Lessons to learn from Wrath's heroics, Part 1

Warning: This post contains two instances of PG-13 language (for those outside of the US, that means vulgar language that is fine for most teens, but may be inappropriate for younger children). Hide your infants and tweens.

With the Cataclysm beta starting and the Ruby Sanctum finally released, it's safe to say that Wrath of the Lich King is coming to a close as an expansion. Thus it's a good time to look back and reflect, to reflect on both mistakes and good decisions made. It is with that lens that I look at heroics today. Heroics will probably play a big roll in Cataclysm, as they did in Wrath of the Lich King, and though Blizzard seems to be designing their expansion to get more of those people who spend most of their time running heroics into raids, heroics are not to be ignored. They will be the first foray into group content for quite a few players, and they deserve a good amount of design attention for that reason. So, let's look back at what Wrath's heroics can teach us:

Forge of Souls/Pit of Saron/Nexus

Now, everyone loves a little bit of grandiosity from time to time, but these heroics show that in high doses, it isn't a good thing. Each of these heroics has its own unique issue with grandiosity. Forge of Souls is too big for the number of enemies it has. The long walks between packs of trash kills the suspense for me while I'm in there. Pit of Saron simply has an absurdly large amount of trash, especially between the Krick and Ick encounter and Scourgelord Tyrannus. Nexus suffers from a similar problem, although the instance itself is really just huge for a heroic. Sure, it gives five emblems, but I'd rather work harder for more emblems per instance than work longer. Put simply, heroics are not raids, and do not need to match them in scale and size.

Trial of the Champion

I don't really enjoy the bosses in Trial of the Champion all that much. With the exception of Eadric the Pure, who is the one boss in that instance whom I enjoy fighting, all of the other bosses have abilities that cause high damage, but can't be mitigated in any way. That instance simply expects you to heal through that damage, with no way for skilled players to avoid it (again, with the exception of Eadric). Not only is that lazy instance design, but it also makes the heroic unengaging and annoying when players don't out-gear it and simply boring when they do.

Oculus

Oh Oculus; how I love thee, and yet how the playerbase does not. If any instance is rife with lessons to be learned about the design of heroics, it is this poor sap.

Let's start with the good points... er, point. Flying in an instance has been one of my dreams since I first bought Flight Form. I longed for an instance where flying was an integral part of its execution, where you would fly from platform to platform on your own flying mounts. I guess you can see that Oculus didn't fit this vision very well. Not only were we unable to fly around on our own mounts, but the instance was so unintuitive designed that trying to get anywhere was a nightmare. Flying in an instance can work, but the instances need to be designed so that the path you take through them is more intuitive than it was in Oculus.

And about those mounts. Let's get one thing straight; I enjoy vehicular combat, but only during quests (where the vehicle in question is simple to operate and often grossly overpowered) and PvP (where there is plenty of room for trial and error to get used to the vehicle). In Oculus, none of these luxuries were given to us players: the drakes were hardly overpowered, complex to maneuver and fight with, and mistakes lead to death, which is par for the course in PvP, but a huge inconvenience in PvE. Vehicles in an instance can be a good thing, but they need to either be simple, or there needs to be a way for players to get used to them, something like the daily Aces High! and how it related to the Malygos encounter.

Forge of Souls

I have one gripe specific to the Forge of Souls, a gripe relating to those packs of casters who don't like to move when they are aggro-ed. They are far apart from each other, too far apart for a tank's AoE attacks to hit them all, and there is no way to set up an LoS pull to bring them closer together. This creates a very difficult situation for us tanks, and I implore Blizzard, when they design trash packs with casters, that they add one of the following elements to those packs: the casters actually move, they are placed close together, or there be a way to LoS pull them.

Halls of Reflection

While I'm discussing specific gripes with specific trash enemies in specific instances, allow me to discuss the gauntlet in the beginning of Halls of Reflection. Now, I have no problem with trash that is actually difficult; it makes what is normally a boring part of the instance more interesting. And I have no problem with trash that required crown control; it's my understanding that we'll be seeing more of that in Cataclysm, so we may as well just accept it. And I have no problem with gauntlet type events where enemies spawn automatically; Violet Hold and Black Morass were two of my favorite heroics back when they were a challenge. Each of these distinct elements, I have no problem with individually, or even in pairs. However, put all three together, and you have a clusterfuck of epic proportions.

"Clusterfuck" really is the best was to describe the trash in Halls of Reflection. When I looked up the definition of that word to make sure I was using it correctly, I found this: "Its more precise usage describes a particular kind of Catch-22, in which multiple complicated problems mutually interfere with each other's solution." That describes the trash in Halls of Reflection perfectly: the enemies do a lot of damage and have many abilities that make fighting them a royal pain, so crowd control is necessary. However, crowd control is difficult to pull off because the enemies spawn sporadically thanks to their gauntlet-style setup, so pulls and the crowd control used to make them manageable can't be planned out beforehand. In short, it's a mess, a huge mess.

So, for future reference: difficult trash that requires crowd control? Fine, just give us the time we need to mark the enemies and set up the pull. Difficult trash in a gauntlet-style event? Fine, just don't require us to use crowd control. Trash that requires crowd control in a gauntlet-style event? We'll begrudgingly accept it; just don't give it insanely high damage, so we actually have time to get it under control

I know that most of the things on this list were things that I felt Wrath's heroics did wrong, so next week, I'll be going over what certain heroics did right and what is worthy of being copied by Cataclysm's heroics. Until then, what heroics will you be happy to leave behind when Cataclysm launches, and why?