agree that this is a difficult situation precisely because of your final point, which is that encounters don’t scale with gear and gear resets occur frequently. Which is why I doubt my arguments will win the day on this one.
…Ranting occasionally is good for the soul, though.
The Real Problem(tm) with these encounters is not that the boss spends most of its time in a cutscene.
Rather, the problem is that Blizzard is pushing the cutting edge players to go back and re-run these heroics day after day after day. What ultimate purpose does attaching frost badges to essentially obsolete content serve?
To give true casuals a way to gear up beyond 232s? Sure, it accomplishes that in a backhanded manner. It gives true casuals a way to slowly build a set of 251/264 gear, but do you honestly think any true casual will fit in the 30 daily-heroic runs for even a single piece of the cheap stuff in under 3 months? If they wanted to cater to casuals, the daily heroic should have been something like a weekly quest for one of the northrend factions that gave 10 badges or something. Perhaps even make it exclusive with the raid weekly: “Go help the DEHTA for 60 minutes worth of farming for 10 badges. Or kill Noth.” I know that after killing 120 gorlocs for DEHTA for the 3rd time in a week for all my alt badges I’d be so ready for some Noth action. This way at least casuals would be able to accumulate badges at a regular rate without needing an hour of playtime each and every day.
Or they could just just bite the bullet and say that practically-free ilvl 232 tier9 pieces is Good Enough for someone with no interest in raiding. They can always bump the badges to frosts when Cataclysm draws near to bring everyone up to the bar, like when they nerfed the crap out of all TBC raids pre-wrath. Then, they could drop the price of frost badge items because the influx of badges among the bleeding edge raiders would be reduced by 19 per alt per week.
Ultimately, though, they shouldn’t be forcing cutting edge players to grind 14-month old pushover content. Nerfing that content so it isn’t so boring is just a band-aid patching over a terrible decision.
I must, just simply must say that at least with the recent nerfs queing for an instance for ages and finding that you pop the Occulus and wait…..people actually stay is kinda nice.
I know I’m the lone Polly Sunshine Pugger on this, but I’ve actually had more random Oculus instances where people stay than where they go…
This is really a joke.
I’m one of those much-hated “casuals”, and a roleplayer to boot. I raided a while but burned out from it and quit last autumn. And you know what? I’m PINING for the days of the TBC heroics, and so are my equally casual, roleplaying guildies. I cannot imagine how anyone could consider these constant “nerfs” to be a good thing.
If you’re going to raid later, you have to learn certain skills. You have to learn teamwork and situational awareness and how to recover from mistakes (yours or another players’). If the non-raid content can be “facerolled” with one thumb in your nose and the other in your butt, how are future raiders supposed to learn to actually play their class and role half-decently?
If you cannot or don’t want to raid — yes, people like that exist and NO we are NOT all a bunch of no-skill whiners with an entitlement complex the size of the solar system, in fact I see THAT more often in wannabe-hardcore people — then heroics are the only challenge you can look forward to. Take that challenge away and guess what? The motivation to play goes with it.
(And if you are already raiding and think heroics are for worthless n00bs and your epixxed-out uberl33t self doesn’t have to pay attention to what you’re doing or mind your aggro or whatever, then by golly I want to see you splattered all over the instance for your arrogance when you fail to move out of the cleave or the ominously colored bad stuff. Just sayin’.)
TBC heroics could be a pain, and party composition could be too restrictive if you weren’t overgeared. But they were a challenge. They kept you on your toes. That made them FUN. Now that more classes have more reliable CC, why is that CC never expected to be used anymore? (I especially feel for hunters whose prized chain trapping skills have no worth anymore. I miss watching a skilled hunter do that.)
Wrath heroics aren’t fun, overall. They are bland, uninspired, mindless AoE-fests. And the few fights that WERE fun get nerfed to hell and back to make them as boring as the rest. I bet they will remove Insanity next, or Loken’s nova, or anything that actually requires a half-second of engaging your brain instead of spamming AoE until the hotkey breaks.
Excellent comment. I have too much to say in agreement, so instead…
/nod
/clap
I’m going to join gnomeaggedon in just saying:
/nod
/clap
Although, may I add, /treehug for putting things so well.
[...] so the credit for the post that contains this comment goes to Wildgrowth with the post No PuG Left Behind. You can’t blame a Mage for forgetting a TreeBlog’s url can [...]
While I agree with the issue of dumbing down heroics, I do have this to say: I didn’t even play WoW when those heroics were hard. I didn’t have an 80 until a few months ago. And I got geared ridiculously fast through those.
But hear’s the thing-the idea that dumbing down the instances will make those future, big scary bosses with actual mechanics harder due to lack of experience is just too general. My guild ran some ICC-10 the other night. None of us are 25 geared beyond essentially what can be picked up with frosties, and even then most of us didn’t have that. We got to Rotface, having one shotted the lower spire and Festergut. We MASSACRED Rotface. One shot. Nobody died. No tense moments. And 9/10 players had never done him before. Our GM, the guy who consistently is our MVH (Most Valuable Healer) was cracking jokes the entire time.
So no, I don’t think making heroics easier completely gimps the ability of players to perform on tough raid bosses. What hurts the players is generally just not being very good, and heroics from the accounts of my experienced guildies weren’t all that hard before either.