How hard was Ulduar?

[garicasha]

the content is 'designed' for LFR players to see, and then Mythic gets a little bit of attention later on

I highly doubt this, I'm pretty sure they design for mythic then start gutting it. I don't have any proof and it'd be interesting to read a blog about it but I highly doubt they're sitting around thinking about LFR. If anything they're brainstorming stuff like "What if the raid chased Sylvanas through chains surrounding Oribos?" and then going from there.

Ulduar isn't hard. Nothing in Classic is hard. People will clear it in complete pug groups within the first reset

I think the second sentence is true but that's not how I define "hard". Running through the Yogg brain room without taking skull damage takes some practice and you can't sit in front of a target dummy and get that practice.

[Djaye]

its not that Ulduar was 'hard' per se so much as it had a ton of fights that introduced alot of new and experimental raid mechanics. everything from 25man group vehicle fights to challenge/hard mode bosses (i.e. mimiron, yogg+, alagon) were not the norm back then, so it was hard. todays mythic groups will crush them.

[Laerrus]

Regular modes in Ulduar were not so bad. IIRC, Freya seemed to be the first encounter most people had problems with.

[Nzx]

Street directly contradicts you. "Udluar being hard", he said. If it's not hard now, it's because the players who would find it hard have left the game.

'Street' lol. Get off the guy's nuts, the only reason you value his opinion is because it agrees with your feelings, and it's the exact same reason why you don't value Ion's or any of the current leadership who clearly feel differently.

Let's not forget that Greg Street is a marine biologist who worked on AoE2 rather than Starcraft, and who is now working on Riot's inevitably hand-holding Fall Guys difficulty MMO rather than on WoW.

His comment on Ulduar being 'hard' relies on context, being 'hard in comparison to Wrath Naxx', much like wiping your own ass is hard in comparison to Wrath Naxx. It's pretty simple - if you still believe Ulduar is hard in the context of the difficulty of comparable video games today, you're wrong. I don't care if your interpretation of an ex-staff member from a decade ago is different, you're just wrong.

Congrats, enjoy the wasteland the game has become, catering to people like you.

oh noeee. I play with 19 or 4 other people at a time. I don't need 12 million other players to validate my enjoyment of a game. I'm living in a true nightmare hellscape where only ~2.4 million unique characters have engaged in M+ this season, how will I ever enjoy myself again

[varren]

The guilds who take 3+ hours to clear Naxx will be eaten alive in Ulduar. T4 to T5 transition all over again.

[dojichan]

As Classic, Classic BC, and Naxx... showed... the answer is no... not hard at all... we were just bad at the game

[Relapses]

'Street' lol. Get off the guy's nuts, the only reason you value his opinion is because it agrees with your feelings, and it's the exact same reason why you don't value Ion's or any of the current leadership who clearly feel differently.

Let's not forget that Greg Street is a marine biologist who worked on AoE2 rather than Starcraft, and who is now working on Riot's inevitably hand-holding Fall Guys difficulty MMO rather than on WoW.

Little bit of a detour here but I'm genuinely confused why you would think Riot's MMO would be even-more-accessible than WoW? League is definitely not casual-friendly and Greg also famously made the "dungeons are hard, eh?" post right before Cata Heroics were nuked from orbit.

[Biglog]

As Classic, Classic BC, and Naxx... showed... the answer is no... not hard at all... we were just bad at the game

That overlooks 2 critical things. The first being that the fights are exponentially easier now over a decade later since many players have run Ulduar hundreds of times. The challenge of raids is more knowing the fights than stats, so that experience is a massive advantage compared to back then. It's a bit oblivious to not take that into account. Secondly, many of the Classic fights have been tuned down since then (ex. Naxx). And you could even add a 3rd reason which is that today in 2022, all of the raid bugs that made certain things in the raid harder than designed back at the time (and that was not a short list) don't exist now.

