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

[DeltrusDisc]

Just a slight correction: Mythic was released in its current iteration with the WoD pre-patch. All of SoO's relevant progression occurred with the "old" 10/25M raid structure that was established at the beginning of Cata.

Sure, but certainly not with Ulduar.

It's the same exact concept. An extra layer of increased difficulty, asshole.

Oh, I'm the asshole? I wasn't the one using italics like I'm so smart. Dude, you didn't even pay attention to the fact that Ulduar didn't even have LFR or heroic modes, it was literally normal, and then normal with something triggered to make the fight harder and often times very different. I see you going on the offence after being called out for your ignorance. I'm sorry for you.

- - - Updated - - -

Mythic was just a name change. Heroic mode in WOTLK was the equivalent of Mythic in MoP.

Not exactly...
In Wrath there was normal for Naxx, then normal with optional hard modes for Ulduar, then normal and heroic for both ToC and ICC.
Heroic is still heroic... now they just offer and even tougher mode above heroic... and an even easier mode below normal.

[Relapses]

Sure, but certainly not with Ulduar.

Agreed. Ulduar hard modes laid the groundwork for what eventually became Mythic but it was a fairly iterative process and it's a bit reductive to refer to Ulduar as the "first Mythic raid."

[DeltrusDisc]

Agreed. Ulduar hard modes laid the groundwork for what eventually became Mythic but it was a fairly iterative process and it's a bit reductive to refer to Ulduar as the "first Mythic raid."

Now just waiting on Blizzard to announce MEGA mode.

[ydraw]

Sure, but certainly not with Ulduar.



Oh, I'm the asshole? I wasn't the one using italics like I'm so smart. Dude, you didn't even pay attention to the fact that Ulduar didn't even have LFR or heroic modes, it was literally normal, and then normal with something triggered to make the fight harder and often times very different. I see you going on the offence after being called out for your ignorance. I'm sorry for you.

- - - Updated - - -


Not exactly...
In Wrath there was normal for Naxx, then normal with optional hard modes for Ulduar, then normal and heroic for both ToC and ICC.
Heroic is still heroic... now they just offer and even tougher mode above heroic... and an even easier mode below normal.

Well, no, not really. In MoP they introduced Flex, so you already had the same 3 levels of non-queuable raids that we have today. They were just named differently.

MoP: Flex, Normal, Heroic

Was renamed to:

Normal, Heroic, Mythic in WoD.

And it wasn't really until Trial Of Valor in legion that "Mythic" raiding really became the ultra hard mode raids we have now. Before then Mythic raids were not nearly as big a step up from Heroic.

- - - Updated - - -

Agreed. Ulduar hard modes laid the groundwork for what eventually became Mythic but it was a fairly iterative process and it's a bit reductive to refer to Ulduar as the "first Mythic raid."

Not least because Sartharian 3 Drakes was actually the first raid with Hard Modes, not Ulduar.

[KaPe]

Not least because Sartharian 3 Drakes was actually the first raid with Hard Modes, not Ulduar.

Zul'gurub and Hakkar without killing Priests. Or Bug Trio in AQ.

[Cronovey]

And it wasn't really until Trial Of Valor in legion that "Mythic" raiding really became the ultra hard mode raids we have now. Before then Mythic raids were not nearly as big a step up from Heroic.

- - - Updated - - -



Not least because Sartharian 3 Drakes was actually the first raid with Hard Modes, not Ulduar.

I'd disagree with the first point; a lot of previous Mythic fights were vastly different than their normal/heroic counterparts long before Legion. Garrosh Hellscream in Siege of Orgrimmar added an extra phase that was completely different than the rest of the fight, Warlords of Draenor had massive changes in every raid between normal/heroic to mythic with Imperator Mar'gok and Tectus in Highmaul getting a lot of changes for mythic specifically. Blackrock Foundry also had a lot of mythic changes; the difference between Kromog on normal/heroic to mythic added a mechanic that required a lot of coordination among your raid, new trains on Thogar, and almost every fight in Hellfire Citadel had some sort of added mechanic to it that made it much more difficult.

