I completely disagree with this sentiment. Controlling 7+ elites is a much better challenge than a tank/healer gear check.

I'd be even more happy if all crowd control was removed from instances. Tanking 7 mobs at once is awesome, disabling half of them with one button press is not.

Don't those 2 sentences contradict each other?

You say controlling 7+ elites is better than a gear check, but being about to tank 7 elites at the same time is a gear check.

It depends on how you see it. Lets compare 2 dungeons.

The expected gear level for Shattered Halls is something around ilvl 100 blues from quests and pre-70 instances (sounds about right as an estimate to me). You can tank all mobs in the big pulls with that gear on your group without insane problems. If you dont meet those gear requirements than you should simply farm lower level dungeons first, no problem with that.

The expected gear on Underbog heroic is ilvl 115 blues with perhaps a reputation epic thrown in. Boglords hit you for lol just hope you string dodges or you die. That's crappy design imo.

I would have loved heroics to have half the amount of trash packs, but the packs themselves being slightly bigger. That would have required more skill and some extra gear instead of just a lot more gear.

Keeping agro is a skill check, not dying is a gear check. CC allows you to balance gear check on the tank against skill check on some of the other players. Personally I like it when the division of duty ends up less on the tank, which is generally where it ends up in a vanilla-mob scenario for any number of non-CCable mobs.

Schnappi, I think your aversion to CC as not having a skill component is epitomized by fire-and-forget, re-apply at will type CCes like polymorph, and that there are definitely crowd control situations that are challenging, dynamic, and fun to more people than just the tank.

The sexybus is a good example: there's a 1.5-second gap where if you're not a good player the mob will kill her by the second seduce. Fear-yo-yo-ing with Curse of Recklessness in a tight space takes attention and reflexes, and shaman kiting is one of my favorite. It's basically the one reason that SL has never made me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon: kiting + fear-kiting + sexybus + still dpsing enough to kill everything before it inevitably falls apart (sexybus has low mana) is always involving, and on heroic still challenging (read: mess up and die in 2 hits).

BRD main issue is you need to know where you're going pretty much. If you don't have someone who knows all the quests and the instance fully, it's worthless to go. If you do know what you're doing and have a decent group tho(difficulty is really high too compared to the crap before), you can finish all of BRD at 54-55 easily, and it gives like 1.5levels from quests and mobs. There's so many side quests in BRD that no one bother to do, but if you have a solid group, like guildmates or RL friends, you can run everything and it's really good xp wise.

The other real issue was the lyceum. Nice concept and all, but it's a newb pug breaker. You either outlevel it or die to it if you have people that are a little "slow". Most BRD pugs I've ever done stopped at lyceum, because of bad group makeup or just bad players.

However, it's still one of my favorite low level instance, it's so big and the lore is quite great, lots of different bosses. Another of my favorite is uldaman, while all the beginning is terrible, I just love the last fight, it was so different and new during beta after having done so many shitty SM runs and all the low instances before that. The last boss is just plain fun, but same as BRD, you want a good group to even be able to complete it, or outlevel it.


Imo, while the BC instances are mostly linear, I also like it because you can usually plan ahead how long it will take to complete, and the different "wings" let them scale the difficulty better. I'd rather take that over a free navigation lbrs where pugs get lost, and duration can vary from 1hour to 4.

Polymorph is the most obvious example indeed. The seduce problem isnt too hard to overcome if you make sure that someone else has some aggro on the mob before seduce goes off. Making sure fear doesnt pull adds requires some more attention, but then you are already controlling 2 mobs and perhaps even 3 if we count banish. If we look at traps, sap or shackle then I think it's fair to say that controlling 1 mob per CC class isnt a lot of added skill.

Personally I really dont like kiting as an added form of CC. It goes even more against team play and more towards "lets all take 1 mob instead of playing us versus them". If I wanted to see everyone take on their own mob I wouldnt exactly group up ;-)

The way heroics were implemented really felt as if someone told me the following:
-Hey, remember normal mode where we accidently pulled 2 of these large groups and you were able to keep 12 mobs off the healer at once?
-Yeah, it made me believe I was the king of the world!
-Well, you're gonna tank 2 mobs now and we'll sheep all the others and pretend it takes more skill.

I know that my example is horribly exagerated, but that is how my feelings are concerning mobs that hit for stupid amounts of damage combined with the dependency on crowd control.

Yes got the same feeling. And honestly its a pretty big turn-off from the game entirely. Gear checks aren't really all that fun. At least for me it doesn't feel like a good challenge.

Though move on to raids and you only tank one mob for the most part and its now even harder

There's also the tank shortage problem. Increasing the number of mobs in a pull pretty much makes the pull harder only for the tank: the healer still heals the tank, the dps still focus fire one guy and cc some others. It's the tank that has to keep all the mobs off the healer and the dps. I don't think people choose not to roll tanks because it's too easy of a job.

