So I ran Stonecore for the first time yesterday on normal mode. It was a pug. I must say, the entire dungeon was quite a challenge, but it was a blast.

While clearing trash we picked up three adds. The healer then proceeded to ignore me (mage DPS) and focus healing on the tank. He did a great job keeping him alive for as long as he could, but then he went down. We still have three adds. Next the paladin went down and it was only myself, a rogue and the healer left. This is where things got interesting. We still had three mobs to take down and we did it masterfully. While the priest healed, I kited the mobs and the rogue would dps them down. We got down to one mob left with the Rogue down and the priest and I traded aggro and DPS. It was an epic battle played by people that truely knew how to play their classes. It's these types of experiences that make the game so much fun.

WoW is finally challenging again, and this is a good thing. I just wish it didn't take an expansion for the game to feel so fresh.

 

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Congratulations on beating a normal trash pack of mobs.

 

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Glad you're having fun, but I'm not sure surviving a botched pull is a good indicator of game difficulty or player skill.

 

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Ghostcrawler is that you?


This post should come with "Brought to you by your friends at Blizzard!".

 

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You are missing the point.





The unpredictability of the encounter is what makes it interesting. It requires you to react to a changing situation, vs. a canned and scripted boss fight. It's as close as PvE can get to PvP.

 

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Try that stunt again in heroic mode, specially in that dungeon - then you'll have something to talk about

 

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Well, exactly. The fact that Heroic Dungeons are kicking everyone's a** is a good thing. The game end game dungeons and raids need to be challenging and unpredictable.Challenging situational PvE fights will require you to do more than just 1-1-1-1-2-1-1-1-1-2-1-1-1-1-2, which makes the game interesting.

 

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I've said it a million times. Change and unpredictability are keystones to entertaining game play, scripts are tombstones.

 

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OP, I'm with you. The game has balls again and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. My little guild of friends has been slowly gearing up through normals the past couple weeks and we just got into heroics the last couple of nights. We took down Vortex Pinnacle first (heard it was the easiest, and we had to physically walk in since a couple people weren't quite at the item level req for the random heroic dungeon tool), and then did VP again the next night and followed up with a full clear of HoO. Tons of fun - I don't think we're going to get into raiding at all this x-pac, but the heroics and then the heroic achievements should provide at least a couple months of entertainment.

edit: Oh, and over the course of many years of 5-mans, some of the most fun moments I've ever had have been botched pulls in challenging 5-man situations.

 

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I can relate to the OP on this one. This is the type of game play I enjoy. When some of the vets here say, "I was surprised how fast Wow felt like the same old thing again." That is because you are just going through the motions stomping dungeon after dungeon.


I am tanking my way through the levels with a Pally right now, and there is very little challege, the sad thing is the only real challenge is when things go wrong. I actually enjoy having the hunter in the group who just random pulls, or can't control their pet. Puts the preasure on me to pick up the mobs.


So I totally can relate to the OP's story here. Back in the day when we were running BRD and UBRS it was fun to have some crazy pull when the healer would run out of mana twice, pats just kept coming, you had to use all your tricks, loose a couple members of the party but still pull through. To me that is fun stuff, not just rolling the dungeon in 20 minutes.


If Blizzard could engineer a way to create this challenge with out bad players having to create it for us, I think that would be really cool. Some sort of random element that no matter how many times you ran the dungeon you couldn't plan in advance for.

 

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