And as KaPe posted above me, there were hard modes before Sartharion as well. Bug Trio is the first proper one with the loot changing depending on kill order; Zul'gurub was technically a hard mode in that there were extra buff on the boss if you didn't kill the priests, but that wasn't designed as a hard mode boss. More specifically, it was just there to prevent you from skipping straight to Hakkar without clearing the raid because of the powerful trinkets rewarded from his quest drop and was never actually intended to be attempted with the priests still up. He had massive attack speed buffs, multiple ways to drop tank threat so tanking him was almost impossible even if you could survive, and an AoE silence so even if you lived and somehow found a way to hold threat, you couldn't be healed as a tank!

[Kharadin]

Forgive me for not reading through the thread, but I'd be interested in opinions regarding whether Ulduar is considered such a good raid (at least in part) by the fact that it was relatively short-lived.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Ulduar and the hardmodes were fuckin' awesome, but I can imagine that because it was so short fewer people managed to get to the 'slog' point in the content cycle before moving on. Idk about everyone else but my memories of raids are definitely coloured by how burnt out/bored I got of certain dungeons. ICC for example, I thought was awesome but I'd be lying if I said that towards the latter end of WotLK I didn't hate the fuckin' place after raiding it on several characters for months on end.

[Sangfoudre]

Back then farming previous tier for gear was interesting. I used to run NM ToC 10 and 25 while attempting the frist bosses of ICC.

[Marrilaife]

To be fair to Blizz the overwhelming majority of theie raids (for the time they were released) were pretty enjoyable and well designed (again, for the time) - its largely secondary factors (having nothing else to do for more than 6 months, specific class design, reputation grinds associated with them, weird mechanics that require specific items not local to the boss - looking at 'insanity' mechanic Nyalotha ) that make or break people's lasting impression of the raid.

Maybe, but some raids imo were badly designed because they either had majority of bosses prefer the same class type (for example your average raid would have 2-3 "multidot" fights a.k.a. councils, but some would have more than half the bosses favour multidotters by overusing medium or long lived add mechanic), or require very specific class mechanic to counter the challenge, often with multiple copies of that ability needed across the raid.

Class design can be an issue if a class is just overpowered. But a raid designed to synergize with a class that it pushes it from "just above average" to "S tier pick" is not just fault of class balance team, but raid design as well. Same could be said about broken OP trinkets - who are they designed by? Raid devs or class devs or yet another, 3rd team? Do these people communicate and realize what kind of impact will it have? Stuff like UVLS allowing Warlocks to have 100% crit chance on dot ticks as long as you managed to apply these dots within the small window, but they could last much past that.

[ydraw]

I'd disagree with the first point; a lot of previous Mythic fights were vastly different than their normal/heroic counterparts long before Legion. Garrosh Hellscream in Siege of Orgrimmar added an extra phase that was completely different than the rest of the fight, Warlords of Draenor had massive changes in every raid between normal/heroic to mythic with Imperator Mar'gok and Tectus in Highmaul getting a lot of changes for mythic specifically. Blackrock Foundry also had a lot of mythic changes; the difference between Kromog on normal/heroic to mythic added a mechanic that required a lot of coordination among your raid, new trains on Thogar, and almost every fight in Hellfire Citadel had some sort of added mechanic to it that made it much more difficult.

I didn't say these fights were no different. I said that they weren't the extra super difficulty of current Mythic raids like we have to day. Where even world first guilds are taking 400 wipes to kill bosses.

[Marrilaife]

I didn't say these fights were no different. I said that they weren't the extra super difficulty of current Mythic raids like we have to day. Where even world first guilds are taking 400 wipes to kill bosses.

Because back then there was significant gear disparity between players on the 1st kill and players on the 500th kill. so top guilds had to not only counter mechanics, but also the fact they came to the fights undergeared.

Modern wow allows people to power farm gear to the point there's often very small difference in ilvl between world top guild on their 1st kill and an average guild who arrives at the boss 3 months later.

