Why did Ulduar (as current content) only last for 4 months?

[Varolyn]

Ulduar today is a raid held in high regard. It was an absolutely massive raid with 14 bosses in total, with some of them being optional, and one of them being secret. Many bosses had a hard mode that could significantly change the way you would fight a boss, and was imo, pretty revolutionary in wow standards. Not to mention the massive amount of achievements in the place, with a lot of them not even being required for the meta.

Yet despite all of this content, blizz released ToC a mere 4 months later, a raid with only 6 bosses with only two rooms and no trash. While there were guilds pushing Alg, yogg 0 etc. when ToC came out, for a majority of raiders, Ulduar became irrelevant. So why did blizz cut's Ulduar's life so short? Were they scared at how all of those naxx guilds were struggling through it? Were they not satisfied with Ulduar? I've heard some talk that Ulduar actually wasn't as liked when it first came out, did that have something to do with it?

[Firatha]

Ulduar today is a raid held in high regard. It was an absolutely massive raid with 14 bosses in total, with some of them being optional, and one of them being secret. Many bosses had a hard mode that could significantly change the way you would fight a boss, and was imo, pretty revolutionary in wow standards. Not to mention the massive amount of achievements in the place, with a lot of them not even being required for the meta.

Yet despite all of this content, blizz released ToC a mere 4 months later, a raid with only 6 bosses with only two rooms and no trash. While there were guilds pushing Alg, yogg 0 etc. when ToC came out, for a majority of raiders, Ulduar became irrelevant. So why did blizz cut's Ulduar's life so short? Were they scared at how all of those naxx guilds were struggling through it? Were they not satisfied with Ulduar? I've heard some talk that Ulduar actually wasn't as liked when it first came out, did that have something to do with it?

But it didnt any guild wanting to progress went back and did clears for the mace through out all of TOC.

[Rorixis]

Why did Ulduar (as current content) only last for 4 months?

...blizz released ToC a mere 4 months later

[Biomega]

Yet despite all of this content, blizz released ToC a mere 4 months later, a raid with only 6 bosses with only two rooms and no trash. While there were guilds pushing Alg, yogg 0 etc. when ToC came out, for a majority of raiders, Ulduar became irrelevant. So why did blizz cut's Ulduar's life so short? Were they scared at how all of those naxx guilds were struggling through it? Were they not satisfied with Ulduar? I've heard some talk that Ulduar actually wasn't as liked when it first came out, did that have something to do with it?

ToC was a rushjob they put out to coincide with the launch of a rival MMO (I think it was Aion?). That's why it was a quick and dirty loot pinata, low effort to make and attractive to people who wanted the gear but couldn't progress on the Ulduar hardmodes (this was before mythic raiding, mind you).

Ulduar was definitely great, possibly the best raid instance they've ever made. But they don't just decide how long to keep something around based on quality alone. There's many other factors. Keep in mind, Blizzard's #1 concern is profit - good content is one way to get to that goal, but it's not the only one.

[Shelly]

That has more to do with the weird pacing of WotLK than anything else.

If anything the releases should have been - Naxx -> ToC -> Ulduar -> ICC.

Anyway, ToC was released to advance the story and set the stage for ICC. At the time Blizz was working towards an expansion every year and wanted to move up patch cycles. Then four expansions later they realized they couldn't do it and went back to expansions every two to three years.

Really they were operating on the high that was BC where they pretty much had all expansion content ready to go from launch since so much of it was built fast and dirty - like AQ 20/40 - or was meant to be max level content that they moved over to be an entire expansion (Kara, Black Temple, Outland).

[opee]

You have to keep in mind what people were used to in terms of raid release 'schedules' at the time due to TBC having so many raids available at launch, and then hyjal and black temple releasing just 4 months after launch.

Then with the wotlk launch, The naxx tier lasted 5 months with very little raid content overall compared to tbc. People got sick very fast of farming naxx, add on the fact there was a lot of backlash at the time due to the difficulty being ridiculously low and that the raid wasn't even new content (rehashed from vanilla).

So Its no surprise at the time blizzard was attempting to release more challenging raid content at a faster rate because the raiding community was not happy with the lack of new content and how easy it was at release.

[Doomchicken]

I remember lots of complaining about ulduar on my server when it was current, or at least certain aspects of it, such as the first boss being a vehicle boss, and hardmodes you could accidentally trigger when you weren't ready for it, like the killing of the heart on the 4th boss. If that was a general consensus then it certainly would explain its shorter life time.

[Cronovey]

Ulduar today is a raid held in high regard.

Honestly, a large part of this is most likely because it had such a short lifetime as current content. Think about raids that came before or after it with extremely long lifetimes like Siege of Orgrimmar, Hellfire Citadel, or even Icecrown Citadel. These are all remembered as okay or decent raids for the most part but they wore players down from doing the content over and over and over again until their third or fourth alts were completely geared out (for instance, in ICC I had three characters in nearly full heroic gear and for Hellfire I had 4 characters in nearly full mythic gear) instead of having a decent lifetime and then moving on to the next raid.

