Alternate paths of progression: Why ICC and Ulduar were the best raids

[Glorious Leader]

What can you kill if your raid group doesn't have enough dps/organization to kill Horridon though?

Let's say it was like LFR wings and you can either start at Jin'Rokh, Tortos, Durumu or Iron Qon. All of the other starter bosses are harder fights compared to Horridon. Thinking about all the bosses, especially after the Horridon nerf, maybe Ji-Kun is at the same level of difficulty but still needs 3 people to not fall behind, but rest is slightly/more difficult (maybe Twins on 10 is easier, that just seems like trash mobs with big health pools).

In ICC I was able to kill lots of things. We had 25 man pugs clearing the first two wings with no problem. That's because the difficulty curve was pretty good and it made for a rewarding encounter, i.e PROGRESSION. Saurfang, the last boss of the first wing was the hardest, with the bosses leading up to him ramping up difficulty (aside from loot ship) and then the next wing same thing. Festie and rotface harder than Saurfang and PP the hardest of the wing. Same for the next wing. Right till the last wing with LK being the hardest. That's how you design a raid to last. Not rip the knob off the difficulty on the second boss and call it a day. You need a mix. If you want to do it linear or you want to do with choice I don't really care. But you need to give players something else to go and do in the raid after beating their head against shitty gear check bosses for hours and hours on end. Icc didn't have that mind you but Icc had a better curve so you hve some success behind you and motivation to continue. After Jinrok you basically hit a wall.

Hey just keep pushing players to lfr. It gets harder and harder to recruit for normals and make a normal raid every day.

[Sonnillon]

@laplacedemon - Horridon is not much of an issue to us, but I was just saying that w/o proper people around progressing on that fight makes it harder than it should be.

You list good classes, like monks, healing priests and paladins, but what do you do if you have none (worse case). Your DPS and other healers will run out personal defensive CDs eventually... You have one CR, you have one BL for the worse door, and well if some of you people along don't have decent def. CD available (like huntets), then well... You can't really say, use your defensive CDs....

I don't expect things to be handed to people, but if due to mechanics you have to work extra hard to make up for lack of x-class (specially on 10-man), which would make the kill trivial, then yes, having a choice would be a good thing. Specially if the second boss doesn't "require" a class to make it easier.

Linear is not bad, but having the choice of bosses like in FL where you had an option to choose what you kill or T11, where you had a choice of 3 instances. Or DS with one lootpinata Morchok and 2 other choices. It would be nicer.

[laplacedemon]

In ICC I was able to kill lots of things. We had 25 man pugs clearing the first two wings with no problem.

When though? Was it right after first wing was released or was it after it got the 30% buff to damage, hp and healing? Were you able to pug Putricide with 0 buffs?

I do get what you're saying (although, the second boss, Lady Deathwhisper also was an add boss and also had lots of mechanics like Horridon; compared to the next boss, Gunship I'd say it was harder). But what I'm saying is that ToT isn't that different in terms of difficulty increase. Council is (or rather was) harder than Horridon. Tortos is pretty much the same as Council. Megaera before the first nerf was really, really difficult for us (after having serious recruitment issues, we took last tier easy so our ilvl was around 500 and didn't have a real off tank during the first week) but nowadays it might be even easier. Ji-Kun is the odd one out, really easy but still has the tactic check. Durumu is harder, Primordius is same as Durumu maybe a tiny bit easier, Dark Animus is harder. Compared to Dark Animus, Iron Qon is easier on mechanics but has a dps check. Twin Consorts is again the odd one. And Lei Shen is harder than probably all.

To be honest, I do NOT know why people are finding Horridon hard -they might even all have different problems so I can't, but what I'm saying is, if you have problem with it, you will have a problem with most if not all the bosses afterwards too. The whole tier is based on executing the boss fight right, whether it's the organization on Horridon, deciding the right kill order for Megaera, organizing the adds on Dark Animus or deciding on Lei Shen's conduits... They are all 'hard' on that sense until you overgear it.

And I also understand the point on casual raiding and LFR killing it. I agree with that. If the second boss is still too difficult for most of the people to the extent that they don't want to put the effort anymore, either whole ToT normals are tuned incorrectly or there's a difference between expectations of normal mode raiders and Blizzard's.