This seriously ruined raiding. Gearing curve was the elegant tool to soft nerf the raid over time, and increase longevity of the tier. Nowadays you can outgear heroic by week 2 of the tier by spam farming m+, and the end bosses are tuned around that extra surge of gear, while being a challenge to world first guilds.

And it wasn't really until Trial Of Valor in legion that "Mythic" raiding really became the ultra hard mode raids we have now. Before then Mythic raids were not nearly as big a step up from Heroic.

Exactly, Emerald Nightmare was designed with the old paradigm, where it's tuned around slow acquisition of gear, so what happened is people outgeared that expectation really fast and steamrolled the place. So Blizzard started with extremely punishing designs where bosses were tuned around having high gear and levels of AP from the get go, just because they had to outdo the playerbase who nolife farmed everything possible to trivialize content like Emerald Nightmare.

I don't think Emerald Nightmare was a badly designed raid, except Xavius which as far as I remember Blizzard admitted of not being able to implement the ideas they had for him, so the fight got gutted. But that issue was also compounded by severe underestimation of Blizzard what are the expected levels of gear and ap on hardcore players. Since then it's been an "arms race" between hardcore players devising more and more twisted ways to speed gear their teams (crafting items then dropping that profession so you have 3 slots tradable? faction changing to get extra warfront item? buying tf boes xrealm and transfering them in paid guild transfer?) / nolife farm... and Blizzard tuning bosses tighter and tighter with more and more mechanics.

And generally this is to detriment of average player, who now cannot top the world first player by 15-20 ilvls any more to cover the difference of skill.

[Cronovey]

I didn't say these fights were no different. I said that they weren't the extra super difficulty of current Mythic raids like we have to day. Where even world first guilds are taking 400 wipes to kill bosses.

Saying they weren't much of a step up from heroic is just downright incorrect though. And multiple bosses of previous difficulties did in fact have wipe counts in that range. Using Method as our example here, literally the World First guild for every single one of the tiers I'll be using for examples, and citing two sources from before your supposed sudden increase in difficulty during Trial of Valor:

Blackrock Foundry: http://i.imgur.com/z8P1vAY.png
Hellfire Citadel: http://i.imgur.com/DRPPPX3.png

Now obviously the raids have different quantities of bosses, so we'll use the average wipes per boss number to do the math on these raids.

BRF: 65.4 wipes/boss
HFC: 75.5 wipes/boss

Moving on to the current expansion, or after the supposed difficulty jump:

Uldir: https://twitter.com/methodshades/sta...342976?lang=en
Battle for Dazar'alor: https://twitter.com/methodshades/sta...51788326334466
The Eternal Palace: https://twitter.com/methodshades/sta...505473?lang=en

Leaving us with the following wipe/boss averages:

Uldir: 83.3 wipes/boss
BoD: 53.5 wipes/boss
EP: 79.6 wipes/boss

Overall the numbers are fairly comparable, with the easiest raid of the bunch being one from the current expansion. The only really large jump in the numbers was for Tomb of Sargeras, featured here: http://i.imgur.com/9ndVMNW.jpg

With an average of over 137 wipes per boss, this one particular raid takes the cake for now because of the difficulty that mythic Kil'jaeden provided. You're objectively wrong; the difficulty curve between the raids is relatively close when you actually take the time to look at the numbers. Mythic raids are generally steamrolled until you hit a few bosses that are meant to be giant roadblocks; in this case, you're looking at Blast Furnace and Blackrock for BRF, Xhul'horrac and Archimonde in particular for HFC, Mythrax and G'huun for Uldir, Jaina being the only one for BfD, and Zaqul/Azshara for EP. There's nothing in particular that suddenly swung to make mythic somehow become much more difficult at any point around Trial of Valor's release; the fights are all designed with mostly similar mechanics and higher number tuning with the exception of last bosses generally having an extra phase or particularly powerful new mechanic.