I like the mixture also, and I like encounters like Oz where the CC is designed to be offbeat. But the instances also have to be able to encompass people's little sisters who don't like to CC much on their warlock and warriors who can't handle 7 elites at a time. The bar on normal 5-mans has to be lower because otherwise these guys can't really do anything.

It would be interesting if heroics had more interesting trash (like, 7 or 8-mob pulls instead of 3-4) instead of just harder hitting ones tho.

This is absolutely true. Shattered Halls is a nightmare for a tank, especially a tank relying on pug intelligence when it comes to aggro and healing aggro. Perhaps that sort of multi-mob pull is fun for other classes but on my feral it's about as fun as gouging my eyes out with a spoon.

I must admit I never done heroic (or even normal when I think about it) Shattered Halls with pug and last time I was there was for the Tempest Keep attunements quests. However back then I remember it was the most fun 5 man instance I've ever tried to tank as a bear and probably the best tunned one aswell for the gear we had. It had some retarded and bugged bosses, but overall it was challenging, it was intense and it was fun.

I'd say that depens on the player. I like multimobpulls and I don't consider it funny to tank one mob after the other, without anything special to do. I liked the timed SH-run as attunement very much.
I think that's an overall Design-Problem. Some people find it funny to be able to do everything easily, others consider it funny to be challenged. A lot of people where pleased with the fact that the heroics got nerfed, because they wheren't able to beat that Instances before, but having done all of them unnerfed, whats the point of doing them in the current state, while everybodies gear is so much better now?

I've done pug heroic shattered halls a a warrior tank quite a few times now, half of them without any sort of CC. While that probably wouldn't be possible before the nerfs, I've never had any real issues. Mark everything up, tell people the kill order they should follow based on symbols, and cleave/tclap spamming is about mind numbing as tanking 1 mob at a time.


pS: Also done it on my druid, feels easier and safer, as though Swipe won't hit everything, it is spammable and much more reliable at the start, where a thunderclap resist+cleave avoidance could send a few mobs bee-lining for the healer.


edit: forgot to mention it was heroic mode, could've sworn I had said it, but guess not.

Tanking as a Prot Paladin is even more boring than Warrior or Druid.

Don't bother with CC, Shield/pull everything, AW + Consecrate, spam holy shield and consecrate until stuff is dead.

A targetable debuff with + threat would be nice that I can spam, but Paladins won't ever get something like that.

Requires 0 thinking, no skill and is one of the primary reasons why I'd like to reroll DK upon expac release.

Meh, I'd say that's true for a pug but totally un-true for a guild group. I ran enough SH on my warrior alt to be halfway to HH exalted, usually no deeper than 21 in prot, and it was a lot of fun, especially the big pulls. It's even more fun with 41+ in prot since you can actually hold all those mobs reliably if you do the right stuff. The one time I did it with a pug rogue though, it was pretty painful, since he decided he wanted to tank one or two mobs from every pull, but that kind of thing is going to bite you whether the pulls have 7 mobs or 1.

Eylirria has it right... with some organization it's not that hard.

I haven't played WoW for almost a year but I tanked shattered halls normal as a warrior with a pug over at a friends place just yesterday with no points in prot (but ok he did have 3 t4 level epics). My first time in SH and the same was true for 2 others in my group. I had to use spellbinder and played without action bars since he didnt want me to screw his up, so it was quite a challenge. We even managed to beat a pull of 3 groups at once (~15 mobs). I had lots of fun. And I absolutely loved doing lyceum (even with pugs) back in the days and wish for more of this stuff in WotLK.

If tanking was more trivial the fun would be gone, at least for me. I guess its fine if some instances are hard (to tank) but it seems stupid that the item rewards aren't reflecting that.

I want hard 5-man content and good rewards for that as in general I find smaller groups more attractive for mastering actual ingame challenges, while larger (raid) groups are more interesting community and organisation wise.

Unfortunately I just don't have the time for a full raiding schedule anymore so unless Wotlk delivers challenging and rewarding 5 and 10-man content it won't be for me.

Heroic SH taught me a lot about tanking. While I never had the chance to do pre-nerf heroic SH on my warrior, I did do it a couple times on my druid, and from experience, the only times I ever had healing aggro problems were when too many mobs were being crowd controlled. It's much more dramatic to have that 7,000 crit heal land on you when you only have 2 mobs beating on you. A 7,000 crit with 2 mobs, 7-8 seconds into the pull, can be a real issue when your DPSers are decent enough that you can't slack on the threat, leaving little room to build solid threat on the extra mobs.

However, once we stopped actively CCing more than 2 mobs per pull, almost all issues imediatelly died down, as the additional targets soaking up the healing threat made it much, much easier to keep the healing threat under the aggro pulling thresholds.

