Heroic Shattered Halls

[Bolty]

Heroics = meh but my friends want to run them so I run them.
Sharanna my paladin on the other hand could use a lot of the upgrades that heroics bring but few people want her if Shalandrax is available. :(

Well, that's more of a server issue with a severe lack of tanks on our server. Tons of healers, not many tanks. Well, scratch that - lots of players who could tank, but refuse to.

I heavily ran heroics (talked/yelled at my guildies into running them) back in Feb/March for three reasons:

1) I wanted to see high-end content before it got nerfed, which I rarely get to do due to slow raid progression.
2) I wanted to advance through the content/quests/trials quickly, because pre-TBC WoW taught me that if you don't move fast enough you won't get to see all the content before the next expansion. Well, this didn't pan out anyway. :(
3) There was no other place but heroics and Kara to access challenging content. As a healer, I crave challenging content that tests my focus, reaction times, etc.

I think I put my Rogue through hell (360 degree cleaves ftl), but it was a blast...but there really was no way Blizzard could have kept heroics at that difficulty level without really massively upping the rewards. The problems were rampant:

a) You needed key classes. Funky, "experimental" class combinations wouldn't work, especially for the uber-heroics like the Shattered Halls time trial. If you didn't bring enough CC, you lost. Some classes (like Rogues) were borderline dogmeat the way the 360-degree cleaves would wreck them in the crowds. Another example - the end boss of Arcatraz was simply not possible unless you had 2 healing capable classes, because his mind flays would do 8,000 damage and if they hit your solo healer, they'd never catch up to the damage output. The end effect of all this is that some classes would get left out in the cold, being highly undesirable to bring over other classes.

b) The damage was sometimes off the deep end. I think Blizzard just set a base modifier of damage, and set it so that "everything in heroic does X times the damage of normal" and considered that "finished." As a result, you'd have mobs like the Felguards at the end of heroic Blood Furnace hitting a Kara-geared Warrior for 8000-12000 per hit. Non-crit. That's raid damage, sure, but you only have one healer, 2 tops. Even if the healer keeps the tank up, the tank's not holding aggro against that, and the Felguard one-shots the healer for 23,500 damage non-crit (true story). You could kite the Felguards, but again, only if you have the right classes (see point a). All of the super-hard-hitting trash in heroics got nerfed massively in 2.1.

c) Some bosses were just poorly tuned. This isn't news for any cutting-edge raiding guild, being used to broken encounters, but that second boss in heroic Ramparts was just ridiculous - his name escapes me at the moment. You could basically have one melee against him and that was that. The curse he would put on a player would instantly do something on the order of 9000-10000 damage to anyone near them, and it fired too fast for anyone to get away from in time. This is the kind of stuff that's on par with Nihilum's first kill of Lady Vashj and them revealing how broken she was. Also, see point a.

2.1 made heroics easier on so many levels.

- If you look at the patch notes, you'll see all of the sick-damage trash mobs specifically pointed out for nerfs.
- Game mechanics drastically changed. Things like 360 degree cleaves stopped, giving melee classes much more viability. Before that single change, melee classes were basically a liability in heroics because they'd suck up so much healer mana/attention to keep alive.
- All epic dropped gear was buffed.
- Many of the hardest pulls had mobs removed. That last trash pull in Slave Pens that was such a PITA became much easier.
- Bosses like the second one in Ramparts got nerfed.

I'm not saying it's as drastic a nerf as, say, what Blizzard did to Gruul - but it's a very different thing now.

That all said, I don't really feel like running an instance unless it's heroic. Walking behind a tank and casting Renew with the occasional Prayer of Mending is not particularly exciting, and that's what healing is on normal difficulty. Heroics are always the hardest on tanks, though. Many mobs in heroics can still one-shot cloth healers, and that's really where the pressure comes from. I ran a heroic Blood Furnace last week with a killer Arms-spec'ed tank, which was fun for me because I had to heal a ton, and just ONCE a mob got away from him - and one-shot crit me for 13,000+. Of course, my first reaction every time that happens is "I would have lived in my PvP gear!" :)

So when I yell "heroics!" and get "meh" from the tanks, I understand. Without anything else to do, I return to PvP...

Heroics are still the best challenge in the game for 5-man unless you force challenge upon yourself, like the aforementioned 6-man Onyxia you crazy Terenas nuts did. :)

-Bolty