Why we need Easy Heroics

My last post (which was last week -- raiding really puts a dent in the blogging, doesn't it?) was about how Heroic dungeons can be a little challenging for new players. It's not that they are hard, it's just that it's very hard to know what to do and how to do it, since little of that information can be found in the game itself. I felt (and still do) that something needed to be done to make them less challenging and to make sure players were ready for them.

So it was funny to read Tobold today and see him complain about how easy Heroics are, and how they should be more difficult. This is not an unusual complaint -- Heroic dungeons were much more difficult in TBC, and anything that is made easier in WoW is criticized for being easy.

It's useful to step back, and look at the whole world of difficulty in games. I think you can sort all PvE content in WoW (and probably in any MMO) into two bins :

Bin A : All soloable content, and simpler non-solo content that can be done easily with pick-up groups

Bin B : More difficult group content that relies on more competent PUG members or (ideally) playing with a set group of friends or guildmates.

A major innovation of WoW was rifling through Bin B, finding a box labeled "Leveling", and saying "Hey, this doesn't need to be here!" and tossing it in Bin A. Grouping was not removed from WoW, it was not made anti-social, but you no longer had to wait for your friends to log on before you really played the game.

At some point when Wrath was in development, Bliz went back to Bin B and grabbed out five-man dungeons. These were usually pugged in WoW 1.0 and 2.0, but never productively or reliably. It was still best to do them with guildies. Why not hoss them convincingly in Bin A? So they did.

The funny thing is that this brought back something people had been missing for a while -- what happened to that happy camaraderie from the days of forced grouping? WoW brought it back in 3.0 with short, simple heroic dungeons that gave rewards for everyone.

Lately Blizzard has added the concept of "normal" and "heroic" versions of every raid, in both the 10-man and 25-man sizes -- so every raid dungeon has four versions. This was done, I think, more to expose all players to all the raid content. But a very nice side effect is that you generally don't run every useful raid with your guild, since counting old raids there can now be four or six useful raids at a time. And since so many people have run some version of the raid and they can't do all versions with their guilds, many raids are run with pick-up groups. Blizzard's done such a great job training raiders that they've essentially tossed raiding into Bin A as well.

In terms of social gaming, these are game-changers. I now play more with strangers than I ever have before in my WoW career. Most times we don't talk a lot, but a little talk is better than none at all.