Insights into Ulduar

In reading through MMO Champion's summary of blue posts, I've picked up on some interesting topics about Ulduar.

On the new raiding model:

"Your old model towards end game was a success, it brought you eleven million players."
"Most of whom never had a chance to finish a raid. They didn't get to see some of the best art in the game, hear the unique music or voice over, or in many cases even see the villain at the end of their quest line. From a production POV, instances are very expensive. It seems an odd choice to lavish all that attention on such a tiny percent of the player base.

At the same time, we know there are players who love a challenge and are willing to do almost anything to beat a raid-destroying boss provided they also have a shot at the best loot. They don't want the instances to be over too soon. They like banging their head against the wall.

And so hard modes were born. We tested the water a little with Obsidian Sanctum. We're going full bore with Ulduar." source

This to me solidifies what we can expect from Blizzard going forward. A new patch every 6 months or so, adding one new raid zone with hard modes. As they admit themselves, developing raid content is costly, so rather than provide us with multiple instances they'll reuse the content to keep the progression guilds busy.

I don't mind what Blizzard is doing to make raid content more accessible. I'm serious about my game, but I don't want to raid more than 3 times a week so it works out well for me. I do get bored with seeing the same instance over and over though. I wish they would resurrect some of the old world stuff and re-tune it for level 80s. It would be fun to go back and do that on occasion, but it isn't the same to go back and clear MC now as a level 80 when the mobs are level 60.

I did RFK on my shaman alt the other day as an example and it was fun! I haven't stepped foot in that instance in years, and it reminded me of the early days when I was leveling my first character.

On crowd control:

"However we stepped up the difficulty on the encounters too. There is no “just burn him down” boss like Noth. The trash will require crowd control on some pulls." source

I'm so excited to see that they are putting crowd control back in the game. There is a lot of good stuff in this same thread, as Ghostcrawler goes on to talk about how dps won't be getting away with "standing in the fires" in this raid. If they are putting back actual strategy in the game, where we will have to coordinate pulls and think about what we are doing, this is going to be exciting stuff!

On mana regeneration (from the same thread):

"In Ulduar, you should run out of mana if...

1) You don't have enough gear for the instance.
2) You aren't playing the encounter well enough.

If you have good enough gear and good enough skill and aren't standing in fires and are kiting adds correctly and doing all the right things, then you aren't designed to run OOM."

This sets my mind at ease in regards to all the upset over the mana regeneration changes. It is relevant to my post from yesterday, if people don't spam heals mindlessly and watch what they are doing they shouldn't have an issue.

I understand the reason to nerf regen now, it was a way to force people to step up to the plate and work together in raids. It was to take the sloppiness out that has become the norm in Naxx. I doubt there will be any PUG groups going into Ulduar, because you won't be able to get away with it. At least not until you already have some geared and experienced people, at which point there wouldn't be a need for the PUG anyway unless you were running some alts through.

And the other reason to get really pumped about Ulduar - it is going to be cool looking! No more boring looking floating ziggurat filed with green sludge and slimes.

"Ulduar is new content. Naxxramas was updated, but only to some extent. We never really got to see in the LK raids just what the dungeon artists, creature artists and encounter designers are now capable of . You'll see it in Ulduar and it's pretty amazing." source