Please bring back whoever designed Ulduar

#1 - Jan. 26, 2012, 12:05 a.m.

** This thread is capped and the second thread can be found here http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3967588043?page=1 **

Or if they are still working at Blizzard, make them in charge of raid design again please.

I am steadily getting burnt out by the same ol' same ol' of the raiding design that started with the atrocity which was ToC.

Normal 10-man -> Flip a switch -> Heroic 10-man

Normal 25-man -> Flip a switch -> Heroic 25-man

There has nothing been quite like the, "OMG!" moment when you pushed that big red button in Mim's room. Or when everyone in the raid blew all of their CDs to get XT's heart down only to see him regain full health and start wailing on the tank even harder.

I don't know how to explain it, but there was more depth with the hardmodes in Ulduar. Whether it was just a DPS race, or having to deal with a slew of new mechanics like Freya, I can say that I have never enjoyed a raiding as much as I did than when I did Ulduar and I was very sad when ToC came out as a tier raid.

Can we please remove the "switch" for hardmodes please? Can we have more of a variety of drops rather than three pieces of the same gear with slightly different colors and some green lettering? Can we please get Ulduar 2.0? *puppydogeyes*

Thank you~

Kaivax

Community Manager

#124 - Jan. 26, 2012, 8:11 p.m.

What a coincidence! We happened to talk about raid design and results with Ghostcrawler and Mumper yesterday, and everyone looked back fondly on Ulduar, among others.

Yes, the same designers and artists who worked on Ulduar are still working on raids.

Here's the thing -- Ulduar is an example of a raid where lots of players got to enjoy the first few bosses, and very few players ever saw the last few. Yogg Saron and Algalon were among the least-killed bosses ever, and not because they were exceedingly difficult. Rather, clearing the dungeon all the way to Yogg took up a big chunk of a raiding week (and you only had an hour to kill Algalon), and the ability to extend raid lockouts came later in 3.2.0 (but extending raid lockouts means getting less loot overall). Raid Finder partially resolves the length-of-raid problem, so we can consider designing longer raids, but that's not always an easy call. Long raids mean longer development time, and while some players might be willing to wait, we understand why others might get impatient.

Of course, having multiple raids in a tier (like the combination of Bastion of Twilight and Blackwing Descent) has the advantage of giving players different environments to play in while potentially making scheduling and logistics easier.

Pushing a big red button for Mimiron was very cool, and again is fondly remembered. We have created something like 40 raid bosses since the creation of those encounters however, and we cant help but think that it would start to feel really gimmicky and forced if every raid encounter had its difficulty set by pushing a button, (or not killing adds, or changing the order you kill the bosses, or the other mechanics we used in Ulduar). We think Mimiron would feel less special if there were six more bosses in the game with big red buttons, and we’re just not sure the design space is there to have a near infinite variety of means by which players launch a heroic mode in game.

Nonetheless, because there are so many requests for those style mechanics, we are considering doing a few bosses with optional modes (in the same way Mimiron, Freya or Sartharion had them) in Mists of Pandaria.