WoD Heroic dungeons require Proving Ground medalFollow

Link to the WoWInsider article with original blue statement.

Personally I'm in favor of this. Getting silver is not that hard, so it should be a very small hurdle for most people. And it will prevent people queueing as Tank to get a short waiting time without ever having tanked before or without having appropriate gear.

Like gear level, however, it will not prevent smart asses from queuing with no intent to actually put much or any effort into the run. Nor will it generate a civil atmosphere in groups.

It is a well intentioned sop to some of the more vocal complainers, but I suspect it won't have a positive effect.

"Oh noes! Tank am terribad. U L2 tank!"
"Hey, I got my silver medal. I know how to tank, I've been doing it since TBC. Now, stop standing in those flames!"
"U bought ur 90. WoW is P2W. Pull faster, I'm watching Duck Dynasty!"

Aside from those concerns, there is also the problem that Blizz has already given a nod to:



In theory, I could tank. I do it as necessary in things like scenarios or dungeons gone wrong. I suppose that's baseline tanking, things like trying to hold aggro, moving the boss out of his circle of glowy stuff that is killing the melee dps, trying to keep the dragon pointed away from the group and stuff like that. I think we used to have fights like that, right? Now, we don't. We have debuffs to juggle and fights that require tanks to tag team. We have ever more elaborate versions of Safety Dance, bouncing around platforms, color changing beams, and all of it is hidden in a barrage of spell effects as well as a cacophony of shrieks, explosions, random babbling and on special days a train set.

A test of baseline tanking will be meaningful ... when we have fights that use baseline tanking. Since those draw complaints as tank and spank or gear checks, that isn't what we're likely to see.

Also, are these medals going to be a per-class basis, or is it going to be per-role basis?

I'm quite sure an Arcane Mage might get Silver in DPS, but then log on his Feral Druid and wind up being terrible at the class.

And even then, if it is character-specific or class-specific, then there's *specs*.

What if a Boom Chicken decides he no longer wants to be a Boom Chicken and decides to mooch off of Heroics while playing Feral (and sucking horribly at the class because he doesn't know how to cat)?

Edited, Feb 22nd 2014 9:51pm by Lyrailis

IMO, the Dungeons in MoP as far as their layout, and design, the storytelling, etc are all fine (though we really really needed more dungeons while leveling up, having only two dungeons from 85 to 87 and then 2-3 from 87 to 90 just didn't cut it), its just that they never did give us any "2nd Tier 5mans" like they did in both of the previous expansions.

Instead, they gave us Timeless Isle. Timeless Isle is OK, but there was no easy-to-access group finder content to actually use that TI gear in, other than LFR ToT and LFR SoO.

LFR ToT has some of the most annoying trash I've ever seen in any dungeons (how many retards, again, cause wipes in the very first trash pull in the first wing? How about the "Bridge of Fail"? Seriously, Blizzard... do you do stuff like this on purpose, just to annoy us?) and making Valor Gear _require_ a run through the first LFR Wing of ToT only invites idiots wearing quested junk with a couple TI pieces doing sub-30k DPS, causing wipes by body pulling other trash, refusing to help down Horridon's adds, or allowing Elders to get fully empowered. Also, those of us with lots of Alts get tired of dealing with said retards on every single character we have to take through Last Stand because we simply MUST have Friendly with Shado-Pan Assault if we want to buy anything with Valor (otherwise, we end up capping at 3k and have nothing to use Valor on).

LFR SoO is a bit harder than ToT, but yet the Item-Level requirement is not very hard to reach at all; full Timeless Isle Gear + Reborn BoE + Shado-Pan Assault Necklace would probably do it, but yet your DPS in that gear is "Meh" at best in LFR SoO from what I've seen.

So that just leaves Heroic Dungeons, and Timeless Isle gear is vastly overkill at its finest for Heroics. You're meant to be 450-463 in there, but yet you're wearing an almost full suit of random stat 496 gear doing 2x-3x the DPS you should be doing which can be Hell on the poor newbies who are trying to learn how to play their class in a dungeon.

I just feel they could have done.... something.... better with 5.4. We needed a new 5-man Tier, meant for ~480 geared people that should have dropped 496s (Same as Isle Gear, but with better/more predictable stat allocation, as well as the ability to.... *gasp* win an Honest-to-God weapon that's better than 489).

SPA gear should not require Friendly; that way only those who are doing LFR ToT are doing it because they are actually working on the Cloak.

No, but some of those things (Especially that damn bridge) and realize that LFR groups are going to wipe constantly on this stuff. They should have known this ahead of time. No, you shouldn't make everything with idiots in mind, but yet... some things are just annoying, even without idiots. That long stretch of trash between the 1st and 2nd boss in Last Stand is a pretty good example of how to make a raid simply annoying.

There's very few mobs, and thanks to the wind mechanic, it takes sooooooo long to trudge through that area, to kill the whole 10 mobs (not counting snakes) between Zin'rokh and Horridon. About the only thing I can say is at least they were kind enough to give you 20VP for the trouble.