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

[Setuzor]

ToC was a simple raid that probably took much less time to design than Ulduar, so they just released it early, not only to keep the players satisfied but also to make the wipefest that was Ulduar Hard Mode obsolete, players needed a feeling of accomplishment.

[bullseyed]

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).

People kept complaining about constantly seeing the Lich King and they wanted the story to just be over with.


And now today people complain that N'zoth doesn't show up in person on every quest to taunt you.

Turns out they just like complaining.

- - - Updated - - -

Go read your quote again: "four expansions later they realized they couldn't do it and went back to expansions every two to three years"

#1. Nothing changed "four expansions later". For that statement to be true, something with the expansion scheduling would have needed to have changed "four expansions later". But no such thing did happen, which is why your statement is wrong.

#2. They never went to "expansions every two to three years" ... up to the current day. It's never been remotely close to 3 years and more expansions have been under 2 years than over. For your statement to be true, more recent expansions would have had to have been released "every two to three years". But that's not what has happened, which is why your statement is wrong.

#3. What I quoted was your response to why Ulduar was out 4 months before the next raid was released. Ulduar came out in April of 2009, after there had been two expansion launches which were 2.15 and 1.83 elapsed years respectively. The article that you quoted is from August of 2006, before a single expansion had been delivered and was obviously invalidated by the time WotLK launched in November of 2008. Things change and obviously by the time of Ulduar, Blizzard was not under the impression they were going to be launching an expansion every year and therefore your use of an outdated article as a reason is an inadequate justification of the other incorrect things you said.

No big deal, but what you said is wrong and your attempt to be right in your wrongness just makes you more wrong.

With the 5 level vs 10 level expansions following WotLK, I could see if they had originally been planned as yearly releases and pushed out due to lack of ability to execute.

5 level expansions made more sense to avoid the level squish upcoming, but they went back to 10 level ones pretty quickly.

[Mysterymask]

Dude. ToC dropped much better gear than Ulduar. When ToC came out, most guilds -- which had not even cleared Ulduar on normal mode -- abandoned it and went on to the next tier's better gear. Ulduar was dead just about instantly.

...no it didn't...not from a long shot

TOC came out GATED AS HELL

Week 1 of TOC: Could only fight normal Northrend Beasts
Week 2: Could only go to Jaraxxus
Week 3: Could only go to Faction Champs
Week 4: Could only go to Twin Valks
Week 5: Could actually finish it also heroic FINALLY unlocks

This was also a REALLY short puggable raid so ..for the most part a lot of guilds who wern't quite that far in Ulduar kept doing it...a LOT of guilds still had Algalon to kill and Yogg 0 wasn't killed for a LOOONG time after TOC...Not to mention the Legendary Mace was still very relevant for the entirety of Wrath...yeah the gear from Ulduar wasn't as good as the stuff in TOC outside of Algalon

Then we had Heroic TOC which had blizzard's brilliant "Attempt Counter"...so after 50 wipes you were basically done for the week too bad so sad...

so no Ulduar was relevant for a lot longer than 4 months....

[Nefarious Tea]

so no Ulduar was relevant for a lot longer than 4 months....

It was not and you know it.

With 25 NORMAL TOC dropping gear 20 ilvls higher than Ulduar, the latter was dead as soon as the first guild on the server got Alone in the Darkness and the Death's Demise title. There was no reason to ever go back to Ulduar after that was off the table, when even the hardest Ulduar content dropped far worse gear you could pug out of TOC.

[Mysterymask]

the latter was dead as soon as the first guild on the server got Alone in the Darkness and the Death's Demise title.

That was almost halfway through ICC for most servers...hell heroic TOC was long done by the first clear

[Mysterymask]

The thing is, TOC was so small and so fast to run that once people had it on farm it was not at all uncommon for guilds that had not cleared Ulduar to go back to it after their ToC run. We would clear ToC and then go to Ulduar for the first few bosses on our first raid night then move on with the rest of it during the week. Gear is important, yes, but achievements (including the drake), the legendary weapon, an Algalon kill were also important.

