Why do people hate Heart of Fear?

[Meillquei]

I don't think it's a bad raid, but it is definitely my least favorite MOP raid.
I think the reason people don't like it is because it has so many fights that are a pain. All the bosses after the first one were just extremely obnoxious (in LFR and normal at least).

[nekobaka]

Personal dislike was its placement based on difficulty mechanics wise. Terrace should have been first, then Vaults, and Heart last with the obvious retuning for gear. Heart also had the most tuning and balance issues if I recall correctly which added on making it far more frustrating than a raid in the middle should have especially compared to the bore of Terrace which in my opinion was easier than DS mechanics wise.

[Skeppio]

I will give credit where credit's due: Garalon was a very interesting fight in concept. Kinda like Quadraxis from Metroid Prime 2. Unfortunately, not so good in execution. If Blizzard can learn from the problems with Garalon, I'd love to see a similar boss in the future.

[badaku]

I didn't like how it looked and how pretty much every boss and trash was a mantid. But I absolutely loved the "gimmicks" as a tank. Finally something to do.

[Vargur]

I always see this word, gimmick, and it's like people get mad about having to play a video game. What do people want? A training dummy?

Every once in a while you want your heroics to be tank and spank... not progress night after night on one boss.

[Calfredd]

There were too many bugs in that place.

/Rimshot

[Bullettime]

I always see this word, gimmick, and it's like people get mad about having to play a video game. What do people want? A training dummy?

Gimmicks in WoW can be really hit or miss and too many in one raid can take away from the raid. Drake flying on Malygos, Flame Leviathan driving, Rhyolith steering, Al'akir final phase, etc are examples of gimmicky encounters.

Now, while these encounters are fine and were used sporadically, Heart of Fear was just gimmick after gimmick. Ta'yak's final phase, Garalon legs, Mel'jarak with his "hey near instakill me after you kill an add" and was easier than reg, and amber suits on Un'sok. 4 encounters in a row that had some awkward left field or pass/fail mechanic that detracted from the encounter itself.

[Sinndra]

Here's a few reasons why I personally don't like Heart of Fear.

1. You spend a whole zone fighting the Mantid, and the story build up with the Klaxxi seems to just drop off story wise once you enter the raid. It's just no body mantid guys dying at your feet one after another until the Empress.
2. It looks pretty ugly in there, doesn't have anything interesting or epic looking about it. AQ had tons of interesting things, so did AN dungeons, this didn't.
3. Fights were annoying! The only fight that was interesting was Empress, the rest is just having one player screw over the whole raid with them being dumb.
4. Trash that's harder than the bosses, yeah that's always fun.
5. Only 6 bosses in a raid is lame and underwhelming. I know it was split with Terrace, but still I want my raids to have at least 10 bosses in them, or one mega one.

That's all I got, anyone agree or disagree?

i woulda liked it to have been one large raid, combine HoF with Terrace and MSV. then mix them up like wings. basically raids need scenery changes every few bosses, as well as choices in path thru the raid. i dislike being stuck in the same monotonous linear raid for 6-8 bosses.

HoF specifically was not my favorite for pretty much the same reasons you said.

[theostrichsays]

Somehow the responsibility of running the "other" raid team fell on me in my guild. They were good people just not good raiders. That place was a bloody nightmare for most of them... Attenuation followed by the Tornadoes... Followed by leg humping for some of the dps.. along with the nightmare of telling people to destroy the damn body and not kill their buddy... literally queen seemed the easiest for that group. But that is why they all hated it, it asked them to do the things they found hardest which generally required them to move a lot or pay attention.
Not trying to be a douchebag or nothing just honestly that was my perspective.

[Tenjen]

bosses with unique features are "gimmicks" but those with traditional ones are "unimaginative"

[clevin]

bosses with unique features are "gimmicks" but those with traditional ones are "unimaginative"

It's that pretty much all of the fights aside, amusingly, from Empress were gimmick fights and a couple involved losing control of your character or being put in a 'vehicle'. Things like clearly missing a whirlwind visually on my screen but nevertheless getting caught up in it was also annoying as were the long fears on Empress in LFR with people who were clueless about dispels (that wasn't an issue on normal). Fights I liked? Vizier, Garalon, Windlord, Empress. Tayak and Ambershaper can bite me.

