Dave Kosak announced on Twitter that there are no new planned Heroic 5 man instances currently planned for Mist of Pandaria. I discovered this after seeing a Mike Preach video where he discusses the issue and shares his views on the subject. From my point of view, this is going to end up being a wait and see type of deal.
Some people might end up being disappointed with the announcement. With BC, Wrath of the Lich King and even Cataclysm the late released 5 mans like the ICC instances or Hour of Twilight had the purpose of fast gearing toons who made it late into the game. The issue was seen to help those who could not initially get gear from Karazhan runs and found it impossible to pug them as a result of people simply not wanting to do outdated content back in the day.
With the advent of LFR, the idea of “progression” for toons is now the method in which Blizzard wants people to both experience content and obtain gear. As of now, since we’re starting into patch 5.2 on the 2nd day of the new LFR, it’s yet to be seen if this vision goes as Blizzard intends.
For myself, I feel that this announcement is a bit pre-mature and possibly made based on preliminary data obtained after the seeing the impact of people doing both new and old LFRs. While there was a hint of this format working in the pre-5.2 patch with the five wings of LFRs, the big question is if this trend will continue over time. I think when LFRs are first released, they experience a high degree of usage. Overtime though, they gradually slow down. This is especially true for certain LFRs like Mogu’shan Vaults Part 2 or Heart of Fear Part 1. My interpretation of these events is that as players gear up, they no longer have a need to run these, except perhaps for Valor Points.
The real question is what will the environment look like in a few LFR patches? Will we see 5, 15, 20, 30 or 40+ minute queues? Currently, I see queues that can exceed 30+ minutes depending on the time of day and the day of the week. At the beginning of the week, the queues are hot since people want to get everything in preparation for raids. But towards the end, the queues tend to die down dramatically.
For myself, I have no answer to this issue. There’s always going to be new players and those who want to gear up alts. The bigger question is how much of this group will be there to create a reasonable queue? That’s the core question that needs to be figured out. The good thing about the older, “fast gearing” heroics from BC, etc. was that you still had certain incentives like badges and reasonable loot to boot. So that provided enough incentive for everyone to run them.
One thing that Mike Preach mentioned was feeling a bit sad for not having new ones for the sake of new content. I think without the incentive of loot or other aspects, 5 mans are essentially a waste of time. I really don’t see repeatedly running an instance as “good” content. I do agree with Mike that I thoroughly enjoyed the ICC instances; those were fun (although I hated the last boss for Forge of Souls) But I heavily dislike doing something repeatedly without some incentive.
I think right now World of Warcraft is in a very bizarre phase in its identity. They are trying to determine the methods of progress but haven’t yet stumbled upon that magic formula. Take Scenarios as an example. Mike and I both feel that there’s really no point of re-running them. In fact, I don’t even think I want to run any of them except Arena of Annihilation and that’s only to get a 450 weapon. There really is no motive in doing Scenarios for myself. The Valor Points are too low and the Scenarios themselves feel too disjointed. I feel when I run a Scenario it’s like going through a ride in Disneyland (matter of fact, I feel this is what the game feels like in general, especially with the cut scenes and RP moments). The thing about Scenarios is that they really aren’t good for anything useful. Not even the Valor Points. They feel like they’re there just to be there as an experiment. The premise on paper sounds good, but in reality the implementation serves no purpose at the end of the day.
Then you have Heroics as the gateway to LFR and upper raiding. But it really doesn’t feel like a gateway because you have too much of a mixture of players inside of Heroics. You have uber geared players (and soon to be moreso as each patch introduces better gear) and you have people just starting out. The expectation level of performance varies too much. The only incentive for running Heroics is a quick shot of daily valor. But beyond that, what good reason should anyone have in running them? In fact, I wonder if they are a good convention as the gateway to LFR.
My problem with the game is that there has been no great formula introduced as of yet. I’m somewhat partial to Wrath of the Lich King. I thought it was pretty reasonable in terms of progression. I felt that the Heroics were reasonably tuned as something you could re-run constantly without being too annoyed. Cataclysm was far too linear for myself. Mist of Pandaria right now isn’t bad, but I am concerned about the queue times down the road. I suppose if we see reasonable queue times, it shouldn’t matter. But we’ll have to see about that.