[eschatological]

In ICC I was able to kill lots of things. We had 25 man pugs clearing the first two wings with no problem. That's because the difficulty curve was pretty good and it made for a rewarding encounter, i.e PROGRESSION. Saurfang, the last boss of the first wing was the hardest, with the bosses leading up to him ramping up difficulty (aside from loot ship) and then the next wing same thing. Festie and rotface harder than Saurfang and PP the hardest of the wing. Same for the next wing. Right till the last wing with LK being the hardest. That's how you design a raid to last. Not rip the knob off the difficulty on the second boss and call it a day. You need a mix. If you want to do it linear or you want to do with choice I don't really care. But you need to give players something else to go and do in the raid after beating their head against shitty gear check bosses for hours and hours on end. Icc didn't have that mind you but Icc had a better curve so you hve some success behind you and motivation to continue. After Jinrok you basically hit a wall.

Hey just keep pushing players to lfr. It gets harder and harder to recruit for normals and make a normal raid every day.

Your memory of ICC is faulty. Saurfang was easier than LDW, if only because people didn't know how to CC MCed people on LDW. Saurfang you never even moved once you were given your spot, unless you were so bad as to not kill your adds before they reached someone. Blood Wing in general was easier than Plague Wing yet was slotted as the "third" wing. Valithria was easiest of all of them, yet was the beginning of the "end wing."

And TBH, I thought the open wing style was illusory in Ulduar (you had mandatory bosses which you could do in a different order if you wanted, but they happened to go in order of easiest to most difficult counterclockwise from Kologarn's staircase), to pointless in ICC. I say pointless in ICC because the only skipping people generally did in heroic progression was to do blood wing and Valithria before PP (though Fester and Rot came first). Ultimately also pointless because every boss was mandatory to get to Sindy, and Sindy mandatory to get to LK.

[Cernunnos]

ICC was 4 mandatory linear bosses (marrowgar>LDW>gunship>saurfang), then later plague opened up giving you 2 bosses to pick the order but where still mandatory Festergut/Rotface, then a mandatory boss (Professor. Then later Blood Quarter opened up which was 2 mandatory linear bosses (Princes then Queen), then later frost quarter opened up, which gave 2 more mandatory linear bosses (valithria then Sindragosa), all of these needed to be defeated to get to the final boss. If it weren't for the gating the only option for progression in ICC would be within plague quarter itself. Only after the frost quarter was opened many weeks later did you have any choice. Plague, blood or Frost.
12/12 bosses mandatory

Ulduar was 1 mandatory boss (Flame levi), then two optional bosses (Ignis and Razorscale) then a mandatory boss (Decon), then you could do the optional boss Iron Council before or after the Mandatory boss Kologarn (you need to kill him to use his body as a bridge), Auriya is optional and can be killed any time after Kologarn, though to make things easier later it's best to kill her after kologarn. The 4 keepers (Hodir, Thorim, Freya, Mimiron) can be killed in any order but are mandatory to unlock the General, who is likewise mandatory to unlock Yogg'saron. Algalon is optional, and can be done any time after decon is defeated anfd you can enter the antechamber.
8/14 Mandatory


Throne of Thunder may share ulduar's size and scope, but it certainly doesn't share it's choices of which boss to fight, if at all.

[laplacedemon]

@Sonnillon

To be honest, we were on that "This is probably one of the worst comps for this fight" more than once before. During DS we had 4 melee when we were progressing on Zon'ozz hc and not only it was hard for us healers, we had to create a strategy which worked for us (and probably only us). At some point we had three priests or two rogues on their not-so-prime-time or 5 people on the priest/paladin/lock token. It is hard for not-that-hardcore 10man guilds to have the perfect raid, I do get that. And we tried really hard this tier for that not to happen.

No monk, paladin or priest healer still seems like a very extreme scenario to me and might or might not be overcome depending on how much time people actually want to spend on it (especially since like you raid, having the right class makes it trivial), skill, latency and especially luck. For that particular raid group, it might be better to have the FL style of progress (which I also enjoyed, yet we did it pretty much on the same order) so they can skip it until it becomes easier for them.

