Patch 5.2 interview with Dave Kosak
Inside an old alt's vault
The latest patch 5.2 news
All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsPatch 4.3 PTR: Zandalari heroics no longer in own tier; all heroics award 150 VP
by Mathew McCurley 
Sep 28th 2011 at 2:30PM
Moving the Zandalari heroics into the general heroic pool seemed like it would happen eventually, considering that having multiple tiers of dungeons to queue up for could get confusing over time. Now, players will be placed into dungeons based on their ilevel and not necessarily which dungeon category they queue for.
This presents an interesting dilemma, though. Players who want to do a quick heroic right now can queue for a random, non-Troll heroic and be in and out with half the VP (and half the stress -- I'm looking at you, Jin'do) in half the time of a Troll heroic. In 4.3, it doesn't appear that you'll have the option. Then again, everyone at a high enough gear level to care about this stuff will just queue for the Hour of Twilight heroics anyway, right?
Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!
Filed under: News items, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 5)
Homeschool Sep 28th 2011 6:53PM
@Snuzzle - Yes. :) To clarify, "With the removal of Tier gear from the pool [of purchasable items], ..."
Molly Sep 28th 2011 2:53PM
No. No no no. NO. I *hate* running the Troll dungeons with anything short of a full guild group. I have pugged ZG all of four times, and three of those times ended in me slamming my laptop shut in frustration at Jin'do. Don't even get me started on the hell that is pugging ZA...
Kylenne Sep 28th 2011 3:13PM
My favorite ZA pugs are ones where most of the group just barely meet the gear requirements, DPS is hovering around 10k, and somebody insists on a bear run. Bonus points if it's a DPS running ahead to pull for the tank.
Molly Sep 28th 2011 3:18PM
Extra bonus points if wipes that result run down the timer, people drop as a result, and you can't get anyone to stick around to finish the dungeon because the timer ran out.
I need a drink just thinking about it...
Chetti Sep 28th 2011 2:56PM
I think I've completed Deadmines successfully twice.. can't count the amount of times I've been randomed into it though. People leave at the door (and I will follow, but I will not break a group willing to try), or the group gets going and someone drops after whatever fight. I'll stick it out as long as the people dropping get replaced relatively quickly (which, with dps its almost instant). Yesterday I zoned into a group that was at the reaper guy, I was told I was the 3rd dps replacement. After the fight, another one left, bring on #4! By the time we got the ripsnarl, a 5th replacement had come in. Not sure what happened, but phase 2 fog and ghosts, ripsnarl threw us all off the boat (not in the kill him or be consumed part, we didn't get that far), I got dumped in the water along with most of the group, the tank got splatted on the beach.. I left when the healer starting complaining again. I'd rather do Shadowfang! And I'm not a fan of that place either. The other cata heroics aren't terrible (though I thought they would be), except.. the beams in Blackrock.
I can do the Zandalaris, but I won't throw myself into them alone. I go with a guildie or 2 though. I'm still waiting for shoulders from ZA, I forget who drops em, but he's been VERY stingy with them! I guess it was only a matter of time before they'd become part of "the heroics" instead of being their own thing. Cause really, how random can you get with 2 options. Now there are 10 options on that random button, which is nice.. always a surprise to see where you're headed.. though I agree, I see lots of groups falling apart at either of the troll doors.
I am really looking forward to the new heroics, something new to do.. little worried though, but thats mostly because this new alt is the best character I've ever had (doing current teir heroics while they're current!). The ICC 5-mans were amazing the first time I saw them (during cata though, not while they were relevant). I think these new ones are going to be awesome as well.
Boobah Sep 28th 2011 3:48PM
If y'all got thrown off the boat... it's because nobody (or at least not enough) was killing the adds before they exploded.
If there's a vapor up, that's your target, unless you can kill Ripsnarl before they blow (ie, when he summons an extra three simultaneously just before he dies.)
GhostWhoWalks Sep 28th 2011 2:56PM
Personally, I hated how they gave the Zandalari heroics their own queue. Not only did it divide up the players, contributing to the long queue times, but it meant that you only had a choice of two dungeons through which to get your weekly VP cap. Talk about tedious.
By comparison, Wrath heroics gave you about a dozen different heroics you could get put into, providing for lots of variety and ensuring that you could run randoms for a few hours and never see the same dungeon twice. This was, infact, the preferred passtime for many of my guildies during the Wrath days; we'd get a team of 5 together and then have a blast just chain-running heroics for a few hours.
