4/15/2023 0 Comments Mimiron big red button![]() Hodir’s was claustrophobic and cold, Freya’s was tangled and lush, Thorim’s was austere and functional and Mimiron’s was utterly, utterly nuts. Then there were the four Keeper bosses, broadly themed around Life (earth), Lightning (air), Frost (water) and Invention (fire, oh God, the FIRE), each with their own lovingly-crafted and totally distinctive arenas. Moving deeper in, the hall patrolled by Auriaya was amazingly light, colourful, ethereal, foreboding and awesome-looking for a place meant to be a prison: The area where Ignis the furnace master was placed was so pretty I actually used a kill shot as my desktop background for a while: I admit it wasn’t that impressive when you stepped in and found a glorified car park surrounded by a purple shell, but once you busted out of that into the swarms of dwarves, golems, giants, tanks, towers and whatnot the sense of scale and of really being involved in a massive coordinated assault was astonishing. Rather, Ulduar managed to get a whole bunch of really clever and fun design elements to converge in one place. ![]() But Ulduar wasn’t just about hard modes, even though that seems to be the big lesson that was taken from it. The big exception to this simple and somewhat repetitive normal/hard division was found in Ulduar, the sophomore raid of this expansion and the place where the idea of raiding “hard modes” were really explored and brought to maturity. For some of us, this seems to lead to a situation where normal mode is a snorefest and hard mode feels equivalent to a sort of vicarious flagellation of the virtual self. My argument was that, with the way raid instances were staggered in WotLK, what this did was create a situation where you had to do a raid on difficulty level 1 and then, when you were finished, do exactly the same fights in almost exactly the same way (with some minor exceptions) at difficulty level 2. ![]() In yesterday’s post I ambled vaguely around the idea of binary difficulty settings as they were translated from TBC 5-man instances to WotLK raids.
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