Completion rates on Wrath heroics
by Allison Robert 
May 21st 2009 at 1:00PM
Halls of Stone surprises me somewhat, as I really didn't think it was a difficult heroic (outside of running a Druid tank on the Brann Bronzebeard event), but Ahn'kahet is universally cited amongst tanks and healers for LOS issues and nasty damage. And Oculus...well, we've talked about Oculus here before. I still think the concept of the dungeon itself is fantastic, but the moment that one or two embarrassed people in your group admit that it's their first time on the drakes, you know you're in for a long and ugly run.
I hope Flyv revisits this data at some point, because I'd love to see how the numbers change over the course of Wrath. With achievements introduced only as BC was ending, we don't really have a good look at how dungeon popularity and completion rates evolved there, and I think the numbers say a lot about the content players prioritize when they get a toon (or multiple toons) to the level cap.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Instances, Achievements
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Brian May 22nd 2009 12:14AM
there's no incentive to do HoS heroic, and every reason not to do it. The timed event is REALLY lame since it has no timer telling you when it's over. I've died SEVERAL times on it, wipe, whatever. Released and not gotten credit because i had no idea how close we were to finishing it.
Verit May 21st 2009 5:45PM
Yeah its actually quite hard to heal as well - and I'm comparing it to healing Ulduar (which honestly varies from boss to boss in how painful it is). I think there's something wrong with a heroic dungeon where you feel on the edge of being able to heal something wearing t7.5 epics and a bunch of Ulduar gear.
To be fair though - there's only 3 heroics I really hate healing - Occulus, HOS and sometimes Lokken in HOL (as a mighty shaman - if you have like over 16k health I can just heal through his damage, but I doubt that's intended)
I've gotten more comments from people I know and strangers that seeing what they've seen so far in wrath they'd hate to heal any of this stuff :(.
BC was worse though - before they nerfed heroics and Karazhan actually took less time for more stuff/money.
Faar May 22nd 2009 12:08AM
Not sure why you would have such enormous difficulty healing the timed event in HoS, especially if you've got high-end raid gear.
I healed that event just fine as a disco priest with only about 1200ish spellpower. Well, "just fine" is probably a bit of an overstatement, unless one defines "just fine" as "pushed to the very limit of my capacity" lol, but we lived to tell the tale.
If I'd had equivalent gear to my druid I'm sure I would have managed much better (druid's at roughly 1770 SP), and disco's major weakness is lack of viable area healing. Still I managed to do it... :) HoS isn't so bad really, HoL is much worse, as is Occulus and UP.
Brian May 22nd 2009 12:14AM
Faar if you have high end raid gear why would you even be in HoS? It's long, it's hard, it doesn't have that many badges. Heroic Nexus would be a better choice for badges.
Also high end raid gear is not necessarily good for heroics. My paladin is geared for LONG fights, he's got 30k mana and I had to sacrifice a lot of spell power to get it. He sucks at healing heroics and honestly if the party wipes more than 2 or 3 times the cost of repairs have far out stripped the value of the badges. I do Naxx 10/25 and Ulduar 10 almost every week as possible on him.
My shaman is friggin ez-mode healing compared to the paladin. I'm doing Naxx 10/25 a couple times a month to get him geared and then I will stop doing heroics on him as well. The cost/reward just doesn't make sense.
Narai May 21st 2009 1:13PM
Not first.
Anyway, Oculus is one of those places you go to just to get the achievement, and then NEVER return to. HoS is about the same. Even if the drops for some classes are godly off of their respective final bosses, better can be gotten out of entry-level raid content with less hair-pulling.
I've also seen Herald Volazj two-manned because the clothies all died due to the insanity adds, and since the dead party members don't show up for the next installment of Insanity, the two remaining can burst right through 'em. He took a little while to die when this happens, but at least he dies.
Allison Robert May 21st 2009 1:23PM
Your first sentence here makes me wonder if we can differentiate between the number of mains and alts at 80 somewhat using these numbers. People will usually spend more time trying to get their mains achievements and titles, but I don't know if that accounts for the 40%-ish difference between completion rates on Oculus and VH.
Or, to put it another way, do people go to the trouble of finishing all these dungeons at 80 only for their mains and avoiding the more difficult ones on their alts? Or are there so few alts at 80 right now that the numbers are an accurate reflection of peoples' dungeon preferences even on their mains? Armory data probably won't help here because we have no real means of differentiating between a main and an alt, but I think they're interesting questions.
Narai May 21st 2009 1:58PM
Definitely a good question for a future article, I'd say.
I'm not totally alt-obsessed, but I do have 3 80s so that I can tank, dps, or heal. When you've got guildies and friends who want to run undesirable dungeons such as Oculus and they need xyz role, I tend to fill it and get the completion achievements more as an afterthought than a true objective.
But there are many folks who tend to just do these dungeons on their mains and then gear up their alts off Vault/Spider wing/etc. I do think Blizzard should take a look at this data though...if people aren't doing these instances, are there ways to make them suck less so that they'll get more visits (without nerfing them into faceroll mode)?
