Will Hellfire Citadel ever get its just appreciation?

[Kaleredar]

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...

Kill vehicles on either side and then just chain together running back and forth with the speed boost from the ammunition crates.

[Vynestra]

After not being there for 14 months and 3 weeks, yes, I have a lot of fond memories now of it.

Wiping on Mannoroth 450+ times, still not great, but meh.

Class design was great, if I knew how bad mages would be in bfa I would've spent more time enjoying prophecy of fear, although I did enjoy it a lot back then.

[rogoth]

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

i was on 'gun' duty so i actually had something to do back then, so from my perspective it wasn't as bad as loot pinata first boss in HFC.

[exochaft]

1. Gorefiend the 6th boss out of 14(?) was a guild killer. Difficulty wise, it could have been boss number 12.

That's what killed my guild, with a combination of dwindling server population to not maintain a mythic roster. We were top 30-50 US depending upon the boss, but the bugs on mythic Gorefiend that lasted for over a month drove many people insane. I still remember the epic rant a warlock had during that fight after dying for real instead of getting ported down below 5 pulls in a row, raging in comms for 20 minutes, then quit the game and never returned. If it wasn't for how tightly tuned that boss was considering it's position and the constant bug of people actually dying instead of getting ported upon "death" like intended almost every attempt, it wouldn't have been an issue. After of month of dealing with that, a bunch of people quit the game as they were fed up with bugs hampering progression, and though we did eventually kill and proceed to one-shot mythic Iskar and Socrathar afterwards, the damage had been done to the roster to where we couldn't recover.

I think what people tend to forget was that there was basically a month to clear mythic Highmaul before BRF came out, as there was a holiday during that progression (I think it was technically 5 weeks?). We managed to clear mythic just in time for BRF, but I could imagine how terrible it made most guilds feel to try to do mythic Highmaul progression, then have to completely stop because they released raids too close together.

Anyways, that's in the past now. I see some people still having issues with the first boss on mythic HFC solo, and I'm not sure if this is a recent change (or I never noticed)... if you basically ignore the ammo and just kill NPCs when things get bad, NPCs eventually stopped spawning. Did it on my hunter today, just focused on killing stuff and not the ammo (unless I wanted a speed boost), NPCs stopped spawning around 61% health left on the door, just ran boxes and the cannons eventually killed it. Not nearly as easy as pre-BfA changes when you could use food buffs to move fast on almost any class, but it's still possible as a ranged at least. I'll bet when they add pets to WoD raids, they'll nerf the encounter to where perhaps the NPCs do much less damage to the turrets to where you could almost ignore them, or the turrets will do scaling damage to the door based upon your ilvl or level somehow.

[Kaver]

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?

I’m appreciating that Hunters now with SV being melee at least have one spec that fits the class fantasy.

[Jester Joe]

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.

Geez no.
HFC was tedious at times.

While I'm not gonna defend Tomb of Sargeras that much, I would put every other raid from Legion above HFC.

Yes, even Emerald Nightmare.

Blackrock Foundry is the only raid that I miss from WoD, and if we get a WoD timewalking raid eventually I am sure it will be BRF that's picked.

[MidnyteTV]

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

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Nighthold is better than BrF, BrF is better than HFC

You lose some credibility saying NH was better than BrF. BrF will go down as a top 5 raid of all time.

[Tojara]

HFC was great, but BRF is one of the best raids of all time.

The dungeon just screams "Warcraft", whatever that is. I don't know how they did it, but the atmosphere, ambiance and boss encounters just mixed together perfectly to make a pretty amazing raid. Every boss felt like it had a purpose (for the most part), you had options where to go, and I honestly liked every boss minus Blast Furnace.

HFC had great boss fights too, and Mannoroth is probably one of my favorite bosses of all time. The only thing I didn't like about HFC is that it was a bit meh to look at.

One of the best things that HFC did was in regards to progression, even though it could have been balanced a bit better. The ring made an absurd difference, but at least you had progression to look forward to each week. Shortly after the ring was completed, they allowed you to upgrade your gear to help push you over the edge. My only real gripe with that system is returning players were pretty useless without the legendary ring, and there should have been systems in place to massively accelerate this process.

[Zantera]

HFC was probably my least favorite WoD raid but I thought the raids were great in that expansion so it's no bash on HFC really. I think people tend to overlook it or underappreciate it because of the state of WoW back then. Similar to BoD now I think it was a good raid that just happened to be current during a moment in time when people were hating on the game.

With that said I don't think HFC was as good as Nighthold or BoD but still good.

[Raugnaut]

Hellfire Citadel was too green. SO much green. Green everywhere. Except for Gorefiend which was purple.

