Ulduar Encounter Difficulty, Poll, Blue Posts, WoW Parody Song, Fan Art

[Boubouille]

I refuse to vote because it says vanilla, and not classic.
Screw that shit.
Classic the shit.

... Would a hug help?

[Tovo]

Algalon was the perfect carrot on a stick. A game like this really needs that type of high difficulty/high reward type of boss in it. It really motivates people, at least me and many others I have played with. If I am able to obtain the end boss experience through LFR, the odds of me enjoying the content for a long period of time is slim. It's all about keeping that subscription. When you work slowly through a dungeon, it is much more satisfying and fun. Ulduar was a fantastic instance.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

It is hard to believe that 60% of voters started in Vanilla. Then again, this is a site aimed more towards the hardcore and community I guess, so who knows.

[Deleted]

only 1.1% of them defeated Algalon in 10-man before Patch 3.2

And somehow, everyone in that 1.1% of your sample is visiting these forums. Just like everyone here started playing when WoW was in alpha, everyone killed C'Thun and everyone was raidleader of a 40-man MC/AQ raid, "back in the days"...

[Vandexander]

This means that we are looking at boss difficulty relative to the easiest bosses, not the percent of the player population that completed each encounter. Keep in mind there is some inaccuracy, as the characters that made it to 85 may not include many of the characters who completed it at level 80 and then became inactive.

Actually, the graph shows a combination of boss difficulty and boss accessibility - no matter how hard or easy a boss is, if you can't get to it, you can't kill it.

I think that Ulduar raiding was epic, but I also think that it was too inaccessible, and that, in general, it wasn't fun for 99.9% of the WoW population. I much prefer the current approach, where the fights are accessible and meaningful for a large portion of the WoW population, and have little sympathy for the whiners who complain that raids are "too easy" now, but are still working on hard modes.
Sure, it may not feel as *elite* anymore, but that's just too bad. The game isn't made for the elite few, it's made for a much broader audience.

Blizzard values raids and raid content, so they put lots of time and effort into creating it, and they WANT people to experience it. They don't want it to be elite, because that defeats their purpose as game creators and as a company. If you want an elite experience, well, that's why they made Hard Modes. If you're smart enough and focused enough and obsessed enough to be able to do hard modes, then you should be able to figure out that there is a big difference between LFR and Regular and Hard encounters, and not have your feelings hurt because LFR and Regular encounters exist and are accessible to the rest of us.

[Papalenin]

I highly, highly doubt 60% actually started playing during Vanilla. I started playing in the last few months of Vanilla and next to nobody I knew and played with during BC plays anymore. There's no way the retention rates were that high elsewhere.

[Vanaline]

Algalon was too much and a waste of resources but the rest was very fine on normal, the ideal for normal difficulty. It's a shame this game has to be utterly brain dead in every aspect prior to heroic raiding, which is largely based around stomping on your nuts with cheap one hit kills and bad tuning and punishing you with sheep herding bullshit than any legitimate difficulty.

Raiding shouldn't be for everyone, but to a cheap studio like Blizzard, not only is it, but it's also everything, period, re-purposed, recycled, refitted for every last scrap of content in the game and that's why I no longer play. Nothing in this game is even mildly possessing of any mental stimuli until the end of end game. I think I'd rather drive a rail road spike through my palm than level anything again.

[asharia]

the hunter fan art looks amazing. why is the bow string above his arm though? i cant not look at it :P

i bet half the vanilla votes are lies

[Vaengence]

There are several issues in comparing these achievements to Algalon. You compared normal achievements to the (pen?)ultimate heroic boss in the instance. I suppose for interests sake you could have comparisons between normal 10 man siege of Ulduar that was tuned so low that every many and his dog could kill it and one of the two hardests bosses of the tier designed only for heroic mode raiders but I don't see a lot of point to it.

Algalon was created specifically to be a heroic only boss. I pointed that out to that Blue Poster in that thread.

The thing is you cannot compare Algalon to the earlier bosses in an argument of accessibility when the boss was designed to be completed by only a few % of the raiding population. Doesn't that seem somewhat silly to anyone else?? What would be a better comparison of "Accessibility" for Ulduar would be comparing those that completed 10 Man Ulduar to those who have the Yogg'Saron 4 keeper achievement on 10 man. I think you will find that while still lower at the end of the instance it won't be as bad as this appears to make it out.