Gabriele Nichols May 21st 2009 2:01PM
In regards to the low number of level 80 alts, I think a surprising amount of people have alts at that level already. I know of at least one person formerly in my guild who had 5 level 80s, and many of our raiders have at least one max level alt. There's also the Death Knight factor, which makes it easier to have a leveled alt.
Essentially, this is all just saying that uncertainty over the data is more certain.
dillonwelch May 21st 2009 2:21PM
I think it helps that Oculus can take a very, very, very long time if even one person does not know what they're doing, as well as being all the way in the southwest corner of Northrend, and VH being a 30 min instance smack in the middle of Dalaran.
kabshiel May 21st 2009 4:32PM
Except that UK, UP, and the Nexus are equally far away from Dalaran, but are among the most run heroics. I'm pretty sure distance has nothing to do with the disparity here.
Wyred May 22nd 2009 5:22AM
Think Allison makes a good point here. For myself I ran heroics like crazy on my main, both to gear up and for achievments. On my Alt, it's here and there, rep items, crafted, etc. Achievments are not a concern at all. As further confirmation, my main went in heroic Oculus twice, completing it once, never again. My alt has never set foot in there and never will. Oddly my main has only done HoS once, but I really couldn't say why I never went back. I didn't dislike it, and obviously it didn't come close to the seething vitriolic hatred I hold in my now scarred and maimed soul for the Oculus.
epsilon343 May 21st 2009 1:14PM
I hated HoS. That was one of the instances where I basically did it in Heroic to get the achievement and then refused to ever step foot in there again. Oculus and Ahn'kahet have the same distinction.
For me to want to do an instance it has to be fun, and those instances aren't fun.
Elmo May 21st 2009 1:16PM
Occulus is actually the only dungeon in WoW I didn't ever do, and I'm on Vezax in Ulduar25...
Kyle May 21st 2009 1:21PM
Some of the heroics are fairly difficult if you are running them when you actually want the gear that drops from there.
Find your way into a naxx pug and youll gear quite a bit faster (especially as most new 80's probably know more than a few with naxx on farm)
Also the badge gear can help fill in some holes but as 10man naxx / heroic is now 2 item tiers behind I think they should start including more tier gear for badges for the valor sets. Most people able to get into naxx have 5/5 by now might as well help the slower guilds into 25/ uld 10.
bmiller May 21st 2009 1:24PM
Hard to believe there's so many people completing Naxx 25 with in 30 days a dinging 80, in fact the highest number (it's called the mode, I believe) is at about 20 days.
I guess it's two kinds of people: 1, the Ensidia type min maxers rolling through in their Sunwell gear and 2. people being carried through.
Myself, it was 4 months on my main, 40 and 17 days and counting on my alts (no naxx-25 runs on either yet)
Manatank May 21st 2009 2:45PM
There are more options than the ones you outlined. Neither I nor my guild is even close to the level of Ensidia. We also cleared Naxx25 pretty quickly after we hit 80 and none of us had any sunwell gear because we were a 10 man guild in BC. We weren't carried, because all of us were in that situation. So, that must mean there is a third option. I'd suggest the third option is that Naxx10/25 was tuned incredibly low and was easy to do in blues and greens. There is no reason other than personal preference not to go straight into Naxx when you ding 80.
Tzi May 21st 2009 3:38PM
My raid full cleared Naxx25 pretty quickly and we're far from hardcore. It took us two reset periods (maybe three), I think, but we only raid twice a week for three hours; if we had run more hours a week and weren't so limited on time, we would have cleared it in our first reset. Most of us were in blues and craftables. A couple people had ten man gear already, but not very many. I know I started still wearing my [non-sunwell] Tier 6 because I had been leveling another toon and had no time to find enough good gear to justify losing my set bonus.
In my experience, (a) a lot of people think they are not ready for Naxx until they are in full heroic gear/rep epics and thus start much later than "necessary" (assuming they want to raid and (b) a lot more people are finished with Naxx then think they are. The few raids I still know who are running it (assuming not an alt run) absolutely have the gear level for moving into Ulduar, but think they need to stay until every last person has every last blue replaced... which isn't the case. So I think those influence people's progress speeds quite a bit.
dragonfyir May 21st 2009 1:24PM
I think the problem with Occulus is less the last boss and the drake riding, but has more to do with the amount of trash and the simplicity of the drake. I mean spending an hour in there pressing one over and over again just plain sucks
komamura May 21st 2009 1:28PM
also this new profile thing is really confusing, I had to use my aim account to create it, but it doesn't post under the profiles name (this isnt the Aim account name ^ that one is)
Bananacup May 21st 2009 1:26PM
Really? I loved HoS and I do it fairly often, I find it's one of the funnest heroics.
Two i'll likely never complete are Occulus and UP, they're horrible and impossible to find a group for.