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by Michael Sacco 
Mar 5th 2012 at 10:00PM
Read the full interview after the break.
Cataclysm Post Mortem -- Dungeons and Raids with Scott "Daelo" Mercer
As a part of our post mortem series on Cataclysm, we sat down with World of Warcraft Lead Encounter Designer Scott "Daelo" Mercer to hear his thoughts on Cataclysm dungeons and raids.
Q. What were your main goals going into Cataclysm?
We really wanted to make sure we were creating new challenges, strong mechanics, and cool creatures while staying true to the expansion and the themes we wanted to carry out. The three raid dungeons came out well and we had a lot of fun bringing the story of Nefarian and the Twilight's Hammer to life. We were also able to add some dynamic mechanics in Throne of the Four Winds, which featured players moving across multiple platforms.
Q. How did this evolve over the various content patches?
Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman were entertaining raids with diverse mechanics, and they translated well when we converted them into Heroic dungeons for patch 4.1. Interesting mechanics and features that once were restricted to raids are now finding their way into our five-player dungeons.
Adding the Dungeon Journal in patch 4.2 was also a major step forward. We wanted to be able to share more information in the game so that players wouldn't feel the need to go look everything up on external websites. While those sites are great at what they do, we felt like we needed to try to alleviate the need to go out of the game to find the information players wanted to see.
The addition of Raid Finder in patch 4.3 also opened up more opportunities for players to be able to experience our raid content. The feature has proven to be extremely popular, and not just with people who had given up on raiding. Many players use Raid Finder to gear up their secondary characters, gain Valor for the week, or just because it's fun.
Q. What do you think worked best?
We've been reasonably successful with our tuning across all four raid difficulty modes. There were a few warts here and there, but we delivered on the idea that 10-player and 25-player raids could exist at a similar difficulty. We also had some memorable dungeons and cinematic moments in Cataclysm. I'm particularly fond of the interactive bombing run in Grim Batol involving the red drakes. Players really got a sense of the epic scale of Grim Batol, and how well they performed in the event could make clearing the rest of the dungeon much easier.
With our improved tools and the experience we've gained over the years, we've become better at finding ways to explain the mechanics of our encounters. Our bosses do a better job of warning players of incoming threats. In Dragon Soul we also began to better inform players of mechanics that caused them to die. Providing a better understanding of the encounters to players is an important goal. We feel that losing to a boss and not understanding why is frustrating, just as beating a boss and not understanding why you won is not as satisfying.
Q. What didn't work out as planned or expected?
Initially, we started off the Heroic dungeons at too high of a difficulty. The difficulty level rather abruptly changed when compared to the Heroics players experienced at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. This major change caught many players off guard, and frustrated some of them. The difficulty also increased the effective amount of time required to complete a dungeon to a longer experience than we wanted. With the release of patch 4.3 we're now in a much better place. We've always talked about being able to complete a dungeon over lunch, and the Hour of Twilight dungeons get us back to that goal. End Time, Well of Eternity, and Hour of Twilight all provide epic play experiences to our players, but at the real sweet spot of difficulty, complexity, and time commitment.
Q. Was there anything that surprised you about how players reacted to a particular encounter?
Not particularly. Something we've learned over the years is to expect the unexpected. The community is very creative and intelligent. The most important thing for us is that players are having fun. They often find interesting ways of approaching things that maybe we didn't expect, but as long the creative solution is still fun for everyone, we usually don't have a problem with it.
Q. What have you learned from Cataclysm and what are some of your top goals for Mists of Pandaria?
We learned we could create a crazy encounter like the Spine of Deathwing. It took a lot of hard work from the whole team and it was a difficult design challenge to tackle. How do you orchestrate a fight on the back of a gigantic flying dragon without inducing nausea? How do we make sure you feel like you're on Deathwing? Delivering that experience was really important and everyone wanted the opportunity to work on it. What was really great was that we launched the story of Cataclysm with the cinematic that showed Deathwing having his elementium plates being put on, then we end the expansion with those very same plates being torn off. It gives some real closure to storyline.
For Mists of Pandaria, we will continue to provide new dungeons and raids while also presenting interesting new types of content in the form of challenge modes and scenarios. Players will also be introduced to new enemies in the Sha, Mogu, and Mantids. Making those creatures come to life will be a lot of fun.
Q. Do you have a favorite dungeon or encounter from Cataclysm?
There are so many. The Conclave of Wind was a great one. Working out interesting mechanics that allowed players to go from platform to platform was a lot of fun and the environment felt really epic. A fight like that was a goal of the encounter team for a very long time.
