Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

A Look At Future Raids: Ulduar

So the other day after I wrote my last post on the joys of being unguilded due to the "set your own difficulty" of WotLK's raids I saw some of the news from the blues about the patch 3.1 raid: Ulduar.

Ulduar will be on PTR in the future, but we're going to have tight controls in place on what can be tested at any given time. Ulduar will also not be up permanently like Naxxramas was in the WotLK Beta. If we have something to test, we'll make the zone and encounter available. If we don't, we'll disable the zone.

That being said, there's going to be a LOT of encounters to test in both 10 and 25 player modes. There will also be a whole lot of "hard modes" and achievements to test. We're shooting for most all of the encounters to have "hard modes" that allow raids to increase the challenge and reward level if they're up to it. We're pretty pleased with how Sartharion and his drakes worked, and we're going to expand on that idea extensively in Ulduar and future raids.

So it looks like the Obsidian Sanctum trend will continue. While the difficulty of the raid will go up, I expect it will not go up nearly as much as the hardcore would like. If comparing it to the school system, I think the hardcore see the current raids as Kindergarten/First Grade level and would prefer AP Calculus level raids. We won't see that.

I am overjoyed about this. Even on my server plenty of my friends on the top guilds complain about the lack of difficulty in the raids yet none of them have finished The Twilight Zone achievement. Apparently to them raids are only fun if you have to bang your head against the wall for two plus weeks to get a boss down. I like this "set your own difficulty" style of raiding because if you're running with a pug or lesser geared/skilled group, you can just go fight him normal but if you're using a solid top-of-their-game group you can push yourselves and get that hard version. Artificial difficulty is still difficulty in my eyes. Apparently a lot do not see it this way.

I am glad, however, that Blizzard is going to reward doing the harder difficulty. In the current tier, Obsidian Sanctum is the only raid that has a "hard mode". All of the other ones just give achievements. I would like it if for example if your guild succeeded in the Heigan dance every week without a single person taking damage, you would get an extra piece of loot off the boss. It looks like this will be the goal with Ulduar; a lot more reward for challenging yourself.

One last thing, I would like for people to get past the stigma of "10mans should be the easy version and 25man should be the hard versions". Blizzard stated many times that by making 10/25man versions of each raid it wasn't their plan to scale the difficulty differently between them. The intention was that no matter if you're in a small guild or a big guild, you can see the same raids at the same difficulty level as each other. 10mans just require less people. The difficulty of 25mans isn't in the encounters, it's in getting 25people together to run the raids and holding them accountable.

The flip side to this all is that often times the 10man fights end up having a little more challenge to them because with less people in the raid, there is less room for error. If one DPS dies to the Heigan dance in 25, it isn't a critical loss as there are 14-16 or so others. If one DPS screws up and dies in 10man, there are only 4 or so others so it has a much bigger impact.