Challenge Modes

Challenge Modes
Challenge modes remain similar to what BlizzCon said about them. However, they have hinted to having realm first achievements tied to them. It's possible this will be scrapped, but if it remains, expect a lot of controversy--and competition!
There are three levels of rewards:

• Bronze: Achievements.
• Silver: Special transmog armor--example was gilded rogue armor with asymmetrical dragon shoulders.
• Gold: Access to a mount with unique look.

Once players have beaten all the gold achievements, they have access to a realm leaderboard.
Challenge-mode leaderboards allow players to filter by instance, time, and by guild.
Inspiration for challenge modes: timed Stratholme runs and the original Zul'Aman run for the Amani War Bear.
Intended to be competitive PvE without confrontation, and a way to foster community within guilds.
Player's UI will show medal tabulation, record times, rewards, and how much time mid-run until you hit the next bracket.
Several achievements for Challenge Modes were available on press servers. There were achievements at all levels for completing the instance, as well as 'Full' achievements for obtaining a medal in every instance. There were also Realm Firsts for Gold and Full Silver challenges (subject to change).
Originally posted by Blizzard (View Original)Collapse
Are you yawning at the idea of more five-player dungeons? You may be interested in Challenges. This is a new time trial system coming in Mists of Pandaria for level-90 dungeons. The challenge itself may not always be difficult, but ranking will be. Do well and you'll earn a bronze, silver, or gold medal. Completing the Challenge on gold will incur a stacking debuff on future attempts: it’ll start with a 5% debuff, but if you manage to finish with a gold medal time on that run you’ll receive a 10% debuff on your next run, and so on.

In addition to realm-wide bragging rights, completing Challenges will award you with unique Transmogrification items and other vanity rewards. Oh, did we forget to mention that your gear will be normalized? Sorry, no gearing up or stacking items to get the best times -- your item level will be normalized so that even when the next raid encounter comes out and new gear drops, your world-record will stand until some other group of chumps actually has the em to beat it.

Challenges will be enabled during any dungeon run that supports them, including those joined through the Dungeon Finder. To help get people together that are looking to achieve the same goals, a special flag will be available to only match you with others looking to do Challenges if you do use the Dungeon Finder.

Originally posted by Blizzard (Official Post | Blue Tracker)Collapse
Ghostcrawler

The difficulty at which we pegged our heroic dungeons and raids was controversial. They were designed to be about as tough as the dungeons were back in Burning Crusade, but the game has changed since then. Coming out of Lich King, we’d gotten the message loud and clear from players that they wanted tougher challenges. They liked the convenience of Dungeon Finder, but they missed using their crowd control and survival abilities and having to strategize about how to beat a given encounter. We designed the Cataclysm heroics with that in mind, and the players who wanted challenging content were thrilled.

The problem was that we had this whole group of players who felt like they couldn’t make any progress on their characters. Even if they wanted to end up raiding with their friends, they couldn’t earn the gear they needed to get into those raids (especially in the absence of Raid Finder). I don’t believe that the instances were too hard; it’s obvious there are players who enjoy that content. I believe the problem was that there were no alternatives. With such a diverse community, the goal is to have experiences that players from all over the spectrum can enjoy. We don’t want to shut anyone out. So, we’re addressing that with Challenge Modes in Mists. You’ll have normal and heroic mode dungeons, and then Challenge Modes, for players who are looking to prove their mettle. Likewise, you’ll have normal and heroic raids, and Raid Finder for players who don’t enjoy wiping on a boss week after week until they can master it.

Hit and Expertise Scaling in Challenge Mode
Hit and expertise are needed in challenge modes; in fact, creature level is increased by 1 in challenge mode, so that the hit and expertise values needed are identical to those needed for raid content. When you enter a challenge mode, your absolute hit and expertise percentages will not change; your other secondary stats will be reduced proportionally to compensate.

If you have +7.5% Hit and 6% dodge reduction from Expertise in your normal gear (let's say item level 489 raid gear), when you enter a challenge mode, you will still have +7.5% Hit and 6% dodge reduction from Expertise. You can think of it as us reforging your gear for you to make sure that you stay at your pre-scaling Hit and Expertise values, so that you don't need to deal with a separate set of gear, gemming, and/or reforging.

Watcher real quick question, and it's something that has been nagging me a bit, but what would happen to special procs?

Say a a trinket or special weapon (like No'kalad) that does a burst damage or increases a primary stat. How will these procs be handled for Challenge Mode? Will they be scaled down or will they do the same damage?
Procs will function, but will be scaled down. A hypothetical ilvl 500 weapon or trinket that has a proc effect that deals 50,000 Shadow damage might only deal 35,000 Shadow damage when you are in a challenge mode (numbers are made up -- heavily rounded for simplicity).

On a separate note, at this time, our plan is to disable set bonuses from functioning entirely inside challenge modes -- they are not always precisely balanced against each other the way classes as a whole are, and due to the gear normalization, if bonuses were functional, the optimal challenge mode gear at the start of the expansion would likely be PvP sets.

That said, there will be very slight power creep as players get access to items that have ideal stat distributions for them, more sockets, and so forth, but we view that sort of optimization as interesting gameplay that we'd like to preserve, especially bearing in mind that when everything is scaled down to a fixed level, an LFR version of an item is equivalent to the Heroic version for the purposes of challenge mode effectiveness. Overall, though, the difference in power will be very slight, and this sort of min-max'ing will only be relevant to players who are vying for the top spots on realm- or region-wide leaderboards. The benefits of doing 1% more damage from having an optimal set of gear will pale in comparison to the time saved or lost by dodging a specific patrol, or aggressively pulling the next pack as you're finishing off the current one. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Challenge Mode Dungeons
By that I mean, it would have been nice if there was the option to run the Challenge modes as part of progression. Maybe JP for bronze, VP for silver and both for gold? Hell, I'm making it up, but hipefully I'm a bit clearer this time.
There's a daily quest that will reward you valor points for completing that day's challenge dungeon.

i want soem challenging 5 man content, not a race content i play with my 70 year retired father, he can complete challenging content but can not rush cotnent making the challenge modes pointless and the heroics dull for us.
Although in challenge dungeons you're competing against the clock, these are tuned harder than heroics and in some cases there're additional pulls and even boss mechanics. So hopefully it'll be content that you find challenging! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)