[Relapses]

Saying they weren't much of a step up from heroic is just downright incorrect though. And multiple bosses of previous difficulties did in fact have wipe counts in that range. Using Method as our example here, literally the World First guild for every single one of the tiers I'll be using for examples, and citing two sources from before your supposed sudden increase in difficulty during Trial of Valor:

Blackrock Foundry: http://i.imgur.com/z8P1vAY.png
Hellfire Citadel: http://i.imgur.com/DRPPPX3.png

Now obviously the raids have different quantities of bosses, so we'll use the average wipes per boss number to do the math on these raids.

BRF: 65.4 wipes/boss
HFC: 75.5 wipes/boss

Moving on to the current expansion, or after the supposed difficulty jump:

Uldir: https://twitter.com/methodshades/sta...342976?lang=en
Battle for Dazar'alor: https://twitter.com/methodshades/sta...51788326334466
The Eternal Palace: https://twitter.com/methodshades/sta...505473?lang=en

Leaving us with the following wipe/boss averages:

Uldir: 83.3 wipes/boss
BoD: 53.5 wipes/boss
EP: 79.6 wipes/boss

Overall the numbers are fairly comparable, with the easiest raid of the bunch being one from the current expansion. The only really large jump in the numbers was for Tomb of Sargeras, featured here: http://i.imgur.com/9ndVMNW.jpg

With an average of over 137 wipes per boss, this one particular raid takes the cake for now because of the difficulty that mythic Kil'jaeden provided. You're objectively wrong; the difficulty curve between the raids is relatively close when you actually take the time to look at the numbers. Mythic raids are generally steamrolled until you hit a few bosses that are meant to be giant roadblocks; in this case, you're looking at Blast Furnace and Blackrock for BRF, Xhul'horrac and Archimonde in particular for HFC, Mythrax and G'huun for Uldir, Jaina being the only one for BfD, and Zaqul/Azshara for EP. There's nothing in particular that suddenly swung to make mythic somehow become much more difficult at any point around Trial of Valor's release; the fights are all designed with mostly similar mechanics and higher number tuning with the exception of last bosses generally having an extra phase or particularly powerful new mechanic.

The irony of comparing WoD/Legion with BfA is that BfA has forced personal loot which was designed to curb split raiding and arguably just made it worse. (Seriously, go watch MethodJosh's breakdown of their preparation for splits in BoD.) I agree that gear is the most elegant auto-nerf for content but Blizzard can't seem to be able to discourage players from becoming increasingly more resistant to their attempts at making it the end-all be-all for progression raiding. But that actually brings about an even more interesting quandary: Is judging instance difficulty by the number of wipes a world first guild takes to kill a boss really the best metric to determine difficulty? I'd say that a more accurate portrayal of raid difficulty would be to compare the length of time between when a World Top 10 and a World Top 200 clears an instance. And when you consider World Top 200, you're effectively eliminating the tryhards and the ridiculous split runners from the equation and looking at a picture where the elegance of natural gear auto-nerfing does its thing.

Iunno. Food for thought. I could ramble about this for hours.

[Cronovey]

The irony of comparing WoD/Legion with BfA is that BfA has forced personal loot which was designed to curb split raiding and arguably just made it worse. (Seriously, go watch MethodJosh's breakdown of their preparation for splits in BoD.) I agree that gear is the most elegant auto-nerf for content but Blizzard can't seem to be able to discourage players from becoming increasingly more resistant to their attempts at making it the end-all be-all for progression raiding. But that actually brings about an even more interesting quandary: Is judging instance difficulty by the number of wipes a world first guild takes to kill a boss really the best metric to determine difficulty? I'd say that a more accurate portrayal of raid difficulty would be to compare the length of time between when a World Top 10 and a World Top 200 clears an instance. And when you consider World Top 200, you're effectively eliminating the tryhards and the ridiculous split runners from the equation and looking at a picture where the elegance of natural gear auto-nerfing does its thing.

Iunno. Food for thought. I could ramble about this for hours.

