5 Man's in Cataclysm

With Cataclysm coming up lots of people are making posts on what they want to see and the pros and cons to each thing.  Most of it is more a want then a knowledge of what it will be as the information we have is limited but it still is interesting to read peoples discussion as long as it does not fall into the war of flames.

5 Man dungeons are a major point of discussion with many people wanting to see them be a bit more challenging like back in BC.  Now I have never played back in BC when BC was end game but I have done dungeons while leveling with the LFD system and have seen many wipes in normal content BC dungeons.  I chalk this up to WotLK and what it has taught everyone.

I see it from my first run through Deadmines on.  All new tanks try to pull everything and have it AoEed down.  Sad part is, at lower levels this is death calling.  Tanks have so little to work with to keep aggro and DPS have so little to work with to reduce aggro meaning that everyone has aggro on everything all the time.  While wipes in lower level dungeons are fewer they still happen with that mindset.

In BC dungeons this becomes a huge issue as the trash mobs are not push overs even to a group of 5 people in all BoA gear.  They can not just be gathered up and AoEed down even after the tank gets more tanking skills and the DPS get more threat reduction skills.  It is not the way the dungeons where made.  They were made to have to use your brain once in a while.  I was in one the other day on my baby priest where the tank kept having to yell to kill the totems first and no one ever listened so everyone was feared and everyone ran into more packs and sooner or later it was 10 or 12 mobs on us.  The tank was great in picking them all up but with 10 packs on you there was no way any healer could keep up with that at level.  Death was nearly instant for the tank and everyone else to follow.  WotLK taught people to just kill, kill, kill and think of nothing else.

With the guild I was in the day the ICC 5 mans came out we went into them and talked strategy on each pull.  I guess that is what the feeling was like back in the BC days.  It was fun, I am a hunter and have tons of ability in this area that I never got to use.  I learned to trap on the fly, to silence to draw a pack to the tank, many other little tricks.  I do not think of myself as incredibly skilled at all but I do think of myself as competent.  That is why I was able to learn that stuff quickly.  Many are not sadly.  They make my competent look extremely skilled which it is not.  I worry about that should CC become a big part of the game again.

Shortly after that we were back into the AoE fest that WotLK had become. When first learning it we used CC and such because we did not know what to expect.  In no time at all we outgeared it and we knew what each pack did so we no longer needed it and it was AoE time again.

WotLK has taught people the easy way and as sad as this sounds there is no going back after that.  People are just way to stupid to be taught now.  They only know one way and that is the fast burn.  Look at every single group you get into when using the LFD when leveling.  All you see are tanks pulling as much as possible even if they shouldn't be and DPS yelling pull, pull, pull and faster, faster, faster.  Waiting for a healer to get mana is also something that never happens.  Their theory is, I never had to wait on my healer at 80. See, they have been trained.  While leveling a healer I learned that needing mana is a almost constant thing.  At low levels I am out on one big pull.  I also noticed that the tank does not care if I have 0 mana, he is going to pull the next 20 mobs anyway because it is my problem, I should be full on mana.  Because I am low on mana is it my fault and I am a bad healer.  If he dies because I have no mana to heal him, it is my fault.  This is WotLK mentality because healers are never out of mana in LK 5 mans.

When Cataclysm comes out and they start asking people to pull as little as possible and to single target and CC people will just start yelling how bad the tank is because he can only take 3 mobs at a time and how bad the DPS is because they can only burn down 1 at a time.  And then whenever someone dies it will be the healers fault because they ran out of mana when they should never have run out.

I will like that for a short time but it will take only a little time to learn and in the end it will turn out to be the exact same as it is now in WotLK.  In a matter of no time we will be running through the same dungeons that were kicking our asses all over the place and AoEing everything down.  Blizzard said they are trying to make sure that does not happen and I believe them, I believe that is their intention, I do not however believe they will do it.  They could do it, they just won't.

Do you want to know why the dungeons will become a cake walk the second we start getting gear no matter how hard Blizzard tries?  Sure you do and I will tell you with a little lesson in history that apparently Blizzard has not noticed yet.

When you moved up tiers of gear back in the day (yes I was not there but I can see the gear and I can read) the increase was minimal.  You had something with +11 agility, the next tier had +12 or maybe even +13 agility on it now.  The one after that had a huge +15 agility maybe.  Things moved up slowly.  That is why end game content was still hard even if you started to gear up a lot because the gear, while better, was not leagues better.  It was better to make things slightly easier but not cake walk easy.

With WotLK you enter dungeons with things that have numbers like +50 agility, while in end game you have things with like +130 agility in the same slot.  You where able to do the dungeon, sometimes easily, with that +50 gear so what do you think will happen with +130 agility gear?  You will steam roll it because you are 4 and a half times stronger then you where back when it was easy to begin with.  Everyone steam rolls things because Blizzard forgot how to scale things correctly.  If the expansion started with items being +50 agility they should have ended with items being +60 agility, maybe +70 for end game heroic raid stuff.  Not +130 stuff that you can get with badges that are given out like candy on halloween.

WotLK was not designed to be easy like it is, it just became easy because Blizzard forgot how to deck out gear.  They think that they want to give us something to make it worth upgrading and they do not realize that we would be just as fast to get the +55 agility item to replace our +50 agility item as we are to get the +130 agility item to replace our +50 agility item.

This is why the Cataclysm dungeons will be laugh fests in a matter of no time just like the WotLK ones become laugh fests.  Look at the itemization on gear now.  If we are getting things with +250 agility then you can guess, at least if they will do as they did in WotLK and make it 4 1/2 times better later, we will be going into those same dungeons we have to use CC and pull small packs with +1125 agility on items and it will once again it will be a laugh fest.

So all this talk is nice, all this talk is fine and dandy but all this talk is pipe dreaming because no matter how great it seems and all those people saying "wow I love the return of CC" will be walking through there like an 80 walks through deadmines now.  Unless Blizzard does something about scaling stats so they do not make "current" content trivial with each small update there is no way to stop this from happening.  If +250 agility on 85 epics is how we start Cataclysm then how we end it at end game raiding before the next one comes out should not be more then +300 agility.  Anything more then that will make all the current Cataclysm trivial way before the end of the Cataclysm cycle just like the gear in the WotLK cycle has made all heroics trivial now.

EDIT:
Some research to back up what I said.  Taking agility off the shoulders to do it on one piece for all tiers as an example.

Agility on Hunter Shoulders:
Classic:
Tier 1 - +16 Agility
Tier 2 - +16 Agility
Tier 3 - +20 Agility
(This is why Classic content stayed challenging, little increase)
Stat jump = 25% From starting end game to ending end game.

Agility on Hunter Shoulders:
BC:
Tier 4 - 0 Agility
Tier 5 - +26 Agility
Tier 6 - +34 Agility
(Nice upgrade but not amazing huge leaving BC content challenging)
Stat jump = 31% From starting end game to ending end game.

Agility on Hunter Shoulders: WotLK:
Tier 7 - +58 Agility
Tier 7.5 - +66 Agility
Tier 8 - +60 Agility
Tier 8.5 - +65 Agility
Tier 9 -+81 Agility
Tier 9.25 - +93 Agility
Tier 9.5 - +106 Agility
Tier 10 - +107 Agility
Tier 10.25 -+120 Agility
Tier 10.5 - +136 Agility
(See how the numbers jumped so high?  That is what made WotLK easy mode for earlier content)
Stat jump = 135% From starting end game to ending end game.