The Trouble with Trolls

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 Yes, it's a completely outdated topic, but what can I do, my head doesn't quite move at the speed of Internet.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.