Ulduar difficulty and the blue post

[Slashgordon]

Not quite. Ever fought a boss like Zon'ozz? Hagara's ice and lightning phases? Yor'sahj's globule mechanics (how he gets different abilities depending on spawns and kills)?

I said 99.9% - Zonozz's ball bouncing mechanic is indeed one of the more interesting mechanics in the raid.

How are hagara's ice and lightning phase original? The ice phase involves killing an add and not getting hit by an ice spike which looks like a white version of anub's spike. The lightning phase has a mechanic which is potentially interesting but its so trivial on normal mode that no one really understands it. TECHNICALLY you do it by creating a chain of players to bring the lightning charges to the objects around the edge in order to disable them. But how many people actually knew that? To the majority of people (at least on normal mode, can't speak for hc) you just run around a circular room in a group.

SO ok, you got me, you found 2 or three mechanics which maybe haven't been done before. But you also managed to pick mechanics which, outside of heroic mode, you can all but ignore.

[smelltheglove]

There are definitely some good things that could be taken from Ulduar and used to make the current model more fun or interesting in my opinion, and something that people would probably enjoy. You do have some good points in there but this:

is just nostalgia talking. If you objectively look at the hard modes they were almost all exactly like toggling a switch nor were most of them innovative.

i dont care. i liked them better any way :P

[Slashgordon]

You probably don't remember clicking on the interface for Razorscale since there was no hardmode. Also, if you read what I said it was that nearly all of the hardmodes were "like" flipping a switch. Ok, you didn't toggle heroic on XT, all you did was dps harder. How innovative or interactive is that? Or not killing towers before FL? Or not killing saronite on General? Or literally toggling a switch on Mim/Yogg? Or just killing the boss faster on Hodir? And so on and so forth. Leaving towers/adds up before pulling a boss is no different than clearing trash and flipping a switch to heroic. The only hard mode which was actually activated in combat was council based on your kill order except for the handful of hardmodes which were just dps faster and that's not activating anything in a different way than just toggling a switch.

I have issues with this, because for all your criticisms, the examples you provided were FAR mroe interesting and interactive than the RL right clicking his character portrait and selecting "heroic mode" from the options.

XT's hardmode had an inbuilt DPS check to even activate it - a great idea. If you couldn't trigger XT's hard mode then your dps probably wasn't up to the later hardmodes anyway - thus saving you from wasting your time. General vezax required you handle the fight in a different way to activate it. Not killing towers before FL allowed you to fine tune how easy or hard you wanted the encounter to be - that's a fantastic idea. If a particular tower was causing you problems you could just disable it and try again, you could gradually ramp up the challenge week by week - that's far mroe interactive than selecting heroic mode.

Toggling the switch on MM was arguably one of the least "interesting" but it was FUNNY. It had soul, it was a huge great red button labelled "DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON." It made you want to press it, all through normal progress it would be there, taunting you. You'd think "shall I press it just for lulz?" You'd maybe press it by accident - it was at least vaguely amusing. VERY different in "feel" from just selecting heroic mode.

[Wilderness]

I have issues with this, because for all your criticisms, the examples you provided were FAR mroe interesting and interactive than the RL right clicking his character portrait and selecting "heroic mode" from the options.

I disagree because I don't find anything more interesting or interactive about just dps'ing harder. That's the goal every pull every week. Yes, you are right that there was a bit of a self-check in there in that if you didn't have the dps to activate it you weren't going to be killing it anyway. So a group that doesn't have the dps for H Ultraxion wouldn't know that until they try it and don't get there. But the actual activation mechanic isn't any more exciting than flipping a switch. Even on Mimiron it was fun or entertaining to hit that button the first time but after the 15th wipe its got the exact same appeal as toggling a switch. Same thing with Freya/FL - how interactive is it to just not kill a few things while clearing trash before a boss?

Ulduar was awesome and there are definitely some things which should be taken from it and used again. I'd love to see a variety of different achievements on a boss, even without any other rewards to go with doing them. Perhaps even just 2 meta mounts of which each set of achievements are easier or harder to do. I don't think its feasible or realistic to expect multiple bosses per tier to have multiple difficulties but I'd love to at least have some end bosses have different levels like Yogg did. I think that'd be awesome to see. I just think that most people like to throw in the hard mode activations as something amazing when they really weren't.

[woofermazing]

They are neglecting the fact that Ulduar was huge. I don't know how often the average guild raided, but if it wasn't 3 nights a week or more, they weren't going to get far into it without a decent gear advantage or an exceptional group of players. I was in a 10 man group that was a well oiled machine, but our 25 man guild raid was not at that level, and it took us a while to clear to Yogg with enough time to put in meaningful attempts.

[KaPe]

I thought they introduced raid id extension specifically to deal with instance length. No more "we only raid X hours per week, we can't possibly kill Y bosses in a single reset". Obviously it was bull, as this feature has faded into obscurity and no really thinks about using it this way. Throwing away easy loot to progress on harder boss? Hah.
Multiple independant wings so you're not forced to kill 10 bosses to face the Big Bad? Optional bosses you can skip if they're too hard? There are plenty possible solutions. Hell, we have LFR, that should trivialize bosses enough so people would "see the content" and this excuse won't be used anymore.

