Not all fights require a hard mode
by Matthew Rossi 
May 15th 2010 at 6:00PM
Frankly, the Gunship encounter in ICC, while fun, shouldn't have a hard mode. It's not really even hard; it's just free iLevel 277 gear for turning on a toggle. I blame Trial of the Crusader -- and specifically, having an entire separate raid lockout for Trial of the Grand Crusader -- for this. I realize I may be on the losing side of this divide, but I really don't think every single fight needs a hard mode. Some fights, sure. The four wing bosses of ICC, absolutely. The Lich King? Heck, it could be argued that Arthas should have taken a page from Algalon's book and only had a hard mode, or maybe Sindragosa should have been a hard-mode-only fight instead of a wing boss, and you only get to fight her after the Lich King is dead in some sort of doomsday scenario where she's chained up by Arthas and breaks free to destroy Azeroth in case of his demise.
I mean, does heroic Marrowgar actually feel very heroic to anyone? In my opinion, the added fight mechanics make it harder, yes, but aren't particularly interesting or epic in scope. Leaving three drakes up on Sartharion actually felt ridiculously heroic at the time when it was cutting-edge content. It took a lot of coordination and solid play to do it back when the best gear you were able to get was Naxx-25 drops.
Festergut and Rotface on heroic just make the fight more annoying, and heroic Blood Queen is basically just a gear check. Strangely, although the same could be argued for heroic Saurfang, I really enjoy that fight and feel like we've executed well when it goes off. I'm certainly not arguing for the removal of heroic difficulty, but man, I'd like to see less of it per raid. Four or five heroic fights with one fight that's basically only a heroic fight, like Ulduar did with Algalon, and a return to the variable difficulty where fights could be tuned by making specific choices would work fine for my tastes. Progressing through the various Yogg difficulty levels last year kept my guild going back well into the beginning of our ICC cycle.
Basically, I think heroic modes should be challenges to overcome, not just a new cycle of farming. You run regular ICC for gear to run heroic ICC at this point, and I think that cheapens the whole thing a trifle too much. Since we'll see an end to guilds' running the same content on 10 and 25 in Cataclysm, maybe a general scaling back of hard modes is in order as well.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Raiding
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Zalvi24 May 15th 2010 6:05PM
hard like heroics more than you can handle?
Darryx May 15th 2010 6:42PM
so let's do it like a druid in the general channel
ben May 15th 2010 8:46PM
Grind baby grind baby but not the leveling kind.
Eternauta May 15th 2010 9:39PM
I mean like playing WoW online and then a rogue gets you from behind
Razzanor May 15th 2010 9:46PM
So here's your chance, drop my pants, like we're raiding Gruul but
Meg May 15th 2010 10:20PM
like the mushroom from Mario Brothers, you have gotta get one-up
Rakah May 15th 2010 10:44PM
in your thunderbluff, like a shaman in the buff
mijody1 May 16th 2010 12:56AM
This post is such win
Dreamstorm May 16th 2010 4:37AM
=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xciuYTeu4Qc&feature=related
Blondies May 17th 2010 3:46AM
c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-combobreaker
Jormund Fenris May 15th 2010 6:13PM
I agree with what you say about the gunship battle, the difference between hardmode and normal mode are superficial at best. Though I really want that cape...
In any case, I really like the idea of keeping hardmodes for more interesting or important bosses. *insert diety here* knows it was bloody fun with OS3D and Algalon.
cwallis24 May 15th 2010 6:32PM
I think they should keep a short list of bosses on normal mode, say 5 or 6 at most. That way you can get through the instance, see the end fight, and have time for your toddler when they wake up from their nap (just an example).
Then there should be hardmode: more bosses to clear before the end-fight, harder fights, and new mechanics in the main fights which make sense. Like, for instance, easy mode ICC instead could have been 4 wing bosses, and LK. Hardmode could have been the full set of bosses, all as the more difficult version.
Emoroan May 15th 2010 7:15PM
I don't really mind ICC as it is, however a few of the bosses did need some looking at regarding hard modes. Hard modes should be more than just bigger numbers, it should add a new mechanic to the fight.
