Posts with tag five-mans

A common refrain among casual players this expansion has been the lament for five-man content. Mists of Pandaria hasn't added any new five-man dungeons since it launched, and for fans of that format, it's a bit of a bummer. In fact, Mists of Pandaria marks the first time that Blizzard hasn't added new dungeons post-launch. In classic WoW, Maraudon was added in patch 1.2, and the Dire Maul set in patch 1.3. The Burning Crusade saw Magister's Terrace in patch 2.4, Wrath gained the three Icecrown five-mans in patch 3.3, Cataclysm had Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub retooled as 5-mans in 4.2, plus the Well of Eternity dungeon suite in 4.3. Yes, if five-mans are your thing, Mists probably has you feeling pretty glum right about now.

So maybe the following tweet from Ghostcrawler will cheer you up a bit:

@GersenKirth We would like to provide more 5-player dungeons than we were able to do for MoP.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) August 25, 2013

Instead of five-man dungeons, Mists definitely saw a focus on scenarios for casual group content. And while scenarios are fun, if you're a healer or a tank, you're not really necessary for them. I personally would love to see a bit more balance in the future between implementing scenarios and implementing five-mans, so here's to a WoW future where both will shine. What about you? Are you hoping for more five-mains, or could you do without them?

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I do not like The Stonecore.

On a recent guild-sponsored alt run, four not-ready-for-heroics players and my level 85 shammy queued up for a random Cataclysm dungeon. We wound up with The Stonecore. We immediately decided that we didn't want to run The Stonecore, but we also didn't want to just wait the 15 minutes to requeue. So, we cleared our way to the first boss and defeated it, successfully eating up the 15 minutes.

Not wanting to actually finish an instance that didn't offer us any level-appropriate gear, we re-entered the random dungeon finder. The result: The Stonecore. Again. We gave up, ran the instance for the lousy 70 justice point payoff, and died a little inside.

A huge part of my distaste for The Stonecore is related to how often it comes up in the random dungeon finder on both heroic and normal versions. It's a wipe-filled nightmare on heroic, especially with a group that doesn't know what it's doing. (And let's be honest, text-based communication on the fly can only get you so far.) I have no complaint about getting regular Stonecore at levels 82 and 83. The problem is that I get it all the damn time when I'm level 85, and Blizzard gives me almost no incentive to finish it.

We had a great time as always last Saturday on our podcast -- Turpster and I welcomed Kevin Dika, the winner of the Child's Play Children's Week auction, who gave a very generous donation to Penny Arcade's charity and won a guest spot with us on the show. We talked with Kevin about his WoW experience -- he plays a Ret Pally, but hey, nobody's perfect, right? -- and got some insight from him about running a guild in the game and what a tough job it can be, how to deal with kids and other folks playing along with you, and how to come up with a worthwhile balance between playing the game and living in real life. We answered your emails (including a few more "Turpster is..." emails), and then we talked about the most popular posts from the last week of WoW.com: the new Druid art form coming to the game, what's new in 3.1.3, and where Blizzard has gone wrong recently with 5-mans, and where they might go next.

It was an excellent show, and we're happy to have Kevin on to thank him for his support (and he did a pretty great job on the podcast, too). We'll be back on as usual next Saturday at 3:30pm Eastern over on the Ustream page, and we might even do some more video streaming next week -- we did a little bit during the aftershow this week, and it worked out better than I thought. Stay tuned.

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