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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsBreakfast Topic: Are heroics really heroic?
by Anne Stickney 
Dec 29th 2011 at 8:00AM
Uh-oh, it's semantics time again, combined with a trip to the way-back machine, even! I still have nightmares about heroics back in The Burning Crusade when they were first introduced. In order to even get into heroic dungeons, you needed a key, and to get that key, you needed a certain amount of faction reputation. When The Burning Crusade launched, you needed to be revered to get a key; this was later reduced to honored. Needless to say, it took a very long time before anyone could step into heroic modes -- and they were difficult, to say the very least.
Trash respawn timers were tight. If you were lucky, you could get to the first boss before the trash started to respawn on you, and if you wiped on the first boss, you got to enjoy the experience of clearing all that trash all over again. Bosses were incredibly difficult, as well -- healing was an absolute nightmare. These days, in comparison, heroics are ridiculously easy. No, I am not kidding you. They are a breeze compared to the early days of The Burning Crusade. You don't have to work to get into them other than obtaining the appropriate gear, and once you're inside, the bosses aren't that much of a struggle.
So that leads to the question we were pondering in work chat -- are heroics these days really heroic? Sure, the items you get from the dungeons are better than your normal dungeon gear, but the difficulty of the dungeons isn't really ramped up anywhere near the extreme that we saw in The Burning Crusade. To me, heroic mode still equates to that antiquated BC model, where heroic meant hard mode, and hard mode meant You will want to stab yourself in the eye with a fork three pulls into the place.
There is something to be said about the sheer relief and sense of accomplishment you got when you cleared one of those old dungeons; you really felt like you'd done something great and played to the best of your ability. In Mists, we're looking at an endgame that doesn't even have normal mode dungeons -- at level 90, you simply leap into heroics. My question is whether or not the term "heroic" even has meaning at this point. We've gone from hard mode and a rep grind, to a slightly less severe rep grind, to not needing a key at all, to heroics you can simply AoE through without having to think too terribly hard about any given thing.
Should heroics still be called heroics? Or are they simply regular dungeons that give better loot, now? What do you think?
Trash respawn timers were tight. If you were lucky, you could get to the first boss before the trash started to respawn on you, and if you wiped on the first boss, you got to enjoy the experience of clearing all that trash all over again. Bosses were incredibly difficult, as well -- healing was an absolute nightmare. These days, in comparison, heroics are ridiculously easy. No, I am not kidding you. They are a breeze compared to the early days of The Burning Crusade. You don't have to work to get into them other than obtaining the appropriate gear, and once you're inside, the bosses aren't that much of a struggle.
So that leads to the question we were pondering in work chat -- are heroics these days really heroic? Sure, the items you get from the dungeons are better than your normal dungeon gear, but the difficulty of the dungeons isn't really ramped up anywhere near the extreme that we saw in The Burning Crusade. To me, heroic mode still equates to that antiquated BC model, where heroic meant hard mode, and hard mode meant You will want to stab yourself in the eye with a fork three pulls into the place.
There is something to be said about the sheer relief and sense of accomplishment you got when you cleared one of those old dungeons; you really felt like you'd done something great and played to the best of your ability. In Mists, we're looking at an endgame that doesn't even have normal mode dungeons -- at level 90, you simply leap into heroics. My question is whether or not the term "heroic" even has meaning at this point. We've gone from hard mode and a rep grind, to a slightly less severe rep grind, to not needing a key at all, to heroics you can simply AoE through without having to think too terribly hard about any given thing.
Should heroics still be called heroics? Or are they simply regular dungeons that give better loot, now? What do you think?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 6)
loop_not_defined Dec 29th 2011 1:36PM
If they added a tougher version of dungeons to mirror LFR/Raids, it would not be through the queue system. Like raids, you would need to pre-form and run out to the dungeon in question.
The moment you throw random players together is the moment the entire "challenging content" dynamic falls apart.
