Will Hellfire Citadel ever get its just appreciation?

[MidnyteTV]

I will go on record and say raiding in WoD was great overall.

I thought mechanically Highmaul was a good warmup.

BrF will probably go down as overall one of the best designed raids, ever. It fit the theme of the expansion, had great boss fights with interesting mechanics that challenged players.

But onto Hellfire....

Hellfire Citadel will probably go down as the least raided instance that was probably at least 8.5 out of 10 overall.

While the green theme was definitely not aesthetically pleasing, the boss fights were great (except for the first one, that one sucked).

I'll never forget how entertaining it was (and sometimes frustrating) to scream at the person with the Eye in the Iskar fight.

Gorefiend was a great encounter. Mannoroth was ok but Phase 3 was the most intense part of a fight outside of a final boss. Archimonde was a great ending to an expansion.

Maybe there's some people out there that disagree, but let's give HFC some love!

[Heyitsmilz]

A lot of memories with my guild in that place. I thank God.

[Socialhealer]

raided it as elemental shaman, 2nd worst tier of all time.

guess class design can ruin everything around it, better get class design right....oh whoops look at BFA. I guess hunters/mages would hate it highly though.

[Aggrophobic]

WoD raids were awesome and while HFC was not the best in that expansion it still beats most raids that came after and most certainly beats anything Legion had.

[ZazuuPriest]

Ill give the original Hellfire Citadel Complex from TBC its due credit if you want...

- - - Updated - - -

WoD raids were awesome and while HFC was not the best in that expansion it still beats most raids that came after and most certainly beats anything Legion had.

Nighthold is better than BrF, BrF is better than HFC

[Aggrophobic]

Ill give the original Hellfire Citadel Complex from TBC its due credit if you want...

- - - Updated - - -



Nighthold is better than BrF, BrF is better than HFC

Haha! No, Nighthold is not even close to BrF. Not in any way.
While NH was the better of the Legion raids the whole expansion was a joke when it came to raiding.

[RobertoCarlos]

A lot of memories with my guild in that place. I thank God.

He prefers to just be called Ion

[montana]

How can I give no love to the raid that gave me back to back to back wings as a ret paladin. the fights were great, the green theme was not. Good raid overall. Not better than night hold or antorus, way. Better than tomb and emerald nightmare

[Lawlhero]

Doesn't help that it was the only raid in the game for nearly a year and a half. Left a bad taste in peoples mouth. The raid would have been way more fondly remembered if there was only 6 months between it and legion.

[Bepples]

On its own, it's a good raid. Solid environment and mechanics. Nothing wrong there. Well, there was one thing wrong, but I'll get to that.

However, there were significant issues that made 6.2 an unenjoyable and regretful patch when it came to raiding. Most of them revolve around the legendary ring.

The legendary ring was an unmitigated disaster. The obvious immediate issue is the trivialising of the raid encounters, but ultimately that's not so bad especially for guilds who were stuck on bosses in there in a raid that was out for a year. What really fucked it up was how it influenced class balance. The legendary ring put immense value on the DPS you could output in that 2-minute ring CD window, since not only did you get something like a 45% damage boost at maximum item level but it also duplicated that damage in the explosion at the end of the duration. That meant that specs that could output the most damage in that window were at a huge advantage while specs that couldn't were at disadvantage.

This led to some of the worst tuning imbalance we've seen since Vanilla/BC. You were looking at a 40% difference between the top and bottom specs in the game POST-HOTFIX. Many specs were made flat-out unviable. For example, you would be insane to play a Mage and not be Arcane (except for heavy AoE), or a Rogue and not be Subtlety, or, most importantly to me, a Hunter and not be Marksmanship.

On the Hunter example: Hunters, like many classes, had a rough launch going into WoD with MM being the only viable Hunter spec on all fights, but that was fixed early on and in Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry you could conceivably play any of the three specs you wanted, and people did. I had a blast switching between the three basically whenever I felt like it. Survival was the best in Highmaul, BM was the best in BRF, but you weren't SOL if you didn't play those. Then HFC comes out. Because of the legendary ring (and the super OP 4-set bonus and priority add burst, but it was primarily the ring) MM was the ONLY choice on pretty much every fight as it had unparalleled 2-minute burst from Rapid Fire and how that worked. BM was usable on a couple if you were doing a heavy AoE strat but MM was still generally better because a) BM's cooldown phases didn't necessarily synchronise with that 2-minute ring window and b) BM didn't have as much of a damage hike during that window as MM did. Then there's Survival. Survival didn't have a single baseline cooldown, period. It was entirely sustained damage. Coupled with the ridiculous Serpent Sting nerf, it's no surprise it ended up being bottom of the barrel. Before hotfixes you were probably better off bringing a 3rd tank to DPS instead of a Survival Hunter.

