Heroic only raid instance

So last week we went over why it's important to have new content coming in quickly and I just wanted to mention that there isn't a whole lot to say other than it shouldn't come too quickly. From theorycrafters who would have to change their spreadsheets and sims more often than they do now (and congrats to you guys for the jobs you do with them), to the people who log on every couple weeks or less who have to re-learn some class mechanics or numbers every couple times they log on. You want people to get through the content and avoid it getting stale.

That said, on to this week's topic. Heroic only encounters. Judging by the dungeon journal information that's recently been released we have 4 bosses that are exclusively for heroic. This opens up a whole can of worms on several fronts. So here are the concerns that come with something like heroic only encounters. EDIT: so it looks like I was reading it wrong and it's just a heroic instance (5man) but the points raised still stand and have merit, also I'm good at reading things I swear.

1) Content for those that clear all of the other content really fast (thinking guilds like vodka, paragon, blood legion etc)
2) People who want to see all the content
3) Encounters that don't exist on normal or are drastically different from normal (and other normal/heroic encounter comparisons)
4) Heroic only Loot.
5) For whom is raid content designed.

There's more that you can take out of this but that's plenty for discussion and anything more would take this to several weeks worth of topics.

I'm going to start with addressing 2. People who want to see all the content, and that blizzard has stated that they want everyone to see the content. This is counter to that idea. It also brings up a minor notion of how do you access the heroic only dungeon since normally one has to clear it on normal, which brings some other interesting questions such as will we be able to work on heroics from day 1? But the idea that everyone should be able to see the content is a direct counterpoint to creating content exclusively for the hardcore raiders in this fashion. Creating things like sinestra is also in the same bracket. I loved the sinestra fight and having normal version of the hardest fights in the game does restrict what sort of encounters we will see, however there is still a very small subset of players that have actually gone through that encounter, even more so when the content was considered "current." Sure there might be nerfs over the course of the tier of content but that's not really the spirit of this discussion and another topic all together. I personally think that the "content for everyone" mentality is a great one, especially since my goals before ICC were simply to see all the content, to beat it all. But when getting through the normal mode content takes you a very short time (top end guilds all obviously have normal down within the first week) "clearing the content" takes on a very different meaning. I don't like nerfing the heroic content, simply because it defeats the purpose of heroic content, I'm fine with the Cata T1 style nerfs (normals got nerfed 20% when 4.2 went live). In fact those are IMO the best type of nerfs. If people still want to go through that content they are more than welcome to and it avoids interfering with the groups that are progressing late into the patch cycle.

But I digress, the idea of a heroic only raid instance isn't new. Algalon and Sinestra were huge successes in some ways and in both cases I think much was learned. That content is great for the heroic mode crowd. It's extremely difficult, you're not constrained by normal mode mechanics or even normal mode flavor to fights. Look at halfus for example. He had 5 dragons, normal mode brought out 3 of them. There is really only 1 way to go for heroic that makes sense and feels right. Bring out all 5. This is the reason fights like sinestra would be really difficult to create on normal then make the jump. I mean you could do things like have wrack last half as long, the whelps don't drop the puddles, everything does less damage. That sort of thing, while effective in some cases like ultraxion where the bigger numbers defined the encounter, is awful for things like sinestra. Imagine if the only things different for the warmaster blackhorn fight, or the theraliona fight or the majordomo fight (oh wait) were simple larger numbers and a tighter enrage timer. They just feel uninspired and identical to their normal mode. While I had some fun working with neat tricks on majordomo staghelm ultimately it was just "do the same thing you do every week, but be better about it." This is not the way heroic encounters should be approached. Granted not every encounter can have simple changes like Omnotron to drastically change the encounter and increase difficulty, but you don't need that every time. I also know that creating and designing fun and challenging encounters is not easy. If you've every DM'd a dungeons and dragons game, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you haven't just think of players who are actively trying to abuse every system in your game to trivialize what you thought would be difficult while avoiding making impossible bosses (it's an incredibly thin line and I applaud blizzard for doing the job they do).

Most of the bosses in firelands felt this way to me, the difference between heroic and normal mode were extremely small. Shannox was to kill the boss instead of the dogs. Beth'tilac added broodlings and a harsh enrage timer, broodlings being annoying and killed people but nothing really exciting about it. Rhyolith...I can't even remember the differences between normal and heroic except more damage and annoying RNG. Alysrazor, 3 hatchlings instead of 1 but approximately the same total health per tornado phase and meteors on firestorm. Baelroc was probably better than the others in terms of change for heroic. Spreading torment was a real mechanic that changed the way you approached the boss on some level (especailly combined with countdown) and while it was a minor change it made a huge impact. Staghelm, I've already talked about him. Ragnaros is in a league of his own and another problem I'm sure will come up again.

