As of the moment of this writing, we’ve not yet heard from Blizzard in regards to the dungeon difficulty of Cataclysm. To those who do not know, dungeon difficulty was a topic that very much in the spotlight throughout Cataclysm. Ghostcrawler originally defended their decision on making heroics hard, as you can read here: https://www.wowhead.com/news/ghostcrawler-dungeons-are-hard-179780
The Dungeons were severely nerfed in some patch or other (around the time of 4.2). Seeing as we’re getting Patch 4.3.4, it seems we’ll get the dungeons in their post-nerf state. Evidence in the Dungeon Journal seems to suggest we’ll get the post-nerf dungeons as well, as pointed out in this post: 5 man dungeons in Cata
It may be too late to change things if Blizzard has already decided to go this route, but some confirmation would be nice. Personally I think it’s a mistake to not release the dungeons in their pre-nerf state, as they went out of their way to ensure that WLK dungeons would be challenging. Also, it’s supposed to be Cataclysm Classic, and I believe a significant portion of those who did enjoy Cata did so largely because of the dungeon experience. I do not often (if I’ve ever) read positive things about Patch 4.3, but there are those who express fondness over Cata’s launch.
During Blizzcon they also mentioned “New Heroic System”, but we’ve not heard anything new on what it might entail. The simplest assumption I can make is that they’ll release the dungeons with the post-nerf changes and then slap a mythic-esque affix onto the new “heroic” mode. Personally, I’d take the genuine difficulty of Cataclysm rather than the artificial difficulty of a watered down mythic system.
Cataclysm had great dungeons. Not getting to re-experience them in their prime would be like releasing Classic Vanilla, but with flying mounts and town portals in every major city.
vanilla was hard-ish perhaps medium dungeons
TBC was easy cause players resources became more efficient while cognition req to succed remained same as vanilla
WoTLK was very easy with healers never losing any mana and mobs doing no dmg
and then cata was really the first “hard” expansion with introduction of heavy mana loss, good healer requirement, don’t stand in fire or get 1 shot mechanics, lower dps from classes e.t.c
cata mechanics should be how every expansion and MMO should be
Indeed. Alterantively, they could have done something like a “story” mode (i.e. post-nerf difficulty) for dungeons. Maybe they could reward 1 badge per run rather than 1 badge per boss, or somesuch. People who are skilled at the game will run the harder difficulty in order to get the good stuff faster, and people who are very green will have an easy mode to play until they improve enough to play what should be the regular difficulty.
Say what you will about Cataclysm, with all it’s faults and short-comings, but it had for sure the best Heroic dungeons I’ve ever experienced in this game. Pre-nerf that is, of course. Post-nerf was a joke.
They we’re nerfed before 4.2 in patch 4.06 which was only a few weeks after release and to be honest I didnt find them too hard you just had to go back to basics and use stuff like polymorph again.
I doubt we’ll get the pre-nerf versions but we’ll see.
Depends on what you mean by that. Currently talents aren’t much of a choise for most specs as was the case in Wrath meta. They were fun in leveling as every point felt rewarding but that’s about it. The lvl 80 and 85 are cookie cutter builds that allow no in between variations.
MoP talent system was oversimplified, but it at least allowed for fine tuning of character between boss fights.
One wonders what information they received from their survey they sent out ~two years ago. Because no matter where I look, be it on these forums, reddit or YouTube, when people speak positively of Cataclysm it’s pretty much always includes praise of the original dungeon difficulty. So unless we’re getting the pre-nerf dungeon, who is Cata classic aimed towards? The WLK playerbase…?
I doubt they gonna release dungeons in nerfed state, they using latest patch only for class balance. And i liked Cata pvp, it reminded me p1 original TBC when everything was abit more tanky and manna was issue atleast for some classes.