Ever since I decided to put everything down in numbers and figuring out just how much healing threat was diluted, and how much more threat I was able to dish, both individually, and to extra mobs with the increased rage generation, I imediatelly picked up the habit of never crowd-controlling anything that I don't need to. As long as it's healable without too much strain on the healer, I will tank as many mobs as they come, 4, 5, 6, depends on the pull, obviously (I won't leave up for instance, multiple mobs that can disorient/deaggro me, it would defeat the point of keeping things on me) -- from experience, it's made everyone's lives easier, and more fun. No need to sit there wishing the rage bar would go up so I can finally shield slam/mangle, no more healing aggro, no more mage/warlock/hunter getting eaten by a mob that made a heartbeat resist against their CC, and most healers I commonly run with just usually prefer having me tank it because apparently, tanking multiple mobs gives them some weird sense of safety.

Just thought I'd share this, because I started off, when tanking, with the "tank 1-2 mobs, tops" mentality, I had this whole idea built up already that tanking 3+ mobs was too much of a hassle, and just too dangerous in general, and I think that breaking through that idea made me a better tank in the long run.

You know, your post reminded me of a problem I've had with WoW since release. It's almost universally agreed that WoW improved upon all the issues that plagued previous MMOs, specifically EQ and instancing. However, a lot of people have felt like there is little to no community aspect, something that vanilla EQ hooked people with. BRD reminds me of lower guk, in that it's huge, there's multiple areas with their own 'themes', tons of bosses etc.. The difference is, it's instanced and guk wasn't. This meant groups would hang out in guk, in certain areas.

I've always thought they should have a large dungeon that was not instanced. Instancing is generally a better mechanic then non-instancing, but there are some things that are missed out. If there was another BRD or two, non-instanced, with elites that have great loot and bonus exp (basically, a reason for people to hang out there)and a relatively quick respawn, that would be kind of neat. You might run into some issues with ganking, but so what. Hell, put pvp objectives inside. Make a pvp objective that lets you temporarily 'close off' an area (like a gate control tower)of the dungeon, for your group or faction, so you have access to the bosses/mobs in there for the next half hour. At the half hour, if an opposing faction group takes it over, they get in etc.. Heck, make it instanced per faction, or have two and one faction can only control one at any time. Make the exp good enough that people could level there in a group as quickly as solo questing, but it put it near the level cap (so level 77-80 mobs if it were done for WOTLK.

Epic dungeons like BRD just don't work in terms of instancing and PUGs. Make it non-instanced, with quicker respawn rates, and huge. You can keep the epic feel and eliminate some of the problems that occurs from making epic instance dungeons..

i dunno, I just miss having a community 'dungeon' that people all hung out in. WoW has never had the community that EQ did. I still like the game, but I hardly know anyone on my server outside of my guild and I think that's odd. In EQ I knew tons of people.

The main reason this worked so well in EQ and would suck horribly in WoW is that EQ was not heavy PVP game. When you met somebody in a dungeon, they were on your side unless you were specifically playing on a PVP server which were the extreme exception and not the 50%+ rule that WoW has. Any area like this on a PVP server would quickly become a huge free-for-all and would be next to useless.

I didn't play EQ, but I did play Dark Age of Camelot casually. I still have fond memories of guild groups in the Catacombs, where we'd claim a room to ourselves and have a good old time until we wiped. And when we wiped, we nicely asked the group in the next room over to send someone over to rez us, and often they would (or they'd call us newbs, and then we'd ask people in the next room over from that). I met a lot of people that way.

I remember arguing that instancing would be the death of the "massively-multiplayer" genre as we knew it -- I mean, City of Heroes had just come out, and it just felt wrong to those of us coming out of Ultima Online and Asheron's Call. Fortunately, Blizzard proved us wrong.

While it doesn't get used very often, instance general chat sometimes feels like the Catacombs scene from DAoC. During our Altazhan run last weekend, an RP guild group announced over general that they'd just killed Aran for the first time. I was happy to have the opportunity to congratulate them.

Asheron's Call had no instancing and a brutal PvP server. I think it worked there (but I honestly don't know, I didn't play on Darktide).

I played AC DT for about a year I think, and I'm pretty sure I've only done TWO dungeons that you weren't supposed to solo(everything was soloable in the game, skill based game and all). One time Aerinth, one time olthoi queen. Darktide was purely a pvp server, and AC pve sucked anyway. The only "cool" pve event is when they made this GM controlled event with some kind of evil god that started wrecking havoc everywhere, and on darktide he let us swear allegiance to him and raided the "good guys" town with us, casting meteors and shit. Then again that wasn't really pve I guess, at least not on Darktide ^^.

No what I think wow should do is have a non instanced dungeon that acts like a bg. Pretty much like an open air AV. You open stuff and advance events thru killing mobs, but you can also get something from fighting people, then you have pvpers working with raiders as some kind of bodyguards, and share loot in the end. That's pretty much what happened with the whole Sands of Time/AQ gate event on pvp servers, Silithus was in flames, and god it was so much fun.

Strongly disagree. Ignoring the technical issues of lag and server instability, the AQ gate event was pretty fun. My most fond single day memory of WoW was the first Azuregos spawn on Mannoroth, with 100 vs. 100 zergfest for hours that Sunday.

Big-scale world PVP should be encouraged where possible.