I'm not saying it to boost my ego or anything like that, but maybe I've been too far away from that casual raiding, so I don't really think people should get stuck on normal modes because of their raid composition. The last time I was in a "whoever logs in gets the spot" guild was years ago (and that was pretty fun too actually). So maybe I'm wrong and Horridon really doesn't fit the "Bring the player, not the class" motto.

(Oh and I think they didn't go the FL way with ToT mostly because of the story. We're getting in from the sewers, only to be pushed back to underground, find a way up, go through the corridors to reach the main part... Maybe they did the story first and designed the raid around it.)

[Deleted]

No it's not. It's really not. Icc was FAR more accessible than ToT. ICC had a much better difficulty curve. It had much better lore. The fights were more engaging. Throne is just wall after wall after wall designed to FORCE players who should be running ToT to go back and do previous raids in an effort to further gate ToT and make sure it lasts as long as possible. Gear check after gear check boss.

ICC became accessible, as the buffs started to apply up to 30% - that's when ICC became pug friendly.

If you can't kill Horridon, what makes you think you'll fare better on Council or Magaera? You seem to be under the impression, that Horridon is a block, when in reality it's about not having a shit setup, people knowing what to do and assuming you have around 500 ilvl. If you don't have the gear, then go back and do T14. The people clearing Normal and Heroics now, are the people who raided T14 and got gear appropriate for ToT.

"People who should be running ToT" aren't forced to go back, cause they already have the gear to get past Horridon. It's people who AREN'T supposed to do ToT due to lack of gear, who're forced to go back.

ToT didn't really come as a surprise did it? People had lots of time to gear from T14 and those who for some reason didn't, have to go back and progress through T14 like the rest of us.

Don't cry about bosses being too hard on Normal, when the solution is right in front of you. If you aren't good enough to clear ToT with your current gear, you go back and get some more gear - quite simple. But that's not a design flaw, that's the way the game works for everyone else as well. And I'm willing to bet, that if you gave my raiders the gear your raiders have, we'd still kill Horridon.

[wariofan1]

No it's not. It's really not. Icc was FAR more accessible than ToT. ICC had a much better difficulty curve. It had much better lore. The fights were more engaging. Throne is just wall after wall after wall designed to FORCE players who should be running ToT to go back and do previous raids in an effort to further gate ToT and make sure it lasts as long as possible. Gear check after gear check boss.

ICC didn't have a difficulty curve, everything could be one-shot until you got to LK or HC, and even on HC my guild one shot every boss up to Putricide on the first run, it was tuned so badly. I really don't need to get in on the lore here as I've ranted enough about the atrocious WotLK lore here, but let me just say that the Lei Shen lore is probably the best lore to come out of WoW, not Warcraft, but out of the MMO. As for the lore of the raid, in this case the whole fortress and the land surrounding it has lore, ICC was just the fortress of LK and Icecrown was just his land, might aswell have been any other fortress or land. Each boss in ToT has lore, they aren't just there for the fuck of it like Festergut, Rotface, Putricide, Valithria, Deathwhisper, etc. Only bosses that had lore in ICC was Marrowgar (really minor lore though), Saurfang, Lana'thel, Sindragosa and LK.

Sure, non-linearity is always a plus, but I prefer awesome fights over that, it's usually just a nice little addition, but nothing game breaking. I prefer awesome boss battles over non-linearity, and thus I think ToT is at least much better than ICC, and maybe Ulduar too. Then again, I'm not the ICC or Ulduar fanatic that many are, I actually despise ICC for not only being the only content for a year, but being an extremely dissapointing raid in itself. And to be fair, non-linearity didn't even matter in ICC, people always went Plague -> Blood -> Frost, so what's the point?

[Pua]

ICC was horrible and I have no idea why do you even mention it. It was such a letdown for a final raid of the expansion.

This is an extreme opinion, and one that sits in an overwhelming minority if you legitimately thought that. In fact, I get the feeling you’re trolling so feel free to move on.

Icecrown and Ulduar weren’t the only raids that provided options, Naxxramas was mentioned as were a couple of others. To be honest, I thought Blizzard liked that model and intended to use it going forward so I’m surprised the Throne of Thunder has ended up like it has.

But there are two issues here:

1) “Optional” bosses and non-linear progression is a good thing.
2) The difficulty curve is very badly set up.

