I completely disagree with this. Heroics in Cata are brutal for the casual player. They're also not brutal in a good way. I wouldn't mind a challenging dungeon that takes time to work though, if I only had to do it once. What makes cata heroics so awful is that they're brutally challenging and they're mindlessly repetitive at the same time. Running heroics in LK was less challenging and more mindless, but it was also faster. You could run five heroics in two or three hours and feel a sense of accomplishment when you put on a new piece of gear and didn't feel like you wasted your precious evening before going back to work the next day.

Now you have the wipe fests and meticulous planning that BC heroics required (much the same as classic level 60 dungeons which you couldn't ever out gear unless you raided), and you have to repeat them just as endlessly as the heroics in LK.

Honestly, it was more fun to try and push an LK heroic faster than I should and risk dying on every pull than it is marking targets, dealing with incompetent DPC cc and wiping because a boss has insane mechanics that often rely on luck. Given that the bulk of anything remotely rewarding for an 85 is still found in heroics and raids, WoW still stops dead at 85 if you're not one of the people that enjoys these elements of the game.

As an aside, it was also nice to be able to run heroics with my not-so-awesome gamesauce wife and watch her enjoy getting a mega geared toon that could destroy any wobbly that tried to mug her while she gathered herbs. That is gone from Cata, and that's the player Blizz should want to keep. For every slavering nerd demanding brutality, there are 100 cute little wives wanting to decapitate anyone who gets in the way of their flowers.

You claim you want a game that's accessible... bring back heroics I can play with my wife.

Yes heroics have gotten harder, but not unbearably so. The mechanics are not luck, just no understood by people like you. A group with an average item level of 340 should not even need cc for clearing instances anymore. Yes, if everyone is 329 you will need to cc and if people play like idiots you will need to make some compensations. However, I do agree with you about the length of heroics. For people with limited play time I feel like logging on and taking an hour to do a heroic on top of a 40 minute que time is just ridiculous. They are trying to fix the que time but I wish they would have reduced the size of the instances or amount of trash or something.

the debate as i see it is whether heroics should be progression content or not, where i stand in that is; yes, for a while then we should over gear them and and face roll them.

in a couple of months when the firelands raid comes out and everyone is geared on t-11 and the odd piece of t-12 we'll be able to roll trough them like a wrath heroic.

also for those who like heroics to be progression there will be no new heroics only Zul' or something =P

@Whyisretgimped

QUOTE "Running heroics in LK was less challenging and more mindless, but it was also faster"

First off, what is with this 'faster' everything? Sit down and enjoy the time you spend in front of the game, whether you play for 5 minutes or 5 hours. How fast you're moving through content should mean nothing to you unless you suffer from severe ADHD, which I'm starting to suspect the majority of players do.

Those high-speed chain-pulling LOLAOE dungeons were also incredibly boring. You ran behind the tank looting everything that sparkled and spamming 1 or 2 spells with no further thought. How is this fun for anyone with more than a single digit IQ?

QUOTE "Honestly, it was more fun to try and push an LK heroic faster than I should and risk dying on every pull than it is marking targets, dealing with incompetent DPC cc and wiping because a boss has insane mechanics that often rely on luck. "

You can STILL risk dying. You will always have incompetent DPS and CC is currently not required on every pull, just a little bit of basic thought. If we nerf the game down to the level that all the 'incompetent DPS' can get through everything we'll have another 'roll face on keyboard' expansion for anyone else who can figure out the basic idea "behind don't stand in the fire." Rather spend a few minutes teaching that newb hunter in your pug how to trap than bemoaning how hard the instance is.

Besides, I quite honestly detested those morons who insisted chain pulling their way through everything in Wrath in a huge hurry. Seriously? Why? Where exactly do you need to get to so fast?

Quote: "As an aside, it was also nice to be able to run heroics with my not-so-awesome gamesauce wife and watch her enjoy getting a mega geared toon that could destroy any wobbly that tried to mug her while she gathered herbs."

Your not-so-awesome gamesauce wife has plenty for her in cata. You can get really decent gear without ever running a heroic. Gear that will at least let you decimate any open world mob.

In fact that's my problem right now. I have a few pieces of high level gear and dailies are quite frankly mindlessly boring. I hit one or two skills and the mob is dead. Next. How is this fun? It's just basically repetition with no challenge.

