Hard mode vs Heroic mode on Cataclysm.

[wut?]

Definitely hard modes. Not much more to say really, as it's all been said:P

[Deleted]

Gosh , why can't people understand that there is hardmodes in ICC? and they are called ACHIEVEMENTS. It's basicly the same thing but some people just want to QQ.

thos achievements are piss easy and not realy a hardmode ;p

[.Aen]

Ulduar-type hard modes for sure.

Heroic just isn't as fun.

[Deleted]

Gosh , why can't people understand that there is hardmodes in ICC? and they are called ACHIEVEMENTS. It's basicly the same thing but some people just want to QQ.

Hardmodes give you better gear.
Achievements in ICC doesnt give you shit, exept a mount if you got em all.

[Elween]

Thats not what this thread is about. Hardmode is triggeting a boss and his aditional mechanics in game to activate the bonus loot. Heroic mode is Switching on the harder mode and bonus loot via the menu. By your logic Naxx had hardmode because its achivements changed fights as well.

thank you

Personally, I would certainly wait a month or two extra for a raid to get another Ulduar instead of another ICC .

same.

[Simca]

Uh, it sounds like a lot of people in this thread didn't actually do the heroic modes in ICC or the hard modes in Ulduar.

The only difference between hard modes and heroic modes is the activation of them.
Proof?

Disclaimer: The following is from a 10-man perspective. I've never done 25-mans nor do I do claim to have done them.

Ulduar Hard Modes

Flame Leviathan: Gains 4 new abilities. The fight is essentially same except don't stand in the fire/lightning/ice and have the cannons DPS the adds.

XT: Gains 2 new abilities, but stops spawning adds. Arguably this fight is easier than the normal mode, even when it was current content. The only difficulty was the enrage timer. Quite possibly the worst hard mode in the game besides Gunship.

Iron Council: Gains the same number of abilities as the regular mode, just different ones. In the hardest mode, tank death mechanic was interesting, but it was really just another enrage timer, again.

Hodir: Adds a DPS timer. This hard mode was incredibly lame.

Thorim: Is a DPS-race. Beat the Gauntlet in 3 minutes, and then defeat Thorim before he gets enough stacks to kill your tanks. The addition of Siff to the fight was an interesting mechanic, but her spells are fairly easy to avoid.

Freya: Gains 3 additional abilities and a lot of increased damage. This fight was one of the more interesting ones in Ulduar because the additional abilities were actually very hard to deal with at times, especially the raidwide silence. DPS had to coordinate exploding adds around the silence times, etc. The roots were extremely pathetic if you had a Hand of Freedom though. They shouldn't have let HoF remove those roots, would have made it more challenging.

Mimiron: Easily the best hard mode in Ulduar, hands down. The mechanics were already tough on normal mode, and the addition of the increased raid damage, the constant fire management, frost bombs, and emergency bots just made the fight an absolute nightmare. Everyone in your raid had to be completely on top of their game in order to actually beat this. This is what hard modes should be.

General Vezax: A very interesting fight. After all the nerfs to the fight, it wasn't very challenging, but still the concept of mana actually meaning something in an expansion where mana had traditionally meant nothing was a very welcome change. The fight mechanics besides this were really lame though and he gains 0 new abilities on hard mode... just can't use the Saronite Vapors.

Yogg-Saron (1-light): This fight was extremely challenging. That said, there are actually few new mechanics between Yogg normal and 1-light. Corruptors cast faster, Hodir doesn't save people, and there are no sanity wells, but really this doesn't change the fight drastically. It becomes a heavy gear check (exactly what you guys are saying ICC heroics are, btw) and DPS race. Managing your Sanity is an interesting mechanic, but honestly you were always supposed to avoid taking Sanity damage because all the forms of Sanity damage also cause HP damage or loss of control of your character. It's like adding a mechanic that punishes players for standing in fire (with the exception of the direct damage Sanity removal spell that Blizzard had to nerf because it added way too much RNG to the fight).