Marrowgar, The ship, Blood Queen, Dreamwalker didn't really add anything.
jv_gdesign May 15th 2010 9:47PM
I like the idea of having more special hard modes. But I didn't like how in Ulduar, to access hard mode, you had to just kill something faster like on XT or Hodir. I enjoyed hardmodes like 4 tower FL or Firefighter, or Iron Council, which makes me perfer the toggle ability in ICC.
My favorite fights are the ones that change the strategy almost completely and require players to essentially relearn the mechanics, like heroic putricide, Blood Princes, or 3D Sarth for example. Fights where the only change is more damage and a tighter enrage are boring.
Meg May 15th 2010 10:22PM
@jv_gdesign
I disagree that Hodir was "just" kill it faster. At the time it required some fierce strategy and perfect positioning, especially by your ranged dps. It was ANYTHING but a "stand and pew pew" fight.
jv_gdesign May 15th 2010 10:55PM
No the reference that I was trying to make was that it was a trigger fight. You can't toggle it. It required the raid to just do the fight better to enter hard mode.
Magna May 15th 2010 6:16PM
I am going to have to agree. After I killed Arthas I looked and saw I had to do everything I just did, AGAIN but with Hardmodes. It really took the motivation out of me. Why do what I just did again? For loot? That may be good for some people, but loot does not motivate me, fun does. And repeating everything just for the sake of it is not appealing or fun.
I loved the Ulduar one, with certain bosses having hardmodes that unlocked a bonus boss. That works really well.
Squeek May 15th 2010 7:15PM
Completely agree.
It's felt like the fun has been sucked out of our guild ever since we finally killed LK25. Now, we're just doing the same dungeon again for more loot. Oh, and drakes.
If there was another dungeon after Icecrown, then I might care. But, we know there won't be a raid with loot better than 277/284 gear. We also know that Cataclysm is going to re-do everything, and unless the stat inflation works its way backward to current gear, quest reward greens will overshadow all of our hard-earned green-texted loots.
The fights themselves don't feel epic at all. The hard modes really don't feel like hard modes--they just feel like changing the way some of the mechanics work to make it slightly harder, like preventing you from stacking up on a fight where that was the original strategy. Compared to Ulduar, which I think everybody agrees totally nailed hard modes, it's just terrible. The fight that changes the most is Putricide, and all that happens is that he double-spawns adds instead of stunning the raid and throws out a plague that you have to spread around carefully. Compare it to Thorim, in which the hard mode is actually LORE.
In Ulduar, it felt like hard mode was the removal of a limiter from the bosses. You left towers up to allow Flame Leviathan to utilize all of his abilities. You broke XT's heart, which removed his limiter. You pushed the self-destruct button, which made Mimiron want to kill you faster. Hell, even the Iron Council had a unique hard mode--kill the bosses in a different order. Not a single fight in ToC or ICC has utilized hard modes properly. It's simply altering mechanics a bit and giving the boss a new ability.
Long story short, the bosses are fun on normal and relentlessly dumb in heroic. The biggest example of a terribly-designed heroic fight is Deathwhisper. Adds spawn on a faster timer, have more health, deform/reincarnate more often, and continue to spawn in phase 2. She has more health, more mana, and MCs more people in your raid. Ghosts kill anyone they touch and anyone within 10 yards of that person (which is FUN with a capital FU because they're untargetable NPCs and damn-near impossible to see). Is it harder? Sure. Is it pointlessly harder? You bet.
Oh, and another thing heroic difficulties do: they force you to stack your raid one way over another. Think Heroic Anub'arak. You literally could not complete this fight without at least 4 Paladins and two geared Block tanks. The current incarnation of LK10HM -requires- a Discipline Priest and no more than one melee class, which is most likely going to be a death knight. The raid stacking is unbelievably frustrating. What's more frustrating is when the hard mode is designed with 25-man in mind, which makes 10-man incredibly hard because it's not scaled correctly (Blood Prince Council comes to mind). In an expansion touting "bring the player, not the class", heroic difficulties completely contradict the concept.
I would like to see them go back to the Ulduar design scheme. Not every fight has a hard mode, hard mode doesn't necessarily mean more health/more damage, multiple levels of hard modes ala OS/FL/Yogg, and hard-mode only bosses.
