5man content (even the heroic stuff, pre 2.1) is just too easily completed to be giving out 2-4 good epics per run. If they were to make it harder to compensate, it just narrows the class comp requirements and makes the dungeons frustrating and annoying, but rewarding. Right now is the perfect balance; challenging, doable, fun, and rewarding (2.1).

I think that is a false perception, there is a fine line between making something harder (i.e. boss hits tank for 5000 damage instead of 1000 damage) and making something more challenging (i.e. the first boss in heroic mechanar). It is pretty obvious what route Blizzard took when designing the majority of the heroic instances, and personally I would have much rather had more encounters designed like capacitus that actually require intelligent thought and teamwork on behalf of the whole group, rather than just brute force dps zergs.

Besides, is it too much to ask for the actual loot drops from heroics to be slightly better than what you would get from a regular 5 man level 70 instance? Right now the only advantage that blue heroic loot has is that it is itemized to fill in gaps that were left in the regular 5 man loot, which frankly is a pretty dumb design in my opinion. Why should class X spec A have to run a heroic for the equivalent to something that class X spec B gets easily from a normal 5 man boss? It just doesn't make sense.

It would have been so great to see more well thought out fights rather than the current situation, if there was a bit less brute forcing required then you could allow more flexibility in groups such as taking two holy/resto classes if that was what was all that was available at that time.

Whether people think heroics are easy or not, it is a simple fact that they are harder than normal instances and the drops for all the bosses should reflect that even if they didn't drop epics. Sethekk halls heroic is one of the most comical for this since even though it isn't a level 70 instance, they never bothered to reitemise the heroic version properly so you can end up with sub 70 blues dropping in a heroic.

Moonkin epic itemization is virtually non-existant.

Perform the following search on wowead:

Epic Items
Damage Done by Spells > 0
Part of an item set: No
Obtained through PvP: No
Crafted by a Proffession: No
New in the Burning Crusade: Yes

Cloth Items: 53
http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4.1&fi...;crv=0:0:0:0:0
Mail Items: 11
http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4.3&fi...;crv=0:0:0:0:0
Plate Items: 7
http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4.4&fi...;crv=0:0:0:0:0

Leather Items: 1
http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4.2&fi...;crv=0:0:0:0:0

Pretty huge itemization hole there, and even if I relax the search, there is only 1 other piece of epic moonkin leather:

http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4.2&fi...;crv=0:0:0:0:0

The ONLY epic leather moonkin gear outside these 2 items is:

• Tier sets
• PvP gear
• BoP crafted profession specific items (far inferior to the other profession BoPs)

I found a small mistake. Eye of the Stalker is a ring, not a necklace.

Traveling OT here, but it does seem odd how many ostensibly complicated fights can be completely trivialized by a DPS zerg. For example, it seems like the "intended" strategies for bosses like Grandmaster Vorpil, Pathaleon, Warp Splinter, etc would involve taking time off for add control every so often. Instead, once you get even mediocre gear, the strategy for 50% of all 5-man bosses boils down to "pop all cooldowns, burn him down ASAP, adds be damned". Obviously not every fight can (or should) be Heigan, but it is a little disappointing how easily a lot of boss mechanics can be bypassed by sheer brute force.

To add something constructive, I think heroics are in a pretty good place as of 2.1. Having every boss drop an epic would definitely be overkill given their accessibility now. Karazhan and Gruul may have better loot in some slots, but there's also a good chance that zero items you want will drop in any given week. With heroics, until you've farmed them to death, you are never that far from a guaranteed tangible upgrade.

For all the talk about Karazhan being the new AQ20/ZG, I think heroics are what really fills that niche now. Generally good rewards, with a few superlative rewards, that you're guaranteed to earn at a steady pace. Difficulty (for the most part) is tuned to somewhere between "mindless PUG can do it" and late Karazhan. Other than the obvious group size difference, sounds a lot like ZG to me.

Actually this is Blizzards own fault, instead of increasing boss HP on these fights they decided to increase adds HP and frequency of spawning, such that you would need an ungodly amount of DPS to kill all the adds AND still have time left to damage the boss before the next wave of adds comes. To put the icing on the cake, they made the majority of these adds CCable by certain classes, thus trivializing many add based encounters by simply bringing a warlock/shadowpriest for aoe fears, banishes, enslaves, etc. The way in which this was handled is completely retarded in my opinion.

I think that is an incredibly shortsighted and selfish thing to say, as a mage you have access to plenty of +dmg gear from heroics. What about all the classes or specs who got completely shafted in the heroic instances, and the only epic rewards they get out of this whole level of progression is their trinket/necklace/cloak/ring from the badge rewards? What about armor? They are relagated to dungeon blues, greens and quest rewards for life because Blizzard was too short sighted to provide them with a viable upgrade path? This isn't even restricted to "offspecs", hell I'm a bloody restoration druid - a class that is listed on the WoW website as a Primary healer - and there isn't a single epic drop from any of the heroic instances that I would want to wear as part of a healing set. There is something wrong with that.

