So the reason behind buffing gear?

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
1

First off, I am ill informed about the current state of the game.

I started playing the game again a few weeks back after skipping all of WotLK untill ToTC was gonna be announced.
Now coming back, it seems as if Blizzard has managed to screw up the dead simple task of regurgitating old content, and make no changes to them. Or am I wrong?

WotLK was easy, and always has been. Even fifteen years ago this was so. WotLK marked the point where Blizzard wanted to have everyone involved in raiding, and raids were accustomed to be like that.
This led to the undertunement of Naxxramas, which disappointed many hardcore raiders, and the promise of Ulduar, which would fix it. But that didn’t really happen. Ulduar didn’t fix the problem and the result was a deflux of raiders who wanted at least some challenge.

You would guess that if Blizzard made any change, they would have made Naxx and Ulduar more difficult this time around. But from what I understood, they didn’t and instead increased the item levels dropped in Ulduar by 8 levels? Why did they do that? This is the biggest part I don’t understand. WHY? Why make it -even- easier than 15 years ago when the easyness of the raids was considered a problem and not a virtue, even then?

I just don’t see it.

2

I didn’t play much of original Wrath. However from what I understand Ulduar had a whole sequence of nerfs, which weren’t replicated in classic other than seemingly impossible fights such as the intial XT-002 hard mode.

So generally Ulduar is harder than the original release (the first few weeks excluded).

In terms of the gear boost, Blizzard felt that players stopped running Ulduar (a very popular raid tier) when TotGC came out (a very unpopular raid tier), so boosted Ulduar gear to keep it relevant into the next phase.

I can’t say if Blizzards plan worked or not.

Edit: Many guilds may have skipped it due to the lack of additonal gear, but even by the end of phase 2 far less than 50% of guilds downed Yogg 0.

3

When Ulduar originally came out in Wrath the encounters were designed to be less punishing but far more organic, if your raid wanted to try hard modes (which were actually really hard) you could attempt to do so, if you didn’t you could just do them on normal mode. If you wanted to do hard content Ulduar was the place to be, at least until they released TogC which was a loot pinata and resulted in Ulduar becoming pointless to raid.

I still think the fight design in Ulduar is far more interesting than anything in TogC, except maybe Anub’arak?

As the person before me mentioned Ulduar had a entire sequence of nerfs in original Wrath, because the hardmodes as their names may imply were really hard. Less than 3% of the playerbase that managed to get to Algalon could kill it, let that sink in for a moment.

Those nerfs were not copied over to Classic, there were some nerfs, but nothing compared to the sequence of nerfs Ulduar got during Wrath’s original life cycle. The nerfs to Ulduar in WoTLK Classic came when TogC went live, and the reason why the ilvl in Ulduar was bumped up was to keep the raid relevant through TocG’s patch cycle.

This is because everyone left Ulduar to rot when TogC came out, because it was essentially free gear with a gigantic ilvl uplift. Ulduar is however still very relevant and can be hard for PuGs to clear, especially on 10m Algalon can be very unforgiving.

4

After 6 months of Ulduar I cannot wait to never return in that place its such a bad raid design with random timers on bosses abilities,hardmode you need to wait 5 minutes for and algabon randomly oneshoting full bis tanks sometimes this place doesn’t make any sense. I missed it in og wrath and this time around I realized I didn’t miss much but gotta do it for the buffed gear :slight_smile: and no nm/hc trinkets stack from toc :slight_smile:

2 Likes
5

Let me get this strait you skipped more than half of the Wrath allready and are making assumptions on the altered content, that was never available in current form and tuning neither on OG Wrath nor on private servers to begin with? And what did you expected, mythic difficulty of modern raids?

Wrath Classic phase 2 Ulduar HM bosses were interesting something on level of pre-nerf Kael’Thas in TK and Lady Vashj in SSC in TBCC, even Sunwell was more strait forward, exept for KJ that required some gear and attention to the encounter.

Now the difficulty of Ulduar in first few months of Phase 2 was perfect, except for XT-deconstructor, that was a bit overtuned yet still killed by the strongest raids. And no you aren’t fighting in original tuning of the raid, most of these are pre nerf so 8 ilvl higher gear didn’t made the raid itself easier from the get go. That in fact created most interesting progression race in WoW Classic so far.

The true reason game is in the state like this is because for some guilds Ulduar HM was a though take and the item drop model when you get 1 252 ilvl item and the rest 3 are disenchanted, starting from third month of phase 2, didn’t helped to keep more casual guilds together. They broke apart, loosing their best players to stronger guilds, with the rest hoping for some easier catch ups in normal difficulty raids in phases 3 or 4 probably.

