Cata Dungeons Revert to BC Model!
 

Source - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...eNo=3&sid=1#44


THIS IS WHAT IM HAPPY ABOUT!

Wow, sounds good. Despite how boring BC was, it still required some work to get gear and get through dungeons, unlike the super easy mode that heroic are in LK. I look forward to feeling like completing a dungeon is an accomplishment again instead of just a farm fest. Hopefully it will range on how dungeon difficulty was back in vanilla; a la UBRS.

I don't mind dungeons being hard, but what I really liked about LK dungeons was the time needed to get through one. Don't get me wrong on this one, even a damn freaking hard dungeon doesn't need to take well over an hour. If your group/gear sucks and you wipe at the first trash pack is fine. But having to go through endless wings of a dungeon and/or additionally masses of trash isn't fun, imho.
From what I've heard/seen so far from cataclysm dungeons is that they do take quite longer. But that might be because of players lacking itemization before going in, I hope.

Anyway, I really hope it will be still possible to do something in cataclysm without having to play 1-2hours at once or raiding in general. I have no time for that. :rolleyes:

PS: I don't want well fare epics or whatever, just some reason to log in, because I like that game ... Getting emblems for heroics that could be done in 15-30minutes was a reason for me in LK, because it was fun, fast and after some weeks you could get something out of it. You were still far behind active players, though and that's ok.

I agree to a point. I like the "adventure" dungeons of vanilla. BC they turned into long drawn out trash fights. LK it became "kill a boss, move to next room, kill a boss, continue to end boss" which really kills immersion for me. Some vanilla dungeons were relatively quick (DM east), others took a bit longer (Stratholm) which gave a nice variety based on your available play time. I feel a 15min heroic run is just proof of how dumbed down for casuals the game has become (yes, coming from a casual player. Imagine that!)

But that's just my preference which isn't right, wrong, better or worse than anyone else's. I just feel at this point LK is too easy, repetitive and boring for me at this point.

Yeah, I just prefer 15minutes of hard work over 1hour of boredom. :)

And I agree, LK heroics are ~15minutes of no work, nonetheless still better than 1hour of boredom, imho. :D

Dungeons will take longer than you will probably like at the start of the expansion. This will mainly be down to people getting used to having to use CC again. So a lot of time will be wasted on explaining what to CC and applying the marks.

Once everyone is familiar with this method of play then it will become quicker as you can assign CC roles at the start and then motor through (as long as you have someone fast at applying marks).

If you remember back to TBC dungeons then Shadow Labs or Shattered Halls took a long time to begin with. Once everyone was familiar with the pulls then hitting the Shattered Halls timed event for the extra loot was a regular occurrence.


I suspect that you are going to see some LFD horror stories at the beginning as people try to get away with WotLK tactics (or lack thereof), and fail hard. So, put together guild runs and knock off those guild achievements at the same time :banana:

I'm not even sure of how many times I had to use polymorph in WotLK. I could probably count it on one hand, though.

Now I'll have to brush up my CC skillz again. ;)

I see Tekkub's "ControlFreak" being added to my addon list again, since I have, umm, 3 80s that have some form of CC, and a 56 mage climbing fast. o.O

Dungeons won't take as long as they took on TBC, don't worry. They will just require more CC than LK (or, some CC as LK required none) and won't be as AoE Numb Grind Fest as it is currently on live. Only that 2 changes will make sure instances aren't as fast as now. On top of that like the blue says, gear for heroics will matter more. Who the hell did the normal dungeons back in the day? Heroics were easy enough.

Do you remember TBC Heroics that even with some Raid Gear they were challenging? That was a bit extreme. The middle point between what we had in TBC and what we have in LK is the key. And that is what we are going to get.

Cataclysm (so far) presentes itself like the iteration in dificulty that LK should have been after TBC and not the moronic aoe fest that it is.

I feel ya there. Outside of PvP, I haven't touched my Sap button since WotLK was released. On top of that, I completely skipped the normal versions of the dungeons and went straight to heroics. Yay for strategy being reintroduced!