Alone in the Darkness: I can't comment much, having not completed it myself, but I have heard that the removal of Thorim makes the encounter absolute hell in Phase 3. I'd imagine this observation is supported by the huge length of time it took for Stars to get a kill.

Algalon: Doesn't have a normal mode to compare, and since this thread is about Cataclysm, it's worth noting they are bringing back Algalon-style encounters.

Ulduar Summary: Yogg-Saron (1-light/Alone), Freya, and Mimiron were easily the hardest hard modes in Ulduar. Thorim and General Vezax had 1-2 interesting mechanics, but in general weren't very difficult. The other hard modes were underwhelming and really don't deserve to be mentioned a whole lot.

Icecrown Citadel Heroic Modes

Marrowgar: The only new mechanic is more fire and spikes during Bonestorm. It's comparable to many of the early Ulduar hard modes, where the only challenge is actually killing the boss before he kills you.

Deathwhisper: An interesting fight, and fairly difficult. While the first phase is mainly the same aside from the addition of mind control, the old-school style tank switching (no taunts) in Phase 2 was a relatively unique mechanic for this expansion. I feel they could have done a lot more with Deathwhisper heroic though.

Gunship: No.

Deathbringer Saurfang: Hard? Yes. Interesting? Not really. Yes, there was a need for coordinated CC, and in expansion without CC, it was a welcome change, but all in all, the fight really was a DPS/healing struggle and not much in the way of mechanics. At the end of the day, it was a gear check with a medium amount of mechanical skill involved, but nothing amazing.

Festergut: Malleable Goo is a mechanic from the Putricide fight and nothing unique to the Festergut fight. Again, comparable to the early Ulduar fights.

Rotface: Vile Gas, so ranged has to stay spread out. Ranged already had to stay spread out for Slime Spray. This changes nothing.

Professor Putricide: The addition of Unbound Plague and the change to the phase transitions makes this the second or third hardest fight in the instance (depending on what you think of Sindy). Like Princes, having a strong grip on raid awareness is absolutely critical, as you constantly have to be DPSing or healing while watching the plague, the vials, the goo, the slime puddles, the gas cloud, and the volatile ooze. If you can survive the Phase 3 transition, then you get the added challenge of a tight (well before the buff) DPS race while juggling the plague! The first time my guild beat this I was so happy I didn't realize that I still had the plague on me and I died, after the fight.

Blood Princes: This is sad so I probably shouldn't say this, but my guild struggled more with this than Putricide heroic. The addition of the movement penalty limits your most precious resource in WoW. Couple this with Flame Orb damage increased so ridiculously high that it will one-shot players unless you absorb it correctly, increased Kinetic Orb spawns, the fact that Keleseth tanks have to be constantly moving, and Shock Vortexes you have to spread out from (and from other players if empowered) and you've got one hellish fight. This fight requires a lot mechanically, and is one of the more challenging ones in the instance. There is always something going on, and it's a real heavy test in raid awareness. A great heroic.

Blood Queen: Welcome to Hodir 2.0, may I take your order?

Dreamwalker: In the heroic version, the Dream is replaced by the Nightmare, where the orbs do not respawn, the stacking buff causes damage, and Dreamwalker takes damage over time. Outside, stuff hits harder and has more HP. While the heroic version's Nightmare phase emphasizes healer teamwork in collecting the orbs together (due to the lack of respawns), I feel that the encounter overall was not much changed from normal. The decay rate is so small it really isn't very noticeable unless your stacks drop, and the color change from green on green to red on red is FREAKING ANNOYING. I have color difficulty with some colors, and the Emerald Nightmare was a big FU to that.

Sindragosa: I haven't actually completed the fight (have attempted it), so I don't want to rate a fight I haven't completed yet. It wouldn't be fair. I don't think there is much argument though that this is one of the top 4 fights in ICC.

