Challenge modes and other things

Challenge modes have been a pretty big topic lately so I thought it might be a good idea to examine them and shed a bit of light on them.

What are challenge modes? They are the same 5m dungeons that you did for levelling and heroic dungeons but with a couple twists. They drop no loot. They are timed. They are higher difficulty than heroic dungeons, some bosses or trash even have new mechanics. Your gear is limited so you cannot out-gear the challenge.

Essentially the intent is to have content that doesn't grow old because it's extremely difficult and you can't out-gear it. It will have leaderboards so you can continue to compete with people by being even more awesome than them. It's also been stated that bronze is going to be hard, gold is going to be crazy.

I think they're awesome and a wicked new way to excite hardcore players. I'm going to be charging them as soon as I've got the gear for it. However, there's some problems with it I'd like to highlight along with some really key components that make it a great new direction for the game.

It's 5m content. This means that group composition is going to be extremely important and can vary a lot. We're likely to see comp comparison intensity similar to arenas. For maxing aoe/single target dps we might see things like a physical only group or a caster only group. We might see people trying to get away with things like 4 dps on trash with a paladin tank doing the minor aoe heals and mega self-heals. Perhaps something similar with a dk. People are going to try to max the effective group's dps in every situation. We're going to see certain specs and combos really shine and some fail miserably. This is both good and bad for several reasons.

1 - We're going to examine class balance and design under a light that it may not meant to be seen under. This is similar to the spine encounter. We saw mages and rogues get taken because of their 20s burst dps potential. Perhaps the aoe pack burst potential will make it so that you are almost forced to take say boomkins for example. Alternatively, and this is something we saw in H Rag they'll have balanced the instance as a whole. That is to say we'll need both great aoe burst, aoe sustain or single target burst/sustain. Who knows.

2 - In raids we see a lot of things like dropping healers for more dps or the other way around. Perhaps in challenge modes we're going to see a necessity of taking a hybrid for certain parts of the run, maybe the only person healing is a hybrid. Imagine some fights we've seen on the ptr, I can't remember the names but the one on the wall with a guy that has almost no unavoidable damage. I can't imagine a benefit to bringing a healer to that specific fight. This means that your healer might be required to have a dps spec/gear or just make sure that you've taken talents that let you do crazy dps. Examples include a lot of monk's abilities, paladin lvl90 talents and many of the druid talents such as heart of the wild.

3 - Connection issues will be a deciding factor sometimes due to the incredibly tight time restriction. Someone lagging? Too bad you'll only get bronze now. Little tricks are going to be giant. Can your tank survive that second trash pack? If yes you better be pulling it or else you're losing valuable time. I can't see a group functioning without a b-rez, or at least without being at a significant disadvantage. Someone lags a half second trying to run out of a fire and you don't have a brez means you're done the run basically.

4 - Lack of gear scaling means you're really looking at how people are playing. It was mentioned though after looking for some time I can't find the source, that you're going to need raid level hit cap for the challenge modes as oppose to the old dungeon hit cap. This means +3 lvls instead of +2 lvls hit cap. You're going to need a base level of gear to get in, but you can't gear up over that limit. Gear will not scale up, it only scales down. This is both good and bad as you really need to push yourself and your groupmates as players, but bad in that if someone is underperforming how do you deal with it, when comp is so tight this can be a problem.

Those are a couple of the things I've thought about considering challenge modes. It might sound like I'm being very critical of the concept but I really do love it. I think this is a phenomenal concept for the game, I'm more just curious about how they're going to expand it with new dungeons that usually come out with the new raid tiers. The rewards I imagine will be something like weapon mogs or the like since there isn't room for a whole new set of challenge gear every tier. That said I'd love to see some cool new rewards in future tiers.

So that's challenge modes, and we've got mop around the corner so there's a thing or two I wanted to address briefly before the last week pre-mop.

We've got the scenario going live next week, with a different version for both alliance and horde. I highly recommend getting into those when you can because my understanding is that they will only be available for a short time. They will award a feat of strength. If you don't already have a horde and alliance character it might be a bit late to level them but if you look around or have some really nice friends I'm sure you can find a way to get someone up to the right level in time to see both sides. I've already got one of each and, if I have the time, might post some of the details here for people who are unable to see both sides. That said you should also read the book, it's pretty good and imo shows why we alliance think there's a horde bias over at blizzard, also shows why I have an aversion to more christie golden novels. Bring back Grubb or perhaps try and snag some of the warhammer writers 'cause those guys know what they're doing.

There's been some sneaky class changes recently that most people wont have picked up on without reading all your class changes closely. They're documented but mostly as small notes, a lot changed and you can't expect everything to make the front page.

For paladins specifically. Divine protection has changed. The base version and the glyphed version have swapped places. 40% magical is now the base version with the 20/20 version being glyphed. -10% physical dealt debuff is now only applied by your aoe. This shouldn't be an issue in 25m raids but 10m and dungeons this might be significant. DPS shamans should keep the debuff up on their own but all tanks only apply it via their aoe now.

There's a couple more but I can't remember them right now. Enjoy the new content, I'll probably get something posted before mists goes live but once it does I'll likely be missing for at least the first week and a half. Also, if you guys see just below the post there's some like/+1/etc things that you can hit. It really helps out and makes me feel better to see you guys hit those.

Edit: I stand corrected on the theramore scenario availablility. You just need two other level 85 friends of any class to do it (for the first week it's out). After that, it just goes to 90 and it will work the same. (Only needs three people.)