Originally Posted by
Marvy
So it's an interesting question, the short answer, is that Blizzard basically ballsed it up big time. People claim that WOTLK was the best expansion, as someone that held realm first on Sarth 3D, Algalon, Yogg0, Tribute to Imortality and Light of Dawn, I can tell you, it was not the best expansion, it was a big clusterf*ck and the devs regularly contradicted themselves and went back on their own statements and decisions.
To determine exactly why Ulduar is considered the best raid of all time for many (here comes the long answer), comes down to a large variety of factors. The fact that it only lasted 4 months is a very strong point in those factors, the "short and sweet" feel of it without a doubt contributed to having fond memories of it. Releasing ToC, an extremely dissapointing raid with only 5 bosses in the same room to replace it when there were only 100 world Algalon kills and 0 Yogg0 kills was an extremely poor decision on Blizzards part and as previous posters may have said, they were perhaps caving into criticism and listening to moaners a bit too much which pressured them into this decision. I also think it was fairly obvious there was a lot of instability at the company during this time as well.
Let's start with what came before Ulduar, which was the release of WOTLK and patch 3.0. Now this in my opinion was a complete shambles of a patch. It ruined the last month of TBC, and then continued into WOTLK. The class imbalance was immense, PvP was broken, DKs wrecked everything, the servers lagged out whenever Wintergrasp was up, there was next to no end game content at all, it felt like a beta. The questing and levelling was great, but then you got to the end and there was literally nothing. The 5 man heroics were a complete joke compared to the TBC ones, the rep grinds were trivial due to tabbards. Naxx was a rehashed raid where it was arguably harder doing the vanilla level 60 version in TBC at level 70, than it did doing the 80 version at 80. We got three new raids all of which were one boss raids. One was a pug tank and spank, one was a vehicle fight for the most part, and the last was admittedly quite good, but sadly it was only one boss. On top of this the splitting of 10 and 25 man raids did not get off to a good start, mainly because they hadn't bothered to balance it properly. If a boss had 10mil HP on 25 man, it had 4mil HP on 25 man, makes sense right? Since its 40%? Wrong, there are usually 5 dps in a 10 man vs 18 dps in a 25 man, which means a 10 mil HP 25 man boss should have 2.77mil on 10 man. How no one with a brain in the dev team managed to figure this out I will never know. This was particularly apparent on Sarth 10 man 3D, which while was a brilliant fight and a really think outside the box challenge, was considerably harder on 10 man due to the dps requirement than on its 25 man counterpart. They had also stated around the end of TBC that "no raids will be easy enough to be pugged", which was not the case for most of the expansion. So in all, the first 6 months of WOTLK were terrible, and was in desperate need of a fix. Ulduar was that fix.
So along comes 8.1, and before we get into that, consider that along with this patch came some serious class tuning and improvements, previous specs which were borderline unviable were considerably improved, and class balance was pretty much nailed in this patch. This patch also had away with talent respecs and allowed you to have a dual talent tree which was a fantastic improvement to the game, one that players had been begging for since vanilla. So along comes Ulduar, and yes it is a fantastic raid. Firstly because unlike today where you can just hit max level and stroll into the current raid tier, you still needed some Naxx gear to stand a chance in there, which made it feel like there was a good deal of content available. Today's model where when a new raid comes out it just completely obsoletes the previous one because the outside of raid items get huge ilevel buffs is just a dumb design and basically contributes to them creating their very own content drought. On top of this the badge model at this point was in a good spot, 5 man heroic and 10 man naxx got you the first tier (Hero), 25 man naxx and 10 man Ulduar the second tier (Valor), and 25 man Ulduar the third tier (Conquest), these badges were better than bonus rolls in the sense that you always got a currency and were eventually guaranteed to get some items if your luck was bad on loot. They also encouraged you to go for the hard modes in order to obtain more badges, or the medium modes in some cases. The difficulty of Ulduar was in my opinion perfect. The pugs had the first four to five bosses to deal with. The semi organised guilds had a decent raid to progress with, and the serious guilds had some serious hardmodes to contend with, plus a hidden boss. Everyone at the time was pretty happy with this model, if you wanted an easy raid you went to Naxx, if you wanted something a bit more serious then it was Ulduar. The gear it gave also didn't completely eclipse the Naxx gear either. Naxx10 gave 200, Naxx25 and Ulduar10 gave 213, Ulduar25 gave 226, however the end bosses and hardmodes gave one tier above, a really great and progressive gearing model in my eyes.