Granted, ZG and ZA had more bosses in each run than most of the Cataclysm heroics, but I took a look at my armory page and I'm nearing 40 kills on Jin'do and Daakara each; there's something wrong with that picture.
Kylenne Sep 28th 2011 3:21PM
You do realize though that queue times are actually shorter for the regular heroics than for the trolls, though, right? And that it's been this way for a while? As DPS, my average queue time for a regular heroic is somewhere around 10 minutes, and it usually pops sooner than that. For a Zul, it's closer to 20. It's because no one with the option not to is pugging them, or because people who are just trying to get valor capped understand that the easier heroics are faster to finish and easier to carry undergeared folks through. ZA is pretty fast with geared people, but ZG takes forever even when everyone is geared and on their game, and you skip bosses.
That's why everyone's rightfully saying the Zuls are going to be the new Oculus/HoR. We're already seeing a stark contrast between the numbers of people (particularly tanks and healers) who are willing to pug Zuls vs. regular heroics. Throwing the Zuls into the general heroics bag is only going to exacerbate the problem, especially if Hour of Twilight dungeons remain as quick and relatively painless as they are on the PTR now. (Yes, most everyone's overgearing them on the PTR, but I don't see them really taking much longer at the proper gear level).
GhostWhoWalks Sep 28th 2011 4:55PM
Except I've seen the exact opposite in my Zul runs. With more people who are geared and who are familiar with the mechanics of the dungeons, it's been several weeks since I had a failed run, or even a run that took longer than half an hour. And I know the exact opposite end of the spectrum too: after 4.1 hit, I could never get a group who could finish a run, and those that did tended to take a few hours with numerous wipes in the process.
The queue time for the Cataclysm heroics have gone down, yes...but it's been because the gear from the Zul heroics and then 4.2 gear made them much more manageable. For many of us, the Zul heroics are already getting to that point of manageability, and once 4.3 hits that will be true for a much wider range of people (nerfed Firelands, the Hour of Twilight heroics and then the LFR gear drops will all ensure that picking up 378 gear will carry much less stress). A group wearing a mix of 365 and 378 items could nearly faceroll the majority of ZG and ZA. Example: the Nalorakk trash pulls that contained Witch Doctors used to require atleast one CC or a wipe was almost guaranteed. Now I've had PuGs who could just burn down those groups without much difficulty.
There are two things you're forgetting when you make the comparison to Oculus and Halls of Reflection. First, people dropped from Occ due to the increased complexity of just finding your way around, not because the fights were hard (in fact, it was probably one of the easier of the 80 heroics). Eregos could give some people problems, but once you figured out how to use the drakes, it was fairly straight-forward. (Except for the Planar Shift, people seemed determined to face-tank the orbs he summons...) Second, Halls of Reflection was very brutal and unforgiving even with ICC gear; the rush of mobs in each wave and the tactics to kill each one more easily were difficult to handle even for the more skilled players.
The Zul dungeons don't suffer much from either problem. Sure, Jin'do still confuses some people, and pulling adds in ZA can lead to a wipe, but they're nowhere near as complex or tough as Occ or HoR, and they'll only get easier once 4.3 rolls around.
I think all of these people raising concerns about PuGs disbanding as soon as they see the ZA or ZG loading screens are being a bit preemptive. Sure, they can be a bit longer than the Cata heroics, but we'll be able to blaze through them just as easily with all of the new gear we'll be getting.
perderedeus Sep 28th 2011 2:57PM
Everyone who says ZA and ZG will become the Oculus of Cata...
You're absolutely correct. And if Blizzard doesn't see this coming a mile away, their designers should clue in to something called "trends."
We'll need either a "Hexed Bag of Goodies" as an extra reward off Jin'do/Dakarra, or they'll nerf the difficulty. I can foresee people getting grumpy about Deadmines too. Basically anything that's a "bit harder" or a "bit longer" than the average faceroll heroic... players will try to avoid like the plague.
