This post isn’t really a response to Brendan’s guest post a few days back. It’s my perspective on the Heroic at Honored issue that was continued by Amava.
As long as you have the desire to progress and to succeed, then I am confident that you’ll do fine in Heroics. Veteran players like myself who levelled to 70 within 2 weeks of TBC’s release ended up learning every encounter the hard way. The first time I did Shadow Labyrinth, it took two hours and trash reclears just to kill Murmer for our one frag. I didn’t even want to think about Heroics at the time.
The Heroics of now are much more manageable than they were before. I’m not going to say easier, because players still need to have a level of intelligence and gear required.
For example, in Heroic Sethekk Halls, the opening pull involving the two ghostly mobs? Both were immune to shackle, traps, and any kind of CC. I remember they would randomly drop aggro and charge our members. It was a nightmare just to be in that instance several months ago. Your tank had to be geared enough to withstand the massive amounts of damage, and skilled enough to hold aggro on two mobs simultaneously. Your healer had to be fast to sustain your tank. Having a Hunter was almost a requirement for Misdirect.
Trash in Karazhan have been nerfed enormously. What once took two nights can now almost be done within three hours. I remember a pack of trash that was outside of Maiden’s hallway leading towards the Opera Event. Those necro’s could not be shackled nor pally feared. You had to have two tanks on at all time getting aggro on both of them simultaneously so that when one tank got frozen, the mob wouldn’t run and charge a random player in the group.
I thought that was the hardest encounter I had ever faced at the time
It’s a habit of mine that I continually forget that heroic instances of post 2.3 are much more different than they were in pre 2.3.
Why Blizzard dropped the reputation level
1: Replay Value
They lowered it because it was difficult for players to find groups for Heroics. Only a fraction of all WoW players are raiding any kind of 25 man content. The 70’s who aren’t are typically in casual Guilds who do not have the kind of dedication or personnel to go the route of raiding but want to have fun doing challenging content. If they’re not interested and don’t have the time to PvP, what’s there left to do? 5 man instances are the only option left in order to acquire gear.
2: Patch Nerfs
There’s been four main patches since TBC was released. In every patch, there’s been nerf after nerf on various heroic instances. Each gradual reduction in difficult increases the margin of error that players have. That means more time to recover in case something bad goes wrong. It means the ability to take in players who have the brains but not necessarily the gear. Grinding to revered would have increased the chance that you would get the necessary dungeon gear to replace your preexisting greens and lower level blues.
3: Player Pool Increase
Even on a server as populated as Ner’Zuhl, it took me a long time to not only find tanks and DPSers, but to find players that had to have the key to go in. Now there are more people running heroics because they don’t have to spend the time necessary to grind the rep to get in. In my opinion, players that were kara geared or higher had no need to run heroics (other then badges for nether’s, etc). What was the point? Having T5 gear is better then badge gear. They could not justify the cost of badge runs with that of raids. Players that were far below that could not keep up with whatever their job was. This resulted in a small selection of players who had the NEED to go in and WERE sufficiently geared to go in.
Now heroics are such a piece of cake. I can breeze through them
What’s my secret?
I run with a Pally tank and a Mage. It makes it so easy for me to blog and read while I play WoW at the same time.
I always love to have a Mage along Regular and Heroics, things just go better with that one class.
Your second secret i guess would be that those are all guildies i’m sure for Heroics.
I like the challenge of Heroics, but i like it more with people that know how to play and that have adequate gear and Healers that are not stingy on heals. When i’m in Heroics and i’m sitting at like 15% HP for what seem like forever and it was forever i know i’m busy up front doing my best to hold the mobs and not to die. When i look at my HP in those instances with some healers my second though is….am i gona be alive in a few seconds? In such instances i’ve always wondered just what are healers doing that i’m sitting that low on HP for that long in Heroics. That was from a Heroic.
Good geared players and a good balance group makes Heroics much easier. The class you have make a lot of difference i’m found. What i hope in WoTLK is that Blizzard implements a much better Heroic System and very competitive rewards in comparison to PvP, Arena, Raiding. Give people good gear choices and rewards. Would even be nice if the dungeon were completely different to make it interesting. But for now you will have lots of Drama in Heroics with everyone in Heroics at all kinds of gear level. Its not hard to gear up, i just believe some people are just to lazy to get gear to do Heroics properly and effectively and that do end up costing 4 other people darely for their lazyness.