That said, I don't at all hate ToC. I think the encounters themselves were great. I think it would have worked best released in the same tier with Ulduar though.

Dont forget we were still hot on the toes of the Black/Plagued drake being removed so everyone was wondering when the Ulduar ones would be pulled

[Azerate]

Looking back at it, ToC was kind of a half tier that was probably released to help the majority with Ulduar, which was quite long and hard

[bullseyed]

Dont forget we were still hot on the toes of the Black/Plagued drake being removed so everyone was wondering when the Ulduar ones would be pulled

Was so nice back then when they protected the folks pushing content.

Although my understanding is you can buy plagued now on the BMAH?

[dagonar]

They should have swapped ICC and Ulduar. They could have easily adapted the story to 'right, you've killed the Lich King, now there's this massive old god that needs sorting' and led it into Cataclysm.

[Drusin]

with only two rooms and no trash.

Yo fucking more raids like this please

- - - Updated - - -

Although my understanding is you can buy plagued now on the BMAH?

You would be correcto mundo bro

[squirtguns]

In my guild, we would do TOC in one day and then spend the other two days doing Ulduar hardmodes. The gear between the two was comparable and everyone was way more hyped for Ulduar hardmode.

[dagonar]

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.

It was such a bad expansion that you decided you would play it to the level to get realm firsts for all the major raids. Seems a lot of dedication for an expansion you didn't enjoy?

[Nefarious Tea]

That was almost halfway through ICC for most servers...hell heroic TOC was long done by the first clear

Halfway through IC... are you serious? I was on a dead fucking ROLEPLAY server with like two raiding guilds back in Ulduar/TOC and we got Death's Demise the first or second week of TOC.

Any server with a half serious guild had it LONG before ICC, and all the medium to big servers had it before TOC. World first was like 43 days after Ulduar went live.

[Drusin]

People kept complaining about constantly seeing the Lich King and they wanted the story to just be over with.


And now today people complain that N'zoth doesn't show up in person on every quest to taunt you.

Turns out they just like complaining.

If only there was some middle ground between too much and not at all

[Velerios]

As said before: blizzard through out the patch because Aion was released; back then one supposed serious competitor. This, and because the Raid was rushed BECAUSE blizzard did changed the whole Argent Tournament mid-expansion (i think that trial of the crusader was never supposed to be a raid at all). Because the Argent Tournament was supposed to be in Crystalsong Forest. My oppinion was that the charge on Icecrown itself was supposed to be a raid. And it was scrapped because blizzard needed the time to transfer the tournament from Crystalsong to Icecrown. It was simply an unfinished, never supposed to be raid. I think that it was originally supposed just to be a dungeon, nothing more, nothing less.

[Drusin]

It was such a bad expansion that you decided you would play it to the level to get realm firsts for all the major raids. Seems a lot of dedication for an expansion you didn't enjoy?

I didn't like the first 4 seasons of Breaking Bad, 5th was great though. Why? Not like I had shit else to do lol.

- - - Updated - - -

Aion was released; back then one supposed serious competitor.

It's funny these days though lol

[Thelyron]

From a competitve point of view ulduar had a big impact on daytime raiding back in the days. Way more guilds participated for more than the usual 6,7 or 8 hours per evening during working days for several weeks. My guild back in the days (for the horde) suffered a lot from it in that specific content.

Since then, raiding schedules became much more advanced, as we know them nowadays.

Ulduar was the last content for many competitive players which were not able to withstand the new trend in raid times.

>the usual 6,7 or 8 hours per evening
what the actual fuck

[Drusin]

>the usual 6,7 or 8 hours per evening
what the actual fuck

Back when men were men

[Lurker1]

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?

Probably because around that time they wanted to focus more on the casuals and not the raiders imho.

[Battlebeard]

I always thought Ulduar was overrated so I never cared it didn't last that long, however 4 months is too short for any raid.

Also, I LOVED ToC so much. The fights were kinda meh, but the general idea of the raid was amazing. I never cared for story, lore or like if a raid make sense. What matters is the raid encounters, so to skip all trash is a fantastic thing, so we can just focus on the important part. I hope to see more raids with no trash one day!