Now if you wanted to talk about whether Blizzard is happy to design bosses only accessable to very few then that is fine, but I really don't see what Algalon has to do with anything even remotely connected to an argument of accessibility of content.

[Firebert]

It wasn't the difficulty of Ulduar that is the golden ratio that needs to be copied to the rest of the game. It was how the raid was set up. How the Storm Peaks set up the massive story line behind Thorim and Hodir. How Freya made an appearance in Sholozar Basin. How we knew that Yogg'Saron was going to be about at the bottom of all this trouble because of breadcrumbs left in Howling Fjord. And where the bosses weren't set up, they were filled with character. Mimiron has by far the best personality for a raid boss whist corrupted, especially during Firefighter. Kologarn was an obvious reference to The Black Knight from Monty Pythin and the Holy Grail. Algalon fitted perfectly with the research of Brann Bronzebeard (Brannbronzan). Razorscale is a she and was Thorim's mount. Nowadays, we have a corrupted Earth giant (origin unknown), two Forgotten Ones (when N'Zoth wasn't set up at all), a Twilight-aligned Shaman (not set up at all), Ultraxion (not set up at all, but makes sense to be a hidden Deathwing creation), and Blackhorn (not set up at all, some random Twilight-aligned Tauren with a drake). The last two fights should have been rolled into one. Even before this: who the hell are the Elemental Council members in Bastion of Twilight? At least Valiona got some breadcrumbing in Grim Batol Heroic, but even then that instance took over two hours to complete (so the breadcrumbing was more difficult to find). Blizzard. When making MoP, at least make bosses that link to the surrounding areas and characters at least. It was the best raid because of this. And Thrall doesn't count.

[gamelyn]

I highly, highly doubt 60% actually started playing during Vanilla. I started playing in the last few months of Vanilla and next to nobody I knew and played with during BC plays anymore. There's no way the retention rates were that high elsewhere.

I think LK & Cata are being under-represented here and not BC & Classic being over-represented. The LK/Cata crowd is probably much younger or older and likely asleep right now. The basement dwelling, porn addicts are the only ones up and we played in Classic. Amirite?

[Nibelheim]

Personally I'd say it was a little too in-accessible, I'd like to see maybe 50% make it to Descent and 75% to The Keepers. These days you can hit max level, spend 1 week acquiring gear via AH, JP and VP, and kill the end boss of the expansion the week after that. Quite a change Hell, can even do it in 3 days if you rush it a bit (like this guy). Level 85: 2/08/12. Deathwing kill: 2/11/12

Best part of Ulduar though was the design of the dungeon, the bosses, the set up to the lore behind them, the methods of activating different hard-modes, etc. Gave the place a really enjoyable atmosphere. Compared to end-game content atm, ehhhh.

[Deleted]

Well, they pretty much said they did not like Ulduar, I am deeply sorry for the guys still playing wow

[Deleted]

Loving Sharm's new song

[roahn the warlock]

That is how raids SHOULD be. imo

[Gilderoy]

Would it be possible to do another chart on the number of non-LFR Deathwing kills? I'd be curious to see how it compares with this information and the information that came out a few months ago.

[Bawl]

Do you have the data on how many people completed the same up to ICC release? IMO Ulduar was still relevant for at least a few weeks after 3.2's release. Hell, the first week you could only kill Beasts. I know my guild knocked that out in like 15 minutes then headed back over to Ulduar to work on whatever hardmode we hadn't finished at the time.

[qqss]

[secksytimez]

Algalon was definitely not the most difficult boss in the instance it was just a matter of having access.

We killed Algalon ranked in the top 100 in 25s and top 50 in 10 man with only 1hr 30 mins of time on him. In comparison to the time spent on the majority of other hard modes he was cake.

As a high end raider I really enjoyed Ulduar and the way it was designed but I can also see why some people complain about not having access to some of the fights.

IMO if they had segmented it more like ICC then that would have solved some of the issues as you could have chosen which bosses you wanted to attempt if you didn't have time for a full clear each week. The difficulty level was a very good balance and their was such a good variety of really tough fights that could only be completed after farming gear from the raid and you really noticed every upgrade the raid received.

[Aqua]

I see nothing wrong with that graph... 1.1% made it to the super hard extra boss... that looks correct to me. And 25% more or less to the decent of madness, exactly the group I was in, Algalon wasn't downed for me until I was decked out in 3.3 gear, and I was totally alright with that.