Blackwing Descent was another favorite and working out the mechanics for the Atramedes fight gave us a lot to think about. How do you create an encounter with a blind dragon that fights? So we gave him sonar and showed the interaction with a sound meter on the player's UI.
In Bastion of Twilight, we really got to sell the corruption angle on Cho'gall which made for another really interesting fight.
Q. Is there a certain mechanic that you always wanted to do but couldn't do prior to Cataclysm?
Not really. There are so many cool ideas to work with that I never feel held back. It's easy to be creatively inspired by the people around you and their energy. It's never a problem of coming up with ideas. It's usually deciding which ones we want to go with next, but the possibilities are endless.
Q. Do you have a "dream" dungeon or encounter that you'd like to create if you had the opportunity?
I've never felt that I haven't been able to do the things I want to do. Everyone on the team is completely dedicated to giving us unlimited opportunities to make epic and awesome experiences. But, if I have to mention something, it would be huge giant death robots. We had Mimiron in Ulduar, but you just can't have too many death robots.
Q. Thank you for your time, Scott.
You're welcome.
Q. What were your main goals going into Cataclysm?
We really wanted to make sure we were creating new challenges, strong mechanics, and cool creatures while staying true to the expansion and the themes we wanted to carry out. The three raid dungeons came out well and we had a lot of fun bringing the story of Nefarian and the Twilight's Hammer to life. We were also able to add some dynamic mechanics in Throne of the Four Winds, which featured players moving across multiple platforms.
Q. How did this evolve over the various content patches?
Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman were entertaining raids with diverse mechanics, and they translated well when we converted them into Heroic dungeons for patch 4.1. Interesting mechanics and features that once were restricted to raids are now finding their way into our five-player dungeons.
Adding the Dungeon Journal in patch 4.2 was also a major step forward. We wanted to be able to share more information in the game so that players wouldn't feel the need to go look everything up on external websites. While those sites are great at what they do, we felt like we needed to try to alleviate the need to go out of the game to find the information players wanted to see.
The addition of Raid Finder in patch 4.3 also opened up more opportunities for players to be able to experience our raid content. The feature has proven to be extremely popular, and not just with people who had given up on raiding. Many players use Raid Finder to gear up their secondary characters, gain Valor for the week, or just because it's fun.
Q. What do you think worked best?
We've been reasonably successful with our tuning across all four raid difficulty modes. There were a few warts here and there, but we delivered on the idea that 10-player and 25-player raids could exist at a similar difficulty. We also had some memorable dungeons and cinematic moments in Cataclysm. I'm particularly fond of the interactive bombing run in Grim Batol involving the red drakes. Players really got a sense of the epic scale of Grim Batol, and how well they performed in the event could make clearing the rest of the dungeon much easier.
With our improved tools and the experience we've gained over the years, we've become better at finding ways to explain the mechanics of our encounters. Our bosses do a better job of warning players of incoming threats. In Dragon Soul we also began to better inform players of mechanics that caused them to die. Providing a better understanding of the encounters to players is an important goal. We feel that losing to a boss and not understanding why is frustrating, just as beating a boss and not understanding why you won is not as satisfying.
Q. What didn't work out as planned or expected?
Initially, we started off the Heroic dungeons at too high of a difficulty. The difficulty level rather abruptly changed when compared to the Heroics players experienced at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. This major change caught many players off guard, and frustrated some of them. The difficulty also increased the effective amount of time required to complete a dungeon to a longer experience than we wanted. With the release of patch 4.3 we're now in a much better place. We've always talked about being able to complete a dungeon over lunch, and the Hour of Twilight dungeons get us back to that goal. End Time, Well of Eternity, and Hour of Twilight all provide epic play experiences to our players, but at the real sweet spot of difficulty, complexity, and time commitment.
Q. Was there anything that surprised you about how players reacted to a particular encounter?
Not particularly. Something we've learned over the years is to expect the unexpected. The community is very creative and intelligent. The most important thing for us is that players are having fun. They often find interesting ways of approaching things that maybe we didn't expect, but as long the creative solution is still fun for everyone, we usually don't have a problem with it.
Q. What have you learned from Cataclysm and what are some of your top goals for Mists of Pandaria?
We learned we could create a crazy encounter like the Spine of Deathwing. It took a lot of hard work from the whole team and it was a difficult design challenge to tackle. How do you orchestrate a fight on the back of a gigantic flying dragon without inducing nausea? How do we make sure you feel like you're on Deathwing? Delivering that experience was really important and everyone wanted the opportunity to work on it. What was really great was that we launched the story of Cataclysm with the cinematic that showed Deathwing having his elementium plates being put on, then we end the expansion with those very same plates being torn off. It gives some real closure to storyline.
