Cataclysm

[Paelos]

The approved term is "pacing mechanisms".

You can have a couple of hard trash pulls between bosses that require some thought and execution. You can have lots of trash packs that require AoE and blast through them. What you can't have is a lot of complicated trash packs in a row.

That was why people hated GB and Deadmines so much.

[Rokal]

You can have a couple of hard trash pulls between bosses that require some thought and execution. You can have lots of trash packs that require AoE and blast through them. What you can't have is a lot of complicated trash packs in a row.

That was why people hated GB and Deadmines so much.

People hated GB trash mostly because they were still learning the dragon mount mechanic at the start of the dungeon. If your group all hits the right targets (basically the ones you'll actually need to kill, as opposed to the ones you skip), it's pretty much an aoe faceroll. I haven't had to use any CC in there for a while because threatening enemies are no longer threatening when they start the fight with 10% hp and can be nuked down in 3 seconds. That said, if you completely screwed up on dragons, there was probably too much trash.

People hated Dead mines trash because there was too much of it, period. There is only one 'hall' of trash in that dungeon that has complicated pulls where you would want to use CC. The instance still has annoying trash solely because there is so damn much of it. Even after they nerfed the amount of trash in the dungeon, it still feels like it takes 50% longer than any other 85 heroic.

I like trash. I think it works well as a pacing mechanism. I think having trash makes the bosses feel more epic, and is preferable to boss conveyor-belts like ToC. I think having some dangerous trash packs that keep the group on their toes is a good thing. For example, the faceless-ones trash that throws your group around in ToT is good trash. I like the humanoid trash packs in VP with the magic-immune shield. Good trash can also teach fight mechanics, which they used a ton of in ZG. You learn about body slam, cauldrons, and toxic link before you face a boss that uses those mechanics.

I think trash fails when it gets repetitive and you are killing the same enemies for the entire dungeon (HoO and to some extent SFK), or when there is just too much of it (DM).

[Paelos]

I like trash.

Too easy.

[Sjofn]

Yeah!  Back to the same handful of instances for you until you're decked out in better gear.  In fact, you should just do those three normal instances over and over until you've got better gear.  No new content for you!

If you can queue for the new heroics, your gear is pretty good. If your dps is still assy at that point, you probably just aren't very good at it, unfortunately, and you make it a lot less likely that the run will be successful. No normal version of the new instances is terrible, don't get me wrong, but it really isn't that crazy to think "OK, people should be able to break 7k" once you're into heroics. My rogue is just barely into doing-the-old-heroics territory, and he can do around 11k with the PUG buff and stuff, and I am seriously not that good a rogue. Although I DO at least interrupt spellcasters, so I have that going for me. 

[Rokal]

I like trash.

Too easy.

This of course being why MMO devs try to call trash just about anything else but 'trash' when discussing dungeons. :p

[Soulflame]

There are heroics with vehicle combat?  That is just so goddamn  .

I thought Wrath had underscored with red pen that the playerbase absolutely hated their vehicle implementation.

[Paelos]

GB just has a bombing run. It's actually the only redeeming part of the place unless you suck at it. Then, it's  at your inept/afk teammates before you ragequit.

[Rokal]

It's vehicle combat, but you only have one ability to use (fireball) and the dragons fly a pre-determined course every time. All you have to do is aim the fireball and use the ability.

[Zetor]

To be fair, everyone screws up that bombing run the first time due to a combination of not knowing:
- you're about to go on a bombing run when you r-click a drake (a typical pug won't remind you of it)
- you can spam the bombs as soon as you hop on the drake, even when it hasn't taken flight yet (this gives you a good ~4 bombs each at the first group, enough to wipe them out)
- which pulls are skipped during a clear (yeah, "groups at the edge of dead-ends" doesn't help much when you're already flying over them and have 0.5sec to decide where to aim)
- you need to not focus on the two groups around Drahga until they're the only things you can hit (end of the bombing path + looping back)