I think the ease of Jin’rokh, compared to the difficulty of Horridon, is simply an example of very bad tuning. If a raid cleared normal tier 14, they shouldn’t expect to hit a wall on the second boss of the tier following; yet that’s exactly what happened. In fact, prior to the nerf, there were next to no 10-man guilds that killed Horridon without being in heroic gear from the previous tier. That’s really very silly.

Saying that, I take the point that a string of easy bosses followed by a string of hard ones could be equally frustrating for raid groups. At least then, however, there’s a far higher chance of gearing up to get you over the hump. If we compare Ulduar to the Throne of Thunder (as the developers chose to), the difference comes into very sharp contrast:

Jin’rokh has a very deep loot table, and only two drops. You then hit Horridon and you’re stuck with no gearing options.

Ulduar bosses had lighter loot tables, but there were four bosses prior to the wall (the Keepers), with a further three optional ones to kill; a full 14 possible drops. Hell, even if you argued that the XT-002 Deconstructor was a wall, there were three bosses prior to him.

Now, LFR helps out a bit. But saying to players who cleared the previous tier that they need to farm LFR, or go back to old content they’ve already cleared, isn’t a positive message when they only kill one current boss a week.

Alas, I think we’re just going to have to accept that the team now just isn’t as talented as the team that brought us Wrath of the Lich King.

[announced]

i agree.. ulduar and ICC were much more fun raids because of the gradual difficulty increase. Marrowgar was a joke.. deathwhisper was a lil harder, Gunship was just about add control.. and saurfang was a dps check in the early stages.. after those 4 mandatory bosses u could choose whichever wing u wanted to do. its not mandatory to start with the plague quarter.. u can choose blood or frost if u want...

i didnt raid ulduar much but love the design of the place... its long,, really fun..and quite gradual as well... blizz needs to go back to this style..

[Sonnillon]

I'm not saying it to boost my ego or anything like that, but maybe I've been too far away from that casual raiding, so I don't really think people should get stuck on normal modes because of their raid composition. The last time I was in a "whoever logs in gets the spot" guild was years ago (and that was pretty fun too actually). So maybe I'm wrong and Horridon really doesn't fit the "Bring the player, not the class" motto.

I was speaking of my personal experience while saying it. And no, I don't want to start a huge argument over different views of things.

We got our kill on Horridon, when our balance druid was switched for arms warrior. Pulls before that we had just the rogue as melee, rest was RDPS. And we did have an interrupt rotation set for the second VPriest, of which was not assigned to rogue. Had so much effusions and pools up, that, that kept wiping us. And tank couldn't be full time on one of the Vpriest as he was mopping up the adds who were all over the place. If you say that is people failing at playing their class to the fullest was wiping the raid, you might be correct. But if we got a decent interrupt in, things went much more smoother.

The first pulls we did on Council we had no Shaman along, which meant, we didn't have any BL, nor SP buff. In a caster heavy raid, this is a loss (the missing of SP buff (we did not have our hunter along, nor we didn't have any active locks/mages). Got a decent setup, with warrior, rogue, spriest, hunter, boomy, rshaman, 2x druid healer and the kill was ours.

Tortos (our present progression), we tried it with 3 melee, 2 ranged. Just didn't have enough to get the turtles down. I know that melee can DPS the turtles w/o much of an problem and being knocked around, but the time it takes for them to get to a turtle and chase it when it is slowed, is a DPS loss. Yesterday with decent balance of 2 melee, 3 ranged and class variety we got it to 10%.

For us it is class over player, though the difference is not marginal. And that's why I brought up my argument.

[Reyzzz]

It had much better lore.

Please, don't make a fool out of yourself. There was basically no lore in ICC except for LK.

[Cairhiin]

No it's not. It's really not. Icc was FAR more accessible than ToT. ICC had a much better difficulty curve. It had much better lore. The fights were more engaging. Throne is just wall after wall after wall designed to FORCE players who should be running ToT to go back and do previous raids in an effort to further gate ToT and make sure it lasts as long as possible. Gear check after gear check boss.