The next question becomes, would enough players engage this content to make it worth the extra development time? While I think more players would participate in these difficult dungeons than in Normal raids, I'm not sure it would be enough to justify the development time. Balancing content is nothing to sneeze at.
loop_not_defined Dec 29th 2011 1:38PM
Side note, the comment system eats < and > characters. To get them to display, you need to type "<" and ">" minus quotes. The letters stand for "less than" and "greater than" if you need help remembering the code.
ZodiacDragons Dec 29th 2011 2:30PM
Thank you loop. I didn't know that. You basically said what I wanted to tho.
Haro Dec 29th 2011 9:34AM
I am not sure i buy the point that Heroics are now essentially easier than they were BC. Yes i never played BC, but bear with me:
Are they more accessible? Less grindy to run? Sure, those are objectively measurable parameters. But easier, as in player power/boss power ratio, boss mechanics, trash mechanics? On launch? running them exclusively with regular dungeon gear?
People who can compare BC heroics with Cata heroics have been playing since BC (duh!)... that's a lot of time. Time enough to have gotten much better at understanding the stuff the devs can throw at us. On the other hand, people new to the game as just as skilled now as you were at BC, and now you are much more skilled at the game. If they increase the difficulty of the heroics accordingly to the veterans increase of skill, new players will not be able to catch up.
So, i don't really buy that heroics are now objectively easier. Veterans are just much better at them than they were at BC. And us, news, casuals or bads, are having just as a hard time with Cata heroics as veterans did when they were first confronted with BC heroics.
Tabasa Dec 29th 2011 10:21AM
The biggest difference, really, was that gear was far less accessible in Burning Crusade than it has been since. If you were a non-raider, chances were fairly low that you would ever out-gear the dungeons. Adding to that the fact that a lot of the dungeons didn't really have much of a difference in loot between normal and heroic modes (the ones that had level 70 equivalents basically dropped the same gear in both modes with the exception of epic gems and the end boss dropping epics), and gearing up was just a much longer process then.
At best, non-raiders wound up in Kara or ZA-equivilent gear levels. Which took the edge off of some of the dungeons, but didn't totally overpower them.
Compare that to Wrath and Cata, where it became considerably easier to get more powerful gear as the expansions went on. Adding to that the removal of the "gated" concept by taking away the rep grinds to get into the heroics in the first place (Anne's not kidding when she talks about it taking a while to even be able to access the heroics), and the entire process was much faster.
As far as sheer difficulty goes, was Burning Crusade harder than Wrath and Cata? That's hard to actually say, because perception goes a long way in coloring someone's judgement, and there was an awful lot in place in Burning Crusade to keep the majority of the player base at the level where the content was very difficult. I do recall doing a few heroics in Burning Crusade with people geared in full T6, though, and it being just as much a "run through and burn everything" experience as anything in Wrath was.
So I agree with you that objectively, the actually gap in difficulty between BC and later stuff isn't nearly as wide as people claim. The model most definitely did change, though, and that did make heroic dungeons easier on a functional level, regardless of the actual tuning.
It's a necessary side effect to them wanting to open up the content to more and more of the player base, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. At the very least, avoiding it completely would mean taking away an awful lot of improvements to the game that I doubt players would be willing to part with, however nostalgic for BC they claim to be.
srshupe Jan 3rd 2012 2:23PM
"So, i don't really buy that heroics are now objectively easier. Veterans are just much better at them than they were at BC. And us, news, casuals or bads, are having just as a hard time with Cata heroics as veterans did when they were first confronted with BC heroics."
Nope. Here's the thing: in their first iteration, BC heroics *required* CC on trash pulls. Or the highly skilled and as-geared-as-possibly tank died. Pull aggro on trash? Dead. Don't move out of the fire instantly? Dead. There was no margin for error.
These days you can waltz into a heroic, the tank grabs entire trash packs at once, and it gets AE'd down.
