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I’d like to start out by saying that we’re completely aware of the demand from the community for dungeons at a very high difficulty level.

As you know, WoD will (re)introduce the normal and heroic difficulties for 5man's at max level, which is already a very nice change in my opinion.

There are players who have been playing WoW for a very long time, they’re extremely skilled and will only be satisfied with the highest level of difficulty that we throw at them, that’s “perfect entertainment” for this type of players.

We also know that not everyone can raid in very high difficulty environments due to its big time commitment. Sometimes life changes, and suddenly instead of 3-4 hours every 2 days, some of these players will only have 1 or 2 hours, and that makes shorter/smaller instances with the same difficulty level as “mythic” an extremely appealing concept.

Challenge modes will probably be interesting for some of these players, but we also know that when people talk about TBC heroic 5man difficulty levels, they’re not talking about mindless zerg/rush timed runs. They’re talking about planning, strategy, CC, improvisation, randomness and sheer insane mobs/bosses power, but the “timed” part is still an important concept in game design to keep everyone on their toes.

We know all that, and we’re doing our very best to provide the most diverse content we can for the next expansion.

Your feedback can change a lot of things, just keep providing it and we’ll be sure to recognize your needs, devs are very interested in high quality feedback, and it can go a long way in changing some priorities during the development of WoD.

Having said that, the current planned difficulty scheme for 5mans at max level is Normal, Heroic and Challenge mode. Right off the bat, we can clearly say that WoD heroics will be much harder than MoP heroics.

Now, we’re not actually planning in making them as hard as the hardest heroics of all time, like the hardest from TBC, or GB and Stonecore from Cata, but nothing is set in stone yet, we’re still thinking about what will be the right difficulty level for anything WoD, and your continued feedback will definitely help us find that elusive sweet spot for a perfect tiered difficulty system.

We also think that we can rework a little bit the whole concept of challenge modes, right now people tend to think about them as purely timed runs, but they can be so much more than that.

I mean, the “timed part” doesn’t necessarily have to imply disregard for control and strategy; hopefully, we’ll be able to make challenge modes much more compelling to the highest skilled players out there, especially those that can’t raid but want to experience equivalent difficulty content to mythic raids in a 5man environment.

If you have any particular views on the subject, I’d love to hear what would be the “perfect challenge mode” for you, specifically in regards to reward structure and gameplay philosophy concepts.

I'm sorry but Cata heroics weren't really hard for organized groups.
You’re right, they weren't as hard as let's say, Shattered Halls HC. Our current goal is to make WoD heroics similar to the difficulty level you had in Vortex Pinnacle heroic for example.

To be honest, I loved Stonecore, it was fun trying to make a clean run where no one would do any mistakes, it wasn’t super hard, but I’d say most bosses had very unforgiving mechanics. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing of course, but bosses like Ozruk for example, need to have better visual cues when they have one-shot mechanics.

Good design needs to be more intuitive, it’s not really that fun to read through the full dungeon journal and memorize everything before fighting any boss, it’s much cooler when something is so well implemented that even if it’s completely unexpected you can still try to “guess” what it does and adapt, react to it on-the-spot, just like you would do with anything unexpected that happens in real life.

before or after the nerf to heroics?
Pre-nerf

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