At the time the hard mode was "revolutionary" simply because it hadn't been used often; it was used as early back as AQ40 when doing the Bug Trio bosses there and again doing Sartharion for 1/2/3 drakes mode but it was the first large scale raid that had multiple "hard modes" even if some of them weren't exactly difficult. When Ulduar released it was fairly disliked; you had the first few bosses being a vehicle fight (Flame Leviathan), a trash killing boss fight (Razorscale) with an annoying harpoon mechanic, Ignis was entirely pointless other than a 2h and a trinket that was for tanks I believe, and XT-002 was the first boss that really had any fun or charming aspect to it. Assembly of Iron was just another council fight with a hard mode activated by kill order which was done before ala AQ40, and then you had Kologarn who was a stationary giant piece of rock with very little mechanical difficulty. Auriaya's hardest mechanic was dealing with her adds; it wasn't until more than halfway through the raid that the hard modes even made a huge difference at all.

Once you got to the Keepers it became more interesting with unique mechanics on Hodir with the fires, Thorim's hard mode adding basically a second boss to the fight, Freya requiring massive amounts of DPS to power through, and Firefighter being one of the most difficult fights the game had seen to that point. Vezax was basically a tank and spank fight when using DK tanks who were massively overpowered at the time with the 1 minute cooldown on Icebound Fortitude although it did have a unique mana regen mechanic, and then Yogg was a very fun and difficult fight when doing the harder versions.

The first half of the raid was incredibly boring or gimmicky fights while the second half was immensely fun and challenging overall, and the lifetime was short enough that most people didn't grind out the hard versions of it for months on end and only really went back for quick clears for Val'anyr shards which is why I feel it is remembered so fondly compared to other raids.

As for why it only lasted for 4 months, Blizzard was in a phase where their claimed goal was 1 expansion a year which obviously never came to happen; but at the time they were rushing the content out and most likely realized that either ICC wasn't quite ready yet or that they had more bosses intended for the raid than necessary and likely moved the extra bosses who didn't make the cut like Twin Valkyr and Anub'arak into ToC along with some filler bosses like Northrend Beasts and the Faction Champions encounter along with everyone's good friend Lord Jaraxxus to give us content in between.

[gutnbrg]

I remember lots of complaining about ulduar on my server when it was current, or at least certain aspects of it, such as the first boss being a vehicle boss, and hardmodes you could accidentally trigger when you weren't ready for it, like the killing of the heart on the 4th boss. If that was a general consensus then it certainly would explain its shorter life time.

that depends on what lots means to u...Also if "lots" of guilds were accidentally triggering hardmode on XT then they were really bad guilds....whats server were u on?

[Mysterymask]

To be fair..they gated TOC pretty hardcore...the first weak of Trial we could only fight the first boss...so we all killed him and then moved back to Ulduar to progress through that

Next week we could only fight beasts and Jaraxxus....thus we all then went back to Ulduar that week to work on it...and so on and so on..don't forget a few things...

1. Legendary Healing Mace...
2. The Tier pieces in TOC were either complete crap compared to T8...or were godly...no real inbetween (for Rogues..we really didn't want to change out until we got into Heroic TOC..)
3. 0 Lights in the Darkness wasn't cleared for a LOOONG time after TOC was released..and Algalon still looming for a lot of guids

[gutnbrg]

Honestly, a large part of this is most likely because it had such a short lifetime as current content. Think about raids that came before or after it with extremely long lifetimes like Siege of Orgrimmar, Hellfire Citadel, or even Icecrown Citadel. These are all remembered as okay or decent raids for the most part but they wore players down from doing the content over and over and over again until their third or fourth alts were completely geared out (for instance, in ICC I had three characters in nearly full heroic gear and for Hellfire I had 4 characters in nearly full mythic gear) instead of having a decent lifetime and then moving on to the next raid.

At the time the hard mode was "revolutionary" simply because it hadn't been used often; it was used as early back as AQ40 when doing the Bug Trio bosses there and again doing Sartharion for 1/2/3 drakes mode but it was the first large scale raid that had multiple "hard modes" even if some of them weren't exactly difficult. When Ulduar released it was fairly disliked; you had the first few bosses being a vehicle fight (Flame Leviathan), a trash killing boss fight (Razorscale) with an annoying harpoon mechanic, Ignis was entirely pointless other than a 2h and a trinket that was for tanks I believe, and XT-002 was the first boss that really had any fun or charming aspect to it. Assembly of Iron was just another council fight with a hard mode activated by kill order which was done before ala AQ40, and then you had Kologarn who was a stationary giant piece of rock with very little mechanical difficulty. Auriaya's hardest mechanic was dealing with her adds; it wasn't until more than halfway through the raid that the hard modes even made a huge difference at all.

Once you got to the Keepers it became more interesting with unique mechanics on Hodir with the fires, Thorim's hard mode adding basically a second boss to the fight, Freya requiring massive amounts of DPS to power through, and Firefighter being one of the most difficult fights the game had seen to that point. Vezax was basically a tank and spank fight when using DK tanks who were massively overpowered at the time with the 1 minute cooldown on Icebound Fortitude although it did have a unique mana regen mechanic, and then Yogg was a very fun and difficult fight when doing the harder versions.

