Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Return to Raiding, Ulduar

I took a break from raiding short after my guilds first KT kill and 2 drake Sarth kill, which was roughly a week after release. After raiding SSC/TK/BT week after week(guild far apart before I could do much of SWP but I got to go with some other guilds once or twice)the current WotLK raids were not too interesting. An argument can be made that Blizzard finally perfected the concept of an entry-level raid, and I totally understand that many casual raiders liked the fact that they could see loot fairly easily and not bang their heads too much, but unfortunately I like banging my head against the wall to a degree.

So I was pretty excited to come back to Ulduar on the first week to find that the encounters were pretty enjoyable. By no means were they insanely difficult, but they required some decent coordination and straight up dps. Fights like Freya and Mimiron required people to pay attention and you couldn't accidentally dps your way to a boss kill.

And then they nerfed everything - even TRASH! - barely weeks after the gates of Ulduar were opened.

I do not understand Blizzard's insistence to make everything accessible. My guild killed most of the bosses early on, before the nerfs, and I thought the normal mode fights were tuned fairly well. Auriaya required some sort of a plan to pull, and required tanks to pick up stuff fast, Freya required people to pay attention and switch targets (OMG there's something new) and each wave was finished off right before the next came out if we were dpsing hard enough -- the transitions felt right. Now the fights are a joke.

Blizz, is there something fundamentally wrong with having to work on killing a boss?