Posts with tag mists-dungeons

While the continent Pandaria is packed and laggy for Europe's launch, the dungeons seem to be relatively quiet and functional. So if you want your first steps to be lag-free and relatively stressless, the thing to do is to get involved in some dungeons.

WoW Insider is here to help. Whether you want an in-depth guide for the expansion's introductory dungeons or a few lighter tips and tricks, we have you covered.

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Blizzard's Lead Encounter Designer Ion Hazzikostas, a.k.a. Watcher, has taken to the forums a few times lately, along with Community Manager Zarhym, to provide clarification on Challenge Modes.

With all the bad air swirling around Blizzard from certain minority groups within the WoW community about catering to casuals, challenge modes are something they seem very keen to stand firm on. When asked if challenge modes would ever be nerfed, Ion replied as follows:

Watcher

If at all feasible, we're not going to be adjusting the content itself. Persistent leaderboards are the backbone of the system, and if we make the dungeon easier, then your 14:13 time last week might actually be more impressive than my 14:05 clear today, but there would be no way of knowing that. It's conceivable that we might adjust the actual Gold/Silver/Bronze cutoff times slightly if it turns out we were badly off the mark with the tuning, but we're pretty confident in our numbers.

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Zarhym also weighed in with his own input on the nerf question.

The new Mists of Pandaria leveling dungeons are brilliant -- they really are, a great mixture of fun and fear, of straightforward bosses and panic-inducing fights. But if you're on the beta now, trying to push through these dungeons, you might not want wordy explanations of just exactly where to stand, what to hit and what to interrupt. Your teammates certainly might not like them and will probably have pulled the boss before you're done typing your ninth message explaining the finer details of boss abilities.

Certainly by the time these dungeons hit live servers, you're going to encounter a bunch of players who don't have a clue about the basic strategies. Nobody likes to wait around and read the dungeon journal to try to work out how to deal with abilities. So here we are with some very, very short, and only slightly sweet guides to explain the bosses in five seconds.

Of course, we also provide full walk-through guides for these dungeons, and for the goldilocks group that doesn't want guides too detailed or too brief, we have the 5 things you need to know guides, which give you just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

So, it should be obvious from the 5-second rule that these guides are not in-depth, not comprehensive, and might not be enough information for tanks and healers particularly. But they're fast and eminently copy-able into in-game chat without risking too much ire from your cohorts.

Let's get started.