Lich King: Like Alone in the Darkness, I can't really comment much. I haven't completed the fight (if I did, it would make my guild World 3rd on 10-man strict, lol, so I don't expect to in the near future).

ICC Summary: Very similar to Ulduar in terms of difficulty and complexity of the end-bosses. Putricide, Blood Princes, Sindragosa, and the Lich King represent a difficulty level clearly above the rest of the instance. Dreamwalker, Deathbringer Saurfang, and Lady Deathwhisper are definitely not pushovers, but I feel that their heroic counterparts are too similar to the normal ones to give them more praise than a passing mention.

Overall Summary

All of this being said, Ulduar is still my favorite instance in the entire game. It was a very memorable time in the game for me, and I had a lot of fun with the challenge of hard modes. It was the first time in the game where our guild had wiped week after week to finally get a boss down (never did 25-mans in TBC, we're a 10-man guild).

However, people in this thread do need to understand that Hard modes = Heroic modes in terms of mechanics. You can't say the ICC heroics are more bland than the Ulduar hards or you're just not thinking objectively (or you just plain haven't done both to compare them).

As for the activation, I agree that Ulduar hard modes had a more epic activation to them, but hearing Mimiron's "OH, I MAD" speech for the millionth wipe in a row was just horrible.

TL;DR: Ulduar > ICC > TOC, but Ulduar hards = ICC heroics >>>>> TOC heroics

[Pepitobenito]

Gosh , why can't people understand that there is hardmodes in ICC? and they are called ACHIEVEMENTS. It's basicly the same thing but some people just want to QQ.

Wrong. There were hard modes AND achievements in Ulduar. Two different things.

Hard modes were much more interesting than the lazy retuning of heroic mode. Almost no game mechanics really changed. Sartharion + 3 drakes and Ulduar showcased how varied a single fight can be depending on what level of challenge you want. Actually needing to activate the hard modes was pretty neat as well. Switching to 'heroic mode' just feels like sloppy design.

[bw13187]

Gosh , why can't people understand that there is hardmodes in ICC? and they are called ACHIEVEMENTS. It's basicly the same thing but some people just want to QQ.

Ulduar had these too. tons of random ass achieves that weren't even part of the meta. No one did them though, except asians and nerds that want to be asian

wow, its so weird that the guy above me chose to reply to the same thing i did...oh well, my post is now pointless

[mordale]

imagine BOTH have the raid set on heroic and activate hard mode.

[Papalenin]

Does anybody know what blizzards view on this subject is? I don't recall ever hearing anything. I really hope for hardmodes being implemented again though. :\

[Simca]

Almost no game mechanics really changed.

You mean like XT, Iron Council, Hodir, and Flame Leviathan?

Stop reveling in nostalgia and look at things objectively.

---------- Post added 2010-09-26 at 07:29 PM ----------

Does anybody know what blizzards view on this subject is? I don't recall ever hearing anything. I really hope for hardmodes being implemented again though. :\

They're sticking with the heroic toggle vs the hard mode activation in fight. It's not really a big difference though as long as they keep the heroics on the level of Ulduar/ICC.

[bw13187]

I was thinking about it, and this is the reason 2 difficulty modes for 1 boss, is a bad idea.

You can so easily tell they design the normal mode first, and then tack things on (to most fights) to make it harder. They should do it in reverse, and make the full fight in all its hard, bitchy, tough glory, and then work backwards noobifying it so people can beat it with a drool cup in one hand.

Also, in Cata, please don't make 11 easy bosses, and then 1 hard boss (speaking from heroic mode perspective in ICC). Like 5,000 guilds are 11/12 hm, and 500 guilds are 12/12 hm. I really enjoy that the last boss is such a pain in the ass (took my guild like 6 months), but the rest of the instance should have been as challenging. Or at least somewhat challenging. We shouldn't always 11/12 it in 2 hours or so with 0 wipes. There's just not enough punishment with the 30% hp buff.

