When initially released they were very hard, on par with if not more so than pre nerf TBC heroics. Ghostcrawler even patted himself on the back over it in a lengthy self gratifying article.
For the release dungeons yes, they are all post nerf.
Some are on par with wrath heroics and some aren’t.
Go to retail.
Understand?
I think this is the article mentioned above:
Some quotes:
We didn’t like that the Heroic dungeons in Lich King and early Naxxramas had become zerg-fests. It made the rewards feel like they weren’t earned. It made all rewards except the best-in-slot items feel transitory…
In Cataclysm, the Heroic dungeons and raids are intended to be challenging – and they are, at least until you overgear them.
Tanks, you can’t pull and AE every group in a Heroic (again, until you overgear the content). It’s a good idea to crowd control at least one target – and sometimes two. As long as you have someone with a long-duration and/or renewable crowd control and someone else with a short crowd control such as a stun or even a snare, you should be fine.
Healers will generally have enough mana to keep you alive in any given fight, but you need to be careful not to chain pull repeatedly if their mana is low.
DPS specs often get blamed the most for not knowing what is going on. It should be your business to understand the mechanics of the fights. You’re a member of a team, not a follower who can always rely on someone else to tell them what to do.
Healers seem like they largely understand that Heroics are challenging, and sometimes get penalized when the rest of the group doesn’t understand that. If you feel like you can’t cast anything but your efficient heal or you’ll run out of mana, then something is going wrong with the fight. Likewise, if you feel like you must spam your inefficient heals to the exclusion of all else, then your group is ignoring key mechanics or is just undergeared.
The item level requirement is intended only to keep out players who have no idea what is appropriate content for them. We know you can game it by getting PvP gear or hiding off-spec gear in your bags. Congrats on being sneaky! If you’re sophisticated enough to try and game the item-level requirements, you should be sophisticated enough to know if you can actually handle the content.
Don’t be stingy and decide you aren’t going to mess with gemming, enchanting, or reforging until you have epic gear. Note that you don’t have to always apply the most expensive enchants or gems. Gear matters a lot. It increases DPS, survivability, and mana sustainability. Healers who get, say, 1750-1800 Spirit notice that they can go a lot longer without gassing out. Go ahead and get enchants or gems or reforge to get a lot of Spirit.
Third, the game could do a better job of telling a group why they failed so that so much blame doesn’t fall at the feet of the healer.
Sad they never figured that one out in all these years.
In Conclusion
We do understand that some healers are frustrated and giving up. That is sad and unfortunate. But the degree to which it’s happening, at least at this point in time, is vastly overstated on the forums. We also know that plenty of players like the changes and find healing more enjoyable now. Both sides need to spend a little less effort trying to drown out the other side claiming that everyone they know – and by extension, “the majority of players” – agree with their point. You shouldn’t need to invoke a silent majority if you can make an articulate and salient point.
As always, we’re keeping an eye on things. There are a few bosses that seem responsible for more wipes than the others: Commander Springvale, Beauty, Altairus, and Admiral Ripsnarl perhaps. By the time you read this, you might have seen us implement Restoration druid buffs intended to keep them competitive in raids. We also just tend to nerf content over time because the original players hitting that content have moved on, so we want to open it up to a wider audience.
In any case, we want to ensure that everyone is having fun and enjoying their time with the game, and I hope that this post may serve to some as the “tare” button that helps you zero in on the intended dungeon difficulty scale. For others, just know that we are actively reading feedback. For everyone offering constructive posts and points about their experience, we thank you.
Apparently the perception in 2011 is that heroics were so bad a lot of healers were quitting over it and the lead designer wrote a long article explaining to people how they were supposed to play in Cata because they apparently perceived that people were not adapting to the changes post-WotLK.
People were saying level 60 was going to be hard, and then level 70 was going to be hard, and then level 80 was going to be hard.
See where I’m going with this?
Its almost like it’s a 14+ year old solved game.
Then why would anyone think it would be difficult?
Read the article from 2011 and you’ll understand how different they were.
That has nothing to do with why people a month ago were still acting as if this was going to be difficult.
They were probably basing it off their own memory of the original Cata release and didn’t know what version they were getting.
If you looked at the Cata beta forums people were saying they were easy, though they were also testing them in heroic gear.
You still get some wipes in pugs and healers have mana issues in the harder dungeons since people are just steamrolling forward and aoeing everything.
It has a lot to do with it and you know it.
So we can look at it like this.
Recently, we knew they were releasing the post nerf versions.
We also can use logic and know that it’s a 14 year old solved game and we are WAY better than we were back then.
So I am confused why anyone would think that the heroic dungeons were going to be difficult, yet that’s all I heard leading up to the release.
Nobody actually said this one.
They were saying this before they knew what version they were getting.
This was a month ago. No one is saying it now.
trolln’ bro?
except blood furnace. that was rough!
People swore up and down no one would kill heroic LK prior to the buff coming out.
They were saying this up until the release.
Who is “people”?
BUAHAHAHA, you think retail is difficult? LOL
How many hundreds of wipes do the mythic progression fights take vs classic fights again?
Note they didn’t use a retail char to see even mythic dungeon stats.
If they are saying heroic retail dungeon is easy….it is. It’s a gear collector. To hit M0 and beyond. Also a daily quest completer.
Even for the mythic 20+ pros who already did their 8 for the week. Heroic lfd sign up overgeared can be faster pick up and run for that quest.
You get 3 mythic 20 dudes int the heroic run…best you can do is keep up really.
Retail added more content to both ends of the spectrum.
It has more lower end and more higher end content than oldschool WoW.