Allright raid besides that though.

[Tradu]

HFC was easily the most fun tier on farm for me. Bosses actually got massively faster and speedkills were fun(at least until you hit the Arcane Mage barrier, but that wasn't until like top20 or so). I also had a lot of fun playing my main that tier, too bad they completely changed it after that.

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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.

Not quite the same story for me, but my guild ended up running 2 alt mythic raids each week, because we just enjoyed playing our characters and the raid that much, and we could comfortably clear farm on mains in 1 night thanks to the ring speeding things up. It was probably the raid I had the most fun in(out of any expansion), because of the combination of the bosses, the people I raided with and the class design. Other raids might have been better in one or 2 of those areas, but never all 3 of them for me personally.

[Irian]

I couldn't stand it. Any good will I might've gained from the boss design was ruined by the (admittedly excellent by BfA's standards...) crappy class design and bland aesthetic.

Maybe it's my inner nerd but I love immersive and engaging visuals. After an expansion of mostly orcs, gritty shit and fire I didn't want more orcs, gritty shit and fire. Having some nice boss designs don't make up for how otherwise uninspired the entire thing felt.

I can see why people can disagree though, since a lot of my dislike for HFC was pretty personal. I don't hate it by any means, it's not a Dragon Soul, but it's no Ulduar or Firelands.

[Aggrophobic]

Geez no.
HFC was tedious at times.

While I'm not gonna defend Tomb of Sargeras that much, I would put every other raid from Legion above HFC.

Yes, even Emerald Nightmare.

Blackrock Foundry is the only raid that I miss from WoD, and if we get a WoD timewalking raid eventually I am sure it will be BRF that's picked.

Well, well. Each to their own. Maybe the the systems around the raids and not the raids themselves still made them feel horrible in Legion.
That expansion was by far the worst we've ever had in my opinion so you know.

[Video Games]

Hfc as a bis arcane mage was some of the most fun ive ever had. There wasnt really a boss that i hated doing

[Varolyn]

Bad cinematic and HFA aside, I personally had a ton of fun in HFC. Even HFA wasn't too bad for me as I just treated it as a time to relax before the real bosses started. And while boss design and class design was very good at the time imo, something I think HFC did really well in and helped a good deal while it was out for over the year was it's layout. It started out linear, then the second level wasn't linear, followed by the last two bosses. Moreover, it had two skips, one going to the second level and one going to Mannoroth. So the raid had a lot of options for how it could be ran. It could be a fresh run, an upper level run for higher ilvl, or just doing the last two bosses.

Having those two skips in a 13 boss raid was a huge asset to the staying power of HFC.

[A Chozo]

Well I liked it, and it's music, but I feel that the endboss of that raid should've been Mannoroth, not Archimonde. I mean, the Defiler came from nowhere. No great buildup. He should've been Azeroth's antagonist, not Draenor. A dual fight against him and Kil'jaeden with Velen helping us would've been more fitting, happening in Legion's Tomb patch.

[aceperson]

i gotta say that i enjoyed brf much more the hfc wod. i found the council fight fun and xhu;'horac fun but that was about it. assault was mind numbingly boring, iron reaver was just a basic tank and spank with a couple bombs to kill. kormrok was interesting the first few times but didn't keep its appeal, kilrogg was the breaker for my guild on heroic so i hated that fight cause my less skilled guild mates couldn't handle it, gorefiend was an interesting take on the c'thun stomach mechanic but nothing new, socrethar was just interupting and killing adds, basically no one did velhari unless you had one of the classes that needed her gear, mannoroth was a cool spectacle of a fight, and i never got a good impression of archimonde because my gm decided skip killing archi normal and just go straight to heroic.

i have since joined a different guild but those were my impressions.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Raiding has been a part of WoD that was praised even when it was current.

So I'd say it's gotten plenty of its just appreciation. I hated Highmaul, loved BRF, enjoyed some bosses in HFC. Mythic Gorefiend was one of my best raiding memories in this game, finally getting him down.

HFC would get much MORE appreciation if they just fixed the first encounter to be soloable on Mythic.

[The Stormbringer]

The Mannoroth fight is one of my favorites!

[Battlebeard]

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!

You said it yourself, Gorefiend, Mannoroth and Archimonde were decent fights. The rest of them were really bad. The first boss is prolly top 3 worst bosses EVER and nothing else was very good either.

You never forget how ENTERTAINING iskar was? I never forget that fight either, but my feelings lean more toward "ok i'm gonna go on a shooting spree downtown cause I'm so furious at this game design".

I do like WoD, it's a great expansion, better than Legion, BFA, and even TBC in my opinion, but this raid was not much to cheer for.