A5 May 15th 2010 8:07PM
Squeek is getting a column, right WoW.com? Right?
Heilig May 15th 2010 10:31PM
I couldn't agree more. Ulduar's hard modes were epic, with every hard mode adding in different (sometimes drastically different) mechanics to the fight. To illustrate the difference between Ulduar and the following tiers, I'll list some of the differences of the hard mode bosses, which is something missing from Squeek's excellent post since it's already so long.
FL - MASSIVE increase in health, Freezing beams, Explosion beams, Fire beams, giant adds
XT - Substantial increase in health and damage, no increased damage heart phases, Adds with a damage aura, void zones
IC - Extreme raid damage aura, massive tank damage, and a punishing soft enrage from tank deaths due to the debuff if your raid's dps was low
Hodir - 3 minute timer required cutting down on healers and forced every raider to maximize uptime of every single NPC's buff
Thorim - Increased health and damage required perfectly coordinated raid positioning and movement along with uninterruptable frost novas and frostbolt volleys that were specifically designed to hinder that movement
Freya - Substantial increase in health and damage of Freya AND her adds, along with new abilities like an AoE silence, huge raid damage zones, and roots that had to be killed quickly punished uncoordinated raids like no other fight
Mimiron - increased health pushed the enrage timer to the limit, fire all over the place, giant aoe explosions that one shot people, new adds that one shot people and AoE silence if not killed quickly, but they're also the only thing that can put out the fire in P3 and P4
Vezax - The boss' gimmick was a complete lack of regen that left you two options: Kill him fast or use the saronite pools to get mana back. Hard mode required you to do neither, along with killing an add that spawned after 4 minutes and had a raid-wide, increasing damage AoE pulse.
Yogg - Full hard mode was virtually impossible, requiring unbelievably high AoE damage, perfect control of sanity by every single raider, insanely well-geared tanks and healers, and perfect coordination by five different players in P3 to avoid healing all the UNKILLABLE ADDS THAT KEEP SPAWNING and one-shotting basically your entire raid
Now, compare those mechanics to ToC hard modes
Beasts - More health, more damage, next phase starts whether previous boss is dead or not, no speed buff on Icehowl
Jaraxxus - More health, more damage, have to actually kill portals and volcanoes now
Faction Champs - More health, more damage
Twins - More health, more damage, more orbs, stronger shield, bigger heal if you miss the shield
Anub - More health, more damage, 2 more adds, only 6 ice patches, adds keep spawning in P3
The only boss whose hard mode was significantly different was Anub, and it never felt more epic, just like it had added difficulty just to be difficult
Icecrown - More health and More damage are just givens for every fight
Marrowgar - Spikes during bone storm
Deathwhisper - This fight really feels epic. The adds come much faster and her health is such that they can't be handled normally but must be clumped on the boss and cleaved down, making the whole fight feel hectic and dangerous, plus she is not tauntable in P2
Lootship - Oh snap, the ropckets knock you back and you might fall off the ship and...be ported back up safely.
Saurfang - blood power gain increased dramatically, making healing of the marks very intense and high DPS a necessity
Festergut - Putricide throws snot at you
Rotface - Vile gas means ranged have to spread out
Putricide - a disease bounces around and must be controlled carefully or it one shots people, ther is no tear gas, instead two oozes spawn at phase changes and the raid gets debuffs where they can only damage one color of ooze
Council - a damaging debuff stacks whenever you move on a very high movememnt fight
Blood Queen - AoE damage goes up as the fight gets longer
Dreamwalker - ...?
Sindragosa - Unchained magic causes and AoE explosion instead of single target, there is one extra ice tomb and the explosions during the air phase do enough damage to one shot people
LK - Valks drop people at 50% but stay around smiting raiders until they are killed by ranged, Vile spirits have too much health to kill reliably and must be soaked by someone with immunity, the entire raid goes to the frostmourne room and has to survive instead of just one guy
LDW, Saurfang, Putricide, and LK are the only fights that feel like a "Heroic mode" instead of just a "Hard mode"
I for one really hope Blizzard goes back to the Ulduar model for Cataclysm raids.
Again, great post Squeek, really nailed it.