Spend some time educating your not-so-awesome gamesauce wife so she can play the game with a little skill. She'll thank you for it.

Gods, I still can't believe there are so many people with this mindset that posts like this are getting upvoted. Do you guys seriously all just want something that spews out virtual loot with no challenge? Rewards just for pitching up? Isn't there something inside you guys that gets a kick out of overcoming a challenge as part of a team? Just what the hell happened to people...

@Plastic Rat

It saddens me to say this but we reasonable people are now the minority after Wrath. Everyone wants the 20 minute dungeon that awards epics instead of the challenge. If Retisgimped posted his opinion when wrath came out, people would be downvoting him telling him he is unreasonable. But I have come to accept that Wrath has fostered this mentality of everything being quick and easy and people like him are now the majority. You and me are now the minority as most of the people who think like us and who actually want a challenge have left the game for other games. I have found myself playing less and less as well and if not for my friends I would not be playing this game any more. It saddens me to see how far this game that could have been the greatest game in history has fallen. It is no longer about the epic experience of going through a dungeon and working towards a goal but more about completing a dungeon as fast as possible and collecting loot. Anything that takes more than 30 minutes is now considered hard, unaccessible or unreasonable. People like us who enjoy the game for its challenge and not because of purple pixels are now called elitists, nerds or worse. It's a game they say. We're already stressed in our real life, why should we put any more effort into a game. A game is supposed to be fun, they say. But I say to myself, where is the fun if we do not control our destinies? Where is the fun if the only possibility is that of success, even if we do not deserve it? Blizzard themselves who created this game originally to cater to people like us who want a challenge have gone away from this philosophy and moved towards designing a game that will retain the most customers. Keep feeding them epics and they will continue to play they say. What Blizzard doesn't know is that easy modes are turning us real fans of the game away and once the allure of epics wear out these people who are just in it for the purples will be gone as well. Downvote me all you want. This is just one man's humble opinion and hopefully there are enough of us out there who share the same views

@Plastic Rat
The "fast" bit, for me, is making sure I can still get instances done with my very limited availability of contiguous play time. I could do the daily random heroic with more than one character every day in the WotLK era; in Cataclysm, if I was lucky, I would be able to do a couple of them per week with just one character.

Games are a leisure activity for me. They must fit my schedule, not the other way. Cataclysm not fitting my schedule (while the other 3 MMOs I tried out and still play do fit) was a good part of the reason I'm not subscribed to WoW anymore.

I'm amazed at the posts that have been mass upvoted and downvoted.

Why did "Jfofla" get downvoted? Because he said he enjoyed the game? We can't even enjoy the game anymore now?

You know, I don't even want them to make the game harder for the casuals. I really wish they could just give the masses what they want. Huge dolops of epic pixels that they so desperately want along with loot pinata dungeons. It's what the masses want, so give it to them.

Just give the rest of us an option. Make a hardcore server where we can go and frolic with our fellow masochists. Where XP is given slowly and leveling up takes a bit longer. Where mobs have more hitpoints and hit back a bit harder. It's perfectly doable. Hell, I believe there are probably private servers that have that already. I'd even play on one if it wasn't illegal.

So come on Blizzard, with your millions of subscribers, isn't it possible to find enough of us 'masochists' to fill one server? And if so, isn't it worth it to keep us paying?

What makes Cata heroics so brutal?

What specific mechanics makes Cata so difficult?

If the issue is with CC/interrupting quit complaining. You only have to use it til you have an average of ilevel 346. Heroics are designed for a 329 average. At 346 you're more than a tier above the content.

I suspect i'm in the minority on this, but i liked wrath heroics too, for a very specific reason: i have a buttload of alts. Right now i've got four 85s, none of them even resembling geared, and they probably never will be, because it would take me FOREVER to even get heroic geared. I liked being able to play for three hours and get heroics done on six or seven chars. Now i'd probably get it done on two, three if i'm lucky. I had one geared toon in BC, and that was fine, because i didn't know any better, but i got hooked on alts in wrath. Obviously there's not going to be that many people who play like me (my guildies think its kind of bizarre), but it's the reason i miss wrath.

To me, as a casual player, Effort does not equal reward.

I'll be gone soon too, I'm not sure why I took last months subscription....

However, to those who demanded this "Elitist" content, I hope you enjoy that big empty server where you and your fan can appreciate each other without those pesky casual players.