The state of dungeons past, present and future

This post was originally a comment on Windpaw's most recent blog Blame the Casuals over at Shock and Paw, but due to its length I figured I might as well make a post out of it. In that post Windpaw talks about the reactions to the 'hardening up' as I call it of dungeon content in the upcoming Cataclysm. While Windpaw agrees that heroics in particular are very easy in Wrath often to the detriment of the playerbase, he (she? not sure...) correctly points out that this is the most profitable way for Blizz to operate as casuals make up the majority of wow players and as a result the majority of the money made. In the end it comes down to a happy medium of keeping both the casual cashcows (no offence intended, I am one of these) and the hardcore minority satisfied.

I couldn't agree more. Hopefully Blizzard finds that happy medium between the faceroll that heroics have become in the later stages of Wrath and the super hard progression of BC.

In the beginning Wrath heroics weren't easy and things like the faction specific boss in the Nexus could decimate a pug with a well timed whirlwind. As Len points out though, the ilvls of gear has inflated to such a degree that of course content designed to be a challenge with ilvl 200 blues and quest greens will be a breeze for ICC geared supergroups.

The problem comes through the fact that the new tier of badge rewards for heroics scales past the most recent raid content when a new patch drops. In BC you had to grind your way up through Kara and ZA etc in a logical progression to the next step - there were no shortcuts to the hardest raid of the time. Now that you can ding 80 and jump from quest rewards to ToC25 standard (or better) gear in a number of days without necessarily seeing the inside of a raid the disparity between 5 man heroics and the top content becomes that much more polarised.

In BC (on my server at least) the raiding guilds were fairly evenly represented across all levels of raids from the entry level Kara to the top-flight Black Temple/Sunwell. In Wrath these days there is no middle ground, you are either in the top available raiding content or getting cheap shinies through heroics to get into the top tier content. The only time I see people running a raid that isn't ICC these days is either for the weekly quest (which is a 5 minute blitz of one boss then everyone disappears in a puff of smoke), or to get mounts and achievements etc.

 One of many, many deaths in Karazhan

Having been alternately a hordcore 4 night a week raider and a casual zero night a week raider over my 3 years in wow I've been able to see both sides of this particular coin. The guild I was in in BC had to grind every inch of Kara beginning with weeks on the first boss Attumen and a slow progression through the entire place. Only after we had that well and truly licked could we move up and start again on the next level of raiding content.

Comparing that to my raiding experience in Wrath there is a massive difference. Take for example my 10 man guild's entry into ToC 10 when it was first released. The first few nights we struggled through, but by a month in we were knocking it over in under an hour, or running a full alt run and not going much slower thanks to the gear those alts could grab from a few days of heroics.

It is a tough balancing act to find a nice place between the hard grind progression of BC and the insta-gearing in Wrath.

I'm not sure that making heroics super hard is the answer here. It is inevitable that the longer an expansion goes on, the easier heroics will be to clear thanks to increasingly geared players and the individual boss strategies being ingrained in muscle memory after x number of runs. Sure hard heroics will be hard to begin with, but sooner or later they won't be hard any more.

What I'd love to see in Cataclysm is some method that finds players progressing through raiding content more instead of just skipping it all to zerg the latest and greatest instance. I'm not saying we should go back to the days of banging our collective heads against boss walls because they were the next step in the chain, but some method to keep content that is not brand new relevant would be nice. There are a number of things that could help with this:
- reduce the number of emblems (or whatever the new reward system is called) gained for each heroic/raid to slow the gearing process from its current lightspeed.
- reduce the frequency of new tier gear being released or at least limit some of it to raid drops only.
- make some raids sequential ie. in order to enter one raid you must have completed a certain assignment in the previous tier's raid (sort of like old-school attunements but not so rigourous and time consuming).

These suggestions may be totally unrealistic etc etc, but I feel stuff like this will help to stretch out content and keep it relevant. You will never be able to stop the uber guilds from blitzing through content the week it's released, and likewise other less skilled/time limited players will always struggle to some degree. However this way progression raiders will still get a challenge from cutting edge content, the middle band will progress at a slightly slower pace and casuals will still be able to see new content and progress and gear too, albeit slower than the lighning speed they are now.

What do you think?

-Seal