How are heroic instances going?
by Elizabeth Wachowski 
Feb 17th 2007 at 11:27AM
Heroic instances were one of the big features of the Burning Crusade. Never outgrow your old dungeons! Do five-mans for epic rewards! But how are they working out for the majority of players? I haven't done any myself, so I really can't comment. My guildmates have used the phrase "hits like a brick" for the trash inside, and noted that it's nice to have a challenging five-man for once, but then again, they've only done a couple.
Checking out the forums, it seems that a lot of people don't think that the pain of doing heroic instances is worth the loot. The level seventy regular instances -- Tempest Keep, Steamvaults, Shadow Labs -- haven't had the regular boss drops re-itemized, so you get the same loot you do on regular, plus the tokens. Plus, many of the bosses do 360 degree cleaves, so stacking the raid towards ranged DPS and against melee apparently makes a lot of the encounters easier. Since you need heroic completions to get attuned for most raids, this is going to put a big roadblock in the way of a lot of melee DPSers.
In general, the two wishes of forumgoers are a) stop making the trash harder than the bosses, thus necessitating multiple mages as CC and b) please make the loot commensurate with the difficulty. Have you done heroics? What do you think about them?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Instances, The Burning Crusade
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Gurei Feb 17th 2007 11:35AM
ive been in a few and they are severly biased towards clases wtih high CC and ranged dps,also they seem to favor a paladins as a more resistant healer rather than a priest.
Baluki Feb 17th 2007 11:52AM
Can you still do the quests in Heroic mode? I haven't been able to get BC yet, but when I do I expect that I'll have difficulty finding groups for some of the more unpopular dungeons, and since some of the quests have unique rewards (trinkets and stuff) that are not found elsewhere...you know, I'd like to finish them eventually.
Plus, I'm a completist. I like to walk around and see zero !'s on guys.
Druid dude Feb 17th 2007 12:42PM
Rana few heroics in Coilfang so far. Trash hits like trucks, bosses hit like freight trains. First couple pulls were actually rather startling, the difference between normal and heroic was much larger than I was expecting. Great challenge.
One difference that was smaller than I expected was the loot. I had assumed that the heroics would help us get geared up for better succes in Karazhan and beyond, that the natural instance progression was:
5 mans > heroic 5 mans > Karazhan
Based on the gear that drops from the 5 mans, this doesn't seem to be the case. My guess is that the heroics are offered as an alternative to Karazhan rather than as part of a linear progression.
Snowy86 Feb 17th 2007 3:24PM
We've cleared most of the heroics already and It's not all that difficult. Thou I haft to agree that the loot is not worth the difficulty level, especially when you get a lot of non-heroic loot in most of the already lvl 70 instances.
Junzim Feb 17th 2007 5:24PM
my group has cleared Coilfang through and to be honest, we're a little disappointed and a lot pleased.
The disappointment comes from so many of the pulls (trash included) being a case of Blizzard stating "Well, we're not really changing the tactics here and the mobs aren't different so my numbers are bigger than yours".
Mob Health on trash is the same so the DPSers have a similar job, they don't have any weirdness so it's the same for a tank, they just hit like trains so it's basically a case of all the difficulty being placed on healers (joy for me).
Remember all those times we priests complained about crits? We sure as hell don't complain about them any more! A crit is a welcome boon in a lot of pulls as sometimes they just turn into slow battles of attrition - can the DPS kill the mob before his 15k basic hits (5k on a tank with 66% Mitigation) finally finish off the tank? Inspiration is a godsend! Extra Armour on the tank! Boo Yah!
However, some of the boss battles receive more than a number tweaking, while some just use existing abilities more often or hit even harder, Blizzard has entirely changed certain encounters when its deemed it fit. Black Strider at the end of Underbog for instance is a whole different fight now, with the lanky sod spawning dozens of UnCC'able 6kHP 1k Lightning Bolting bog striders that turn the fight into a carnival.
All in all, a guaranteed epic at the end of a 5 man instance? 3 Badges of Justice (for most of them anyway) for each member of the party? I don't think those things sound bad.
If anything Kharazan sucks the big one. It's just a raid but with crappy rewards. Last night we had epic Mail bracers OF THE WHALE drop.
Yes, you heard me right, OF THE WHALE. Some bracers with Spirit and Stamina only with epic quantities of the much hated stats. They weren't even called something like "The master's cuffs" they were actually named of the whale.
Worst. Epic. Ever.
Argent Feb 17th 2007 5:57PM
sheesh. who even still kills the beast boss in kara? he's just a voidcrystal waiting to happen for the most part, regardless of suffix.
i find the heroic mode dungeons to be a refreshing change of pace. some of them seem to be a bit over the top (sethekk halls comes to mind) when it comes to demanding rigid class compositions, but for the most part, you can do them with some pretty fun group makeups.
i do wish blizz adds some more interesting heroic-only look to the mix. it's kinda disapointing to do a big, hefty dungeon crawl only to see the same old stuff as in regular mode drop.
lastly, if anyone thought the 45 min strath run was demanding/impossible -- wait until you see the heroic quests for shattered halls...
corruptedend Feb 17th 2007 8:03PM
I appologize ahead of time for the fact that this comment is completely off topic but this old movie called saturday night fever was on and i looked up and what do i see but the same exact dance that human males do if this topic has been posted previously again i apologize.