Since the bombs recharge quickly, you also need to basically spam 1 and aim with the mouse, which is not a good thing if you click everything (I'm a compulsive keybinder myself and only click stuff like hearthstones, but there are quite a few clicker players)

[Paelos]

Related, even with Call to Arms, tanks are often in highest demand for Dungeon Finder, and we think this is largely because tanks are expected to lead and set the pace of a dungeon run. It’s a ton of responsibility. A tank I work with said recently, “I don’t even mind doing all that, but it’s just such a pain to have to manually mark targets every single pull while the other players just wait around for me to tell them what to do.” With this change, there is less need to sit down and try to communicate about which is the sheep target and which is the trap target. And if someone CC’s the wrong thing, there is more chance for recovery. It’s the way Sap has worked for years, and you don’t generally see players calling for groups with 3 rogues just to make the trash that much easier.

Personally, I'm glad they finally get this and are acknowledging it publically. That being said, this has been going on for years. It was a major problem in running heroics in TBC. You addressed it in Wrath by giving more classes better tanking abilities and letting more people do AoE damage. Now, you're making the same mistake. Once again, I'll point out that CC is almost never used at the higest levels of your raiding content, yet you seem to enforce it on the "lesser" players for some reason.

[Lantyssa]

If you can queue for the new heroics, your gear is pretty good. If your dps is still assy at that point, you probably just aren't very good at it, unfortunately, and you make it a lot less likely that the run will be successful. No normal version of the new instances is terrible, don't get me wrong, but it really isn't that crazy to think "OK, people should be able to break 7k" once you're into heroics. My rogue is just barely into doing-the-old-heroics territory, and he can do around 11k with the PUG buff and stuff, and I am seriously not that good a rogue. Although I DO at least interrupt spellcasters, so I have that going for me. 

You don't give yourself near enough credit.  You're a better player than the majority of the player base, and well, people really are that assy even at this point.

[Ingmar]

Hell I was flailing away in my pvp suit and some random other dps stuff I had lying around and doing 6-7k the first time I had ever played a fury spec in like 4 years, with no research ahead of time and missing half the glyphs I was supposed to use (in heroic stonecore, not one of the new ones.) It is mind boggling to me that people can get the ilvl to go to the new ones and not beat that easily...

...unless they're doing what I was doing, and wearing PVP gear. I think fixing the pvp gear qualifying you for the dungeon gates loophole would probably help PUG success rates immensely. (Was a guild group, I wouldn't inflect first-time furythorgrim on strangers.)

[SurfD]

Yeah!  Back to the same handful of instances for you until you're decked out in better gear.  In fact, you should just do those three normal instances over and over until you've got better gear.  No new content for you!

Well, except for the fact that if you can actually legitimately queue for Zandalari instances (ie,you are not stacking PvP gear or carrying around junk gear you cant use to boost your iIlevel), you should theoretically not have any upgrades in the "normal" heroic tiers.   I mean, average iLevel of 346 essentially means you are ready for raids, and 7k dps would prob get you booted from most pug raids before you could blink.

[Merusk]

...unless they're doing what I was doing, and wearing PVP gear. I think fixing the pvp gear qualifying you for the dungeon gates loophole would probably help PUG success rates immensely. (Was a guild group, I wouldn't inflect first-time furythorgrim on strangers.)

I said that a while back in this or the PUG thread and everyone was all, "rawr, no, pvp gear is fine for dungeons, hushup."  I still disagree with that thought and agree wtih you on the idea.

[Sjofn]

If you can queue for the new heroics, your gear is pretty good. If your dps is still assy at that point, you probably just aren't very good at it, unfortunately, and you make it a lot less likely that the run will be successful. No normal version of the new instances is terrible, don't get me wrong, but it really isn't that crazy to think "OK, people should be able to break 7k" once you're into heroics. My rogue is just barely into doing-the-old-heroics territory, and he can do around 11k with the PUG buff and stuff, and I am seriously not that good a rogue. Although I DO at least interrupt spellcasters, so I have that going for me.  