For Mists of Pandaria, we will continue to provide new dungeons and raids while also presenting interesting new types of content in the form of challenge modes and scenarios. Players will also be introduced to new enemies in the Sha, Mogu, and Mantids. Making those creatures come to life will be a lot of fun.
Q. Do you have a favorite dungeon or encounter from Cataclysm?
There are so many. The Conclave of Wind was a great one. Working out interesting mechanics that allowed players to go from platform to platform was a lot of fun and the environment felt really epic. A fight like that was a goal of the encounter team for a very long time.
Blackwing Descent was another favorite and working out the mechanics for the Atramedes fight gave us a lot to think about. How do you create an encounter with a blind dragon that fights? So we gave him sonar and showed the interaction with a sound meter on the player's UI.
In Bastion of Twilight, we really got to sell the corruption angle on Cho'gall which made for another really interesting fight.
Q. Is there a certain mechanic that you always wanted to do but couldn't do prior to Cataclysm?
Not really. There are so many cool ideas to work with that I never feel held back. It's easy to be creatively inspired by the people around you and their energy. It's never a problem of coming up with ideas. It's usually deciding which ones we want to go with next, but the possibilities are endless.
Q. Do you have a "dream" dungeon or encounter that you'd like to create if you had the opportunity?
I've never felt that I haven't been able to do the things I want to do. Everyone on the team is completely dedicated to giving us unlimited opportunities to make epic and awesome experiences. But, if I have to mention something, it would be huge giant death robots. We had Mimiron in Ulduar, but you just can't have too many death robots.
Q. Thank you for your time, Scott.
You're welcome.
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: Blizzard, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 4)
Jordan Mar 6th 2012 1:08AM
Many casual players are much better than people give them credit for. I'd offer the following explanation: 1-80 content essentially trains players to believe that standing in fire is an acceptable risk that is worth the reward of maintaining top-dps, that CC is irrelevant and just slows down the dungeon, that interrupts aren't necessary, and that healers don't need to worry about mana, and tanks don't need to worry about blowing cooldowns in damage intensive moments.
99% of the game trains new players to develop bad habits, and never learn good ones, and the last expansion (WOTLK) made lots of old players unlearn good habits and learn bad ones. Suddenly you hit Cata dungeons and everyone is expected to play like it's TBC heroic SLabs again, even though the game hasn't had that kind of playing experience for years. You can't expect a player base to spontaneously change like this.
Andrew.martin1981 Mar 6th 2012 2:40AM
Why not?
Vanilla and BC expected a pretty drastic upgrade in play quality at endgame. Like for all of wows history except for wrath getting through dungeons and heroics was kind of an accomplishment. Why can't we expect that going forth, why do can't we expect people to go into a dungeon and prove they deserve to finish it.
Aaron Mar 6th 2012 7:41AM
No, many casual players really are awful. Yesterday I was in a group with a level 40 boomkin in half agility gear. He wouldn't cast spells until the mobs were half dead. At one point he actually melee'd. I told him politely that he would do three times as much damage if he would wear gear that only had intelligence on it. His response: "whatever".
Jordan Mar 6th 2012 9:31AM
You could not be more wrong about Vanilla. I distinctly playing back in the old Loch Modan a long long time ago in a patch far far away, where there were outdoor elite zones that required coordinated groups and liberal use of CC to even complete certain normal quests! That was the first time my first toon (a mage) learned how and why to polymorph. Until then I had thought the ability was silly and useless. After that quest I learned it was powerful and rocked-socks.
I also remember during that time-period that a successful clear of Gnomer or SM Cathedral was HARD, like absolutely incredibly hard for a little dinky 5 man normal.
Absolutely nothing like that exists or has existed since at least WoTLK. 1-80 is a faceroll, partly because of nerfs to difficulty, and partly because gearing up is so easy now.
Kellif Mar 5th 2012 11:54PM
Something that I noticed was the inclusion of mechanics (in nearly every raid boss) that prevent that boss from being solo'd. I'm think primarily of Firelands, but most of the bosses in Dragon Soul should be nearly impossible to solo as well. I suppose it's possible that many of those mechanics will not work the same way if there is only one person to target, but things like Fading Light on Ultraxion and Baleroc in Firelands will be a huge dps race, if anyone wants to solo them.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but it was something I thought was interesting.
