Sounds like a good change, and although I've yet to step into ICC I would imagine it would be nice to use this since not all bosses come in a single lineup like ToC.

I hope there's more to this than just talking to some random NPC that's standing right outside boss rooms. Something that actually fits with the fights.

I have to admit, I'm more of a fan of the Ulduar hard mode system. The tricks that you had to do in order to activate them were based in the reality of the game itself rather than the interface. How fun is it going to be to click on Arthas and toggle him from normal to heroic and back? How dangerous is he going to feel when you're raid leader has that kind of power over him right before you face off against him?

The Ulduar system also allowed a gradual movement into a lot of the hardmode like with the towers in FL or the keepers on Freya.

Nice

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I hope there's more to this than just talking to some random NPC that's standing right outside boss rooms. Something that actually fits with the fights.

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Did you even read the first post? It's an interface toggle.

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I have to admit, I'm more of a fan of the Ulduar hard mode system. The tricks that you had to do in order to activate them were based in the reality of the game itself rather than the interface. How fun is it going to be to click on Arthas and toggle him from normal to heroic and back? How dangerous is he going to feel when you're raid leader has that kind of power over him right before you face off against him?

The Ulduar system also allowed a gradual movement into a lot of the hardmode like with the towers in FL or the keepers on Freya.

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I fully agree with this. Interface based switches break the immersion. Hard modes became a new interesting way of interacting with the raid environments, making them a lot more dynamic than the Naxxaramas/ToC "Just move forward and kill everything" philosophy.

With that said, I'd bet one of the reasons pushing toward this is to cut on the design encounter workload. Coming up with specific mechanics for each hard mode and balancing them must be a lot of work, whereas a simple UI switches is a whole lot simpler in design, and allows you to pump up the numbers and be done with it, if that's all you want.

Personally, I like that H ToC and reg ToC are different... that way, you quickly kill all the bosses on easy mode, then start on the hard bosses and spend the rest of your time doing that. If it's just one instance, then you have to try to figure out how long it will take to kill the bosses on easy to attempt the bosses on hard. If you kill them too fast, you've wasted raid time. Too slow, and you've lost out on loot.

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I fully agree with this. Interface based switches break the immersion. Hard modes became a new interesting way of interacting with the raid environments, making them a lot more dynamic than the Naxxaramas/ToC "Just move forward and kill everything" philosophy.

With that said, I'd bet one of the reasons pushing toward this is to cut on the design encounter workload. Coming up with specific mechanics for each hard mode and balancing them must be a lot of work, whereas a simple UI switches is a whole lot simpler in design, and allows you to pump up the numbers and be done with it, if that's all you want.

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SURPRISE...the heart ran out of health and XT is at full hits! Must be hard mode!

Look...if you press that red button over there--don't press it!!!--you get hard mode.

Where is hard mode on Razorscale?

What's that extra box over there next to Hodir? Oh wait, it disappeared, now we KNOW it's hard mode.

That isn't immersion. That was putting a non-obvious user interface for selecting hard mode into the game. And in the case of XT, it caused a kind of silly transition inside of the fight for those guilds that just barely had the dps to trigger it.

I agree that a UI-based trigger isn't immersive. But neither is a red button on a wall. Same difference.

Blizzard employees are so lazy.

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SURPRISE...the heart ran out of health and XT is at full hits! Must be hard mode!

Look...if you press that red button over there--don't press it!!!--you get hard mode.

Where is hard mode on Razorscale?

What's that extra box over there next to Hodir? Oh wait, it disappeared, now we KNOW it's hard mode.

That isn't immersion. That was putting a non-obvious user interface for selecting hard mode into the game. And in the case of XT, it caused a kind of silly transition inside of the fight for those guilds that just barely had the dps to trigger it.

I agree that a UI-based trigger isn't immersive. But neither is a red button on a wall. Same difference.

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On XT, it was adding another element to the fight itself. In Flame Leviathan it gaves you a few steps to gradually get to hard mode, etc.

Thanks for this. Nobody wants to run an instance 4 times/week/character

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I agree that a UI-based trigger isn't immersive. But neither is a red button on a wall. Same difference.

