And by that I mean the rehashed raids, Zul'Gurub and
Zul'Aman. Yes, it's a completely outdated topic, but what can I do, my head
doesn't quite move at the speed of Internet.
First, a brief assessment: as I recall, ZG/ZA were
meant to bridge the gap between blue gear from heroic dungeons and epic gear from
normal raids. They were relatively long (though pretty linear), taking around
an hour for a competent but inexperienced group to finish. And... they rewarded
valor points for completion.
Let me stress that: they rewarded valor points for completion. In fact, they were the
only way players could get close to the weekly valor point cap without running
raids. The original Cataclysm heroics, besides dropping only 346 blues as
opposed to the 353 epics of ZG/ZA, only awarded half as much valor per week.
The inevitable result: non-raiders (which, as Blizzard likes to remind us, make
up a large part of the WoW population) flocked to them massively.
ZG/ZA were called "long and difficult". And
the problem wasn't the length or difficulty in themselves, mind you. There was
a legitimate clamor at the end of WotLK for more challenge in Cataclysm. But
the trouble was the LFD, a system designed to encourage and deliver fast
dungeon runs.
Getting rid of the LFD was unthinkable. Too many
people had forgotten how to manually move their characters to dungeons; and
even more importantly, I think, the random LFD allowed for a pretty spreadsheet
with large numbers of players evenly distributed over each dungeon. You know,
the kind of thing that brings a smile to an executive's face ("this will
look smashing in my slideshow presentation
at the board meeting!!!").
The original Cataclysm heroics, when attached to LFD,
had been bad ideas. ZG/ZA were abysmal. They were longer and arguably more difficult;
there were only two of them; they were both troll-themed. Couple that with the
race-to-the-end, daily-valor LFD mentality and you have frustration on a
massive scale, followed by boredom on a massive scale.
The interesting and sad thing is, the troll dungeons
could have been perfectly viable if they had been kept off the dungeon finder/daily
valor scheme. The fact that not everyone raided, and the 353 epics that dropped
there, were enough to draw people looking for some upgrades.
Sure, if that had been the case, ZG/ZA wouldn't have been
ran as often as the LFD heroics... and that would have made the spreadsheet
lose some of its luster... but it would have added diversity to character
progression. The way it actually happened, it simply raised the mandatory "bread-and-butter"
of daily valor up to a new, more frustrating level.
Now, the failure of the troll dungeons might have
been a reason why Blizzard decided to go ahead and implement the misbegotten
LFR. In their view it wasn't the LFD that screwed up the difficult dungeons but
exactly the other way around... so they went in the direction of less difficulty and more LFD. Yay. That was my cue.
