Hard mode vs Heroic mode on Cataclysm.

[Ciah]

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.

Except it's not. At all.

For starters some of the "achievements" are actually EASIER than doing it the "right" way (hi lootship) or just rewards for not sucking (marrowgar, blood princes)
Also the achievements don't activate a change in boss mechanics, or drop better loot. So they are not hardmodes, nice try though.

[Auxpriest]

The Ulduar hard modes were substantially more enjoyable to activate than the individual switching in ICC (or worse yet the ToC version).

[Deleted]

Hardmodes by far.

[v2prwsmb45yhuq3wj23vpjk]

True, and they still will in Cata. However, there won't be two kinds of ilvl splits; there will be just one. Normal vs heroic will have ilvl differences, but 10 vs 25 will not. So, they have a lot less inflation to deal with.

Which means the Heroic/Hardmode thing had nothing to do with it.

[Atica]

I miss hardmodes so much... There is nothing exciting ass pressing a bigass red button to see what happends or the iron council, depending on wich order you killed the bosses, the encounter became entirley different. Do you even have the firepower to activate XT's hardmode? And can you defeat an old god all by yourself? And what tower is the most convinient to keep?

Hardmodes were simply awesome. Heroic mode is just a step backawrds, and i can't possibly figure out why Blizzard would want to take a step backwards. Aren't they supposed to set the bar higher for each pacth /expansion rather than do whats easiest? I miss Ulduar SO much.

[druidicitus]

I want to play game, no the UI please. Give me more hardmodes.
But make them switchable by raid effort, not by 1 idiot pushing button which is not supposed to be pushed :-)

[Shadowviper]

Hardmodes for sure. I like having to do something special to make the boss so angry it gets more powerful. Instead of just flipping a switch and poof now they are pissed off because you flipped the switch.

[Mesovr]

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.

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.

[Bomula]

Hardmodes. It makes it seem more realistic

[soadnation]

Which means the Heroic/Hardmode thing had nothing to do with it.

they did though. without hardmodes there would only have been 2 iLvls per raid tier, with them there was 4 which tey didnt want. In cataclysm to get only 2 ILvls they removed 10/25 man loot difference and stayed with hardmodes.

[MestHoop]

Trying to be objective here:
First off, hard modes seem to have more people liking it. This comes from the old D&D setup where you enter a room and you have NO idea what's happening.
You fight a robot and all of a sudden it drops it's heart. Do you kill it? Looks like a good idea! Oh shit it just got stronger... And then you deal with it.
It's more realistic. Even the mimiron button, which people seemed to hate most. If you DON'T know what it does, it COULD mean something bad for mimiron and not for the raid. So all in all it gives a bit more immersion into the game than flicking a UI switch.

The problem with this however is that it sucks up developer time. Remember that ulduar was supposed to be in at the start of wotlk? Remember how long it took to actually implement it? Do you really want to wait that long for a new instance because they had to implement inventive ways to activate the hard/heroic mode? Even though the entire normal instance is done?

Sounds kinda silly dunnit?
I personally would rather have ulduar style hard modes, but at what cost? I remembered how taxing it was to walk around in 3.0 with BiS gear and nothing to do :P

[Deleted]

Heroic mode isn't about the encounter being the same with minimal change and more hit points. The way they've executed it so far can be considered to be the above in some cases, especially compared to the ulduar hardmodes, but that's totally irrelevant. Hardmodes aren't bound to being the only encounters with different mechanics, and heroics aren't bound to always be a stat increase with little to nothing new. That discussion is different.

For the record, I preferred hardmodes.

[soadnation]

I really dont think it was the hardmodes that set ulduar back.Your telling me that the button for mimron or XT's heart took so much development time that the raid got pushed back? Maybe the balancing of the hardmodes is what pushed it back but in all reality the same thing would happen for a simple heroic mode.

[Elovan]

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.

I would agree with that last statement, if the achievements changed the fight then it was hardmode. 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.

[Joán]

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

[Pappahealar]

Hard modes. The mechanic itself is just better. Activate Hardmode by doing something with the fight rather than just press a ui button to make it Heroic.

Leaving Freya with all 3 keeprs up, pressing the selfdestruct button on Mimiron. Killing yogg without keepers help. It just gave a more epic feeling, and something actually changed in the environment, rather than a boss having mor HP and more damage, and slightly different mechanics..

[Vindir]

I'm fairly certain I'm in the minority when I say this but I prefer neither. They should make the bosses hard to begin with. If you down it, grats -- if not, your guild has some work to do. In vanilla, our guild wiped constantly to new encounters -- but when we downed a boss, it was rewarding. We proudly displayed the boss kill on the front page of our guild site.

I understand the reasoning behind hardmodes & heroics. I just don't agree with it. You didn't see Nintendo coming out with "Super Mario Brothers: Baddie Edition" just so people could see Mario rescue the princess.

However, should I have to choose one given the choices, then definitely hardmodes.

[deevicoos]

People saying heroics are just harder apparently missed the memo where half of them do alter your tactics. Some of them are just gear checks (gunboat, lana thel) some of them do have more complex tactics but are still gear checks (marrowgar, princes for example) some of them clearly aren't. If you don't MASSIVELY OUTGEAR it, festergut's maleable goo means your healers will fail to heal the tank or you'll hit enrage because there was always 2 DPS with -60% DPS and the positioning of the healers is different, rotface while a faceroll, repositions have the raid, deathwhisper is trickier. Heroic dreamwalker is just a gear check for the ground pounders but requires more from the healers.

In the end several ulduar hard modes were just gear checks, thorim, hodir, Freya were all just the fight with knobs that required higher throughput and tougher tanks. However they immersion factor was a lot nicer. That's the one thing hard modes actually have on heroics. And for that reason I'd say hard modes. However writing a hard mode "switch" for every boss is as contrived as flicking the heroic switch. To go with hard modes we'd have to have some bosses who lack hard modes.

[BreakingBen83]

Hardmodes are hard
Heroics are gearchecks.

this

[exochaft]

I want to play game, no the UI please. Give me more hardmodes.
But make them switchable by raid effort, not by 1 idiot pushing button which is not supposed to be pushed :-)

Hey now... it took a lot of personal restraint to not push Mimiron's big red button when I saw it. If Blizz made it shiny, I guarantee my entire raid would've been fighting to push it! In essence, it took a lot of raid effort to NOT push the button.

WotLK raid evolutions felt more like a long-scale PTR than anything else. I mean every new tier of raiding introduced a completely different method of trying to hand out loot... I suppose you could say that Sarth and Ulduar shared a similar level of activation, but Naxx/Maly didn't offer anything in terms of gear rewards for doing something more difficult outside of switching between 10 and 25man versions. It started out with hardmodes, then it moved to completely separate instance copies that were permanently normal or heroic, and then there was the UI option to flip between normal/heroic modes finally in ICC. I even recall the blue posts basically sounding like "well, we want to try something new this time, and it will likely change in the next raid tier." I certainly hope Cataclysm at least picks one method and sticks with it.