VSUReaper Mar 5th 2012 11:58PM
I think the initial heroics were tuned just right, but the learning curve was too steep: basically if you weren't flawless, you wiped the entire group.
I would rather see an eventual wipe (people go oom?) and more personal drawbacks for not performing: stand in fire do less dps?, and training for how to CC in quests, so that while in 5 mans, I (as a tank or healer) dont have to teach the mage how to sheep, counter spell, and spell steal.
Another option would have 9 heroics, 3 easy ones, 3
Mid grade ones, 3 über hard ones - ramp them up and make it obvious the way they ramp up.
As far as raids go, I think a major failing was the way melee was penalized thru so many raids. There was either running across the room for target swaps or explosions on the melee.
For the people talking about dbm and dancing, that's been PVE since forever. Collapse, spread, turn and burn, save CDs for X boss attack...
No Cata wasn't great, but it was good. They pulled through on the biggest complaint I had about wrath which was no cc or difficulty: wrath was an aoe-fest.
chatmanm2 Mar 6th 2012 2:59AM
I totally agree with you on the not having to train people. Being a mage since BC, I remember when I used to have to CC things in dungeons and even raids (Sunwell anyone?). Then wrath hit and CC went out the window with single target trash. Cata came back and my guild group walked into our first heroic (Throne of the Tides) and right away a skull went up on one and a moon on another. First reaction...Sheep the moon.
I can't tell you how many times I threw up a mark (Even telling someone, ok sheep this, or hex that) and it didn't get done. This quickly became my way of telling if someone had played the class prior to wrath or not. Even a running joke in our guild "Oh look a wrath baby mage..." or some other line.
The 9 heroics thing would be amazing. Even the CC in quests would be cool too. Things went from aoe hard and hope things die fast enough (Or possibly not even hope), to CC everything and hope that the person CCing refreshes it in time.
Sunaseni Mar 6th 2012 12:05AM
I thought T11 was a pretty good raid tier. Even if you disliked some of the fights, there was bound to be a fight you thought was pretty cool. Mine was Atramedes or the Omnotron Defense System. Nefarian was also a pretty cool fight, since pre-nerf, it required some really sweet kiting skills from both a tank and DPS. What I didn't like was that even with 12 bosses on normal, it was a lot to do in a week. The splitting up into raids really helped on that aspect, as it allowed you to say, skip one of the raids for a week without feeling like you missed out on much. It allowed my guild to say, devote one week to BWD, and the next to BoT. This comes with a caviat, though: the difficulty was way too high for an introductory tier. Even coming into Halfus, that was a fight that could get really punishing for groups in all blues, due to having to deal with: fireballs, breaths, and an interrupt with huge consequences for missing. My guild was able to clear it all, but it took a lot of dedication, and we only cleared Nefarian in the last week before the nerfs. While the difficulty was doable for my guild, it's the first raid tier. Difficulties should go UP from there, and with T11 being tuned really high, there's not much higher difficulties can go for normal difficulties. The nerf, while making the fights really trivial for us due to our trial by fire, lowered the difficulty to about where it should have been from the get go.
Firelands, I feel, was the best of Cata's raids. Though with 7 bosses for the entire tier, each boss was completely different, and it had a proper difficulty curve with Shannox being challenging, but doable for even pugs, all the way up to Ragnaros who exemplifies how a fight with an elemental lord should be. The Ragnaros fight in particular made it clear how weak Ragnaros in Molten Core was, and showed how much powerful elementals get in their home realm. It had great lore and tied into the world's story well, and the heroic modes are sufficiently different to legitimately make it feel like 14 bosses in a 7 raid tier, rather than how ICC did it with 12 bosses, all with heroic modes where some weren't all that special (Lootship, I'm looking at you).
Dragon Soul, though, felt like a step down from Firelands. From a boss design perspective, many of them were recolors of other models, the mechanics were really simplistic on normal mode, and their lore was flaky. While I can deal with the first two, the last made the tier really lackluster. Absolutely none of the bosses except for Deathwing parts 1 and 2 had a connection to the world. Compare to ICC: we fight the leader of the Cult of the Damned, the son of one of the Horde's greatest heroes and the greatest champion who fell at the Wrathgate, the leader of the San'layn who've been built up since TBC, and Sindragosa, the login dragon who everyone wanted to kill 2 months into the expansion. The cathartic feeling of completing a part of the story was missing in Dragon Soul, and I felt that could have tremendously helped out the feel more than tougher mechanics. I get a feeling, though, that this was due to the Raid Finder forcing them to essentially create 24 bosses in the same time they had once had to create just 8-12. Maybe in the next expansion, with this process down pat, we can have a better tier, but I'll wait and see.