So no, for a competitive guild Ulduar was a good raid tier and the difficulty of hardmode/heroic raids are just in perfect spot for a 13yo raiding content with some minor twists added to keep the interest.

6

Wait, did someone actually kill prenerf XT 25? I remember checking logs and saw no guild killing him.

7

My bad, the 1st kill was indeed the same day as hot fix on 1st of February, not the day before that.

1 Like
8

I am not talking about Heroic Modes here, I might misremember but I believe that Heroic Modes only started to take place in ICC, maybe also in TOTGC, but then not from the start.

Ulduar had hardmodes, for achievements. But outside of that, it was an easy raid. There were no Heroic modes. So what happened here: was Ulduar released more difficult than the original time around, or did they just come with heroic modes right away, and is it those that were really hard?

9

Ulduar has hard modes which can be activated on an individual fight basis. Some have more than two difficulties like Iron Council & Yogg-saron. As well as achievements the hard modes award better loot. Functionally hard modes are not that different from heroic mode, except you have more choice in which ones to activate.

The vast majority of bis loot comes from 10 or 25-man hard modes, not that much from normal (1 piece of bis for me came from normal). Normal fights are pretty easy.

Several bosses have no hard modes- Ignis, Razorscale, Kologarn, & Auriaya, these are all very easy fights. Flame Leviathan, XT-002, Thorim, Vezax & a couple of the Yogg Saron hard modes are fairly easy.

Freya hard mode is a bit RNG but of medium difficulty. Hodir, at least at first, is difficult due to needing specific classes.

Assembly of Iron is hard needing a lot of dps plus can be RNG dependant. Mimiron & the harder Yogg fights need good raid co-ordination, difficult fights but not that class/gear dependent.

Algalon only has a normal mode & can be very difficult due to his tendency to one shot tanks (especially non-pally tanks). His 10 man mode is easily the hardest fight of the expansion so far.

After week 1, Thorim was the most downed hardmode with 22% of guilds who downed him doing the hardmode. No guilds got XT-002 hardmode which had to be nerfed. 3% of guilds who downed Hodir did the hardmode. 42 Guilds downed Algalon, compared to 7655 who killed XT normal (the most killed boss).

Overall Ulduar was the hardest raid tier so far (maybe comparable to Sunwell). Personally I didn’t enjoy it too much, the difficulty of the fights was all over the place, it’s a really long raid, & some of the fights seemed very RNG/class setup dependent (there’s a reason why there is x3 as many Pally tanks as all the others combined).

10

Wait, how could XT be the most killed boss when you had to go through FL to get to him?

11

Wierd that algalon doesnt oneshot our tanks?

12

Because hes really easy once they nerfed the HP on him.

13

But you need to kill FL to get to XT, so the number of kills of FL has to be at least equal to XT.

14

But you dont need to kill FL on Hardmode.

15

That does not really matter. Neezer’s post says “the most killed boss”, not “the most killed hardmode”, no?

16

He was talking about hardmodes.

17

Its not an often occurrence but its happened a few times 1,2 sec =5,5 pally gone but it prob his mistake idk

18

You’re logic is a bit flawed.

Naxx was easy and lasted forever. Ulduar was hard and was “cut short”.

Naxx was popular and lots of people raided it while Ulduar, while popular and remembered fondly, killed more guilds than anything since Sunwell or AQ40. It was a raid for hardcore raiders and it pushed the casual (and majority) of players away from raiding. ToC brought them back.

Ulduar Hard Modes are still harder than ToC HC. I know this because mimi HM has kicked my guilds butt way longer than ToC - we’re already 5/5 HM and it wasn’t even close to the difficulty of Ulduar hard modes.

ToC still drops better iLVL gear that anything in Ulduar but only on the top difficulty. In OG Wrath, normal ToC made Ulduar pointless. This isn’t the case now.

Bosses like Hodir HM and Mimiron where still under 50% completion multiple months into the tier. It feels right that BiS items still drop from these encounters, given Ulduar is un-nerfed and “at release” difficulty.

You remember wrath as easy, and a good chunk of it was. but Ulduar wasn’t.

19

They buffed the gear to make Ulduar feel like a more rewarding jump from T7 and to make Ulduar last through T9 and still be relevant. People are still doing skip runs in Ulduar for the 252 pieces so it has been somewhat a success.

The only issue I had with it was they left T9 untouched and so you entered T9 with enough gear to completely trivialise the entire content patch, even in a reasonably average guild. Infact if ICC came out today people would also demolish it, because of those Ulduar items.

20

It is very possible that I misremember, but I think the whole hard-mode thing was not implemented from the start and if it was, then it didn’t drop improved loot.
So we just didn’t do any hardmodes.

But, I could be wrong. It’s been a while.