So it's not a question of skill. The two factors that have really changed since then is that tanks don't really have threat issues anymore, not even on packs, and that blue or purple gear is easier to get before you head into the dungeon. But that doesn't account for the difference in difficulty.
amnbrownie Dec 29th 2011 9:34AM
I miss those days in BC, though it's not to say we're better off. The dungeons felt epic, and as a fairly new player who wasn't raiding yet, they were exciting to me. If you had the time to sit and wait, and make friends to do dungeons with, they were a hard, fun experience. Those were truly heroic dungeons; and the fact that you had to get enough rep to get inside them made them all the more prestigious.
They definitely don't have that heroic feel anymore, and I don't think the name applies anymore...but it has kind of become the namesake for dungeons, so changing it would be just extra work and likely cause confusion.
As a side note, though I wish the new dungeons had that old Magister's Terrace challenge to them, I think for the player base we currently have, they did a fine job tuning the difficulty and making them a little interesting. They all have a simple mechanic or two that you must do (Interrupt Azshara, break through the ghoul circle) without being too complicated for the guy who's in the back autoattacking and watching tv.
amnbrownie Dec 29th 2011 9:43AM
Though I see your point, the simple fact is there is less required of you for the majority of the fights/trash in Cata Heroics. Nearly all the pulls in BC required heavy CC, cool downs, interrupts, etc... as a healer, you would likely have to drink after every trash pull. It would take that much mana to sustain your group, and back then, you could cast lower ranked spells to conserve mana. It wasn't unheard of for a hunter to chain trap or kite a mob around when things got crazy. You couldn't just AOE the whole group. Now days there are a few gimmic trash pulls, but for the most part, you just aoe or single them down if there's only a couple...you don't HAVE to interrupt, CC, or anything of the sort.
Not every single pull was like this, and if you were one of the few people who raided heavily and had good gear, I'm sure things weren't this challenging. But it took a lot more time to get gear, and unless you raided or had hours to spend grinding mats for a crafted piece of gear, you were in blues and greens. After some time, I had a group of friends that I ran dungeons with on a regular basis, and though we had developed a rhythm, things could still go wrong and we would wipe.
Haro Dec 29th 2011 10:14AM
Every single one of the things you said (healer running out of mana after every pull, using 2 or even 3 CCs if available, interrupting key abilities, hunters chaining frost trap (or freeze, never played a hunter, so i don't know the exact name)... i've seen them as required at the start of cata in heroics. Not as nice to have, but required. I've seen many LFD just break after the first pull because there was no CCer.
What's the difference with now? that by then we only had 333 gear, except for a few rep pieces, and some 346 gear from JPs. Now we are decked out in 378 gear, which is, in terms of raw stats, logaritmically as far from 333 as 333 was from wrath regular gear.
Gimmlette Dec 29th 2011 9:49AM
As a long-term player, I remember the days of incessant runs of Ramps to get the rep to get the key so you could turn around and run "heroic" Ramps. I got one key before the rep reward was changed to Honored. That was a magnificent change as it opened up these dungeons to a huge number of people, some whom were raiding SSC/TK. WOW life was different back then, our goals different, the tone of the game was different.
Back then, those "heroic" dungeons were meant to be hard and not for the average gamer. I remember the complaints about heroic Black Morass. On my server, I think there were only three or four guilds that completed it before it was nerfed. I remember taking an adequately geared group in there and not lasting through the first three waves. Heroic Hillsbrad was another dungeon people complained about, vociferously. I spent 5 hours working on heroic Shadow Labs. Can you imagine 5 hours spent working through a heroic 5-man today? I just spent 5 days clearing it every day to get Murmur's pole arm for transmog purposes. I ran past half the mobs and the first boss. Oh the memories. (A side note, if we don't need the key for Kara anymore, why is the phylactery still behind Murmur?)
