Comments on: Heroic dungeons, and what is the optimal length for an instance anyway?

By: Drew

Drew — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:06:19 +0000

I, too, enjoyed ToC for this very reason. It allowed for better focus from the raid, too, IMO.

By: Rurjaos

Rurjaos — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:15:33 +0000

When actually playing the instance, almost any length is ok. But when not… most of then take too long, because they block “my” tank/healer and there’s nothing else to do than stupid farming. ALL “progress”-quests done.
Fast char switching could be the answer: quequeing one and leveling another…

By: smakendahed

smakendahed — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:19:43 +0000

Wrath didn’t have any secret formula for making the queues shorter. In Cata dungeons and heroics because more challenging for DPS and some of the class mechanic changes to healer and tanks turned off some people.

Sounds weird, but it’s true.

I loved my Hunter in vanilla, TBC and into WotLK but after the class changes (right before Cata release)? Meh. I liked it less and switched over to tanking with my DK. That required learning how that class worked for tanking as I was running it as Unholy and using it as my enchanting/alchemy ho. hehe

So my guess is the queue time is big for DPS because a lot of tanks/healers said, “F this.”

By: Kring

Kring — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:10:46 +0000

- Most normal dungeons don’t reward reputation, only the 85 ones do.
- They reward less reputation then heroics which is your most important source for gear at the moment.
- You can nearly deck your char out in 333 gear from quests and the justice points you saved from WotLK. There are no upgrades in non-85 normals and very few in the few 85 ones.
- The queue for DPS is much much much longer.

By: Theladas

Theladas — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:01:07 +0000

Yeah, there was one valid suggestion I saw that said the normal-difficulty dungeons should always reward some JP. It obviously wouldn’t be as efficient, but it would be one way to keep gearing up without breaking your back in Heroics. Then again, just 70 JP for a 45-minute normal dungeon can feel pretty grindy, too.

By: Sara Pickell

Sara Pickell — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:46:41 +0000

Maybe you should just stop calling them trash. Sure getting killed by the non-boss mobs sucks, but isn’t it just karma for arrogantly calling them trash when they’re actually presenting you with a proper challenge?

By: Sara Pickell

Sara Pickell — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:31:59 +0000

Like I said, it depends on the time slice. For an inherently short time slice, you have to deal with organizing it, introductions, meshing your group into a unit. In my personal experience, even well organized groups can never really get rid of that process. So a short bit allows the group to incorporate the first run as part of the meshing process, just like a counterstrike pub team will spend the first round of a map just figuring themselves out.

When you have a fairly long time though, this isn’t as much an issue. If you can afford to spend 30 minutes just getting everyone ready to go in, and get everyone basically functional by the first boss or so. In this case it’s better just to have one long instance so that people don’t quit out of boredom and force everyone else to go back through the organization process.

@Syl
But that’s all part of the gating process. Those 5 day a week raiders will naturally out gear everything relatively quickly, while the casuals will naturally fall behind and actually have to work harder in the long term than the other people since they can’t just overcome poor tactics with better equipment or enhancements. So of course the curve of content difficulty over time looks completely different between the two player groups. If gear didn’t make much of a difference than the two curves would overlap a fair amount. Remove both level and gear gating and now everyone moves commensurate with their interest and skill. Simply have a decent curve, and everyone will naturally fall along their point within it.

But that wouldn’t be WoW, so nobody would play it.

By: spinks

spinks — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:10:49 +0000

It’s down to progression.

The game is set out so that if you aren’t progressing, you are probably wasting your time. So once someone has the gear they need from normal instances, they’re not actually getting anything useful after the first instance of the day (because that gives extra badges).

ie. there’s no reason for people to keep running normals, no rewards for doing it. And grinding instances in itself isn’t fun enough to keep people at it.

If they gave out heroic level gear for normal instances, people would happily run them, I’m sure.

By: spinks

spinks — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:08:51 +0000

I have heard this. I think the argument was that if you allow people 15 mins or so to settle down and start paying attention, you then have 20 mins of full attention in which to teach them, and another 5 to wind down. I suspect that’s the kind of thinking that leads ours to 45 mins.

By: spinks

spinks — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:07:18 +0000

Ideally, the endgame for casual players would be casual LFD raids, not hardcore heroic 5 mans …?