Tiggering Hard Modes, HFC Style

[Spotnick]

So a few years ago, Blizzard said they couldn't come up with ideas to trigger "hard modes" like Ulduar on every fight and that is why they didn't keep up that model.

However, reading the threads in here, people seems in a vast majority prefer that model instead of flipping a menu switch.

The last time Blizzard did it was in ToES, it wasn't really hard, but at least they did it, and they didn't even try this xpac despite a few opportunities to do it.

So for fun, let's see how they could have done it in Hellfire Citadel.


Hellfire Assault: Use the munitions only one one canon for the whole encounter, would trigger hard mode once that one is full.
Iron Reaver: Get it down to 50% before the first air phase.
Kormrok: Start at purple
Hellfire Council: Different Kill Order
Kilrogg: Soaking heartseeker using a hulking berserker
Gorefiend: Kill and heal to full all the adds inside the stomach before the first feast
Iskar: Kill adds in specific order
Socrethar: Do not use the construct
Valhari: Kill the fight with all 3 adds up
Zakuun: Let no pilar spawn
Xhul'harc: Keep the green add and purple add up together long enough so they merge with the boss to buff him.
Mannoroth: Do no kill any of the channelers (boss would be attackable)
Archimonde: Get him to x% before the first nether banish


You get the idea, sure somes are generic, but still better than just flipping a switch.

What would be your triggers?

Keep in mind it needs to be something that can't be triggered by a raid failure, like I thought of sending nobody in Kilrogg's visions or not interrupting something, but those are mistakes that could happened, it needs to be something you want to do on purpose.

Of course there are a few gear checks, those are the most obvious to do.

Could have been interesting to have some of those I must say.

[Dangg]

So a few years ago, Blizzard said they couldn't come up with ideas to trigger "hard modes" like Ulduar on every fight and that is why they didn't keep up that model.

Lamest excuse for laziness ever.
I can't believe people are accepting it.


'But we will have to repeat some of them!'
So what? They are recycling boss mechanics too.

[Atherions]

I think it would get really boring really quickly, i raided during Ulduar, and yes activating the hardmodes were fun the first time around, it however it felt just like flipping a switch after a while. Also having to active hardmode during an encounter would make it hard for blizz to design encounters that are hard from the moment you pull. I'm not so sure jerking off for the first 5 mins of a fight is going to feel very exciting after 150 wipes

[Deleted]

The issue with the hardmode triggers wasn't the lack of ideas, it was the lack of a POINT. I'm going to relist all the hardmode triggers from Ulduar

Talk to NPC then start boss
Kill Heart then start boss
Kill Big Guy Last
Kill in X minutes while effectively killing boss in normal
Don't kill NPCs before starting boss
Reach boss in 3 minutes then start boss
Push Button then start boss
Don't kill NPC(cloud) before time
Don't talk to NPC then start boss

Most of them are "Do action before boss , then start boss" effectively how you setting heroic/mythic nowadays. Also, many of those triggers were nuisances to guilds that didn't want to tackle the difficulty on "hardmode" like XT's or Thorim because you needed to wait/stop dps. At the end of the day, this just took development time from making better bosses to making

-->a trigger for the fight
-->a buff that gets applied to boss/adds that heals them+ adds hp and damage
-->sure you don't accidentally apply hardmode to an encounter without trigger happening
-->sure the fight doesn't accidentally lose hardmode midway

etc.

[Zachysaurus]

its possible to make some fights harder right now just by doing them in unconventional ways or by doing the achievements, obviously it would only be for fun but still...