So I think, don't design your instances (HMs anyway) with a stacking buff involved. You could leave that on normal mode, sure, that would fit the design of "everyone gets to see the end content," but it kind of just sucks when the 30% buff makes 11/12 horribly faceroll on hardmode, and then the last boss slaps you in the dick so hard you wouldn't dream of taking the 30% off.

in short, plan any scaling nerds to the instance, for just regular mode. Start out by designing hard modes, so theyre all hard and enjoyable. Reverse engineer these to make them accessible to normal modes. This avoids designing an EASY first half of the raid, for bad players.

Oh, and it would help if you wouldn't make previous raids OBSOLETE by handing out so much badge gear.

[errosync]

Rotface: Vile Gas, so ranged has to stay spread out. Ranged already had to stay spread out for Slime Spray. This changes nothing.

You didn't have to stay out for Slime Spray, but it helped trivialize the hard mode if you did. My main beef with heroic modes in ICC were, especially on 10 man, that normal mode gutted out anything that made the fight even remotely hard. I would've gladly had LDW do her mind control on R 10 and the rockets knock people back for being stupid and standing in red on Lootship, or higher bonestorm damage on normal and the spikes being the main issue with more coldflames on heroic.

The only other thing I didn't like was how the changes in the ICC heroics were usually consolidated to a single new ability, where in Ulduar the hard modes usually had multiple changes to them, and even sometimes offered mini-progression within the encounter, like Freya, IC, Yogg and FL. If anything, that's what I miss: not just having to do something to make something harder, but the ability to separate players and guilds out not by how many heroics they've downed, but by how they've done the boss fight.

[Will]

It may not have given special loot, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a hardmode, ie a more difficult way of doing the fight.

No. I partly disagree. Players deliberately making the fight harder to beat are essentially fighting in a more difficult manner on the same mode they are currently toggled to - for instance if people choose to gimp normal mode in order to make it harder, they're still on normal mode at the end of the day. Although gimping a fight for challenge can be considered a 'hard mode' per Se, in the game we typically refer to hard modes as an intrinsic level of difficulty designed into the encounter itself that is classed as the official 'harder' version of it.

To illustrate my point we could gimp an encounter by fighting naked, sure it would make it a hard mode to us in terms of difficulty, but not in terms of official design - by taking an already tuned difficulty level and making it harder it doesn't change the fact that the encounter is still flagged under its original difficulty level. Players these days are more concerned with official hard modes that come with the better loot, titles or achievements for the credibility and intended game progression.

- and this thread is discussing official hard modes, not player-made hard modes.

---------- Post added 2010-09-26 at 08:53 PM ----------

Gosh , why can't people understand that there is hardmodes in ICC? and they are called ACHIEVEMENTS. It's basicly the same thing but some people just want to QQ.

This isn't a QQ thread, it's so far an intelligent debate over which we prefer out of the two types of system for triggering harder difficulties. While we're all busy discussing it rationally you're the one who bursts in here with a true 'QQ' post.

Okay so on track I think the ulduar system is better. Not only for the points mentioned by previous players, but the ulduar system also gave us the ability to play boss fights differently. Iron council for example and the ability to fight it in multiple ways as opposed to having 1 linear encounter every time. Flexiblity.. Plus the fun in choosing which towers to leave up or which keepers to... keep!

[Samyaaza]

Defo hardmode.

[Simca]

The only other thing I didn't like was how the changes in the ICC heroics were usually consolidated to a single new ability, where in Ulduar the hard modes usually had multiple changes to them

For this point, it's really just down to ICC vs Ulduar though. This doesn't really have anything specifically to do with hard modes vs heroic modes because technically they could design the heroic modes in the next raid to have 5 new abilities on each fight.

I do agree with your other point about tiered progression, that was an interesting mechanic.