Not only was Ulduar's hard mode trigger system great, the hard modes themselves made the fight feel completely different. FL+4 felt completely different from normal mode, same with Freya, Yogg-Saron. There were some boring ones like Hodir, but overall Ulduar was just a mass of awesome. The best raid in WotLK by far.

I agree, Ulduar was the ultimate in raiding. It had everything: lore, mechanics, scenery. It was engaging and exciting and the bosses were all unique and fit in well with what was going on. There was never a sense of, "Oh, here's *another* dragon to fight."

What about Razorscale? I guess she was Thorim's mount, but that boss still had a fair degree of dragun-derp. :/

Razorscale had a breath attack, but lacked the tail whip. Also, required a new and interesting mechanic to bring her to the ground, as well as a tank swap/kite mechanic.

Unlike Sindragosa, you couldn't just say "Normal dragon rules apply" for Razorscale.

Ulduar was a great raid, but I couldn't call it the greatest raid in World of Warcraft. Kara still tugs at my heart strings in a special way no other raid has been able to do. I learnt everything I know about raiding from Kara, and I got my first ever piece of tier gear from Curator. The fond memories of Kara probably means I'm not being objective, but Kara's environment, bosses, variety to the fights. Greatest raid ever :)

Yep,

Ulduar was the best method for hardmodes.
It was varied, from simple dps race like hodir, to complex like firefighter, to mechanic changing like vezax. With the end boss having a scalable difficulty for the really uber to stoke their epeen on, and a hc mode only boss as a kind of reward for defeating the other hardmodes.

In fact, uld is pretty much the definitive raid model imo, more like this one pls, everything since has been pants.

Agree 100%

Razorscale is an armored version of Veranus, who is a proto-drake. I could be wrong but I'm fairly confident in saying that proto-drakes are not the same as dragons. So "dragon-durp" would not apply since she wasn't a dragon. Also, that fight was really fun, the only slightly annoying thing about her was the achievement "Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare."

Also, Ulduar is awesome. Not was awesome, is awesome. Whoever designed that raid needs a raise and also needs to be paid to do more raids.

I'm also in the Ulduar camp. Not only was the really the first raid instance that *really* made me look around in awe since Molten Core (remember the first time you actually got Executus down and walked into Rag's room and looked around?) but the triggers were different for every fight and required the raid to do/not do something.

Plus, in some ways it was a built-in gear check - especially in what seems to be one of everyone's favorite examples in this thread, XT. If you couldn't kill the heart fast enough, it didn't matter and if you could, there was a good chance (if you could do the spark dance), that you could kill him with the enrage. Plus it made things a bit more exciting as your raid got closer to being able to kill the heart "on accident" and having to yell on Vent to everyone to stop DPS on the heart.

Agreed, I loved how engaging Ulduar's method of activating hard modes was. It made you WANT to do hard modes, I mean, look at Mimeron for example, a big red button with a sign saying do not push? who DOESN'T want to push that!? and XT, i mean, knowing your raid had the dps to break this guys heart made you (me at least) want to do hard mode on him. It also gave a sort of explanation on why this guy suddenly does a bunch of stuff that he doesn't do on normal mode.

"It was just such an engaging method for activating the hardmode fights, though I do believe a few were too easy to accidentally stumble onto, whether you meant to or not."

One of Blizzard's stated reasons for leaving the "Trigger Method" behind is that, as you mention, sometimes it was difficult to know what triggered the hard mode. They worry that will be too rough on the average raider.

I don't think that's a real issue. The "average" raider shouldn't even be worrying about hard modes. The raiders that are going after hard modes are gonna be able to figure out the Triggers just fine. If they can't, they're probably gonna wipe anyway!