Poll: What hardmode do you prefer?

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  1. #41
    Fluffy Kitten Wilderness's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Zibi View Post
    This is my big problem with the triggered vs activated via portrait debate. "More immersive than clicking a button on your portrait"

    Hodir, Freya, Ignis, Thorim, Flame Leviathan, Vezax and the like you actually did LESS than click on your portrait. To activate Freya's Hardmode, just clear 3 packs of trash then pull the boss. Hodir, just kill him fast. Thorim.... just go fast. Flame Leviathan, just skip everything and go straight up the middle to the boss. Ignis, see Hodir. Vezax you just... kill the boss. And honestly, while people love Mimiron's button, it's just one click to activate the arbitrary hard mode, and I think in some ways Yogg fits in there as well, since all you do is NOT talk to the keepers and go down to fight him.

    All in all, I understand why people liked the multiple difficulties (Yogg 4 keepers down to 0, Flame Leviathan 4 towers to none, Sarth 0 drakes to 3) and I liked those as well, but I can understand why Blizz no longer desires to make them so frequently (I presume balancing 4 versions of the same boss in 3 different difficulties takes excessive amounts of time). When it comes to most of the Ulduar Hard Modes, however, after a while it just felt gimmicky. After farming full heroic clears of Ulduar for weeks/months, it gets REALLY old. It would've been nice to just flip a switch for hardmode and clear thru, rather than "oops, someone lagged and we missed hardmode, wipe now or we lose it for the week."

    Anyway... that's just my 2c.
    That's exactly how I feel as well. The only Ulduar hard modes that were activated in combat were XT, Vezax, and Council - Council was a little more interesting since the kill order mattered, but XT was just dps harder and Vezax was just don't kill the little adds and kill the big add when it spawns. If there had been more variety of in combat choices to make then I could understand why people liked it but to me not killing towers or not killing the Freya's lieutenants just doesn't seem any more interesting or different to me than toggling a switch.

    I do get why they don't make a lot of mult-tiered difficulty fights because I am sure that balancing that does become much more difficult. I'd still like it if they would do that maybe once a tier or every other tier though, for an end boss or the "ultimate" boss of that tier.

  2. #42
    Quote Originally Posted by bloodwulf View Post
    Not sure if this is what you are asking, but i believe ulduar implemented hardmodes the best. You had to complete the fights with entirely new mechanics...not just X mob has Y more health and does Z more damage.
    That's exactly the same...

    Completely new mechanics? You mean like the Meteor on Alysrazor, or the Firestorm? Like the Broodlings on Beth'Tilac? Like the stacking debuff on Shannox? Like the Countdown on Baleroc? Like the Concentration on Domo? Like the trap debuff, World in Flames, the entire phase 4 on Rag?

    Every fight in t11 and t12 has completely new mechanics only seen by the Heroic mode.

    If anything everyone nostalgias far too hard about the Ulduar ones. They were the original "Mob has Y more HP and does X more damage" hard modes. Most of them were ridiculously arbitrary, like killing the Heart or pressing a button, you'd often never know them in advance (Leviathan, Freya) and hell half the "Hard modes" were just doing it faster (Thorim, Hodir etc)

    Ulduar is completely overrated and the new system lets Blizzard be far more creative, instead of having to waste time thinking of dumb triggering mechanics.

  3. #43
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    Personally I like the FL model more even though it has it's flaws as well. I think people are just looking at ulduar through rose-tinted glasses and forgetting how little you actually did to activate some hard modes. It's also an outright lie that nowadays hard modes are just "added damage and higher health", that's actually more true for stuff in Ulduar than in tier 11 or tier 12, just compare something like Ragnaros heroic to Yogg+0 lights, Yogg is basically just more damage and a higher dps check, Rag has an entire new phase added into it.

    The "triggering" of hard modes leaves the devs less room for doing fun things as well in my opinion, there's only so many times you can use a mechanic like in XT again and again before it gets REALLY stale and boring, and don't even get me started on the "do the boss faster and you have a hard mode" fights. With the current system you can basically have 2 entirely different fights on normal/heroic, with the Ulduar system the base fight is the exact same but you may get a mechanic or two that's new.

  4. #44
    Old God Swizzle's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Acideyeliner View Post
    Holy crap @ the results. And Blizzard said they didn't like the Ulduar HMs. Their fans obviously did. Wow.
    150 people doesn't constitute a sample size large enough to even know whether those 150 people even did the HMs in Ulduar when they were current content or if they are just jumping on some sort of bandwagon. The only real difference between Ulduar and current systems is purely cosmetic. Instead of flipping a switch, you simply didn't do something. The same effect is incurred by both systems, yet one only "felt" more immersive because it had a graphic associated with it.

  5. #45
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    I dont know who was the designer of the whole Ulduar instance or there were several ppl but as far as I can remember this person is not working in Blizz anymore. But at the time ToC came out there was a discusion that you can see which encounters were made by him and which are not. For me (I play since Vanilla) Uld is the most interesting raid there is. It is so much different then the others and so clever designed and innovative. The Hard modes are so much fun that I have no words. Not to mention the achievs.

    When I voted for the ULD type of HMs I imagined a full bar there and when the page loaded I was glad there it was. So glad that alot of ppl prefer this the the ToC type of HMs.

    Blizzard, make the game fun again!

  6. #46
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by bloodwulf View Post
    Not sure if this is what you are asking, but i believe ulduar implemented hardmodes the best. You had to complete the fights with entirely new mechanics...not just X mob has Y more health and does Z more damage.
    Yeah, cause Ragnaros Heroic only does more damage and has more health as compared to the normal version. It's not like the fight is entirely different with differently behaving flames and an extra phase or anything.

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