In short (too late), T11 was varied and interesting, but difficulty's too high for introductory tier. T12 was golden, but with a few issues such as Rhyolith being too RNG-based. T13 was largely meh. I don't think any of the tiers were duds, but T13 was a poor way to end the expansion. Perhaps most of the effort for an expansion should be devoted to the last tier; it's the one we'll remember and play the most, with less devoted to the beginning or middle since they'll be stepping stones.
Killik Mar 6th 2012 4:22AM
You're right - Apart from DW, T13 bosses do have a bit of a feel of "so who's this schmuck?"
Andrew Mar 6th 2012 12:12AM
I for one really enjoyed early Cata heroics (as a quite casual player that only ever downed 6 bosses in Ulduar 10 when it was endgame).
It often took 5+ attempts to down a boss, especially when you had to come up with a strategy. Discussing what we'd do in Vent was so much more fun than just "oh hi, you showed up? Here's a purple, roll on it. Oh you lost? Same slot machine again".
It wasn't perfect, some dungeons were a little too unforgiving (Stonecore).
What Cata was missing IMO was something in between the regular dungeons (too easy to be entertaining and basically no loot upgrades) and the heroics. Something you could PUG and advance your character when the guildies were offline.
Jordan Mar 6th 2012 1:29AM
"Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman were entertaining raids with diverse mechanics, and they translated well when we converted them into Heroic dungeons for patch 4.1. Interesting mechanics and features that once were restricted to raids are now finding their way into our five-player dungeons."
Wait, I thought most players would consider the Trollroics to be the low-point of this expansion?...
Killik Mar 6th 2012 4:19AM
They are both entertaining instances, but grinding just the two of them for months was mind-numbing.
jealouspirate Mar 6th 2012 1:27AM
"What Cata was missing IMO was something in between the regular dungeons (too easy to be entertaining and basically no loot upgrades) and the heroics. Something you could PUG and advance your character when the guildies were offline."
That's the role that heroics are supposed to fill.
abbarnes Mar 6th 2012 1:57AM
Entry Cataclysm heroics were perhaps a bit too hard and too long. I still had a great time there. Once they buffed Luck of the Draw, nerfed/removed trash, and fixed some individual issues such as making the wind easier to see on Altarius, I felt that they were just right. But the 4.2 Hour of Twilight heroics are stupid faceroll easy, and I didn't enjoy them one bit. In fact the quote
"just as beating a boss and not understanding why you won is not as satisfying."
applies directly to the HoT heroics. I ran them quite a few times, and several bosses I'm still not exactly sure what the mechanic is, because we just faceroll it. I healed an entire boss fight just by casting riptide on the tank once. Murozond is probably the only exception. That fight is pretty fun and memorable, but it still extremely easy. All of the other fights in HoT heroics are pretty forgettable.
Surely there is a middle ground! Or better yet put in some kind of Nightmare mode or something. There is a need for challenging 5 man content that you can't "finish over lunch". You need quick, easy content, but why can't we have both? Yes, there are raids, but those are on a weekly lockout. You generally can't just log in on a random night, grab a few friends, and go raid. You have set nights where your guild gets together in an organized fashion. Challenge modes are a step in the right direction, but they aren't a complete solution. A timed run doesn't provide the same experience as defeating a challenging boss. They also only provide cosmetic items and achievements.
If I was in charge for MoP, what I would probably do is make a handful of entry level "heroics" @ level 90. Then have the vanilla era dungeon revamps be a higher tier 5 man heroic. So basically imagine that ZA/ZG had come out as they were in 4.0 instead of 4.1. That would give the casual "run a dungeon during lunch" crowd content they can run. It would also give people looking for more difficult 5 mans content. And it would also provide a smoother progression into the entry raid so that it wouldn't be such a brick wall.
Possum Mar 6th 2012 3:44AM
In the world if you stand in fire it does no damage. In a dungeons pre-Cata it does minimal damage at best. During wrath everyone learned to LOL-faceroll. I don't think it's so much that the dungeons were tuned too high in Cata, I think it's just the players were tuned to low.
Maybe they should look back and some of the old content and actually de-nerf it. To get people actually used to paying attention while running dungeons and questing and to actually teach them to play their class while they level instead of at end game. If you're not teaching people to play their class as they level what else is leveling but a way to stretch out playtime?