Has anybody else run into anything like this for other dances? (besides the macarana dance )
Hal Feb 17th 2007 10:55PM
WoW fans: all your Burning Crusade news are belong to us!
"are belong to us?"
What language is this?
paul Feb 18th 2007 12:15PM
about that dance... welcome to two years ago when wow launched.
rhanthony Feb 18th 2007 1:42AM
Re: #7: Yes, thats way off topic. It's also amazing you are just catching on. ALL dances in the game are based on some other pop culture dance style of some era. Orc males do MC Hammer's "Can't touch this" dance, Blood elf males do Napoleon Dynamite's dance, etc. Thanks for playing the game though. Find appropriate topics from now on though, you'll get alot more info and a much warmer welcome. I mean did you REALLY have to ask if this was too off topic? And if you found yourself asking... yes, it is. Stop posting and find a more appropriate place.
Re: #8: "...are belong to us." Welcome to the Internet. A little fad started a few decades ago. It's been full of historical moments, and this one can be tracked down to a video game. Google "All your base are belong to us" and enjoy. Yes, this was off topic as well. But thanks for playing the game.
Re: Heroic dungeons: I haven't had the chance to give any of these a shot but me and my kids are looking forward to taking a stab at a few. We keep hearing that the loot hasn't stepped up in part with the difficulty which is a little discouraging, but hey... it's all about the challenge of the game right? Who cares what gear is in it for ya... I mean, it's not all about ... well ... damnit. Yeah, that sucks. We probably won't bother. Arena stuff looks like more fun anyway.
Cheesehound Feb 18th 2007 7:28AM
@8 Sounds like American to me.
RogueJedi86 Feb 18th 2007 9:27AM
I'm just waiting for the day we get Heroic Mode Deadmines. It'd be nice having a bunch of 70s in Westfall, and having to bust their asses getting through it. A reminder of the days when all of us had trouble on it.
Deathlike Feb 18th 2007 4:54PM
RogueJedi86, you probably won't need to be 70 to be able to go through Heroic Deadmines. It just increases the difficulty, but as far as I know, how difficult it becomes depends on the original level of the dungeon.
Plus, we all didn't go through Alliance as our first character. I had trouble with RFC and WC before anything else. ;P
roseroyce04 Feb 18th 2007 11:58PM
Stop making fun of poster #7. He's obviously 5 years old and is just starting to learn about the pop culture of years past.
Kazia Feb 19th 2007 12:08AM
We did a run of Ramparts on heroic while waiting for more guildies to get Kharazhan keyed about two weeks ago. For a close group of players that we are, this was the type of challenged we enjoyed as in general we would normally rip through 5 man instances without pausing.
Every pull had to be done properly into a safe zone, had to be CC'ed properly, you had to exercise agro management, and you had to pay attention and be aware of your surroundings. In my end game blues, mobs were hitting me about 1k-3k a pop and if a clothie got agro, it was 5-8k a hit, which usually meant dead.
We had alot of fun and made it too the final boss but couldn't down the dragon just due to its massive damage output. Essentially, we were undergeared.
All the mobs had increased health and damage output but were otherwise unchanged. Each boss on the other hand had all its normal abilities plus one extra ability. For example, the first boss had his normal attacks and the two priests with him. However - he also has a non-removeable debuff that he applied every 15-20seconds (lasted 30 seconds) that reduced the effectiveness of healing on me (the tank) by 10% and it stacked. This turned a tank and spank into a DPS race where the boss had to be downed before the tank bit it. We made it, though in the end I did have 10 stacks on me (shield wall FTW).
We got only one blue off the first boss (a very strong arcane resist shield for yours truly) and 3 blues off the second. All were blues that were marginal upgrades to what we could get end game, however, considering it was an upgraded level 60 dungeon, we didn't expect epics all over the place (last boss yes). The instance is also on a 24 hour lockout timer.
To me this suggested the lower ones were more aimed at sidegrade gear and farming the Tokens to tradein for epics over anything else.
Heroic Dungeons, especially the ones like Steamvaults/Tempest Keep etc seem aimed at those who are farming Khara/Gruul and even Magtheridon (tryout the trash mobs there just too understand how far you have to go lol) etc. rather than new to 70's. While I expect end bosses of heroic low level instances to have some decent loot, I do expect all bosses of end game heroic ones to provide good quality epics, though it might be a while before we find this out for certain.
Still - all in all, its a great way to keep the same content fresh and intersting as well as to keep providing a challenge to go back to, even after newly released content pushes us forward.
Kaylek Feb 20th 2007 11:29AM
@9
No. It's all about loot. Loot and pwning face. The end.
Swiftlydead Feb 20th 2007 12:23PM
@10: It's japanese poorly translated to english. You lose.