Cataclysm happened a bit more than a week ago and strangely enough, it is leaving me feeling of two minds about it. I find the world to be superbly done. The quests have never been better. The humour found in many of them, the raw emotions of some of the NPCs make for a delight of a time.
Now, for people who know me, these above comments will sound very strange. I hate levelling. I do not alt. I do not quest. I have levelled a total of two characters to max level in 31 months and one of them is a DK. I have never enjoyed this part of the game and yet this time, I feel like I want to achieve loremaster of Cataclysm.
If I strongly disliked the above, I completely and truly loved tanking. Whether it was in instances or in raids, I never really felt as happy in this world as when I was getting my face smashed in. Somehow, this too feels like it is changing.
I have run every single instance on normal and a few of the heroics. The instancing world has changed. Gone are the days of the heroic quickie. These new instances take a long long time to finish. I actually don’t mind it being harder even though they do feel harder than they did when I started heroics in BC. Trash does matter and I love the challenge. I’m using shield wall on most pulls where we can’t CC enough mobs and I’m truly enjoying this.
What I do not enjoy is the sheer length of them. I loved in Wrath that I could, even at the beginning, start an instance and be done within 45 minutes to an hour. Now, it feels like I might have a much harder time doing even a heroic daily on week nights. The longest instance in Wrath was Old Kingdom which even at the beginning would take about an hour on heroic. Even that long instance would allow you to have time to do your jewelcrafting daily, some other dailies, some mining, etc. It allowed you to do other things in the game than just instancing and raiding.
Let’s compare this with Halls of Origination or as I like to call it now, HoO Crap. Even on normal, it will take an hour easy. Now the instance is beautiful, the fights are different and challenging. But why does it have to be so damn long?
I like that trash matters again and I don’t think that there’s too much or too little of it. The problem is when each trash pack can take 2-3 minutes compared to the 30 seconds of Wrath, it lengthens the instance quite a bit.
I’m guessing that by giving even the weakest of trash so many hit points, they’re future proofing the instances which won’t become a zerg fest even when the DPS reach 20k on average. But now?
I try to play about two hours at most on non raid nights. At this point, I’m having a hard time fitting in a heroic run without risking running late and not sleeping enough. The challenge is great. The time sink is not.
I quite agree. A heroic can take up my entire evening of gaming with hubby and since I am tanking, even in a guild group there’s an intensity and pressure in that role. I know that pressure will settle down in a week or so when I’m not the only heroic geared tank in guild… but yeah.
Notable are the reports of raids not being half as painful – whether it’s more tanks/heals/dps or that heroics are so overtuned that people are finding raiding “a walk in the park” comparatively!
I like a hard heroic – I love a dungeon with interesting trash pulls! But the bosses aren’t nearly as hard as the trash, and if it takes a half hour to GET to the first boss (in a 3 boss dungeon!) then… It’s not REALLY hard, it’s just artificial difficulty.
Yeah, please don’t get me wrong – I do enjoy the difficult boss fights. Getting the mechanic and doing the Heroic Ozruk fight the first time felt awesome… but the time involved in a whole instance just seems rough…
I completely and hole-heartedly agree about the length of instances. I personally love nearly all aspects of the game to at least some level (I rock my “Loremaster Nehmen” title nearly everywhere I go!), but with these new instances, it’s almost gotten to the point where I refuse to run with anyone except my guild, lest the instance take 2 hours.
Even beyond the sheer difficulty and length of each pull, I find that I’m having to take a large amount of time with each pull to explain how it needs to be done to avoid certain death. This is largely because when I random queue with anyone other than a majority of guildies in the party, I almost inevitably end up with a party of players who have never done the dungeon we’re in on heroic or even on regular mode.
Maybe I haven’t been running enough instances (and haven’t set foot in heroics yet), but I find myself pleasantly surprised that they’re more than just go here, go here, go here, boss, go here, go here, go here, boss, etc. Maybe I just need to run them more toget jaded.
My biggest annoyance with Halls of Origination was that Rajh is boss that ends the instance, but there are four bosses at the end. The group killed the one to get the random loot (the tank didn’t realize that–he actually wanted to do all the bosses) and then the healer left where there were still three more bosses to kill.
We couldn’t pull in a healer for the remaining three bosses so we just had to end the run.
For what it’s worth, the start of TBC was like this. I think you’ll find that run times will decrease significantly as players get more comfortable with the pulls and their characters in general. Not to mention, gear will improve dramatically overtime too.
Ultimately, it may be frustrating now, but in the long run this is far better for the overall experience of Cataclysm. Actually being able to use Heroics as a test for applicants will be a welcomed return.
I second this… we will notice a significant speed increase in heroics in 2 tiers of gear. It won’t feel like wrath, because there are more mechanics that don’t get out-scaled by gear, but it will get much closer.
Think about Heroic Shattered Halls… in relevant gear, you -had- to have good CC to get through that instance. Once we got SSC/TK gear (which was only the 2nd tier of that xpack), you could faceroll all but a few pulls, which were nasty because of a specific hard-hitting, frequently applied mortal strike. I think that’s the sort of thing we can expect in Cataclysm, and I’m looking forward to it.
I’ve had more or less the same guild group for heroics since I started running them… particularly the same healer. We’re already noticing a night and day difference between what it felt like to do them with a 333 average ilvl, and what it feels like with a 343 average ilvl. Give me another 10 points and I’ll start ignoring a lot of the CC… 20 points and there will be rocket boots pulls again =D
I completely agree. Although the length of wrath hc was maybe a little too short, I think 3-4 hours is way too long. Being able to jump in, do something fast and log again is a good thing. Alot of people play that way. They shouldn’t have to set a whole evening for one heroic. It sounds ridiculous, but this is fact! It will only scare people away from pugging, and that’s really sad. I know I won’t do Deadmines for along long time again
This is sounding more and more like the BC upper level instances I’ve been doing to finish off the BC Dungeonmaster achievement. At level, the Botanica took 1.5 hours last night, and were it not for the instances crashing this morning I was on target for that for Shadow Labyrinth.
I’m starting to wonder if this will push people even more towards a “gogogogo” mentality due to the time sink involved.
Yeah, I remember BC heroics being quite a time sink. Even before heroics were implemented there was still some long instances I spent quite a bit of time in. I can’t even begin to tell you how many UBRS runs I did. guhhhhhh
Ugh Shadow Labyrinth, just the mere mention of it gives me the heebie jeebies still. Man all this talk of how tanking is in Cataclysm has me chomping at the bit, as I return to my tanking roots with my Goblin Warrior (Was an Orc Tank in Vanilla/Cataclysm, then rolled a mage as I had major warrior burnout)
We are at the beginning of new content. It will get easier as we gear up. The sky is not falling. Wrath spoiled us with being able to jump in a heroic with out any type of speed bump. Heroics should be seen as 5-Man hard modes, not afk your way to justice points.
Of course it will and is already getting better. My main point was the length of time required to do an instance, not the difficulty.
Even with the new gear (3 pieces of 359 and the rest 346), the instances still take a good hour to unfold (except for Vortex Pinnacle) which is a fair amount of commitment in one’s evening.