Lemons Sep 28th 2011 3:11PM
Yea Deadmines is just annoying. The Vanessa Vancleef fight especially. Whose idea was that? Go through all these bosses' history? Who cares where these loot pinatas came from? They're like the one time actors that you see on Star Trek who show up in one episode and die later on in the same episode. Who wants to know that guy's history? No one.
clundgren Sep 28th 2011 3:22PM
Agreed but...the reality is that the Troll dungeons are FAR tougher than Occulus. Occulus demanded a different mechanic for the final fight, but the reality was that an experienced group could knock out an Occulus in >15 minutes. The goody bag was enough incentive that at least some groups would put up with it.
On top of that, players hadn't been essentially forced to run just Occulus for months on end. Even if they massively nerf the troll dungeons, I frankly never want to see the inside of them again.
The incentive to get groups to stick with the troll dungeons will have to be massive. And most players will still probably drop.
This whole issue is just one more example of how ham-fisted Blizzard has been with tuning this entire expansion. I am frankly amazed at how much tinkering they have done with a system that was essentially working well.
Were Wrath heroics faceroll by the end? Yes. And that was a GOOD thing. The reality is that for most regular players, after the first few times running them, the novelty is off, and running heroics is largely like doing dailies: part of the grind. The dungeon finder firmly cemented this mentality, for better or worse.
And when running the heroic is something you feel like you need to do, rather than want to do, it's better to just make it faceroll so that players can at least get a kick out of pushing big numbers, tanking 20 mobs at once, etc.
Chetti Sep 28th 2011 3:25PM
Deadmines wouldn't be so terrible without the nightmare stage. Stupid rotating bars, with no room to squeeze my skeleton bones past, kills me every damn time. EVERY. TIME. Hate it so much. The Vancleef fight with the ropes isn't even bad, that part is kinda neat.
I remember last week I did a run with a new tank that had never seen heroic deadmines. It was a very long, wipe-filled run, though I've got to hand it to everyone in the group because everyone stayed. Tank was honest from the get go, asked for tips. We had someone who was VERY good at the reaper (thank god, because I can't work that thing at all). It was funny, we got up the dock to the boat, right before he pulled ripsnarl and said "this is the end right?". We all got a good chuckle - "no, sorry.. this is where the real *FUN* begins >.
kaminari Sep 28th 2011 3:50PM
what are you talking about? when the group is decked in T 12 the troll heroics are a face roll, and when that gear is sold for justice ponts most people will be on T 12 with the odd piece of valor gear to run the trolloics.
clundgren Sep 28th 2011 4:30PM
@Kaminari
I think you define "faceroll" differently than the vast majority of the player base, as reactions to this article demonstrate.
Again, if people were dropping CoT, which really was faceroll, because it was *slightly* longer than the other randoms, they will be doing so FAR more quickly for the troll dungeons. The fact that you personally think Jin-do is "faceroll" is irrelevant.
ecwfrk Sep 28th 2011 5:08PM
Yeah, Oculus stayed hated for PuGs because of the drake mechanics. For guild groups, it was once of the quickest dungeons to run thanks to all the nerfs they gave it to try and get people to stick when it popped.
Once people start complaining about people dropping groups right after the loading screen fades, Blizz will likely nerf the Troll dungeons' difficulty to more closely match the other dungeons. They may even do it before the patch goes live.
kaminari Sep 28th 2011 5:13PM
@ clundgren, no I think my definition of faceroll is the same, however I think most of the posters are not considering the flow of the game, remember all the complains about the old heroics being hard?, but after a couple of weeks when people got T 11 from justice points they became a lot easier, the same thing will happen after 4.3 drops.
giving everyone T 12 with justice points will be enough of a "stealth nerf" for people to face roll thru he troll heroics.
if you had do them with current gear levels you would have a point, content becomes easier with every new gear tier released.
jlhealy Sep 28th 2011 3:01PM
This sucks. I am almost all 378, and I still prefer the normal heroics - they drop cloth and heavenly shards, and they aren't nearly as long as the troll ones. I forsee heavenly shards becoming even MORE expensive once people can't even farm LFD for them.
Cephas Sep 28th 2011 3:04PM
4.3 is adding a Maelstrom Shatter. 2 Heavenly Shards per Maelstrom Crystal. Farmability will be going up, not down.
Chetti Sep 28th 2011 3:30PM
I really enjoy doing the regular heroics more as well, groups are always hit or miss. But, I do LOVE LOVE LOVE coming out of grim batol or tol'vir with like 6 stacks of embersilk (I'm a tailor, so I get the extra cloth).