Matticus, thanks for reading, and taking the time to put together this follow up article. As always, a great read. Also, a special thanks to your guest authors, the posts have been interesting.
The title of this article is about one-shotting heroics, and I can tell you, as me and my “honored” rep friends plod through dungeons in Heroic mode, we are definitely NOT one shotting. Its wipe after wipe after wipe.
With the right group of people, this is tremendous fun. We learn a lot, nice DPS rivalry to top the meter without pulling unnecessary aggro, make fun of eachother when we mess up, and so on. When we have to PUG a slot or two, as the original article discussed, it can be a nightmare or it can be good, depends entirely on who responds to /LFM.
From my experience and WoW timeline, I can’t really reflect on nerfs or other changes to the content. I do often wonder if the nerf callers just find the content easier because they’re more experienced, have a better cohesive team they work with, and also have better gear over time. Then you repeat the same dungeon that used to plague you, and now you do a good job, through a mixture of skill, familiarity, teamwork, and gear. Maybe. Or maybe they did nerf it 🙂 for n00b 70’s like me.
I’ve been following your advice on minimum stats for Kara entry, and I’m just about there (a tad shy on stamina). And a few friends I work with are doing the same. We’re ready to begin that harder content.
At this point in my WoW career, I think Heroics are the right thing prior to Karazhan. From what I see, the biggest barrier to success in Kara is organizing the right blend of 10 people, both their toon (class, spec, gear) and the actual people (skill, attitude, availability, preparation). Once you have the people and toons you need, then you’re back to the in-game challenge of beating up mobs.
Heroic mode feels to me like an alternate route for progression, without the logistical hassle of organizing all those folks.
But we wipe and wipe and wipe and wipe. We’re getting better every day, but man, do we wipe.
Sometimes I think you doing something else and have an auto heal macro going
It scares me sometimes
Amava, it’s all about Perseverance. But at the same time, be sure to look at it from a technical standpoint. What exactly is causing you to wipe? Is there a CC that’s not going off? Or the heals not powerful enough? Wiping for the sake of progression is good as long as you’re learning. Yet running your team against the wall repeatedly is not if you’re not learning or trying new tricks each time you’re in there. That’s an important lesson to learn whether or not you’re doing 10 mans, 25 mans, or 5 mans.
If you wipe, find out why so you don’t wipe because of that same reason.
Thanks for the article Matt. It was a good read 🙂
Doc, yes I do. I’m busy blogging when I heal you in heroics :S.
My favorite spot to wipe has got to be the top of the stairs in Heroic Ramparts. After the first little bridge in there, which still gives trouble, we do a great job, even with that guy who summons the two hounds. But when we get to the top of the stairs, with the 4 casters and one CC-immune melee guy, wow. We did make it past once, but any time we go back, that’s just horrible. That might be an example of a battle where strategy will only take us just so far, and now a bit better gear is necessary.
The core team does an awesome job of learning from wipes. As I said, we get better with each pull, and do a good job talking strat and improvements during our corpse runs 🙂
I (70 warrior tank) have done so many heroics i lost count. i Have all the gear i can possbly get (25+33+50+41+41+50+100+75+ prolly more badges speent, never bought a nether however) and the most successful heroics i ran were always with the smae group of classes (or people for that matter) i dont really pug any1 esle but dps, never a healer i dont know or have run stuff with (b4 i started getting a little more picky)
So in order for the perfect instance run is having the proper group for that instance or even running with ppl you know and trust, and having about 2000 group dps (tank dps included) sure there may be a death or 2 but thats the name of the game and if your running with ppl you know and like that may not be that big of a deal
Damuron, it always helps when the people you run with are those who you’re familiar with. I’ve started running heroics with players that I know because we’ve partied before or something. If worse comes to worse, then I hit the LFG queue.
Matticus-
I’m a mage with ~571 bonus damage. This isn’t my first 70 (my first two being a priest and a druid), and I was just wondering if this is sufficient enough to do heroic Mech. I remember Mechanar being the easiest Heroic back in the day, but I always tanked or healed it. Any suggestions on heroics for me to do? 🙂