So we were all stuck as MM for the entire tier. What's worse is that the tier lasted a full year. What's even worse is that at the end of that tier we got Legion which basically redid every Hunter spec... and not in a good way. Turns out HFC was Survival's last raid ever in its ranged form. It went melee in 7.0. That's another discussion, but as a long-time Survival player it would have been really fucking nice to have a proper send-off for the spec. "Hey, you know that spec you love and have been playing for 8 years? It won't exist in 12 months, so we'll let you enjoy it in HFC while you can". NOPE. I couldn't play it in HFC because my raid depended on me being MM. Seriously. There were bosses that I doubt we could have killed at all if I were SV instead of MM. Sounds ridiculous, but look at Gorefiend. If I wasn't there that day, the raid skipped that boss. Seriously. It just wasn't an option, and that was the "last hurrah" they gave to the spec. Broken and unviable, with everyone forced into MM for the whole tier.

TL;DR: The Legendary Ring was a major factor in forcing people into single specs of their class for a year regardless of whether or not they liked that spec.

P.S. Remember how I said there were some things wrong with the fight design? That was the priority add mechanic being on every single damn fight in there. Seriously. Voidfiends on Xhul'Horac, ghosts on Gorefiend, bombs on Iron Reaver, dreadlords on Mannoroth. This is another factor that made certain specs overwhelmingly better than others like, say, MM which had Careful Aim + Aimed Shot for immense DPS right on add spawn v.s. SV which was entirely sustained damage.

EDIT: Here is the simulationcraft for that tier. Again, post-hotfix.

http://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/Raid_T18M.html

Holy hell. Switch from MM to SV to lose 20% DPS! And this was for pure single-target Patchwerk, i.e. SV's best-case scenario. It was even worse in real fights with priority adds.

[Kaleredar]

The theming of the place was a little dull and frankly, I feel it was too big. Too big in that there were a lot of largely pointless areas in it... In a way, though, I guess it's emulating raid and dungeon design of of "indistinct hallways connected to indistinct boss rooms."

Aesthetically it had some really cool things, but I feel like they were denigrated by too much repetition... The entire first floor is all very same-y, from the broken fel spires to the trash mobs to the "lots of crates everywhere" aesthetic. I think the raid would have actually benefited from some consolidation of room and more efficient space layout. This would also likely have helped them lay out each area with more succinct theming.

Another issue was the whole "Archimonde" thing and Grom basically being given a pass for being an asshole the entire expansion. Having Archimonde as a boss to be punked around sort of denigrates the significance of him being defeated in WC3, especially when WC3's defeat featured a great piece of dramatic irony wherein a powerful demon is defeated by humble nature spirits. If they wanted to resolve that all from a narrative perspective in a better way, I think Grom should have sacrificed himself to kill Archimonde in the end, seeing as Grom has done all of nothing since then anyway.


Complaints aside, I think it's still a fine raid. Definitely better than Dragon Soul, at least.

[ceall]

It would have been a good raid if it didn't last 14 months.

Aside from its length of being current content, there still have been major flaws.

1. Gorefiend the 6th boss out of 14(?) was a guild killer. Difficulty wise, it could have been boss number 12.
2. The 4 (or 5) bosses after gorefiend were complete push-overs.
3. Class design, while overall better than bfa was worse than bfa for my class (fck you clarity of power!)

This combined with the length of that raid made it to one of my least liked raids ever. I think the only raid I disliked more was highmaul.

[rogoth]

you had the easiest 'mythic' boss encounter you will ever see in the whole first encounter, the hardest part of that fight was not falling asleep from boredom, the worst tuning roadblock seen since first boss in HoF heroic, and a total mess of end bosses ranging from jokingly easy to wtf hard for no reason, it was alright as a tier goes but nothing special imho.

[Tech614]

It over stayed it's welcome, much like SoO and that is what people remember about it so no.

In fact the HFC content drought waiting on Legion might not be the longest ever, but it was definitely the most dead the game ever felt. Most people are not going to look back on that time fondly.

Also it flat out wasn't that good of a raid. The memorable bosses in that raid amounts to 2, Gorefiend and Archimonde and Gorefiend is memorable for all the wrong reasons.

[Raelyn]

I'll appreciate it when they remove or change the first "boss" event to make it soloable by 120 classes who don't have multiple speed boosts/teleports. I always fail cos one of the cannons dies. Maybe I'm doing it wrong...

[Kaver]

On its own, it's a good raid. Solid environment and mechanics. Nothing wrong there. Well, there was one thing wrong, but I'll get to that.

However, there were significant issues that made 6.2 an unenjoyable and regretful patch when it came to raiding. Most of them revolve around the legendary ring.

The legendary ring was an unmitigated disaster. The obvious immediate issue is the trivialising of the raid encounters, but ultimately that's not so bad especially for guilds who were stuck on bosses in there in a raid that was out for a year. What really fucked it up was how it influenced class balance. The legendary ring put immense value on the DPS you could output in that 2-minute ring CD window, since not only did you get something like a 45% damage boost at maximum item level but it also duplicated that damage in the explosion at the end of the duration. That meant that specs that could output the most damage in that window were at a huge advantage while specs that couldn't were at disadvantage.