The first half of the raid was incredibly boring or gimmicky fights while the second half was immensely fun and challenging overall, and the lifetime was short enough that most people didn't grind out the hard versions of it for months on end and only really went back for quick clears for Val'anyr shards which is why I feel it is remembered so fondly compared to other raids.

As for why it only lasted for 4 months, Blizzard was in a phase where their claimed goal was 1 expansion a year which obviously never came to happen; but at the time they were rushing the content out and most likely realized that either ICC wasn't quite ready yet or that they had more bosses intended for the raid than necessary and likely moved the extra bosses who didn't make the cut like Twin Valkyr and Anub'arak into ToC along with some filler bosses like Northrend Beasts and the Faction Champions encounter along with everyone's good friend Lord Jaraxxus to give us content in between.

i dont get this at all...where are u getting this info from? Annoying harpoon mechanic? Ignis being pointless? Assembly of iron was epic with its 3 different hardmodes...

[Cronovey]

i dont get this at all...where are u getting this info from? Annoying harpoon mechanic? Ignis being pointless? Assembly of iron was epic with its 3 different hardmodes...

Razorscale was an annoying fight where you spent 80% of it fighting trash mobs while waiting for the NPC's to fix the harpoons to bring the boss down.

Ignis was pointless. There was no lore at all in all of Northrend about fire giants even being a thing, he served no real purpose other than "hey I make stone golems" and had no interesting loot on him.

Assembly of Iron was just re-using a hard mode mechanic from Vanilla's AQ40 raid. There was also nothing particularly "epic" about it in any way other than epic tank splatters on the floor from doing it hard mode without a proper CD available.

All this info is from actually playing from healing, tanking, and DPS perspectives during this time period in both 10 and 25 man versions of the raid. When it was current, people complained about it and now it's looked back on fondly because it didn't have the ridiculous content drought 11-15 month run time that other raids did.

[rogueMatthias]

Ulduar was kind of weird and should have been pushed back a tier. From what I remember it was an "Argent Tournament Patch", which added all the argent tournament and dungeon and everything leading up to the big show Colliseum...

... and then Ulduar was there instead, and the whole narrative of the patch was kind of on pause until Crusaders Colliseum. Ulduar made sense as a culmination of the story of the Stormpeaks, but stuck in the middle of the the Tournament content it was a bit random.

I just don't think they thought it through too well tbh, and Blizz have even mentioned that they regret giving it so liittle time.

[Azerate]

This thread is made on a false premise that everyone is a top tier raider. A lot of people were only able to progress further into Ulduar thanks to ToC gear anyway.

And by the way, I may remember incorrectly, but wasn't Yogg+0 considered impossible, and was only achieved by some underdog guild like half a year after Ulduar release?

[babyback]

Edit: I misinterpret the thread.

If I recall correctly the Ulduar patch was kinda botched. Yes, Ulduar was an amazing raid but the whole patch was weird.

There was also a lot of complaining about nothing to do at that point.

[Tiwack]

Legendary made sure it wasn't irrelevant and ToC was mostly a tiny and quirky filler raid to allow them the time to finish up ICC.

[Forogil]

that depends on what lots means to u...Also if "lots" of guilds were accidentally triggering hardmode on XT then they were really bad guilds....whats server were u on?

Previous poster didn't specifically say guilds, and I do remember pugs repeatedly triggering hardmode on XT when it was the weekly raid-quest.

However, that was after the release of the next raid, but still annoying.

[Arainie]

We got realm 5th or 6th Algalon during ToGC on a realm that had several top100 guilds and we were not the last guild to kill it after ToGC was released. As previously stated only one Heroic boss per week was released so it didn't really feel like Ulduar was made irrelevant from the beginning, that took over a month more to happen.

[MatadorMedia]

Because they were dumb... Blizzard admitted a long time ago releasing the next raid so early was a huge mistake. Ulduar was one of the best raids of all time; sad the gear was trivialized so quickly into its life cycle. Although, to be fair, I've gotten my use out of the place having raided it a bijillion times trying to get Mimiron's Head to drop to no avail.

[Sylvaeres]

That has more to do with the weird pacing of WotLK than anything else.

If anything the releases should have been - Naxx -> ToC -> Ulduar -> ICC.

Anyway, ToC was released to advance the story and set the stage for ICC. At the time Blizz was working towards an expansion every year and wanted to move up patch cycles. Then four expansions later they realized they couldn't do it and went back to expansions every two to three years.

Really they were operating on the high that was BC where they pretty much had all expansion content ready to go from launch since so much of it was built fast and dirty - like AQ 20/40 - or was meant to be max level content that they moved over to be an entire expansion (Kara, Black Temple, Outland).

I honestly think that thematically it would have made more sense to do ToC+Maly+Sarth>Ulduar>Naxx>ICC, in the same vein of how BRF lead into HFC