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.