Today I spent way too much time playing WoW with my friend, Chris but hey- it’s the weekend so I don’t feel too bad. Nicole was out of town at a show choir and I didn’t have a lot to do save for either A)journey through Azeroth or B)clean out the laundry room. Ahem, it’s not hard to see what got priority.
Anyways, we were working on a heroic Blackrock Caverns run and kept getting randomly grouped with players that were less than optimal. It’s not that they were all bad players- in many instances they were quite good! However, if we wiped it wasn’t uncommon for someone to just drop out of the group rather than toughing it out.
In a way I understand that- wiping sucks and sometimes it’s not worth sticking around if a group looks like it’s under geared or inexperienced to waste your time (and gold in repairs) to see if it’ll pan out. Just the same it was more than a little discouraging.
However, after working through this inconvenience for an hour or so Chris and I began talking about the difference between a normal Cataclysm dungeon and a heroic one. Eventually we arrived at the conclusion that while not impossible, heroic is worthy of its namesake almost to a fault.
After a couple of runs of a Cataclysm dungeon on normal you’ve pretty much got the rhythm down and from unless someone makes a mind-boggling mistake you’re golden. Heroic on the other hand is like a gauntlet slap in the face. It’s fiendishly difficult in the beginning and even after you understand the mechanics each boss employs to defeat you it can be a struggle.
The problem isn’t the difficulty, but how violently you’re shoved into that difficulty. There’s just not much middle ground between the two difficulties. To quote Yahtzee* you’d have to be pants-on-head retarded to fail normal dungeons and heroic dungeons are like herding cats.
Don’t get me wrong- I LOVE the new content and all but do wish that there were some way to better prepare players for the deep end of Cataclysm pool.
Am I alone in this or have any of you also struggled with the leap to heroism?
So I have no idea why I didn’t think to look it up at the anonymous game store, but apparently Cataclysm has been available for pre-order, i.e., has had a known release date since it was announced in August. I’m not sure how this minor detail slipped by Joshua and I, especially since around that time we were still playing World of Warcraft daily. But if you didn’t already know, the newest expansion from Blizzard is set to come out on November 1st of 2010. Just in time for my 22nd birthday!