Indeed. The main thing that has me concerned is the mention of a “new” heroic mode for Cata. They mentioned this during the last Blizzcon and have not yet told us what it entails. My greatest fear is that they will go with post-nerf dungeons to appease the RDF crowd and then slap on a mythic-esque system to the dungeons.
Currently I don’t think anyone knows, so all we can do is hope.
In all of classic the only 3 dungeons I ever had to give up on were heroic Blood Furnace, Arcatraz and Mana Tombs when attempted with unfavorable tank/healer combo. To say that it was easy is really not accurate. Vanilla was “hard” because tanks had no area threat and weak single target thread in mitigation gear, thus bottlenecking entire group. In tbc some encounters were impossible with bad tank/healer combos even in appropriate (normal dungeon+crafted) gear.
Cataclysm dungeons on release were outright broken, some bosses were impossible for most group setups, the phoenix in Uldum dungeon coming to mind.
I disagree with this statement. I played prot warrior at the time, which was deemed to be the worst tank, and I got the meta dungeon achi prior to the nerfs. These days every class has access to some form of CC and AoE. If your comp had weak CC you had to use defensive cooldowns on trash. Mobs had abilities that needed to be countered, unlike wrath where you can literally facetank everything.
I was not part of some big raiding guild. My guild was formed at the end of Wrath and the quality of the players varied quite a lot. We didn’t beat all heroic raid encounters in the first or second tier. And yet I could take a group of any constellation and make it work. Sometimes it included more wipes, perhaps, but I can’t remember ever having to throw in the towel because the dungeon could not be done.
I did all the heroic dungeons in guild group as well. We didn’t even struggle really, being experienced raiders and on voice chat. But I remember some of the bosses, especially in the tolvir and twilight hammer dungeons, were exceptionally unfair to pug groups collected via RDF. I am specifically talking about bosses, you could take trash slowly, cc, drink between pulls, all fine and dandy. But the phoenix or obsidian statue bosses were impossible if you had a tank and healer in blue gear with no voice to coordinate defensives. Especially if dps was sup-par also. And I seem to remember a dragon who would cast rain of stone shards on healer forcing him to move, while slapping tank for 40% of his hp per hit at the same time.
The content does not need to be easily cleared by lfd pugs. Noone should give a flying flipp about lfd pugs. I want my dungeons to prevent somewhat of a challenge.
I wasn’t ever on voice chat in dungeons, but you may have a point. Individual fights could maybe see a tweak or two, but the nerfs they did was a drastic overcompensation. The game basically went back to the WLK gameplay loop, with RDF groups requiring 0 need to communicate again.
We’ve received the last patch in terms of class balance. We certainly didn’t launch TBC or WLK with Black Temple or ICC up, and the RDF was delayed until phase 4 even though it was very much in the patch WLK classic chose. And Blizzard elaborated on their reasoning for delaying the RDF, but I feel like that topic has been discussed ad nauseam and it’s irrelevant to the present day as RDF is in the game.
Blizzard also said that WLK dungeons were garbage. They didn’t use those words, of course, but Ghostcrawler described them as:
We didn’t like that the Heroic dungeons in Lich King and early Naxxramas had become zerg-fests. It made the rewards feel like they weren’t earned. /…/ It made class abilities feel less useful and interesting. Who needs that crowd-control or survivability talent when nothing is hurting you? Who needs a mana-conservation talent if you’re never going to run out of mana? Who needs a crit talent if your heals often overheal anyway?
And the Classic team said this:
Our 2008 design intention was for it to be a little easier than the 2006 original, but we missed the mark and it ended up much easier than we intended. Bringing up the difficulty a bit will make for a more fun and interesting challenge while awaiting the opening of Ulduar.
If Blizzard cares about the game being fun, they shouldn’t release the Cata dungeons in their post-nerf state. Because they aren’t fun precisely for the reasons listed in the quote above. They, as developers, know this. The players stare themselves blind at the rewards. If there is an easy way to get what you want, screw the gameplay (as is very evident in how we in Europe play Alterac Valley).