You don't give yourself near enough credit.  You're a better player than the majority of the player base, and well, people really are that assy even at this point.

Aw, that's nice of you to say. DPS is not my strong suit, though. Healing and eating bon bons, though, I can do that like champ.

As for the PvP "loophole," that drives me crazy. Not because people "cheat" to get in, but because I can't TELL when my REAL GEAR is non-assy enough to get into a heroic if I have most of the honor gear (I go through really random PvP cycles. I won't PvP for two years, then I will hyperfocus on it for three weeks, then not do it again for six months, etc ... and I just so happened to have a PvP moment recently). It's really, really irritating.  


I could proooobably heal in my PvP gear. Maybe. But I wouldn't like it.

[SurfD]

You can armory your toon to check that.  For some wierd reason, the Ingame iLevel number always only shows your "complete inventory average", where as the armory will show both your Complete Inventory average and just your Equipped Item average.

[Sjofn]

That's annoying in a different way, as it means I have to remember to log out in my PvE gear that I want to check, etc. If it showed in game it wouldn't an issue.

Amusing aside: I totally almost wound up tanking a heroic by accident because it will pick that first by default if your total gear total is high enough. 

[sinij]

I like trash.

Too easy.

Rokal = Blizzard PR bot.

[Fordel]

I still think you suck at your rogue Sjofn. 



The only difference between shitty DPS and Base-line but still bottom of the barrel DPS is the pressing of buttons. Seriously, press your god damn buttons people. Casting three of the incorrect spell is still more DPS then 1 of the perfect spell every 6 seconds.

[Rokal]

I like trash.

Too easy.

Rokal = Blizzard PR bot.

Meanwhile every modern MMO from WoW, to Rift, to LOTRO has trash in dungeons. Hell even other genres have trash of a sort. You didn't just fight 6 bosses in Megaman or a brawler like Golden Axe, finishing the level and the enemies contained within it was part of the fun/challenge. Just killing bosses one after another is boring, and it ends up making the bosses feel less exciting. See: ToC.

But pointing this out means the only possible explanation is that I'm Blizzard PR! I swear, some of the people on this forum 

If anyone actually wants to have a discussion about whether trash is good/bad for MMOs, rather than just saying "u must work 4 blizz if u liek trash" or "lol, you like trash? that's like saying you like poop!" feel free to chime in.

[Ingmar]

The ToC 5 man actually did have trash. (And I don't care what people say, I actually quite liked the raid. IN. FER. NO.)

That said no trash would be pretty lame if every dungeon was like that. Where they struggle seems to be in realizing when they've gone over the line in amount of trash.

[Rokal]

I can't for the life of me remember any trash in ToC 5-man. I ran that quite a few times as recently as November too. Are you counting the faction champions as trash?

[Ingmar]

I can't for the life of me remember any trash in ToC 5-man. I ran that quite a few times as recently as November too. Are you counting the faction champions as trash?

There were the waves of jousters before the first faction champions, then some groups of paladins/monks/priests before the 2nd boss as well.

[Lantyssa]

Well, except for the fact that if you can actually legitimately queue for Zandalari instances (ie,you are not stacking PvP gear or carrying around junk gear you cant use to boost your iIlevel), you should theoretically not have any upgrades in the "normal" heroic tiers.   I mean, average iLevel of 346 essentially means you are ready for raids, and 7k dps would prob get you booted from most pug raids before you could blink.

Do I need to use the green?  I can use the green, even though Schild hates it.  He's hardly around to notice.

Aw, that's nice of you to say. DPS is not my strong suit, though. Healing and eating bon bons, though, I can do that like champ.

...

I laughed pretty hard.  Not your intent, but I couldn't help myself.

[Rokal]

I suppose those count as trash. At the same time, they are linked to the encounter and I believe if you fail the encounter they reset? In that sense, it would be like calling adds in any boss fight trash. Are the faceless ones that come during the Erudax fight trash? What about the adds you had to kill during the Shade of Akama fight in BT, or the Faerlina fight in Naxx?