Obviously, this ignored one of main reasons "not many people saw Algalon". Ulduar was killed by ToC. Trivially easy instance, offering vastly superior rewards for less effort. What a suprise that people didn't want to progress to Algalon - the fact that he had that retarded time limit didn't help, either. And as long as Normal N+1 tier ilvl > Heroic N, this will not change and the only way to get "majority of people to see the content" is to make everything easy and nerf asap.

As for hardmode activation - I really don't mind the current system. Yeah, sure, pressing that button was fun. On the other hand, Vezax? Hodir? Thorim was a nuisance as well, doing speed run so you could face "true boss" instead of nerfed gimp. Creative maybe, but not sustainable in the long run. I don't care *how* you activate it, I care *what* you activate. If the boss fight is well designed, simple menu option will do its job.

[Bigbazz]

I disagree that algalon was easier than either firefighter or freya hardmode, we killed those bosses within a decent time frame and hit a wall on algalon due to tank survival being a big issue, to where we simply didnt touch it for a while because people already had their mounts and totc was out so soon after ulduar, when we went back and killed it (herald of titans included) it was with better geared tanks and more determination after having a break from it, and we killed it after a few attempts, but aside from yogg +0, algalon was the most difficult encounter for us as a guild.

Ulduar difficulty was perfect, having everyone kill the last boss regardless of how crap or afk they are (LFR) really takes any value or meaning out of the content, might aswell make a wow movie about deathwing and go to the movies to see that. LFR is a cool idea, but it should be limited on the content, it should be a stepping stone in gearing towards the normal mode (which are also too easy) where the full content is available. Hardmode only bosses like Algalon and Sinestra are great, they add a lot of depth to the game.

Comparing how many people killed Algalon before TOTC is stupid because TOTC came out so soon after Ulduar, which was a massive raid that most people were still progressing on. The model they had in ICC was the best, a smooth difficulty ramp up, normal modes were fairly hard but nerfed over time with the raid buff, hardmodes were harder with a few bosses being exeptionally hard. If you compare pre nerf normal mode LK with pre nerf Normal mode Deathwing, LK is was massively harder to kill, but by the end of the expansion a lot of people had killed it with the raid buff and many people were doing heroic modes.

Ulduar and ICC kills had some value, even on normal mode, where as normal mode DS is more like Naxx in difficulty, anybody can clear it and clear it quickly, a week 1 clear job. Then you go heroic mode, kill morchok easily and hit a brick wall on zonnoz chuck norris fight compared to everything before it, though still difficulty doesnt ramp up properly until the gunship.

[clevin]

I have issues with this, because for all your criticisms, the examples you provided were FAR mroe interesting and interactive than the RL right clicking his character portrait and selecting "heroic mode" from the options.

XT's hardmode had an inbuilt DPS check to even activate it - a great idea. If you couldn't trigger XT's hard mode then your dps probably wasn't up to the later hardmodes anyway - thus saving you from wasting your time. General vezax required you handle the fight in a different way to activate it. Not killing towers before FL allowed you to fine tune how easy or hard you wanted the encounter to be - that's a fantastic idea. If a particular tower was causing you problems you could just disable it and try again, you could gradually ramp up the challenge week by week - that's far mroe interactive than selecting heroic mode.

Toggling the switch on MM was arguably one of the least "interesting" but it was FUNNY. It had soul, it was a huge great red button labelled "DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON." It made you want to press it, all through normal progress it would be there, taunting you. You'd think "shall I press it just for lulz?" You'd maybe press it by accident - it was at least vaguely amusing. VERY different in "feel" from just selecting heroic mode.

Precisely this. While each of the hard mode activations was effectively the same as flipping a toggle, the actual mechanisms fit the fight. Even Mimi's hard mode fit - it was a mechanical/engineering themed fight, so pushing a Big Red Button was thematically consistent.

The reason a lot of people didn't kill Yogg when it was current never mind Algalon had less to do with difficulty and more to do with the clash between the length of Ulduar and how much time some guilds put in. I was in a fairly casual guild that raided 2x a week for 3 hours per. Guess what, even if you can reliably one-shot bosses, it takes most of the first night to get through the Keepers and if you stumbled at all you were probably only 2/4 or 3/4 on them. I would bet that a lot of midrange guilds were like us - it wasn't so much difficulty as the actual time spent in the raid. We were fine with it, but to Blizz our progress would have looked like it was 'too hard' when it wasn't, it was just too long for a 2 night per week guild. Had we consistently raided 3 nights it would have been fine.

What Blizz misses by judging the success on how many people killed Yogg or Algalon was that we had FUN in the fights prior to that. We didn't judge the success of our raid entirely on progress, for us it was a good mix of challenge and fun. Nerf it too much and it was just pushing buttons to get loot. That seems to be what people want, though, so... /shrug.

[Arkbird]

Ulduar was the pinnacle of a good raid. It's all been downhill since.

[Desdonde]

They are neglecting the fact that Ulduar was huge. I don't know how often the average guild raided, but if it wasn't 3 nights a week or more, they weren't going to get far into it without a decent gear advantage or an exceptional group of players. I was in a 10 man group that was a well oiled machine, but our 25 man guild raid was not at that level, and it took us a while to clear to Yogg with enough time to put in meaningful attempts.

That wasn't fully due to raid size, but moreso due to how normal modes scaled. I mean, a raid as large as Ulduar could be made and lessen the trash a bit, if that is the true concern