Sorry but opinions are opinions and yours isn't anymore valid than mine. ICC had a lot of great fights like Putricide, and Lich King but it also had a lot of horrible fights like Lootship, Valithria, Rotface. But seeing as you equate quality with accessibility then sure ICC was a lot easier. And obviously there was the stacking buff.

Throne of Thunder has gear checks? What a surprise, you realize right that ICC had gear checks too? It was just much easier to get that gear, as the entry level for ICC was much lower. MMOs are by their very definition nothing but gear checks.

[Deleted]

I don't like how LFR has turned raids into long corridors

[Nangz]

Its worth noting that what made ulduar and icc different than other nonlinear instances like firelands is that the rewards were reasonably the same. You could only get tier from end wing bosses as opposed to firelands where alysrazor and shannox were usually more important than rhyolith and bethtilac.

[kamuimac]

You have options: Go back and clear HT14 content for gear and come back to ToT if you're stuck, difficulty is around the same, with several bosses being "easy bosses" in T14, which you should have access to on H by now.

And u dont see anything bad with the progression model where for progress in normal u need to come back to old tier and progress HC ? why this need to mix 2 compeltly separate progress styles ? i find such mix a flawed designe - reason ? HC raiders are all for didfficult bosses to overcome - people whos main focus is normal mode dont look for such high difficulty - why ? cuase they choose to play normal not HC - and at this point ur either in really good guild which is far into normal ToT if not already starting on HC or stuck on Horridon (50 % of raiidng guilds) or council/tortos :/

[Venant]

ICC didn't have a difficulty curve, everything could be one-shot until you got to LK or HC, and even on HC my guild one shot every boss up to Putricide on the first run, it was tuned so badly.

Putricide wasn't released for awhile after the first wing opened. Nobody 'one-shot' Putricide week 1.

[Pua]

Hey just keep pushing players to lfr. It gets harder and harder to recruit for normals and make a normal raid every day.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything you’ve said, but there is a point to be made here that’s very relevant.

I’ve become increasingly worried since 5.0 that the middle ground of “normal raider” is simply going to disperse into EITHER heroic or LFR centric, but that’s the best-case scenario – people are giving up the game altogether, too. I’m not against heroic raids or LFR, in principle, but I do feel (LFR in particular) is having a hugely detrimental impact on normal raid groups. In and of itself, LFR is already pulling a huge number of potential guild-level raiders out of the pot because they can play the content without having to worry about schedules, raid leader moans or loot drama.

But the other, less obvious, impact is that if you’re not raiding to a heroic level, you’re not enticing enough to potential recruits who will simply view LFR as the simpler alternative to towing the guild line.

I’m honestly worried about this. I stopped heroic raiding because I didn’t want to invest that volume of time anymore; that said, I don’t want stuck with the cesspool of LFR.

What are my options?

[fangless]

I don’t necessarily agree with everything you’ve said, but there is a point to be made here that’s very relevant.

I’ve become increasingly worried since 5.0 that the middle ground of “normal raider” is simply going to disperse into EITHER heroic or LFR centric, but that’s the best-case scenario – people are giving up the game altogether, too. I’m not against heroic raids or LFR, in principle, but I do feel (LFR in particular) is having a hugely detrimental impact on normal raid groups. In and of itself, LFR is already pulling a huge number of potential guild-level raiders out of the pot because they can play the content without having to worry about schedules, raid leader moans or loot drama.

But the other, less obvious, impact is that if you’re not raiding to a heroic level, you’re not enticing enough to potential recruits who will simply view LFR as the simpler alternative to towing the guild line.

I’m honestly worried about this. I stopped heroic raiding because I didn’t want to invest that volume of time anymore; that said, I don’t want stuck with the cesspool of LFR.

What are my options?

Path of least resistance.

You can get 502 items, nearly as good as last tier's heroic items, by pressing a queue button. Of course people are drawn to that. If I could get gear upgrades by just staying online for an hour, I'd probably do it too.

[edlike]

Alas, I think we’re just going to have to accept that the team now just isn’t as talented as the team that brought us Wrath of the Lich King.

This is pretty absurd to say. Experience the progression path through normal as the design team has intended you to. Progress on heroic in whatever manner you want. I doubt it will take you til 5.4 to kill Lei Shen with the myriad gearing options available. To criticize the designers because the tier is linear on normal is just ridiculous.