I don't totally see how what you quoted relates to the fact that you feel gear for your spec isn't well represented in heroics, or makes me selfish. But I'll gladly agree that some classes/specs make out better than others in any given tier of progression. I'm sorry that Blizzard doesn't seem to have provided healing leather in heroics. Hopefully they will rectify that in the future. Itemization holes aside, though, I still feel that heroics are in a good place overall.

Sorry I "overquoted" you, I cut it down to the part of the quote that was relevant to what I was trying to say. And thank you for acknowledging that the heroic instance itemization leaves something to be desired, too many people look only at what is available to themselves, and don't consider that maybe other classes haven't been as well itemized.

I too find it a bit odd that there is no healing leather or mail available from heroics, could it really have been that big of an oversight from Blizzard? Or are they trying to hint that Armor value is really just an overrated stat and you shouldn't bother with it unless you're a Main Tank?

I mean, how often don't you see Cloth wearing Holy Paladins for example, it would be interesting to see some statistics on things like that. The data is already available out there on the Armory. Blizzard could even post the results as one of their Top Lists under 'Most Cloth Wearing Non-Cloth Classes'. That would hopefully give their Itemization Team something to think about

Either way I would prefer if they didn't screw too much with the loot tables at this point as it would probably do more harm than good. Badge/Token bought rewards are always a better approach imo.

There is a LOT of Heroic healing mail:
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=27826
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=27458
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=27759
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=27835
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=27549

and also 3-4 level 70 healing mail pieces that drop in non-Heroic as well.

I geared up entirely through Heroics before I even stepped foot in Karazhan or any other raid instance so clearly it does work. The blue healing mail that's offered through Heroics are extremely strong and some pieces are only a few stats short of their Karazhan epic counterparts.

Edit- Anyway; the OP mentioned that there were no healing mail in Heroics. I posted a list of healing mail that ONLY drops in Heroics. There was no "epix only" qualifier (though I guess that could be inferred through the thread title), but what's the difference between a Heroic-exclusive blue drop and a Heroic-exclusive epic drop? From my experiences, not much really.

I agree. What should matter is the quality of the item, not the colour of the item link. To say that the lack of an epic drop of a certain type in a certain type of instance means Blizzard is giving the "middle finger" to a portion of its playerbase is alarmist and whiny.

Master Thief's Gloves ? - Epoch Hunter or Murmur ilvl 110

Confirmed Heroic Murmur.

There is actually a fairly large difference. I'll use a couple of drops from slave pens for example, because they are very similar:

Rare: http://www.wowhead.com/?item=27545
Epic: http://www.wowhead.com/?item=30538

Total Difference:
+49 armor
+5 stamina
-5 crit rating
+17 hit rating
+18 attack power

If we balance out the ratings and count only the stats the matter, it works out to something like:
+5 stamina
+12 hit/crit rating
+18 attack power

This item has a total of about +25% or so raw stats on it than a heroic blue dropped in the same instance. I'm not familiar enough with the item budget system to be able to calculate what the stats on some other heroic blues would be if they were converted to epics, but I'm fairly certain that the increase in stats would be very noticeable when spread over an entire set of items.

Just as another measure of the complete folly of this argument, let us take the Mantle of the Sea Wolf that was linked earlier, from heroic Mana Tombs, as an example. Vestia's Pauldrons is the cloth version of this, which is almost identical except for a couple of stat points that are shifted from sta to +heal. This item drops from the chest in mechanar, which could probably be 2 manned by any tank and healer capable of completing heroic mana tombs. Am I the only one who thinks this is just moderately ridiculous?

I think it has to do a lot with the "epix upgrade" that they did in 2.1.

Basically, pre 2.1, heroic epics were ilvl 95 I think, which were very close to the ilvl 115 blues that dropped in the instance.

With the upgrades the heroic epics got a massive buff, but the heroic blues stayed the same, which is what made the huge gap.

Link to Boots of the Endless hunt is http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29262
current link not working ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=292629).

nice work.

Something to add in here, there was leather gear that was hybird. Strength, Agility, Stamina, Intellect and spirit besides +healing on them. All of these changed to pure feral stats though. I think Blizzard relied on these items as THE leather healing gear from heroics, but as they got changed, they forgot to add new healing leather gear (and forgot to change items names to a more real name that matches stats. http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29264).

That's a relief I guess, they didn't ignore Resto Druids, they just forgot to update the items. Sorry for the slight derail, I just thought this was funny

From the 2.1.2 PTR Patch notes

Coincidence right?