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.