The Less Skill Required, The More Fun the Content is

The title of this post is something I just mentioned in a comment to someone with regards to the timewalker dungeons and some issues he had in it.  The line refers to random group content only.  And I 100% completely believe it to be true.

The problem with the timewalker dungeons (which I have none, I love them) is that a lot of "bad" players run into them thinking they can just plow through them like they do a current dungeon and they meet their demise.  This happens by the tank not being able to take all the damage, the healer not being able to keep up with the healing, or the damage dealers just not doing enough damage to down the mobs in a timely manner.

These players are the ones that think they are good players because "I can solo heroics if I wanted to" and do not realize that their gear is scaled down.  The first time they run into something where they might need skill, and they do not have their over geared characters gear to carry them through it, they fail.  Miserably.  Welcome to timewalkers.

There really is no reason to ever wipe in a timewalker dungeon.  I've done them all.  I've done them with great groups, I've done them with poor groups.  I've done them as tank, as healer and as damage dealer.  I've done them on characters I was good at and characters I played quite poorly on.  And one thing I am absolutely certain of is that these dungeons are a push over compared to what they originally were.  They are easy, very easy.  Assuming you do not try to play as if you were are over gearing it and try pulling the entire dungeon at once.  Yeah, that won't end well.

To illustrate my point I am going to play a game of make believe, because that is just fun to do.  We are going to take a group of "poor" players and put them in 710 item level gear.  We have Bob the rogue, Ann the hunter, Dave the Mage, Megan the healer and Tom the tank.

They are "decent" in the idea that with enough practice they can eventually get things down, or can at least sneak in and do well enough to not be kicked in a pug so they can get a few bosses down here and there, but each on their own is a poor player.

Now in this make believe world lets send those players into two random dungeons together.

Enter Dungeon #1: Upper Backrock Spires Heroic.

They walk in and start pulling, the tank is taking little damage, the healer is able to keep everyone up with hots only for the most part and the DPS are all on different targets but everything is dying fairly quick.  They are not even stopping the mobs from operating the canons and they don't even notice they are there because things are going down so fast.

They get to the first boss and screw up a bit, Dave the Mage even dies trying to deactivate the things when he jumps down but Megan uses the battle rez on him and he is back to trying to open them again.  The boss goes down pretty quick even if they do not do the fight right, so to speak, because they over gear it.

Second boss comes and they do not interrupt, the boss switches focus to a damage dealer and because no one was interrupting, the healer just heals them through it.  They stand in bad a little too long, the two adds with the boss go down seconds apart because of split DPS instead of one at a time nice and fast as intended.  The tank does not even hold aggro on all three as the adds routinely attack the damage dealers instead of the tank and the healer still has no problem.

On the way to the next boss they get knocked back into more mobs, and then still some more, pulling the entire room.  The tank goes into panic mode and instead of rolling his coodowns he hits everything at once, but it works and they get by because the DPS is so OP.

The rest of the dungeon goes like this.  Mistakes, misusing of abilities, abilities not being used at all, ignoring stuff because the healer can heal through it, you know the deal, the standard poor skilled pug thing.

When all is over, everyone had a great time.  Things got slaughtered, things moved fast, and with the exception of Dave, who wears tissue paper as armor, no one died.

Enter Dungeon #2: Ahn'kehet, the Old Kingdom, Timerwalkers

Tom the tank runs in and pulls a pack with a spell flinger, not one of them or even two of them, but three of them.  With the lowered gear scaled closer to correctly, but still pretty OP for this content, the poor players are not downing the mobs as fast as they just were in the last dungeon they did.

Being the mobs are not going down, that means three spell flingers are up.  Being the group does not know anything about stunning or interrupting the spell flingers start flinging spells and the tank goes down faster than a thai hooker, then the healer melts and everyone else follows suit pretty quickly.

They reassemble, tom the tank blames the healer for not healing him, megan the healer says he went from 100 to 0 instantly, and she is not lying, and the damage dealers just sit back and let them argue because to them, it is both the tank and the healers fault.

They go in and pull again, doing the same thing.  One mob less then before because that is all they killed, one mob, and it was not even a spell flinger.  This attempt ends in the same way the previous one did, with the tank dying, the healer dying and then the damage dealers dying.

After playing the blame game once again where Megan calls Tom the worst tank ever, even after she said in the last dungeon "You are so easy to heal Tom, you take no damage, you are a great tank" they go at it again and decide that perhaps they will only pull one pack this time.

They do just that and they do a little better.  The spell flinger is getting casts off as the damage dealers are attacking what seems to be everything but the mob they should be focused on and the tank, of course, can't be bothered interrupting an ability that does 80% health damage to him.  The healer struggles to keep him up and keeps struggling, until the end when Tom dies and then Bob pops evasion and evasion tanks for a few seconds before it goes down.

Wow, that was really hard for these poor players.  If only they knew how to interrupt, how to stun, now to focus damage, how to actually do damage at decent level in this gear instead of letting the gear carry them like normal, it would have been no problem.

They move on to the next two flinger packs and do it as they did the first, with 2 pulls for each pack.  Their repair bill is already a nightmare and they have not touched the first boss.

When the first boss comes it ends up being another wipe fest as Tom does not pick up the big add, and unlike the second boss in UBRS where the healer, when over geared, could heal through the damage that was being put on to the damage dealer, that was also over geared, this time a lower scaled geared healer could not keep up the lower scaled geared DPS that was getting beat on by the add.  They wipe.

It happens a second time too before the tank realizes that he needs to pick up the add.  Surprise surprise, who would have ever thought that the tank should do that.  Bad Tom.  After they down it, Dave says some of his gear is broke so he is heading back out to repair, everyone else follows to take the chance to repair and when outside they all come to the conclusion that it is not worth finishing this dungeon.

So when this is all over, before it is even finished, no one had any fun because the content required skill, something this make believe "test" group did not have.  No fun was had by anyone, well, except for the spell flingers perhaps.

I like the timewalkers dungeons.  They are a fun throw back and they are extremely easy when compared to the original ones, but even if I do like them, I freely admit, I love blowing through a heroic dungeon now even more.  I love the fact I can basically solo them, and so can anyone else in decent gear.  It is just flat out fun to blow things up.  Anyone that says otherwise is lying.

While I can interrupt, stun, knockback, trap, tranq, etc, in the timewalkers, and while I do find them fun, doing things where you do not need to do any of that because you can just destroy stuff is just more fun, sometimes at least.  And in my opinion "sometimes" means "in random groups".

I am of the opinion that anything that uses the random group making system should never, not in a million years, include anything that requires any modicum of skill.  Leave that stuff for raids, mythic dungeons, and other content were you assemble a group yourself and don't let the system do it for you.

The reason people remember BC and wrath dungeons so fondly is because at the time they were released, when they were new and no one knew what they were doing and they were still a challenge until they were learned, we needed to assemble groups by hand. 

Look what happened when they added that same concept with cataclysm.  The cataclysm heroic were no harder than the wrath or BC ones on release.  But they were random groupings.  And what happened there?  Dungeons are too hard happened.  Sorry, they were not too hard, they were never too hard, they were easier than wrath heroics, they were easier than BC heroics, but they allowed random grouping.  That is what made them hard.

Come to think of it, I did not need those make believe examples, all I needed was the cataclysm heroics.

With guild = awesome fun, a bit of a challenge, but felt great doing them.

With random grouping = Curl up in a ball crying while whimpering mommy or it was great.  A flip of the coin, random if you will.

Bottom line is, for random content, the less skill required, the more fun the content is.