You DARE trespass upon this hallowed ground?

I said in my last post that I would talk about the Lady Deathwhisper encounter on heroic mode. Well I’m also going to talk about the gunship battle encounter, simply because it doesn’t deserve a post on its own, you’ll see why in a moment.

First of I just want to ask you guys a question: Am I the only one who feel like WotLK is full of unused potential? I mean they have all of these great new resources available which they didn’t have in TBC or vanilla, yet they don’t even use them to even a fracture of their full extent.

Phased content and hardmodes are perhaps the two biggest features in WoW in my opinion and the ones that has been the most game-changing. I’ve always felt like the phased content was not used properly in WotLK, but it seems like they will get it right in Cataclysm, at least I hope so.

The hardmodes however is something I simply cannot understand, the only explanation I have is Blizzard being utterly lazy about it. When Ulduar first came out, the hardmodes were brilliant. Mimiron, Freya, Thorim, Yog’Saron, there was so many cool hardmodes that really changed the battles completely and they were all different in terms of how they were activated and executed.

Now that my guild’s been progressing into the Icecrown hardmodes, I’ve been getting a good look on the four first bosses.

In my last post I talked about Lord Marrowgar, and while the encounter wasn’t the best I’ve experienced, it sure was hard as hell. However, when we engaged Lady Deathwhisper, I was simply shocked to find at that she wasn’t all that difficult. In fact, we only had a few wipes due to people one-shotting each other while mind controlled. After a few attempts we downed her with relative ease and I was simply scratching my head wondering if we were getting better, or the encounters getting easier.

The big shock of the night came when we engaged the gunship battle. It started of with a lot of confusion since none of us could find any proper tactics other than lose forum posts and rumors. We couldn’t understand why tankspot hadn’t uploaded a video about this as they had with all the other hardmodes.

The answer was simple, the battle had hardly changed. In fact, it was so similar that if someone were to accidentally enable heroic mode in a pug, I believe no one would have felt the difference. The only change to this battle is a slight increase in the opposite ships hit points, a small damage buff to Muradin, and a 7 yard knock-back effect to people who gets hit by the mortars, and since people are now being teleported back up on the ship if they fall down, this is hardly a difference maker at all. When we downed this encounter at the first try with zero deaths I was really starting to wonder if this was a joke or not.

The gunship battle in itself is a genius idea, and this comes from someone who is generally opposed to vehicle-fights. I love the fact that you have to use jump-packs to board the other ship, and it really gives me a “Pirates of the Caribbean” sort of feeling when Saurfang yells “all hands on deck!”

This encounter has so much unused potential. With the mechanics implemented into the game Blizzard could have pulled something really epic here. How about moving to the enemy ships lower deck and plant bombs in their engines? How about aiming at strategic points to deal more damage with the cannons?

I can understand why they wanted the easy-mode to be bearable and not so chaotic, but they could have done more work on the hardmode. A 7 yard knockback, that’s it? How much time do you think they put into this? It makes me wonder about what the Blizzard design team is actually spending their time on.

Now, there certainly has been a lot of ranting and it may get tiresome to read. I will finish this post by confirming that Saurfang did indeed stomp us into the ground. We also decided to sneak past him on normal mode to experience the Rotface encounter on heroic mode and that was pretty much like running into a brick wall as well, so I still have a lot of faith in the hardmodes to come. I do however; wish that they would have taken more time with the lower spire.

Icecrown Hardmodes, good or bad?

My guild finally managed to beat Lich King on 10-man normal difficulty and thus allowing us to progress into the 10-man heroic version. In a single night we managed to get to Saurfang and I’m not sure if I’m pleased or not.

As far as difficulty goes, I can’t say I have much to complain about. I like my content difficult, and the Icecrown hardmodes offered much in that department.

I was happy that they didn’t decide to make the heroic version of ICC a separate instance. They did that with ToTC and it was an absolute nightmare for me. Farming an instance in four different ways burns you out quicker than a match-stick. However I was disappointed that the trash remained the same. I would really like to see some difficult trash that keeps the raid on their toes, trash that demands CC in order to get through.

Marrowgar literally tore us apart and we did not at all expect him to be that difficult. The amount of damage he deals out to the raid is huge and very unpredictable and I found the encounter to be more based on luck than actual skill.

The problem I have with this encounter is that it can go wrong, and when it goes wrong there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. If you get placed in a bone spike during bone storm and he decides to do a little dance on top of your head then there is no amount of healing that can save you, you will die unless someone has life-saving cooldowns. Difficulty is good, random elements which you do not have control of and cannot prevent is not good, it makes for a frustrating encounter and is in my opinion poor design on the part of Blizzard.

Also, according to Blizzard, hardmodes were supposed to have “elements that make them different”. I can hardly say that placing bone spikes during bone storm is a very big difference-maker. If you compare this to the first hardmodes when Ulduar was released, it seems like Blizzard are getting lazy. Making a boss hit harder and have more health is not my idea of a different encounter. Since we only have one instance per tier, can’t they at least take their time to make the hardmodes different? They obviously know how to, Yog’Saron and the four keepers was completely genius.

We eventually downed Marrowgar. We came to the conclusion that the raid took less damage with two healers then three, because getting people of out bone spikes were crucial. I do feel like it was mostly luck that made us down him, and I can’t say I liked the encounter much. What I did like was the fact that I haven’t been healing that hard since fighting High Warlord Najentus in Black Temple and that definitely was refreshing.

I will save the other bosses for later segments, as I don’t want each one to be extremely long. For the next segment I will talk about the Lady Deathwhisper encounter.

Introduction!

Hello there! Let me start this off by introducing myself. I’m a 21 year old guy who’s been playing WoW since shortly after launch. I’m a pretty average guy with geeky interests such as D&D, Warhammer and other fantasy-related things. In short, I’m a gamer, and I spend many hours each day in front of the computer.

This blog will be a World of Warcraft related blog with focus on PvE raiding. The reason I want to write a blog like this is because I have been reading such blogs for many years and also listened to podcasts attached to WoW. I find myself sitting on lots of opinions and I thought writing a WoW related blog myself would be a nice thing to do. If I can get some people to read and comment on it was well that would be swell.

I’ve raided for over 4 years, from first entering Onyxia’s Lair to raiding Icecrown hardmodes today. I have throughout this entire time been playing the very same character, an undead priest named Hargrim. I’ve always been a healer, I can’t really explain why, but it’s just the path I’ve taken.

Now I won’t take up too much more time talking about me, but before starting I just wanted to say that this is a blog about my opinions, I’m not stating facts, I’m simply talking about things from my perspective. If you don’t agree with me, that’s completely fine.

I hope you will enjoy this blog as much as I will enjoy writing it. Any comments, good or bad, are always appreciated. Trolls are welcome to flame; I find it only humorous ;)