Why does HoF get such a bad rep?

[Senen]

Zor'lok was one of the worst boss design ever in HM, before the several fix/nerfs. So terrible boss AND difficulty curve totally screwed up.
Garalon was such a gimmick fight that most people really liked him or hated him completely.
Un'sok was a vehicle fight.

Added to that that the three other encounters weren't particularly flavourful (even if I personnaly really liked Mel'jarak.)

Also, plenty of guilds used an exploit on Mel'jarak, more or less killing the race. (Yes, Midwinter, I'm looking at you. )

[v1perz53]

Amber Shaper was an example of Blizzard not learning from the past. If you are going to create a vehicle fight, you really need to at least implement a daily quest or something where players can get a feel for that vehicle. Sure it is easy in theory to tell someone "2 when you are casting 1 when the boss is casting" but until you do it, you might not know where your explosion cast bar shows up based on your UI, or the feel of the melee range interrupt in the vehicle. All things that could've been solved by making a vehicle daily like for Malygos dragons (but that actually taught you what to do, unlike the Malygos daily). Not that most people would've done it, but at least it would've been possible to practice.

[miffy23]

Haha Midwinter are like the pimply fat kid in a very mean highschool class at this point, everyone either pokes fun at 'em or hates on em. Poor Alliance.

Personally, I just really enjoyed the mechanics of pretty much all fights, and I really liked the ambience too. I know it all felt very similar to waht we already saw of the Mantid, but I just liked that style. It was unique, it was different, it felt like something other than xx "corrupted shadow" instances and Orcs everywhere.

On top of that we got the amazing Mantid voice acting and the really neat animations on them...I just miss the Mantid ;_;

[Replica]

Amber Shaper was an example of Blizzard not learning from the past. If you are going to create a vehicle fight, you really need to at least implement a daily quest or something where players can get a feel for that vehicle

That completely defeats the purpose of the Amber vehicle and makes the fight a complete joke.

[miffy23]

That completely defeats the purpose of the Amber vehicle and makes the fight a complete joke.

Agree..I thought it was fun. Even fondly remember dreading person x or y getting transformed. Good times.

[Adramalech]

Bugs.

AQ40 was also hated, AQ20 was despised.

Thinking back now, I liked AQ40, damn nostalgia fooling me.

For me, it's this. AQ20, AQ40 and HoF aren't bad raids... but I'm not a fan of the theme at all. I'm not saying I dislike the mantid or the qiraji themselves. In fact, the mantid were awesome. It's just... a raid full of the damn things... yeah.

[hablix]

I don't have anything good to say about HoF, but I only ever did it in LFR. If Normal (Flex) mode existed then, I'd probably have better things to say about it.

PS I had some of my best times in vanilla raiding AQ20. Killing Ossirian was one of the biggest buzzes I ever got from killing a boss.

[Deleted]

Do people really dislike HoF that much? In my opinion, it was a totally fine raid, and miles better than ToES. I consider H Vizier to be the most amazing boss of the whole expansion, and although he demonstrated the game engine's limits of what you can achieve in mechanics design, he was loads of fun.

I guess most of the hate comes from Amber-shaper. Firstly, it was a vehicle encounter, which are often if not always frustrating. But above all... All raid groups, from the pug one that will attempt the raid two patchs after it got released, to the world first race ones, rely on some key people to do the most difficult, specific tasks. Amber-shaper didn't allow that, which mean that your weakest element, whom you'll always try to give the least amount of responsibility possible, could suddenly have the whole fight's fate on his hands.

And when you play with some really slow learners... That fight was not fun.

[v1perz53]

That completely defeats the purpose of the Amber vehicle and makes the fight a complete joke.

Agree..I thought it was fun. Even fondly remember dreading person x or y getting transformed. Good times.

Just like it did for Malygos! Oh wait...

There was no difficulty in Amber Shaper, just unfamiliarity. That is artificial difficulty and it didn't make the fight hard and rewarding, it made it dumb until everyone got to practice transforms once.

[Meejum]

Garalon was just ridiculous in all forms. The stupid +bonus damage cleave thing had happened plenty of times by that point in the life of the game, yet Blizzard still seemed suprised when it was taken advantage of.

The style of the place looked to similar for me. Trash looked like bosses, bosses looked like other bosses, there just was not enough variance, for me.

Other than that, the fights were mostly enjoyable, and the Shogun Assassin (by way of the GZA) reference after blade-lord dies was epic.

[Deleted]

I hated Garalon and loved Amber-shaper. I'm one of the few people who actually like vehicle fights.

Only moment Amber-shaper was a problem was when we had a semi-new mage that simply could not grasp the simplicity of the vehicle system. He was shortly kicked after failing 4 times to interrupt himself/Monstrocity.

[eschatological]

H Vizier was a great fight once they nerfed it from theoretically-possible-but-not-really. I think most people's problems existed with Ambershaper. On 25 man a lot of guilds just 3 tanked it and thus managed to juggle stacks with no issues in p2 because the third tank just perma-stayed in the vehicle, and any additional constructs were just immediately broken. On 25 man people fixated by orbs in last phase occasionally just suicided outside of the group because the enrage wasn't tight.

In 10 man, though, you had to rely on one of the other 8 to 1) have enough practice on the vehicle to do it properly, 2) juggle stacks on the Monstrosity and Ambershaper properly, which took more practice, and 3) break them out at exactly the right moment when someone else was going in because you couldn't sustain a permanent construct in 10 man. Add that on top of not being able to suicide the fixating orbs in last phase and it made it a very difficult fight (unless you did the cheesed fire mage strat). It took us so long to just get everyone enough practice on the construct. It was by far the hardest fight in the instance on 10 man, but it wasn't a real hardness, it was RNG hardness (like Vizier pre-nerf). If you could pick who got constructed, it would have made the fight much more manageable. We got to pick who tossed balls on H-Sha, I didn't see why Ambershaper was different.

I enjoyed H-Empress, but that's because I wasn't one of the DPS who had to sit for a 3rd and 4th healer. Just the stun rotation we had on adds in the intermissions were crazy enough. HoF was enjoyable to me, except for the one boss outlined above (and Vizier pre-nerf, but that fight was untenable as released so I don't really consider it as a proper fight til it was nerfed).

[Angrybathtub]

Ambershaper vehicle fight was a disaster. Also, 10man Empress shekzeer required 4 healers (at least 1 disc priest), or 3 insanely geared/skilled healers.