Having Fun in Heroics

I've been real busy at work for the last month, but thankfully this breakneck pace tends to wind down for the winter holidays. It has put a damper on my free time though and the only game I've been able to enjoy has been Wrath of the Lich King. Luckily, the dungeons are proving to be quite entertaining if a bit too easy. My normal group of dungeon runners has pretty much skipped normal mode and jumped right into the heroics. In the Outlands if we had jumped straight into heroic mode this would have meant were almost out of PvE content. Thankfully, though it looks like a lot of ten man PUG groups form for Nax and the Wintergrasp raid instance.

In general, its been much easier to find pick up players to fill out our heroic runs in this expansion. I guess some of this could be related to the ease of the dungeons. More people feel comfortable doing heroics since they don't feature trash mobs that hit you for 10,000 damage. Still I think the revamp of the reputation system has also helped pick-up-groups in the expansion. Since you can earn reputation for any faction just by wearing their tunic, there's less fighting over specific dungeons. I know in the Burning Crusade people only ever wanted to run Mechanaar or the Daily Heroic. Mechanaar and the Daily Heroic was considered easy badges and the other dungeons were considered to be "not worth the effort".

Also the heroics were actually a little too hard in the Burning Crusade. It was considered much easier to run Karazhan and Zul'amon for badges rather then try to do them. In the Wrath of the Lich King most of the dungeons are simple and fairly quick to run. Most can be done in under a hour even with some accidental wipes. Heck, a few barely have any trash mobs at all and are just filled with boss encounters. The ones that are a bit longer often have better loot tables. Halls of Lightning in particular is more challenging then some of the other dungeons, but has the only epic two handed weapon from the heroics.

Anyways, I'm glad its been pretty easy to pick up additional group members since I'm currently in a very small guild. We're mostly real life friends and co-workers who been playing MMOs together for awhile now. Heck, some of them used to clear Kurn's Tower with me back in the original Everquest. We've seen how raiding has changed with the more modern games and how the classic hardcore approach has faded in popularity. Wrath of the Lich King may be a little too easy, but it gives us much more freedom to approach raiding without sacrificing our first born to a guild. As a result this might be the first game where we actually have a chance of seeing all the raid content.