HFA: Dont kill martak
Council: Kill order or achievement
Kilrogg: No visions
Gorefiend: Come right out of stomach, or achievement
Iskar: Change add kill order/dont kill specific adds
Socrethar: no robot
Fel Lord: let ALL the pillars pop
Xhul: Play very badly :P
Tyrant: Dont kill add(achievement i think?)
Archi: ahcieve

that being said, they couldve done some interesting things for some fight to allow ppl to make then harder similar to Ulduar

Kormrok: something akin to Sarth 3 Drake, using the trash mobs as the "drakes"
Council: Protectors of the Endless 2.0
Gorefiend: add some goo on the floor before the boss that makes him never digest you once your inside, this would be the easy mode. make a group for inside, they stay in the whole time and pewpew adds, outside group pewpew boss. hard mode would be not using the goo and doing the fight as it currently is(and tuning it proportionally)
Iskar: Dont use eye at all (healers would love :P)
Socrethar: No robot
Mannoroth: another example of possible 3 drake type hard mode. leave initial adds up and make manny spawnable by clicking corpse or sumthin
Archimonde: Pull him in too Black Gate Portal and do the rest of the fight in there (similar to Mythic basically)

so there is potential there, but that sort of adjusted difficulty doesnt work very well with the current raid system and i think the current system works fine enough, despite being a little repetitive

[Wilderness]

However, reading the threads in here, people seems in a vast majority prefer that model instead of flipping a menu switch.

Who are all these people in the vast majority? Did they actually play in Ulduar? I'm glad Aladya listed them out so I don't have to, but there was absolutely nothing interesting about how the hard modes were activated in Ulduar. Most weren't even activated in combat, which is the same thing as flipping a menu switch, and even the in-combat ones could almost all be summed up as "dps harder/faster". So the first and only time we had non-menu hard-modes ... they were for all intents and purposes the same as using a menu. And you think that they are going to be coming up with new and fun ways of doing that for tier after tier? No thanks.

[Meaux]

Would you rather have varied, creative boss fights, or varied, creative triggers for hardmodes? Personally I would much rather have the former.

If Blizz had kept to the Ulduar hard mode method, I guarantee you that by the time Firelands came around everyone would be complaining about the triggers, "Another 'kill the heart' hard mode? GG Blizz I'm going to GW2 it will kill wow.'"

[Gilgameshh]

I think it would get really boring really quickly, i raided during Ulduar, and yes activating the hardmodes were fun the first time around, it however it felt just like flipping a switch after a while. Also having to active hardmode during an encounter would make it hard for blizz to design encounters that are hard from the moment you pull. I'm not so sure jerking off for the first 5 mins of a fight is going to feel very exciting after 150 wipes

I think the complete opposite. I believe multiple difficulties not only get boring EXTREMELY quickly, and they also burn people out extremely quickly as well.

I'll take Ulduar style hard modes over multiple difficulties every... single... time, without exception.

- - - Updated - - -

Would you rather have varied, creative boss fights, or varied, creative triggers for hardmodes? Personally I would much rather have the former.

If Blizz had kept to the Ulduar hard mode method, I guarantee you that by the time Firelands came around everyone would be complaining about the triggers, "Another 'kill the heart' hard mode? GG Blizz I'm going to GW2 it will kill wow.'"

So you'd just prefer running the same raid on multiple difficulties? How fun is that by comparison?

[Meaux]

I think the complete opposite. I believe multiple difficulties not only get boring EXTREMELY quickly, and they also burn people out extremely quickly as well.

I'll take Ulduar style hard modes over multiple difficulties every... single... time, without exception.

- - - Updated - - -



So you'd just prefer running the same raid on multiple difficulties? How fun is that by comparison?

How does doing one extra thing to trigger hard mode make it a whole different raid?

[WintersLegion]

How does doing one extra thing to trigger hard mode make it a whole different raid?

Yeah I can see them also turning the fights into a pain. Take the idea for a hardmode for Iron Reaver after a while if you didn't want hardmode it would be get boss to 75-60% and than you wait until after the first airphase.

[Deleted]

Hardmodes that are triggered by something you do inside an encounter, be it kill order or a mechanic/benchmark you achieve, limit encounter design by default. Let alone as stated, in some respects punish you for being able to do more dps/healing, which is outright stupid.

As for the multiple difficulties complaint, looking at the quality of the playerbase in my eyes it would be better if LFR and Normal would be combined to one, making the difficulties -> LFR/Normal -> Heroic -> Mythic. In current stage there is too big of a gap between a casual and a mythic raider in gear levels alone. 4 difficulties is bit too much.