I probably did around 50+ brd runs in my time and in retrospect the experience was more of a bore and hassle than enjoyment. Don't get me wrong there were fun times, but as huge as that dungeon was it just got tiresome.

BRD was one of the more boring ones, I'll agree to that.

I didn't think the length in TBC was all that bad, besides Shadow Labyrinth perhaps. But the heroic version was just stupid hard, where if you had no CC as dps you weren't really welcome. On the flipside, the current faceroll kind of heroics aren't any better. Feels detrimental to one's evolution as a player.

Like someone said earlier, best case scenario would be something in between TBC and Wrath.

I must know LBRS like the back of my hand, the amounts of times I ran that trying to get +dmg gear which easily beat MC gear.

I'm looking forward to more challenging content. :D However, I hope people don't behave the way they normally do when you go into places like HoR or Oculus (they even nerfed that to make it easier and people still complain).... as soon as you zone in, 2 to 4 people ditch. :mad:

True. What I really hope dies down is the whole "Oh, we wiped once, time to leave the group." But with the lack of penalty for leaving after a wipe and the LFD system, I have severe doubts about this. One can hope though.

There is a penalty for leaving in the middle of a run.. you have to wait before you can queue again.. plus the wait for the queue itself.

There's no penalty for leaving an LFD group if more than 15 minutes have elapsed since you zoned in. I'm usually okay with one wipe, or even two, but if I'm in a group that's wiping over and over for stupid reasons and won't listen when I make suggestions for fixing the problem(s), I really don't think I should be forced to stay in the group, or be penalized for leaving at that point.

On the other hand, if I leave the group immediately, or in the first few minutes, I'm completely okay with having to wait an extra 15 minutes to queue again. Most likely, if I'd stayed in the group, it would have taken at least 15 minutes to finish the dungeon, so I'm not really losing any time.

What I do hate are tanks who sell "instant queues" for gold with no intention of actually running an instance and leave the moment they zone in, and DPS players who queue as tanks to get groups faster but don't actually know how to tank, don't make any effort to learn, and then roll on DPS gear. :(

I envision wipe fests with all those who have leveled without ever having learned cc basics and los.

As a Tank, I have already planned some Macros for when I join a LFG. :D

Something like:

CC - Crowd Control. This is where you dust your Sheep/Sap/Roots and actually use it on mobs to make my life easier. Bla bla bla. :D

I'm loving the changes. The Heroic Blackrock Caverns movie looked pretty promising.

I do feel there's going to be loads of RAAAGGEEE because isntances won't be an uber easy emblem grindfest anymore.

Tho I think that making instances harder when you actually outgear it would be nice too (atleast for heroics). Tho I guess you then get problems when you have like 2 people who outgear it massively and a tank for example who barely has good enough gear.

But I certainly like the changes in CC (and my lock who'll be king of CC with glyphed fear). And it seems they're trying to make boss encounters a lot harder again.

All in all I'm looking forward to Cataclysm with the talent changes, the need of CC and the whole guild revamp. The only thing I'm not sure about are the stats. It seems they're dumping the stats we have to use now in well .. less stats that combine a few of the ones we have now. Which could lead to every caster or every healer and perhaps even every caster and healer needing the same kind of gear etc. But I'm not in the PTR or beta or anything so I could be wrong.

Spirit will, once again, be the deciding stat as to if something is "healer gear" or "dps gear".
All healers have talents or masteries that give them mana regen from spirit, dps get nothing from spirit.

In fact, the "Healer/Non-Healer" difference will be far more spread - many caster DPS have talents that convert Spirit into a DPS stat currently, but those talents don't exist in the 4.x talent trees. Shadow Priests, especially, will have to toss the vast majority of gear with +spirit, as it will be nigh useless.

I believe it was only Balance druids and Elemental shaman that would have (useful) conversions of spirit into +hit rating. (Holy paladins have this as well, but only for ease of levelling)

The main competition for gear has traditionally been on cloth, but with these changes and the armour type bonuses then I don't believe it will be a huge issue.

woohoo yay for cc and strategic dungeons, i'm all up for it and it was something i severely missed in LK.

some oldskool dungeons where indeed boring, but hey, at least they had some sort of "adventure" feeling to it, and in wotlk, with a bunch of lvl 80's they are boring even if they take only 15 minutes of pressing a few buttons.

so i'm all up for somewhat longer dungeons and more cc, but only if there's somewhat of an "adventure-ish" feeling to the dungeon itself.

