Calming my Fellow Hardcores
Recently, a lot of my fellow hardcore raiders have been moaning and groaning over the fact that constant hotfixes and minor patches have done nothing but make the Ulduar bosses easier. It’s a long running joke now in my guild to try and anticipate the ways Blizzard will make the boss we just spent an entire night to get server first kill on will be nerfed when John Q. Casual comes in a week from now and can’t grasp the mechanics.
I am honestly torn on this. I mean on our server, despite the nerfs, we are still two bosses ahead of the 3 or 4 guilds all on Mimiron. We clear the instance quicker each week easier than the last and we can always say that we did stuff like kill Razorscale and XT-002 pre-nerf. When we finally get Yogg’Saron down in my mind at least we are at the mid point of the instance. Ulduar comes with a new fun feature of these hard modes, a few we have tried in 10-man,a nd we are going to do next week as our lead on progression seems rather stable at the moment.
Zarhym in this post made a decent point on their philosophy. The reason the bosses were harder when we first entered is a final form of tuning. As they see the percentage of guilds who get these bosses over time they tune accordingly to get the amount of people with the right gear level. So the boss we wiped on ten times to learn wasn’t the intended end result, the faceroll we did after is. A lot of people are up in arms over this, but I will try and soothe the tempers of my hardcore brothers and occasional sisters.
When you kill Yogg’Saron, you are at the mid-point of Ulduar progression. The next week you are on Flame Leviathan, ramping up the towers (you can do one or two before killing Yogg, but 3 or 4 are no jokes). You then are going to be on Hard Mode XT-002, Iron Council, Kologarn, etc. Until you hit the No Watcher Yogg’Saron and you win the title (at least i hope so in my case). These hard mode bosses have been getting BUFFED since the patch and even Ensidia has claimed that a few of them are actually impossible. This is the fodder the Hardcore raiders are looking for. This is where Mimiron has doomfire, and Hodir required 12,000 dps to kill. This is where Freya has a root, healing ability, and Ignis-style interrupt on top of doing nearly triple damage and has 50% more life. This is where raiders like me who miss the sheer brutality of mechanics sunwell had and a true test of raiding character. This also allows for the casuals (take that in whatever connotations you want) to see the boss, to experience some of their mechanics and get some decent loot to progress on to probably Tier 9 normal modes.
But that’s not all…
We were given a special celestial parting gift by Blizzard as well as a reward for our hard mode uberness. ALGALON, the boss you can only access by doing the hard modes and a true test of skill instead of tenacity as he has the 1 hour per week window to kill him. He’s going to be rough, hard and nasty and I think if anything Blizzard has finally found a way to keep both challenged and gave us Hardcores something amazing we never got to have in Tier 7.
If this is the direction Blizzard wants to go I’m very glad. The hardmode concept was a 100% win in my mind and will really separate the men from the boys in the hardcore raiding community. I can’t wait to kill Yogg’Saron and get right onto the stage two made just for us.
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