This led to some of the worst tuning imbalance we've seen since Vanilla/BC. You were looking at a 40% difference between the top and bottom specs in the game POST-HOTFIX. Many specs were made flat-out unviable. For example, you would be insane to play a Mage and not be Arcane (except for heavy AoE), or a Rogue and not be Subtlety, or, most importantly to me, a Hunter and not be Marksmanship.

On the Hunter example: Hunters, like many classes, had a rough launch going into WoD with MM being the only viable Hunter spec on all fights, but that was fixed early on and in Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry you could conceivably play any of the three specs you wanted, and people did. I had a blast switching between the three basically whenever I felt like it. Survival was the best in Highmaul, BM was the best in BRF, but you weren't SOL if you didn't play those. Then HFC comes out. Because of the legendary ring (and the super OP 4-set bonus and priority add burst, but it was primarily the ring) MM was the ONLY choice on pretty much every fight as it had unparalleled 2-minute burst from Rapid Fire and how that worked. BM was usable on a couple if you were doing a heavy AoE strat but MM was still generally better because a) BM's cooldown phases didn't necessarily synchronise with that 2-minute ring window and b) BM didn't have as much of a damage hike during that window as MM did. Then there's Survival. Survival didn't have a single baseline cooldown, period. It was entirely sustained damage. Coupled with the ridiculous Serpent Sting nerf, it's no surprise it ended up being bottom of the barrel. Before hotfixes you were probably better off bringing a 3rd tank to DPS instead of a Survival Hunter.

So we were all stuck as MM for the entire tier. What's worse is that the tier lasted a full year. What's even worse is that at the end of that tier we got Legion which basically redid every Hunter spec... and not in a good way. Turns out HFC was Survival's last raid ever in its ranged form. It went melee in 7.0. That's another discussion, but as a long-time Survival player it would have been really fucking nice to have a proper send-off for the spec. "Hey, you know that spec you love and have been playing for 8 years? It won't exist in 12 months, so we'll let you enjoy it in HFC while you can". NOPE. I couldn't play it in HFC because my raid depended on me being MM. Seriously. There were bosses that I doubt we could have killed at all if I were SV instead of MM. Sounds ridiculous, but look at Gorefiend. If I wasn't there that day, the raid skipped that boss. Seriously. It just wasn't an option, and that was the "last hurrah" they gave to the spec. Broken and unviable, with everyone forced into MM for the whole tier.

TL;DR: The Legendary Ring was a major factor in forcing people into single specs of their class for a year regardless of whether or not they liked that spec.

P.S. Remember how I said there were some things wrong with the fight design? That was the priority add mechanic being on every single damn fight in there. Seriously. Voidfiends on Xhul'Horac, ghosts on Gorefiend, bombs on Iron Reaver, dreadlords on Mannoroth. This is another factor that made certain specs overwhelmingly better than others like, say, MM which had Careful Aim + Aimed Shot for immense DPS right on add spawn v.s. SV which was entirely sustained damage.

EDIT: Here is the simulationcraft for that tier. Again, post-hotfix.

http://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/Raid_T18M.html

Holy hell. Switch from MM to SV to lose 20% DPS! And this was for pure single-target Patchwerk, i.e. SV's best-case scenario. It was even worse in real fights with priority adds.

Good thing they switched SV to melee.

[Shaetha]

you had the easiest 'mythic' boss encounter you will ever see in the whole first encounter, the hardest part of that fight was not falling asleep from boredom, the worst tuning roadblock seen since first boss in HoF heroic, and a total mess of end bosses ranging from jokingly easy to wtf hard for no reason, it was alright as a tier goes but nothing special imho.

I want to direct your attention to gunships in ICC. That is the legit easiest heroic/mythic boss ever, so don't ever exaggerate.

[Kaver]

I'll appreciate it when they remove or change the first "boss" event to make it soloable by 120 classes who don't have multiple speed boosts/teleports. I always fail cos one of the cannons dies. Maybe I'm doing it wrong...

You’re doing it wrong. It is very easy to complete without any movement abilities. You just need to know when and where the adds spawns so you can pre-place yourself in the right locations.

[Bepples]

Good thing they switched SV to melee.

Yeah, so instead of funneling 95% of Hunters into BM and MM for just one patch they can do it for the rest of time! Why did you have to quote an 800-word post just for a troll one-liner?

[Xloudman]

My favorite part of HFC was after killing mythic archimonde and having it on farm for a few weeks, a few (like 7-9) of us would use one of the off raid days to find normal/heroic mode guilds advertising in the group finder as "prog groups" and carry them through as much as we/they had time for. Met some great and interesting people that way, Hipposlapper was the realest of the real.