Kippers Mar 6th 2012 4:18AM
This sentence stuck out to me:
"[Players] often find interesting ways of approaching things that maybe we didn't expect, but as long the creative solution is still fun for everyone, we usually don't have a problem with it."
I feel like he's referring to something specific-ish, but my brain is not computing. Thoughts on what's being referred to here, if anything?
ravyncat Mar 6th 2012 5:19AM
My problem with the extremely difficult (in comparison to Wrath anyway) heroics at the start of the game was that was the ONLY end game content for you if you weren't a raider. Guess what...a lot of people who play WoW and enjoy it aren't raiders.
But when you are one of those people and you can't even do a heroic dungeon....you are left with a whole lot of nothing to do once you reach the level cap.
Those dungeons were more difficult than ICC and Ulduar for my guild. (We raided both in Wrath. Never finished either, but still got about half way into both.)
Most of us only started playing in Wrath...so all the CC etc. from BC days was something no one knew how to do. No one had ever done dungeons in BC much less raided then--not even the few oldsters who have been subbed since Vanilla.
And...we never managed to finish a heroic dungeon those first few months. We would try for several hours and then call it in frustration.
When that happens you feel like a bad player and that isn't fun. We weren't goofing off, but the "one mistake by one person wipes the group" mechanics were too hard for us to overcome. Our A-Game, as people are putting it, just wasn't up to that level. Maybe in comparison to hardmode raiders--probably actually--we are bad players, but that doesn't mean we are worthless. Telling someone to "just step it up" does not help if you are already doing the best you can.
Guess what happened by about April? Most of my guildies quit the game. They might be back for MoP, or they might not. But they definitely added to the mass exodus of players.
I just think there should be more of a happy medium in there when it comes to dungeons. Tuning them for raiders is awesome for raiders...but not so much for the average player out there. Make the raids hard, sure--that is why there is now an easymode raid for the masses--but give everyone else something to do at level cap too. There are only so many alts I can level without getting tired of it.
Snuzzle Mar 6th 2012 7:43AM
Hey, you know what? That's what heroic dungeons were originally FOR. People who couldn't hack heroics did normals (and normals weren't as loleasy as they are now). And those who wanted the extra challenge did heroics. It was kind of like normal/HM raids are now.
I understand that for some people the Cata entry heroics were too hard. And that normals were too easy. There really needs to be a middle ground. They need to bring the three tier raid system to dungeons. LFD would be for when you just want points. Normal is when you want to do something fun with a few guildies. And heroic is for when you want a real challenge.
Why don't they do this? It would make everyone happy.
Calicia Mar 6th 2012 7:57AM
I think the test for intro five-mans should be: Do you need DBM to do this? I think the test for hard five-mans should be: Do you need vent to explain or complete this?
Stonecore fails the first test. The first and third bosses have mechanics that can insta-kill mdps and without DBM, it was frustrating for casual players.
GB fails the second test. Explaining how RDPS is to deal with the purple trogg on Unbriss or handling the adds and the eye of the storm on Erudax was painful to do in a chat window if you had an inexperienced player.
Players with more experience end up pulling out of DF and only running with their guild and less experienced players get stuck in a long wipefest ... not fun. In the end, you are going to have some n00bs who don't care to learn and some jerks who are too impatient to explain, but at least create an environment where inexperienced players who are willing to learn and experienced players who are willing to teach can interact in a PUG.
Thinking back, one of the better tuned dungeons was probably Blackrock Caverns. The boss fights had interesting mechanics, but those mechanics could be explained to an inexperienced player quickly and easily.
That's not to say that five-mans should not be difficult. Even though they were too long, the Zans were an appropriate difficulty level for the gear that they dropped, but having GB and SC mixed in with all the other dungeons at the start was a mistake.
Snuzzle Mar 6th 2012 8:15AM
I disagree. I've never used DBM for any of the Cata heroics. Just turn enemy cast bars on. The dangerous attacks are very visually distinct and easy to avoid, once you know you have to avoid them. Though they did need to tweek the first boss of Stonecore since it was sometimes hard to tell what was a burrow cloud and what was a burst cloud. But they did fairly quickly; it was a simple graphics change.
And I can see how Vent is helpful, but it's not necessary for any of the starter heroics. Here's how to explain what to do with the purple trogg: "CC it then don't touch it." And Erudax? I just mark myself with a Star and say "Follow me." But "Get in the purple swirly" is just as easy.