As for the raid itself, well it was as fantastic as people say. People always enjoy bigger raids I find, especially where there is a fairly loose order in which you can do the bosses. There were some really great boss designs in there including Flame Leviathan (although I know not everyone will agree with that one), really memorable and unique fights like Mimiron and Yogg-Saron. The lore and story were also big deals. The trash was hard and required a brain, unlike the complete aoe zergfest that was the Naxx trash. The scenery and art was fantastic, models we hadn't seen before, the train, literally everything about this raid was fantastic. I remember being progressing on Vezax hard mode when people were reading the upcoming developer notes for the upcoming 8.2 patch and someone quoting a line like "...where you will fight not one, but TWO jormungars!", and everyone was thinking, was this an out of season April Fool's joke?
So that brings us to patch 8.2, a patch so terrible that it most likely also contributes to Ulduar being fondly remembered. So this patch launches and a lot of the systems I complimented from the previous system go down the drain. The new Trial of the Crusader raid is extremely dull boring pathetic boss fights compared to Ulduar, mostly taking place in one room with no trash and just a bunch of pointless RP to go with it. To go from slaying an Old God of death and defeating a construct of the titans who intends to destroy the planet if you don't stop him, to having to prove yourselves by killing a giant yeti and a pair of worms in front of Tirion Fordring was a piss poor excuse of a raid. The fights were also extremely simple compared to their Ulduar counterparts, having far less mechanics, and now "hard mode" was remade to heroic mode, where basically it was the same fight but with 30% more HP and damage, and some extra adds, unlike the interesting twists that some of the Ulduar fights had. As if this wasn't bad enough, the raid was tuned so piss easy that freshly dinged 80s could just stroll in and 1 shot everything. 25 man normal mode rewarded 245 gear and 10 man 232. This was a shocking disgusting inflation of ilevel that made Ulduar completely obsolete overnight. On top of this doing daily heroic 5 man now rewarded the new 4th level of badges Triumph, which meant hardcore raiders were forced to do a daily heroic, a year after they had already facerolled through them back when they had level 70 gear still. Last but not least this was the first raid to introduce 50 limited attempts on the heroic version, another function which was not well received at all by the community. Finally the tier sets absolutely sucked this patch as well, because not only did they look generic and like something an npc would wear, they were not class unique and were instead cloth/leather/mail/plate unique. On top of that unlike previous tier sets which had recolors depending on the ilevel, these all looked the same, add further insult by this being the first tier set you could completely buy with badges. So some idiot who had just dinged and done the pug raid a few times and the daily heroic looked the same as a fully BiS heroic raider. Remember transmog didn't exist back then so this was a big deal to some. All in all this was a terrible patch, with a terrible raid, which will be fondly remembered for ending Ulduar prematurely.
So in conclusion why did Ulduar only last 4 months? Well as you can tell by how we go from terrible patch, to good patch, to back to terrible patch, I would put it down to extreme indecisiveness and instability in the dev team, possibly heavily influenced by the marketing team as well, don't forget this was around the peak time of subscribers. Other games releasing around the same time such as Aion and Age of Conan were definitely considered serious threats to WoW. WOTLK release felt rushed for an xmas release as it felt like a beta with no real endgame content. ToC felt like "We need a new raid and we need one fast, what can you do". I do remember reading that Ulduar was supposed to be there with the release of WOTLK as well, so it's save to say they had been working on it a while, and clearly used that time wisely to create an epic raid.
There will be many other reasons why people fondly remember Ulduar, but I have tried to keep it relevant to the question relating to the time frame of it here.