I agree that they are functionally trash though.

I think the only dungeons with too much trash in Cata are the ones that they took from vanilla and revamped. In trying to keep those dungeons close to how they originally were, they didn't realize (or didn't think it would be a big deal) that the amount of trash in DM or SFK easily eclipses the trash in the other heroics. But something like Tol'vir or Throne of Tides has a fine amount of trash for me personally. HoO doesn't have much trash, but it's the same packs throughout the entire dungeon. It gets boring quickly, and at that point if your group beat the first 2 packs of the trash, the trash isn't really doing much except wasting your time by the time you are killing the 6th or 7th trash pack.

GB I'm more divided on. On the one hand, the amount of trash in the instance is fine if your group does an average job on the dragons (let's say every trash pack you need to kill is probably at 50% or less in most groups). If you do screw up the dragons, there is probably way too much trash though. GB rewards your group with a faster run without requiring you to over-gear the dungeon, but it also guarantees that the first few runs you do are probably going to be longer than, for example, your first few runs of Tol'vir. I'm not sure this is preferable, but it at least gives the dungeon a fun gimmick rather than making you feel that all the Cata dungeons are so straight-forward.

I didn't like ToC or, for a more straight-forward example, Azjol-Nerub because the pacing of both dungeons felt way off. The small size of Azjol-Nerub and the small number of trash packs didn't make it convincing as a 'real' place in the game. I'm supposed to believe this is some vast & dangerous underground cavern when I reach the end of it after walking through 3 rooms that take 10-15 minutes to clear? Even though Dead Mines still feels like over-kill, I much prefer it to dungeons in the style of Azjol-Nerub.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I'm not entirely sure you even play wow.


Neither the jousting packs nor the monk packs were linked to the respective bosses and if you wiped on the bosses you didnt have to clear them again so they were indeed trash.

[Sheepherder]

I think he missed the good expansion.

[Sjofn]

Aw, that's nice of you to say. DPS is not my strong suit, though. Healing and eating bon bons, though, I can do that like champ.

...

I laughed pretty hard.  Not your intent, but I couldn't help myself.

Or was it. 

[Nevermore]

What's going on in here?

[Sjofn]

Noooooothiiiiiiiiiiing. 

[Paelos]

The bunny is poking ppl with a stick again.

[Lantyssa]

[Sjofn]

The bunny is totally making DIRTY INNUENDO rather than poking with sticks! I save all my stick pokes for you, Paelos.  

[Maledict]

Personally, I'm glad they finally get this and are acknowledging it publically. That being said, this has been going on for years. It was a major problem in running heroics in TBC. You addressed it in Wrath by giving more classes better tanking abilities and letting more people do AoE damage. Now, you're making the same mistake. Once again, I'll point out that CC is almost never used at the higest levels of your raiding content, yet you seem to enforce it on the "lesser" players for some reason.

Um, I missed something here. CC has been used in raiding since the very first dungeon (MC - even had a boss fight with it built in). The only instances I *can't* remember CCing things in are AQ40, Naxx 25, ToC and Icecrown Citedal. Every raid in TBC used CC, and BoT isn't called Bastion of Trash for nothing. If you weren't using CC on those packs when the dungeons first came out I'd be impressed, as packs of 12+ NPCS with healers have a tendancy to splat raids hard. Hell, Tempest Keep was  *reknowned* for it's brutal trash that was often harder than the bosses themselves - everyone was CCing those desperately.

CC is a fundamental part of raiding and dealing with trrash - always has been. From MC through to SWP and to BoT. Yes, you can eclipse it with gear as it gets nerfed, but thats just what happens in 5 player instances.

[SurfD]

Yeah, I Imagine that if it wasnt for the fact that there are only like 18 trash mobs in the entirety of BWD, you would probably have had to CC stuff in there too.