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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 5 of 5)
jlhealy Sep 28th 2011 5:22PM
Cephas said...
4.3 is adding a Maelstrom Shatter. 2 Heavenly Shards per Maelstrom Crystal. Farmability will be going up, not down.
Is this confirmed or just speculation? The only thing I've seen about the shatter has been people saying "This would be nice to have." Is it on the PTR?
Arrohon Sep 28th 2011 3:22PM
Something that was not mentioned: you can do the new 5-mans with the normal heroic queue too. This way you can choose to either do a true random heroic just for the VP or do a random Dragon Soul 5-man for the gear. So, when you queue you could get Deadmines or you might get Endtime.
ogawd Sep 28th 2011 3:31PM
O gawd no!!!! Please don't do this to us! I beg if there is even a wow god out there, PLEASE don't do this to us!! It's bad enough already!! QQQQQQQQQ Noooooo!!!! The queue's are bad enough lately, this shall make it that much worse! All the geared toons are done running trolls, I think if I was to see another troll I will throw my pc out the window!! Don't make me do that :(
Guy Sep 28th 2011 3:35PM
I don't really see why people would want to queue up for the new instances when they can get the same VP by running through something like Deadmines with 378 gear. Right now I do the troll instances because I get twice as much VP and now most of the groups are pretty good overall so it isn't a big deal. But if I got 140 VP for running old heroics, I would. I know the drops will be better, but if they are like the troll instances the drops will be a lower ilvl than what I can buy with current VP. So outside of the helm and shoulders for non-raiders, there seems to be little reason to run them early on.
kristelledecker Sep 28th 2011 3:39PM
To me this is a good idea and a bad idea at the same time. I like the fact that I won't have to run the same two dungeons providing more VP over and over and over again, which gets quit monotonous. In my experience, ZG and ZA provide ample opportunities to pick up good groups that can complete them fairly easily now. 'Bad groups' is still a big problem though when newcomers come in that don't have experience with the two dungeons. Doing this change will allow even more newcomers into the dungeon groups that wouldn't try them before, which will make ZG and ZA 'hard' once again.
Also, some people queue for ZG and ZA specifically for better gear than the other dungeons offer, but this change will not allow them to choose those dungeons specifically, which would most likely get really frustrating and cause even more auto group-quits upon entry of the dungeons.
Boobah Sep 28th 2011 3:55PM
The gear discrepancy (in drops, anyways) between the launch heroics and the Zandalari isn't that great. Especially when you add in the seven or so slots filled with Justice Point 378s.
ScrubRogue Sep 28th 2011 3:53PM
I sure hope they make any dungeon available via randoms, I have yet to do any of the pre zulagain dungeons. I've barely done the troll dungeons lol queue times are way too long.
They REALLY shouldn't use PVP gear to determine if you're eligible for a dungeon (guilty...very guilty)
Zani Sep 28th 2011 4:48PM
Ugh... I've only done deadmines on heroic (and it actually went fine), and then a few of the regular cata dungeons. Otherwise I've only done ZA and ZG. Which means I'm going to zone in to a dungeon, say "umm.. sorry guys I've never done this before, can you explain the bosses quickly?" and immediately get vote kicked as soon as its possible... sigh.
On the bonus side, those new dungeons (at least the End Time one that got reviewed in one of the articles on here. can't remember which) sound like they are a lot shorter than the Zul's. So maybe I'll just stick to those.
Sean Sep 28th 2011 5:40PM
Yeah,
this last set of dungeons wasn't as fun storyline wise nor progression like WotLK.
Then we had to the 2 OTHER randoms, the troll dungeons, which you need the gear to get in but you need the gear from it, kind of a catch 22. Zul aman...too long, and not as fun. I like ZG but can be tough with pugs.
Homeschool Sep 28th 2011 6:50PM
@Snuzzle - Yes. :) To clarify, "With the removal of Tier gear from the pool [of purchasable items], ..."
Homeschool Sep 28th 2011 6:53PM
Disregard - Reply-fail.
Altaholic Sep 28th 2011 8:30PM
Honestly, lately I've had more fail groups in regular heroics than in Trollroics. I actually am loathe to have to start running BRD and Stonecore and SFK again, instead of just facerolling through ZA/ZG with mostly people in FL gear just trying to quickly cap valor.
brain314 Sep 28th 2011 9:33PM
I've stopped doing troll randoms because they take longer and are more stressful than I'd like. I'd rather do 2 "normal" heroics than 1 troll dungeon. And it's not just a matter of undergeared people. The people are geared enough if they can enter the dungeon (although there are probably a few who slip in via PVP gear), but rather people not knowing the fights, and not following simple directions.