I don't look back on those days with rose-colored glasses. The way the game was billed was that these instances were HARD. It was hard to get into them. You needed people who knew how to play their class. You HAD to run the regulars and be in solid blues before stepping into a heroic. If you had one piece of green on you, it was almost a death sentence. Being able to access that content now is a very good thing. It is hugely demoralizing to wipe repeatedly before you get to the first boss. 5 hours? No thanks.
But I do think there should remain a challenge level for us. I view heroics as the stage in-between instances, where you start amassing raid gear, and the raids themselves. I think that level should always be there. With a new expansion, the 5-mans give you a flavor of the kinds of things you'll be facing in the raids. I tell my guild that running the heroic 5-mans gives us a chance to learn to work together. If we can handle running heroics, we are ready for raiding.
BC heroics are the "up hill, both ways, in the snow, barefoot" stories. I felt Wrath heroics were something of a joke. Cata heroics are much better in terms of needing everyone to be on their playing toes. I don't wish to go back to the grind that was BC heroic running, but I don't want the faceroll that was Wrath. I'm interested to see how the MoP instances play out.
Jack Spicer Dec 29th 2011 11:24AM
I want there to be a challenge level between raiding and heroics that is very bluntly not for people with only 30 minutes to play.
Aaron Dec 29th 2011 8:04PM
"Can you imagine 5 hours spent working through a heroic 5-man today? "
I couldn't imagine doing that in TBC. If I had to choose between that and finding a new game, I'd have found a new game. As WoW's population ages (a college junior in TBC is now 25 years old with a semi-serious girlfriend, working two crappy jobs until a decent one opens up), I think more people are in that predicament. Me myself personally, I don't expect all the content to be broken into tiny chunks, but I appreciate that I can log on for an hour and do something more interesting than farming herbs.
"(A side note, if we don't need the key for Kara anymore, why is the phylactery still behind Murmur?)"
You don't need the key, but you can still do the quest chain; in fact, I'm right in the middle of it. It's good lore, and it gives me an excuse to solo some Outland dungeons. Also, the Violet Eye quest chains give about 10K rep, so if you're in a hurry to max your Violet rep, you can cut out one Kara run that way.
Jack said:
"I want there to be a challenge level between raiding and heroics that is very bluntly not for people with only 30 minutes to play"
And that's totally fair. I like big complex dungeons like Blackrock Depths, with multiple wings, a dozen bosses, and a tavern in the middle. I just can't go there on a whim, or because the RNG says that's my random dungeon for the day.
robsmith77 Dec 29th 2011 9:51AM
At the start of each expansion, when players don't out-gear the fights, the answer is yes. But as the average ilvl of each player increases, so heroic dungeons become easier to the point where you probably don't even need a full group to run them.
Yaroukh Dec 29th 2011 10:05AM
LOL at "people got better". Are you even serious saying that, or are you merely trolling? Please stop fooling yourself. Get bunch of PUGs, go to Jin Do and tell me he isn't waaaaaay harder than any of the new 5mans bosses. I haven't wiped single time in the new 5mans. And no, I am not HC raider.
No, Heroic aren't Heroic anymore. And those talking about "Heroic" being only a word are safely missing the point. WoW has completely dropped whole difficulty level. Now those who like a bit of challenge have nothing to do in PvE unless they can get a raid team together. For me, that is significant loss.
Haro Dec 29th 2011 10:19AM
The new 3 heroics, yes, i'll agree those are way easier than the previous heroics (launch and trolls). But i assume those are just a free ticket to let everyone into the (too) high ilvl they require for LFR. Seriously, LFR would benefit in terms of challenge from a lower ilvl entrance requirement.
But i maintain all i said about cata heroics (yeah, excluding the end time thingy).
Marathal Dec 29th 2011 10:16AM
/facepalm
Yes yes yes. BC was hard. We get it, the fights were tougher................ you had to walk up hill both ways through driving snow...............
Keep in mind also
Computers were slower, if you were lucky you had DSL for a connection, did you even have Deadly Boss Mods?, Power Aura's?, any dozen of add on programs we all run without even thinking about it?