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Then why shouldn't we do everything through UI menus? Why bother have us clicking on object in the game worlds to interact with them? Talking to quest NPCs? What a bother! Just add an automatic laundry list of things to kill!

For the record, my best Ulduar memory came from the big red button. As we were sitting before Mimiron discussing strategy, our gnome rogue sneaked over to the back and hit it, catching us all unaware. We all died horribly in that fire. I almost went out of breath because of how hard I laughed. It was epic. It was memorable.

In-game triggers add context to hard modes. XT has his heart broken. Mimiron's room self-destruct sequence was activated. Freya's guardians are helping her. When you make me interact with the game world, as insignificant as that interaction might seem, it still draws me closer to that world. Each time you have me interacting with a context menu, it reminds me I'm on a computer.

Love it.

I've never forgotten that I'm at a computer. And even if I had, I'll happily take being 'reminded' that I'm playing a video game in exchange for not having to kill the same boss four times a week.

One practical question: Once you have "set" a boss to hard, can you "set" him back to easy if you can't kill him? Or is he in hard mode for the rest of the reset?

The Ulduar approach was more interesting, and therefore superior. The "special trigger" approach emphasizes what hardmodes should be about - new mechanics and extra raid coordination, as opposed to just pumping boss stats.

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I have to admit, I'm more of a fan of the Ulduar hard mode system. The tricks that you had to do in order to activate them were based in the reality of the game itself rather than the interface. How fun is it going to be to click on Arthas and toggle him from normal to heroic and back? How dangerous is he going to feel when you're raid leader has that kind of power over him right before you face off against him?

The Ulduar system also allowed a gradual movement into a lot of the hardmode like with the towers in FL or the keepers on Freya.

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This.

Switches should be in game in the playing area not a toggle in the interface.

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In the upcoming patch we are adding a new feature to the Icecrown raid instance that allows the raid leader to change the instance's difficulty setting on a boss per boss basis. The way the raid leader chooses to switch is the same as now, by right-clicking on the character portrait. The difficulty settings can be changed from inside Icecrown Citadel, with some restrictions. For example, you cannot change the difficulty in combat or during certain events specified by our design team. To enable the ability to change the raid difficulty to heroic, you must first defeat the Lich King on normal mode, as doing so unlocks the heroic version of this raid instance. There is no heroic version of trash; meaning changing the difficulty will only affect boss difficulty.

We chose this particular functionality because we didn't want to use the Trial of the Crusader method, and have four versions on a raid of this size. We felt the Ulduar method of having to know a certain trick to do on the boss was difficult to communicate and tied too heavily to achievements. We might eventually convert Trial of the Crusader over to this new system but Ulduar and Naxxramas will likely never change.

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As game designers, the goal is always to improve and streamline the player experience, if something can be implemented in the game, as opposed to making it an element of the UI, fantastic. If that can further enhance the experience and add bits of non-intrusive narrative into the gameplay, even better!

Ulduar and the lore surrounding it was probably the most interesting dungeon experience/lore that was not connected to events of previous Warcraft games. The dungeon felt epic, and the hard modes felt like there was a reason for them being tougher. Mimiron and Thorim in particular were genius hardmodes. The red switch was immersive, you were detonating Mimiron's room, it made sense that the fight would be harder if the room you were in was self-destructing.



But wait we know Blizzard's not big on bringing in narrative into WoW, despite their experience with storytelling in previous games, they avoid at all costs cut scenes at all and confine the interesting narrative almost exclusively to comics and novels, one of the explanations often offered is that they don't want to pull the player out of the experience, and this is a valid stance, other games have done this very well. Then of course Blizzard's design team should be seeking ways for players to create their own narrative, and to let the experience itself tell a story. They would never take a genius idea like hardmodes and simply turn them into a drop down menu.


Edit: In all seriousness though, I don't play this game for narrative, I wish I did, because the world is rich, but the presentation never will be. But I'd like to know if this was actually a scoping issue or not, that may help me decided whether or not I should loose all faith in the design team's ability to see good from bad. (Or at least whoever made the decision regarding hardmodes)

No insane Sunwell-like trash on heroic mode...I like it.