Heroic dungeons at launch are definitely a step up, and a lot of fun. The increase in difficulty comes from the fact the mobs in trash packs have dangerous abilities that need to be dealt with, the dungeon bosses are a lot more complex than the dungeon bosses in Wrath, and, at launch you cannot over-gear the content and brute force your way past the skill checks.
If you can find a dedicated team of players to farm these with during pre-raid, you’ll have a great time. RDF at launch will be interesting. I think the player base for Cata Classic will be much better as original Cataclysm was populated by many neophytes, whereas this time around it’s veterans of the franchise/genre that have been playing for over a decade, almost two in some cases.
The two dungeons that come to mind when I think of people having fits over launch difficulty are Grim Batol and Stone Core. No surprise to anyone that was there before. Those two dungeons are outliers in that the trash pulls and bosses form start to finish are challenging at launch all the way up to the point you start acucmulating 359 gear from normal Tier 11 raids.
While those two are the standouts, many dungeons have challenging fights/achievements that stand out as well. The escape sequence from Heroic DM, “Headed South” in Lost City, the first and last boss of Vortex Pinnacle, the second boss in Black Rock Descent are the fights that come to mind without doing any research.
You will need all five players paying attention and able to handle the mechanics or things get rough. Even losing a lowly damage dealer on a boss fight can mean your doom because you will fail a DPS check via a mechanic, enrage timer, or you won’t be able to kill the boss before your healer runs out of mana. Healer mana and healing in Cata… that’s a topic that could/should be discussed in it’s own thread. That change alone makes dungeons at launch a lot more difficult that anything people were used to save for some of the harder heroic dungeons during TBC luanch.
Raid difficulty is also a step up in Cata. Tier 11 has some very difficult bosses. In many cases, the bosses are harder on 10 player difficulty compared to 25 because you have fewer people to deal with mechanics, and the loss of one player on 10 is very hard to recover from. Fights that come to mind are Halfus (easiest boss in tier 11 but tight window on mechanics), Ascendant Council, Cho’Gall, Nefarian and Al’Akir. Even on normal those fights will be more challenging than most of what was seen prior, save for the hardest of bosses in Wrath. On heroic, you could almost count the fights in all of the previous raids (pre-nerf Vashj & KT, Muru, Kil’Jaeden, Yogg one/zero, Firefighter, Arthas) on one hand that are as difficult as six bosses from the first tier on heroic (Ascendant Council, Cho’Gall, Sinestra, Al’Akir, Omnotron, and Nefarian).
