What is the Ideal Difficulty Level for Heroic Dungeons?

We've seen heroic dungeons swing wide on the pendulum between easy and hard. In Burning Crusade, heroics were kind of like mini-raids. In Wrath, the necessity for crowd-control and the like mostly went away (which was good, because every class - even Rogues! - had been given AoE tools that they really wanted to use.) In Cataclysm, we saw heroics get beefed up to be far harder - with plenty of 1-shot mechanics and crowd-control and bosses where a single error could make the fight unwinnable unless you far out geared it (letting the Faceless Ones reach the eggs on Erudax, for example.) And then Mists swung the pendulum far in the other direction, making probably the easiest heroics ever.

So where should the difficulty be in heroics come WoD? I'd argue that they've never been just quite right, but the biggest problem is that there's a huge difference between what people want from them. Some want an intense, raid-like challenge that requires careful coordination and fast reflexes. Others want something they can breeze through quickly to get their VP.

Generally, the player base is better than they used to be. I actually think a large part of the perceived drop in difficulty is actually due to us all knowing our classes better. We also have great online resources to help us squeeze every last drop of juice from our gear and rotations. Likewise, our toolkits of abilities have gotten more diverse, so every player has a way to respond to most situations (Rogues used to just have to pick a target in an AoE pack, for example.) I would actually argue that a lot of Mists' era LFR fights are more difficult than many of the old-school raid fights from Vanilla and BC, but Blizzard can design around better-skilled players these days.

There is another factor that is crucial to remember: heroics need to be designed for the people who are just getting in to them. Many of the so-called hardcore complained about the Wrath of the Lich King heroics as being too easy because they remember blowing through them in ten minutes. But the thing is that that didn't really start happening until the latter days of the expansion, when most people (at least on their mains) could easily get a 4-piece set of tier 10 (the highest raid tier during the expansion.) When they were new, the heroics were certainly not as hard as BC ones, but you'd still wipe frequently (heroic Loken was brutal when you still needed gear off him.)

One of the reasons it is so important to bring in new dungeons over the course of an expansion is that as people run the current ones, they'll outgear them. While Mists dungeons were probably too easily tuned from the start, the effect has been compounded by the fact that nowadays, most of us have a decent set of 528, or at least 522 SPA gear, which allows us to utterly destroy everything in our paths with impunity.

There is, of course, also the problem of designing dungeons for pre-made guild groups using voice chat, and LFG groups that will use the in-game chat window at best. In general, the former will have a far easier time with just about any challenge than the latter.

So here's a fairly radical solution: do to dungeons what they've done with raids. Create a "Dungeon Finder" difficulty for heroics, which would be tuned for LFG groups. You would then be free to make more challenging versions with higher-level rewards, but this would only be accessible with a pre-made group (and given the new group finder that's coming - the non-automated group finder - you could push people toward that style of dungeon-run by offering the better rewards.

Ultimately, I think that as long as dungeons are seen as a stepping stone to raiding, they've got to remain easy enough to let new players get through without quitting out of frustration. While I do think it would be nice if the community was less wipe-averse these days (really? quitting after one wipe on Sha of Pride? Don't you want your Valor?) I don't know if the solution is just desensitization through ball-crushing difficulty. We saw how that worked out in Cataclysm, and it was not pretty (and while I hate to bring in the old subscription number game, as I think there are tons of factors that influence that, not the least of which is the worldwide economic downturn that may make some people think they can't afford what they see as a luxury expense, it was the early days of Cataclysm, with nothing but brutal content, that saw Wrath's constant ascendence in subscriptions turn around and start to drop.)

I wouldn't mind, actually, seeing a new "Mythic" dungeon difficulty to satisfy the people who miss the super hard Cataclysm or BC heroics, but I think that there needs to be a meaningful progression through 5-mans that is not solely for the hardest of the hardcore.