I just hope that banish / enslave will be required more in the new dungeons, opposed to what was needed in LK (i think i used it 0 times on my lock).

The old pre nerfed semi-raid dungeon Stratholme (old 10 players) I loved that one with 4 friend going in and wrecking the place while having fun
and beating a 10 player pug group while add it, in time and gold that is.

It was hard but I can remeber me tanking there, and seeing my healer going bear growling away my agro, and laughting on ts, telling me to keep agro..

that was just great fun.

BC HC yes it was hard, but with friend I could be done. even with a Blue/Green tank. Me being that tank having 2 other alts in the group allong with a wicked T6 Warlock and T6 Healer, the only downside was keeping agro.

But with the lack off tanks the allways asked me to get my warrior to tank the HC. And for being a good tank I ended up in SWP with main Hunter :)

We had K at 1% and wiped, than came the nerf... damm them. We could have killed him without that nerf..

Now there is only face rolling and a l2p if you wipe with a damm pug. Good thing we are 6 friends in 4 guilds at this time. so if we go out with the alts and get the 5th pug. it allways fun if they try to vote kick one off us out.. :)

I'm looking forward to Cataclysm I think raising the level off skill/luck needed is a good thing. Lets hope the people who shout l2p don't go screaming blizz this is to hard fix it!

I'm wondering how it's going to be with LFD tool. People now lost their last remaining bits of conscience and being additionally extremely bored with 9month ICC farm. And gearscore is reigning on my server now (it didn't the last time i played). And i don't have a guild. I expect Hell.

so how were you trained on marks growing up?

Skull - First Kill Target
Cross - Second Kill Target
Moon - Sheep
Diamond - Sap
Square - Hunter Ice Trap

and then if more was needed other symbols were used for weird CCs, such as banish or Hibernate or sumthin

Skull - First Kill Target
Cross - Second Kill Target
Star - Sheep
Circle - Hex/Sap
Square - Hunter Ice Trap

Skull - First Kill Target (sometimes used to mark things to gtfa from)
Star - Second Kill Target
Moon - Sheep
Diamond - Sap
Square - Hunter Ice Trap

"Skull" - First Kill Target
"X" - Second Kill Target
"Diamond" - Sheep (by my request on my mage)
"Star" - Sap
"Condom" (Circle) - Hunter Ice Trap
"Panties" (Triangle) - Other CC

Skull/X/Diamond were pretty consistent. Sap/Trap/Other always varied depending on who made the group.

In later TBC when I tanked on my long abandoned paladin I remember I had a macro in the form of

"What's the pull order you say?"
"This room, the next room and straight to the boss!"

I clicked it every time I joined a group. Paladins were basically the only good AoE tanks at that time.

Loved it when my rogue had to put points in Improved Sap (or whatever the name was) so he had like a 75% chance not to leave stealth.

Anyway I'll gladly be leveling my lock in Cata, using glyph of fear so I get a nice CC. Bursting away with the new talent points.

I just hope the game stays enjoyable for a long time even if you're at 85. In WotlK and TBC I had this feeling you were just doing the same things you already did before. Even tho I did not raid back at those times.

I hope the changes are enough to refresh the game a bit, cause it IS getting an old game in the meanwhile. Of all the expansion tho, this is the one I'm most looking forward too.

There are days I feel I'm the only one who has ever referred to them as that, or heard of them being referred to as that. =\

Ahhh the good old condom. Never heard of the panties tho.

We generally used:
Skull - 1st target
X - 2nd target
Moon - Sheep
the blue-ish thing - Hunter trap
Star - Sap
the purple thing - Banish/enslave demon/Entangle Roots (when you could)


Oh the life of a druid in PvP where you couldn't CC anyone indoors. Had loads of fun in BG's with my Moonkin/resto healing druid.