I don't disagree at all, but the person I was responding to was specifically using wipes by world first guilds to make his claim so I used the data of the actual world first guild for each of the raid tiers I referenced (with most of them sourced directly to players from their guild). As someone who has firsthand experience and the data to fall back on, claiming that the difficulty escalated suddenly after Trial of Valor's release was just incorrect. Emerald Nightmare was a standout as being much easier on mythic than any raid that came before or after and it was meant as the introductory raid of Legion; their claim was that world first guilds weren't posting 400+ wipe bosses previously, which is factually incorrect. Even Nighthold had 3 bosses that took top guilds 200+ wipes each, and all three bosses were in a row at the end of the raid which basically made for a 600+ wipe wall at the end of the raid.

The forced personal loot really did just make the problem worse, but the only way to prevent the current version from happening would be to make raid lockouts account-wide, at which point they'd just be running on multiple accounts and it would punish the average player who has alts. There's just no proper solution to the problem because it's not an actual problem; let the top guilds do what they want to do within the established game design and loot mechanics and stop punishing the regular guilds because of the fraction of a percent of players that abused split runs.

Split running is stupid for the average player, but there's no way to really stop top hardcore players from finding a way around it unless you make raid gear so much higher item level that it's basically impossible to do but the escalation of gear and item levels between tiers at that point would be absurd to the point that the next tier's LFR gear would have to replace mythic raid gear or risk being split as well which would be absolutely absurd to deal with. The solution would be to just roll back the stupid personal loot change and allow Master Looter to remain to ease the stress this puts on those top guilds and fix the problems it caused with regular guilds having to depend on personal loot now.

[ydraw]

It's time to stop whining about Master Loot, honestly. It's not coming back. Whatever tiny benefit it had to the very few guilds who used it properly was completely dwarfed by the expense of Blizzard hiring armies of GMs to deal with the tickets caused by master loot.

[Milfshaked]

Anub Heroic was definetely overtuned and didn't help hardcore raiders to like the raid (we got to the last boss within a couple of weeks and then were stuck there for another couple of month).

I dont think anub was overtuned as much as that the previous bosses were undertuned. There was almost no difficulty increase in ToGC. Heck, northrend beasts was probably the hardest fight of the first 4. Anub was the brick wall he was because Valkyrs, champions and Jaraxxus were so easy and did not properly create a difficulty curve.

[Dismayxz]

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.

Does it matter if it's a guild or not? It really doesn't. Mechanics in Raids should never be or have been PuG Friendly to begin with. XT isn't even really a PuG killer. The problem isn't with the mechanic, if people can't do something as simple as not overkill the fucking thing. It's with the players that can't hold their horses, if the intention is to not do or trigger hardmode.

That's how simple it is. The annoyance with the boss in the case of XT (and bosses with similar 'issues') came from players in affected groups (not all, but apparently enough to fuck it up) not being bright enough to throttle. You simply can't just make every core mechanic of a fight like XT irrelevant, because some people apparently lack the braincells to anticipate. The mechanic was fine and easily manageable, with or without voice. Means it was a fine and working mechanic. You simply don't blame the mechanic, when you're a shit player (generally speaking, not you personally in this case).

[Zephire]

Never thought about this… Now I'm curious about when we did Yogg +0. I thought we did it during the current content but maybe not... Intreguing.

Just have to say that ToC was great, I had loads of fun in there! Maybe shouldn't have been it's own tier but it had fun bosses and a nice achievement.

OT:
I think ToC was the result of a scraped Nerubian kingdom zone. I'd assume that since it was scraped, they had a bit too long time until ICC and make use of what they made before the scrap.

[Relapses]

Never thought about this… Now I'm curious about when we did Yogg +0. I thought we did it during the current content but maybe not... Intreguing.

Stars did +0 on 7/7/09. ToC was released 8/4/09.

[Deferionus]

My guild went back and spent more time in Ulduar than ToC. Ulduar didn't become 'irrelevant' until the release of ICC. Even then people still worked on the mace. Yogg 0 was one of the most difficult WoW bosses still. Firefighter was extremely fun.