[Dechno]

What about making the achievements work as hardmodes, and then the loot will all be warforged (and/or an increased chance for socket+tertiary)?

[Spotnick]

Who are all these people in the vast majority? Did they actually play in Ulduar? I'm glad Aladya listed them out so I don't have to, but there was absolutely nothing interesting about how the hard modes were activated in Ulduar. Most weren't even activated in combat, which is the same thing as flipping a menu switch, and even the in-combat ones could almost all be summed up as "dps harder/faster". So the first and only time we had non-menu hard-modes ... they were for all intents and purposes the same as using a menu. And you think that they are going to be coming up with new and fun ways of doing that for tier after tier? No thanks.

Not saying they were fun, but Sartharion was probably the best hard mode they did, they kind of did the same with Freya.

It doesn't need to be a "trigger" in combat at all, but I think that being in the same instance and decide or not to try the hard mode version was more fun, and in Ulduar not all bosses had hard modes, some of them are kite pointless TBH, having just a few extra pieces of loot available with higher ilvl when you defeated the encounter in hard mode was a better model IMO than repeating 3 times the same loot table.

[Pijips]

What you said for Xhul is kind of like what happens on Mythic. When you kill the big adds, they empower the boss's abilities

[Deleted]

Some things are the same, just automatic though. For instance, I noticed that to pull Mannoroth on hard mode, you just pull the skeleton in the middle, and the trash just infuse him.

If you could just pull the skeleton in heroic, it would be exactly the same thing (with all other numbers changed etc.).

So for a lot of that, it's mainly that you can now kill it again on heroic instead of being saved on both.

[Deleted]

Although some of the bosses had lackluster hard modes, so does bosses as of today and I hate the whole LFR/Normal/Heroic/Mythic difficulty stuff. It's like going through the same bosses, but with the click on a menu he suddenly hits harder or has additional mechanics. I'm personally of the opinion that the hard mode system worked the best thus far. It felt more organic and was a lot more hype when your raid leader uttered the words; "kill the heart" and all hell breaks loose.

Devs said it wasn't obvious or clear how to trigger hard modes, so they discontinued it. An expansion later they added the dungeon journal. I think it would be worth a try to go back on HM, but either way I don't care too much. I'm just stating my preference.

[Deleted]

A side-effect would be that we would be able to pug some bosses on hard mode for sure. I would love that since I don't like strict weekly schedules in gaming anymore. Then again, that's something that could be rectified by simply unlocking mythic saves to become heroic-type.

[Blackmist]

The best hardmode was Sartharion.

3 sub-bosses. Each can be disabled prior to the fight. Learn the new mechanics one at a time. Combine them for more challenge, with the top one being the hardest thing in that tier by a country mile.

By having various levels of difficulty in one encounter, some guild can start slowly and some can go right for the top challenge. It's far more granular, which means most guild had something within reach. There was no sudden wall where all progress stopped.

Many of the parts of Ulduar followed that model too. Flame Leviathan, Freya and Yogg-Saron. Early Wrath was really the best time for raiding.

Then the Crusaders' Coliseum happened and it was all downhill from there.

[Soulzar]

This thread just instantly gave me nightmares of wiping on Hodir at 1% 5000 times because we were going to be a few seconds short on kill timer. Oh and then that time you don't wipe in time and kill him .. and have to wait another week to try hard mode again.

Its neat to have and works for a lot of stuff, but every fight like that would get old fast. Save the "do fight differently on same mode" stuff for achievements IMO.

[Deleted]

This thread just instantly gave me nightmares of wiping on Hodir at 1% 5000 times because we were going to be a few seconds short on kill timer. Oh and then that time you don't wipe in time and kill him .. and have to wait another week to try hard mode again.

We were glorious on Hodir. I figured I should be tanking him on lowbie resistance gear with a dps flask so that the dpses won't pull agro and the healers would have no tank healing of merit. It still wasn't easy but doable.