Its a fine line they have to walk. Do you design content for the absolute best, less than 1% of the players running on top of the line gaming rigs, with every add on program possible telling them when to move and what to cast the instant they need to or the other 99% that may not be running on a gaming tower and using a 4 year old lap top that has its video card raped when they try to run a 25 man. If you want a challeng turn off all the add on programs and play with the default UI and settings.
If you want to make them back to the ways they were in BC just put a tool tip note next to it saying "Here is content we spent thousands of hours developing, that you will never see. KThnxbye"
Sorry for the rant.
The Dewd Dec 29th 2011 10:16AM
BC Heroics were brutal and if you didn't have the right tank/healer/dps/CC, you were screwed. My guildmates and I tried to do a Shadow Labs run that took us, ultimately 2 days and 2 tries to get through. I forget the exact makeup but we had almost no usable CC and that 6-pull at the entrance to the 2nd boss' room was almost impossible.
The same can be said for a lot of the heroics at the start of Cata. Trying to do full guild runs, we found that being "coordinated" on voice chat doesn't offset the loss of health/damage/heals from Luck of the Draw if you don't have 5 people who are Zen Masters of their class and spec. I don't mind putting in the time to do a lengthy heroic but I can't stand the way Blizzard goes back and forth between "AoE Faceroll Trash/Deadly Boss" and "Deadly Trash/Faceroll Boss". I want a challenge but not one that's going to make me corpse run every other pull.
All that having been said, I like the new model better. If they want me to cap my valor every week, making me sit in a queue for most of the night or wipe endlessly with guildmates isn't much fun. I'd rather get in and out quick. I haven't seen too many wipes (random or premade) on the new instances unless people do something stupid. With the addition of the Raid Finder (and people who are gearing up through it), it's making even the new heroics pretty faceroll-able - and at least that means it's less painful to cap valor rather than running the same 2 Zul'Roics 7 times a week.
Stilhelm Dec 29th 2011 10:19AM
Don't forget that part of what made BC heroics hard was the way the game was then. A warrior's thunderclap hit a maximum of 4 targets, and shockwave didn't exist yet. Someone doing 1k dps at that time was pretty decent if they weren't in full 25-man raid gear. Now players can do 2k AoE dps at lvl 60, and 2-3k single-target dps at 70, and tanks can do even more.
Back in the day, there was separate caster gear for healing and dps, because before there was spellpower there was +healing and +damage. Plate often had agility, which provided nothing but a little dodge and crit. In short, itemization was terrible, it was like Blizzard went out of their way to make sure gear had stats you did *not* want, so choosing between gear meant choosing between the pieces that had the least of the stats you didn't want, not choosing pieces based on the stats you did want. Also, gear didn't fall off trees or otherwise just get handed to you.
The game was different then, it was what it was and was considered normal. The game is different now, in that there is virtually no thought or effort required to obtain gear. The things that require thought and effort now are normal and heroic raiding, and some achievements. Gear is so free they might as well just put it all at the vendor for a few copper each so some people aren't punished by bad luck.
Spellotape Dec 29th 2011 10:30AM
Difficulty is relative: there will always be part of the general population of the game that has a problem or significantly hard time completing a dungeon due to their own lack of ability/inexperience or that of someone else in the group.
There were and are plenty of people who did BC heroics and were/are average or terrible - same for anyone rolling a character last expansion, this one, or vanilla. The notion that grinding a rep and getting a key automatically makes you more awesome because you ran it a lot on normal is pretty self-aggrandising.
Marathal Dec 29th 2011 11:14AM
I started during Wrath, I did the grinds for keys. At first it was great having keys and being one of the few people could ask to get into a heroic. Towards the end I dreaded seeing someone leveling an Alt because I knew what was coming. "Can you get us into X heroic?" "Oh while your here would you mind helping run us through?" Not going to miss that part.