When I first started queuing for random heroics myself, I joined no less than six that crumbled after only one or two bosses -- usually because the group's healer couldn't keep up with the monster-inflicted damage. This is a common problem right now. Elsewhere, many inexperienced players join heroics thinking that the boss mechanics are similar to the normal versions of the same dungeons, only to find that the heroic counterparts are often on a crushingly higher difficulty level. For instance, a secondary boss named Altairus in the Vortex Pinnacle (pictured above) merely shifts the direction of the wind (resulting in a buff if you're facing correctly) and breathes fire on the tank in the normal version of the instance. These conditions remain on heroic... alongside a host of cyclones that can easily throw you off the mile-high tower (and the dragon's breath is much more erratic). In my own PUG attempts, we barely drained half his health. Faced with situations like these, angry players vote to remove poorly performing comrades from the group, only to find their replacements suffering from the same stress. In the worst cases, little to no communication occurs, as players simply hope for the best as they often did in Wrath.

As a damage-dealer, I find this frustrating -- not because the content is difficult, but because so many players give up after only a failed attempt or two. It's pathetic. Since damage-dealing classes make up the vast majority of WoW's players (because such classes lack the pressures of tanking or healing), waiting times for joining random heroic instances can currently run up to an hour, compared to the 20 or so minutes that we whined about suffering through during Wrath. In other words, if your group breaks up without even downing the first boss, all that waiting time was for naught. Tanks and healers, of course, can join a random instance immediately on account of their high demand, but they face the often childish pressure of impatient damage dealers who've been waiting for hours. On the other hand, you have players like me, who are just so happy to finally be in an instance that they all but grovel for the other players. I myself have almost completely leveled the new archaeology profession -- easily one of the game's most time-consuming activities -- just by working on it during the time I spend waiting to enter a new dungeon.


That said, I've apparently had better luck with pick-up heroic groups than most. My personal favorite run took me through The Halls of Origination (above), a complex and lengthy Ancient Egyptian-themed dungeon with seven bosses. I entered with four random players, and together, we downed all but one of the bosses (and we even got that one to 1% health). Everyone respected each others' abilities; we all stayed to the end, despite it being the first heroic attempt at the instance for any of us. We even worked together to earn achievements, such as the one you receive for remaining on a camel for an entire boss fight. Neett, Jackins, Wetodded, and Lilpeach -- you guys rock. The run took us a little over four hours (owing to a few wipes), but I haven't felt so connected to a random group of players in years. In other words, this is a far cry from Wrath's quickie dungeons like Azjol-Nerub, and closer to the dreaded runs though Scholomance and Blackrock Depths during WoW's initial release. None of us were particularly well-geared at the time; our success sprang from teamwork. Even though we were all dead tired by the end, we refused to split up because we knew it might be ages before we found a similar group again.

Indeed, such pitch-perfect pick-up runs are rare, and guild runs are obviously the easy way out -- and Blizzard seems to be pushing players away from lone-wolf gameplay in Cataclysm, with a mass of guild achievements and a guild-leveling system with enviable perks. My own guild may not be tackling some of the game's new raid instances yet, but our efforts in heroics are far more successful than anything I've witnessed in PUGs so far. I'm sure this is true for most guilds. As a PUGger by necessity, however, I welcome these changes to WoW's bread-and-butter five-man dungeons, and I hope that Blizzard doesn't nerf them as some are predicting. I may have once spent almost two years in one of the game's best early raiding guilds, but nowadays, I don't have time to spend several hours a week on a raid instance. These challenging dungeons, in other words, allow me to enjoy fairly strategic encounters on my own time without having to give specific chunks my life away every week for a raid.


If you're new to the game, consider what you're getting into. Leveling a character these days is breezy, streamlined, and even fun -- but in their current state, end-game five-man dungeons are often challenging and rough on players who haven't mastered their class by 85. This, of course, can be a good thing. And the clincher? Blizzard always expected and intended this. Right before the game's release, a Blizzard poster commented that "People are going to get hit like a truck in Cataclysm, as they did in Wrath, when they realize they aren't the all-powerful beings they came to think they were while they steamrolled month or year-old instances. Groups will wipe, and people will leave them thinking someone isn't doing their job, until they realize it's them, it's everyone, and they can't just roll through instances like they had gotten used to."

Yet I argue that what we're experiencing here is considerably more difficult than anything we faced in Wrath. And I, for one, hope it stays that way. To be fair, such difficulties may largely disappear once enough players start sporting epic gear in this brave new shattered world, and we'll be back to the mindless area-of-effect blitzes that characterized most of Wrath. I hope not. For now, WoW feels like a game again at its most accessible levels, instead of a protracted dress-up party. Five-man heroic boss fights are often more difficult than their counterparts in Wrath; hopefully, the resulting lessons mean we'll start queuing with players who truly know how to play again. Cataclysm was supposed to create the world anew and purge the chaff; let's keep it that way.



Leif Johnson is a freelance game critic from Chicago who regularly writes for several acclaimed gaming websites. You can see what he's up to over at his blog. He also asks that you ignore his pathetic DPS in the screenshots above. He was trying to take decent screenshots, dangit. And he does just fine with his keybinds, thank you very much.