[Mormolyce]

It's a bit too long IMO, and fighting bugs isn't my favourite thing to do (the Mantid were interesting in Dread Wastes but it gets old after a while - never liked the AQ raids either).

But I wouldn't say it's bad.

[Gliff]

It was awesome on Heroic after they fixed the first boss.

Empress was my favorite boss of the tier. I just wish the DPS check was tighter so guilds didnt bring so mnay healers.

[Trubo]

Overall Tier 14 was a decent tier, not great like ToT but definitely not terrible. I've read a lot posts saying that Heart of Fear is the worst raid this expansion, but I don't understand why.

From a healer PoV I thought it was awesome; the damage was well tuned so there was a lot to heal, and each boss had one or more fun mechanics to deal with; Imperial Vizier Zor'lok I consider to be far above average for a non-end boss despite his place in the instance. The instance isn't particularily stunning to look at but it isn't completely rehashed either so I consider that a minor issue. I personally thought that ToES was far worse than Heart of Fear; sure the instance looked really good, but 3 out of the 4 bosses were below average (one of them being completely terrible), the only decent boss (imo) was Tsulong and I can't imagine it was very fun for non-healers.

What are your opinions on it?

Have to agree with the OP. Heroic Vizier was definitely the boss that separated the players with raid awareness from those that are just good at tunneling, discounting bad latency spikes. My only complaint with T14 is that I didn't get much of a chance of raiding the heroics while current due to guild roster instability occurring twice: first when half our core+officers decided to server transfer and form a 10 man; second with 4 others gotting recruited into other guilds before we were able to merge with a good 10 man guild on our server.

But as neat as the mechanics were, they are what made it so difficult on LFR.

1. Vizier in general
2. Blade Lord needed proper taunt swapping and raid stacking
3. Garalon Pheromones
4. Wind Lord add control and no one dispelling Quickening
5, Amber Shaper with proper target switching and knowing how to use the Amber MC effectively
6. Empress being a long fight, punishing tank swap mechanic if failed, the sonic fields not being burst correctly, no one dispelling the long ass fear in last phase and people just standing in the purple fear cleave.

Combine that with overall really bad loot drops (think only healers had a weapon drop from the zone and no trinkets whatsoever) and it's not that surprising people stayed away from HoF LFR beyond the tier tokens.

[Mormolyce]

bosses with unique features are "gimmicks" but those with traditional ones are "unimaginative"

Sigh so true.

[TheWindWalker]

Too many gimmicks for a small raid.

This exactly. The bosses were basically gimmick after gimmick.

This really confuses me. The entire allure of different raid bosses is that they have different mechanics and learning and overcoming those mechanics is why you have progression at all. I mean, I literally can't figure out why someone wouldn't say this of every single raid we've had since Wrath.

[Vargur]

Also, it felt too cramped and crowded. Too "small" if you must.

[Maleric]

Heroic Vizier was the worst fight of the expansion IMO. Doing the fight the right way felt like the wrong way, and the ability timing was so inconsistent.

The monotone color scheme didn't do much for me, either.

[Feindy]

i think it has something to do with first, third and fifth boss

[wariofan1]

The bosses just weren't memorable imo. The first boss is fine, the second boss feels like a prolonged trash mob, Garalon is way too gimmicky and feels like a mess, the fourth boss is an overglorified trash pack, the fifth boss is okay-ish, and the final boss is very underwhelming, all final bosses of T14 were underwhelming actually. Furthermore, the whole place is just depressing to look at, orange really isn't that pretty of a color when combined with a dark environment.

I'd really like to see another bug raid done right, like Ahn'Qiraj, but Heart of Fear wasn't much fun.