Keep in mind what Classic is and what it isn't. For the players that have never stepped foot in Ulduar it will still be quite challenging. But even then it's about 80% the difficulty of what it was new, even with Blizzard going "pre-nerf" with Ulduar difficulty to start. That's compared to very difficult for even top guilds when it was new. Blizz is doing what it can to make it a good experience, but thinking players simply "weren't good" back then because they are easier in Classic with all of the advantages is nonsense. Most of the top wow raiders I have seen unfortunately quit long ago, so if anything it's the opposite.

The only way to actually recreate the difficulty of Ulduar (or any raid) would be to completely redesign every Classic boss fight with entirely new strats, so that guilds truly go in blind as it was in retail needing to learn the fights along with everyone else. But that's not realistic from a dev standpoint.

[dojichan]

That overlooks 2 critical things. The first being that the fights are exponentially easier now over a decade later since many players have run Ulduar hundreds of times.

This is a direct example of being bad; A common way to get less bad is to practice...

Also thanks for supplying all the reasons why it wont be hard! I love when people argue my side for me<3

[karung]

As far as I remember Algalon was not that easy.
Yogg-saron fight with +0 titans was something else.

Idk why people love that place, but I think Alg and Yogg were the only fights that I actually enjoyed. The rest was annoying af. Esp the gauntlet event...

[Xath]

Compared to what came before? Hard.

Compared to what would come in subsequent expansions? *VERY* easy.

Other than Firefighter and Algalon, nothing is really that tough. Those might take you a night or two of learning.

Zero light dps requirements were nuts. A lot of servers didn't have a first kill til post ToC release. Of course since talents are on last patch and people know exactly what is needed I expect it will fall over. What makes raids hard is figuring them out once you have a reproducible strategy at least half the difficulty is gone if not more.

[garicasha]

The guilds who take 3+ hours to clear Naxx will be eaten alive in Ulduar. T4 to T5 transition all over again.

This is the most on-topic thing to my personal situation; I can't find a guild on my server that is clearing 25 Naxx, Malygos, and 2 Drakes in under 4 hours. And I just don't want to commit to a time schedule to not get Yogg 0.

But when I think of making my own I'm realizing that it's gonna be rough.
Reasonable roster requirements are something like:
--3 decent tanks, 1 shield 1 non
--Holy Pally
--2 shammies of different roles
--3-4 dedicated healers
--1-2 dudes that are solid at both healing and shadow/elemental/boomkin whatever
--Couple pure dps that can soak up the leather and mail gear
--As many warlocks as you can get, being the least played class that also has the most competition for gear
--3 paladins or so for blessings, which is the easiest of the requirements

And most importantly, these folks all have to be committed enough to be willing to sit on the bench because you gotta have those 25 bodies in there

[Rusken]

It's definitely a step up from Naxx. That being said the vast majority of the raid (excluding hardmodes) is still fairly easy, with the only fights posing real threats being Mimiron and Yogg and even they won't be much of an issue with current knowledge and the fact people are doing double the DPS they were doing in T7 gear back in 2008.

I suspect most guilds will do at least 13/14 week one with the more casual/less co-ordinated guilds probably struggling on Yogg for a bit until they figure out the Insanity mechanic.

[Osmeric]

Little bit of a detour here but I'm genuinely confused why you would think Riot's MMO would be even-more-accessible than WoW? League is definitely not casual-friendly and Greg also famously made the "dungeons are hard, eh?" post right before Cata Heroics were nuked from orbit.

Personally, I don't see why any casual player would give him a chance, but he may feel the size of the prospective (if largely illusory) casual audience for his game cannot be ignored.

He has said this, though:

https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/sta...10776195133440

You can’t make a game for everyone and have it be loved by anyone. We know some of you won’t agree with our choices and maybe not even like the game. That’s okay.

[Nzx]

Little bit of a detour here but I'm genuinely confused why you would think Riot's MMO would be even-more-accessible than WoW? League is definitely not casual-friendly and Greg also famously made the "dungeons are hard, eh?" post right before Cata Heroics were nuked from orbit.