And now Blizzard wants to roll the regular heroics with the trolls? They better pull and Oculus and throw some massive bonus loot at the end because otherwise, the work-to-reward isn't worth it.
realisingself Sep 29th 2011 5:06AM
Not too keen having the Zand's in the general pool. They are a step up from the Normal Heroics, and as a tank, I would much rather carry a couple of dps in a normal heroic, than spend 30mins wiping on bosses which while quite easy, seem to be beyond most players in LFD.
That is unless they nerf the hell out of them so they can be farmed like current Normal Heroics.
Goran Sep 29th 2011 5:27AM
I guess it was inevitable and on a general level I do applaud this change. Having only two heroics giving out much larger rewards in VP can not be sustained when people got bored of thoese two within the first month of release already.
On the other hand we are sliding faster and faster on the slope of autofarmed gear.
Does not one of the designers see how it devalues anything you do in game when it just gets easier?
Getting points was easy enough already and now it's even more of a "stay logged in for 30+x minutes and collect points"-World of Warcraft.
Where is the fun in that?
Most people running those instances have no interest in the places, if they ever had, and just want their points and be done.
This sadly leads to one other thing though. With no interest in the challenge people have no interest in developing any skills within in the game. In this case that includes grouping skills. As bad as it has gotten, this has the potential to make it even worse, as now running the Zuls has no benefit over the other heroics apart from slightly better gear you can mostly replace in one night of raiding or with the vp earned anyway.
So even the not really hard but at least one notch up heroics will be bailed from in droves.
Why risk any kind of wipe potential and a 30 min investment at least when in that time you can log an alt, do dailies and requeue into something else?
On the other hand I'm really confused that any tank/healer is still going into LFD-heroics at all. With the state of behaviour and general aptitude of the average player I would not for the life of me enjoy having any kind of responsibility towards these groups.
Although many will like this change, because it makes gear farming so much easier it again is a step to make the game less involved, to make content meaningless and to make players robots on rails.
Legs Sep 29th 2011 8:38AM
Am I the only one who thinks most people have a biased view of PuGs for Heroics/Troll Heroics?
I'm not saying that every group is perfect, but I can't remember the last time I had a group that failed to finish a regular heroic, and overall I am pretty sure that at least 75% of the troll heroics I have run get through (although certainly some take longer than they "should")
I usually run with my guild's top healer, so maybe that is enough to tip the scales in my favour? Maybe, but I also think complaining about PuG groups is a WoW player's version of complaining about the weather...
Kittens Sep 30th 2011 10:54AM
You're not alone ;)
I've actually experienced the opposite lately when pugging on my healer; pretty much all my Zul runs are quick, clean and fast, I rarely encounter any group that is bad. But when I decided to go back to some normal heroics cause I needed only 60 more VP....... well.. those were disaster :/ People were barely geared for them, which is not bad BUT: they didn't care about CC/silencing/killing healer and caster mobs, everyone has aggro all over the place, bosstactics.. what are those? And my healer is well geared but when you are all little squishies that all insist on getting hit by everything all the time.. I'm gonna race through my mana even on trash packs haha. When I encounter such a group I always ask if anyone needs tacts before a boss because I'm happy to give them. Either everyone stays dead silent, says 'LOL' or 'no'.. and then they wipe cause apparently no-one knows what on earth they were supposed to be doing. This was just a few evenings of normal heroics so I might have had some extreme bad luck, but it caused me to leave three groups in a row.. and I rarely ever abandon ship, no matter how bad it gets.
I think this could be caused by almost all the better more geared players only running the Zuls, effectively removing a lot of good players from the normals. Now, I'm very happy they are going to pair up the Zuls with the rest of the heroics again, but.. the same problem will still exist for a while.. because all those good players in the Zuls now? They'll be in the three new Hour of Twilight dungeons. Lets hope that after the newness of those heroics has worn off, people will mix through the dungeons evenly because of the 150 VP reward for all of them.
Legs Sep 30th 2011 11:02AM
Glad to hear I'm not alone then!
I haven't been running a lot of dungeons the last couple weeks (have all the valor gear I need on my main and RL is too busy to gear up alts), but I hadn't seen that non-zul suckiitude.
I do know for a fact that most of my guildies who got their bear got it in PuGs, and I have been in two PuGs who have gotten the bear and several that were VERY close. For me I would say the ration of awesome runs to terrible runs is probably 3:1 or so...
One of my favourite types of groups (in non-zuls anyway) are the ones that listen to instructions but are poorly geared; we still get through, but slowly. When that happens I like trying to account for as much of the DPS as possible :) I have managed 60+% of the damage on bosses, and I think 47% is my best mark for a whole run...