Compare this to things in DS or CataT1. Morchok was amazing, splitting the raid in 2 has been a favorite concept of mine since ulduar's Thorim encounter. It's just fun and should be used extremely sparingly or else it will get annoying very fast. That said, it was an easy encounter but felt very different from normal. Yorsahj was uninspiring but made it drastically more difficult. Zonozz was also a simple change that added huge layers of difficulty. I'm glad there was an encounter where the simplest mechanic of "range" was used to make a huge difference. It's been a while since we really had to worry about healer placement. Hagara was neat but uninspired for the most part. Ultraxion was straightforward but when you have a big DPS check encounter (and healing for that matter) the only real way to up the ante is making the numbers bigger, no complaints there, looming darkness was appropriate as well. Warmaster deck fire and goriona's bag of tricks  were again a good step up if they could have avoided the plague of bugs that came with that encounter including fake fire, handicapped gnome firefighters and an evading goriona. Madness had basically 2 new mechanics that needed to be addressed and the numbers got jacked up so much that they became a mechanic all on their own. Impale specifically. I'm not even going to address spine right now since it's almost in the same league as heroic rag.

So you can see where the problem comes in with designing encounters to scale up with heroic mode. You can have extremely boring encounters that are nearly identical to their normal mode counterparts or you can have wild swings in the encounter while keeping the flavor. In some cases it works, in some cases it doesn't. Ultimately the idea of heroic only encounters frees you from this consideration and as long as they aren't pivotal to the experience. For example, one might see madness as a good nominee for this heroic only treatment but then without doing that heroic encounter many people will find a lack of closure in the content which is important.

Heroic encounters also require heroic loot. One thing I have found a bit tedious in cata raiding is that you come across bis lists that have heroic loot on them, then you look at the normal mode loot and the bis list not counting heroics is identical minus the heroic tag on the item and possibly gemming for the hit thresholds. I would absolutely love to see a completely different bis list when adding 4 boss encounters to the table. Especially now that tanks need hit and expertise, trying to balance your tank stats will be much more fun than if it was the same as "get the same loot but higher ilvl." It just makes the gearing game more interactive and more in-depth than it has been before, it makes progressing more about balancing your gear and messing with it, tinkering with gem/enchant choices to find optimal setups. This, in my opinion, is good. The only danger is having something like the shard of woe from sinestra all over again. Options are just not dropping trinkets since they always seem to be far more powerful than intended for various reasons. Specifically I'm thinking of death's verdict, shard of woe, and one of the tanking ones early wrath that had some insane amount of defense on it. Another consideration is that previously heroic-only encounters have been something of a super-heroic difficulty level and have had higher ilvl loot. This I think is a bad thing and runs counter to what I mentioned already. If it's higher ilvl almost everyone will say "take the higher ilvl stuff, balance the rest of your gear around those pieces." So we'll still have to see what loot comes out of heroic raid encounters but these are things to start thinking about since the beta is starting to become more polished and the classes are getting numbers tuned meaning that we're likely to see a launch date being announced soon.

Lastly for today I wanted to cover a concept that has cropped up in some things said in either blog posts or interviews or forums posts. For whom does the bell toll. With the redesign of 5 man dungeons perhaps raiding content is next on the block for some slight refocus. It has been stated recently that there will be no level 90 5man normal dungeons. There will be heroic dungeons and the challenge modes but nothing like grim batol. The intent here is to allow people to play the dungeons and not go through crazy hoops just to complete them the way the first month or so of cataclysm, the people who are looking for that, they say, is challenge modes. So what does this mean for raiding. Are we going to see normal mode encounters become the normal mode dungeons of raiding?

Raid content is designed as content for those that have reached level cap and are looking for challenging game content to tackle. With so many people playing the game, that is a huge skill gap, the best players in the world kill bosses within weeks of them being launched, while those even right on their tails sometimes take a couple months to get through it while some even further back don't even complete it. Now for many it's not that they aren't good enough, a large group of players who love to raid may not have the time. Real life exists and it does interfere with playing the game, for better or worse. Those players must be kept in mind as well. The kicker comes in the place where there's really not a fine line between any groups that would make it easy to separate normal and heroic mode content. Many guilds and players will end a patch cycle having not completed an instance. Firelands is a good example. I didn't get heroic rag down before 4.3, I know friends who were only 3/7 H and still progressing, there are people that might have only gotten heroic shannox down. The point being that there's a gradient of players out there and a gradient of guilds. Back to the question, for whom is this content designed?

It's clear that the heroic only content is designed for the elite. I would love to get some of those server first titles and I could go on and on about 10m vs 25m and how they shouldn't be counted the same and not be competing for server first titles, but at the same time those are the laurels of progression raiding. This content is clearly designed for those that constantly push what the developers expect from us. Yogg 0 is a perfect example. There were those out there who thought it impossible to complete, with some sketchy math to back up their statements, that the numbers were just too high and that with available gear there was no way to get through it. Along comes some guild who changes the game and kills it without any exploits as blizzard was contemplating nerfing the fight. Heroic only encounters are for these guys. Can they be for others as well? I think there's room for others to experience the content before it gets nerfed but making things difficult for those guilds means that there will be some who just don't have the means to get through it. Is that ok for content that exists only on heroic? These are great questions and ultimately it comes down to the players themselves to discuss it. It's really hard to avoid bias in this because previously there has been a very clear divide. One heroic only encounter means you either have killed it, or you haven't, it puts you on one side of this argument. Having 4 heroic only encounters will help the gradient form and hopefully create a more open and less polarizing discussion on the topic. They are also great topics for the comments!

See you guys next week.