League is absolutely casual-friendly when compared to its in-genre competition. It's like comparing Diablo 3 to Path of Exile. I don't know anything about Ghostcrawler's specific posts or tweets or anything else, but I do know his decisions were near-universally panned during his time with Blizzard and the general mood of the vocal community when he left was the equivalent of a sigh of relief. It's only now in hindsight and nostalgia that anyone thinks his ideas were/are good for the game.

Riot's MMO will be accessible because every single attempt to make a 'hardcore' MMO since WoW has fallen flat on its face and died. MMOs need to be a second world, not a second job, and surely they'll realise that. If they don't, it'll be New World part 2. The space where Riot's MMO will thrive is with people who think Yordles are cute and want to cosplay as Draven, not with professional xMLGx69x gamers. It needs to be a content creation machine, not a crucible of skill.

If Riot make a 'hardcore' MMO and it doesn't fail, and it manages to do 5 man content and raiding better than WoW does, I will be beyond happy to be proven wrong because I'll almost certainly be playing the game. I suspect the chances of that are <1%, though.

[garicasha]

I always felt the heat Ghostcrawler got was unwarranted, or more accurately that whoever was game designer was gonna get it regardless of what they did.

Wrath was where class tuning was starting to matter more and more but they didn’t yet have the tools to tune for PvE without completely breaking PvP, and I think that caused a lot of aggravation to some players.

There were some decisions that in hindsight could have been done better, like the Wrath dungeons being such a pushover and then the Cata ones being so dang hard.

But even that was a completely reasonable response to Heroic Shattered Halls “must have a humanoid CC” that we used to do back then.

[Craaazyyy]

It's about Black Temple level difficulty I'd say for the 25m with hardmodes.

10m will be a huge step up from naxx10, but still pretty easy

its definitely not BT level difficulty, BT was a joke even during its time

original BT was cleared in like a week and didnt need massive nerfs, while Ulduar took 85 days and took lots of nerfs.. sure most bosses didnt take that long, but still Yogg+0 took a while

and since they said that they're gonna be launching it at pre pre nerf state it's gonna be much harder than BT.. will it be hard? no it's not gonna be super hard, but if you're struggling in Naxx in any way then you're gonna be stuck in that place for a while

like lots of people were stuck in SSC or Vashj and in TK on Kael, so these same guilds are gonna be stuck in Ulduar for longer probably

[Tsyplenk]

It was a challenge 10 years ago maybe when it was all new and fresh. If people are struggling with Naxx or Ulduar in 2022 that says a LOT more about the player than it does the content at this point. The world's best players aren't clearing retail raids within an hour of release, literally every time, and they practice in beta and PTR. There is a reason for that.

Probably because all the best players quit retail years ago when it turned into steaming garbage. All you have now is what's left, aka the no lifers that can't let go and their lives revolve around the game and their 15 year's worth of character progression.

Barely anyone plays for Mythic raiding compared to how many raided hard modes back in the day lmao.

[Randominatór]

It was hella hard compared to Naxx. Yogg +0 was killed by my guild in Trial Of Crusader, we were about world 50 rank.

[ifrah]

As far as I remember Algalon was not that easy.
Yogg-saron fight with +0 titans was something else.

Idk why people love that place, but I think Alg and Yogg were the only fights that I actually enjoyed. The rest was annoying af. Esp the gauntlet event...

Algalon wasn't that hard by the time you had the marathon of an attunement done. Timer was annoying, whatever distraction amped up the stress levels of the raid and cut off obviously the effective time you could spend on it.
Yogg+0 was quite a challenge compared to the content that was around back then, and because of the "mathematically impossible" talks (and no extra loot beyond the mount), not too many even started progress until the first kill was out.

All in all I'd say Ulduar was fun to progress but utterly awful torture to farm as the clear took rather hefty amount of time. Most of the bosses, especially on today's standards, are just filler encounters.