Combining heroic and normal lockouts for ToC to make people “not feel obligated to raid as much” is silly because there’s zero commitment required to complete it. It’s six bosses with (nominally) zero trash and it’s a complete joke on normal mode; even the most braindead pugs from over a decade ago would clear it in an hour or less. Removing normal mode from the itinerary won’t make people raid heroic mode for an hour a week and then call it good, it will just make people feel obligated to head back to Ulduar for chase items instead.
This is fine, I really enjoy Ulduar and don’t mind having the opportunity to spend more time there, but the fact of the matter is that the only people actually affected by this (people who are doing ToC hardmodes) will actually have longer, harder time of things, and let’s not pretend otherwise. People progressing hardmodes will have reduced access to loot to help get through them (for example, if you’re working on Anub hardmode, that’s 5 bosses a week worth of ilvl 245 gear you’re not getting), and people farming hardmodes will be going back to farm Ulduar after ToC.
Especially when you read their explanation as to why.
ToC was the first raid to have no trash. It’s quite possible that the people who complained about it didn’t like it, because it didn’t feel like the other raids, which felt a lot like dungeons. As an aside, I actually really liked ToC, but don’t really like Violet Hold.
Anyway, then they go on to explain:
But I mean, that exact same explanation of “providing a vibrant social ecosystem, for friendships to form and develop in.” applies to being able to do both Normal and Heroic. Heroic raiders may very well want to run Normal with PuGs for fun, and/or to build their off-spec or off-off-spec, and that provides exactly the same experience.
How many weeks of running Normal and Heroic are you really going to have? And what’s that going to mean (adding a second — or third raid night? Is that really a bad thing?).
Was it unpopular at the time because of the lockouts, or because people really liked Ulduar, and ToC was quite unimaginative in by contrast. 3 raid day weeks were pretty common then, too, until things were on farm. The 25-man guild I was in at the time was raiding Tue/Wed (with optional Mon once we had things on farm).
From what I remember, think we maybe ran Normal for 2 weeks, while doing Heroic progression… but it might not have even been that long, because I’m pretty sure either the first or second Monday, we just went and finished some achievements in Ulduar.
EDIT: Now that I think of it, I think we might have been stuck on Faction Champions for a bit? My memory isn’t nearly as good as it was 15 years ago!
Blizzard did a lot of experimenting with raid locks and hard modes in Wrath. ToC was the only one you could do the same size on multiple difficulties, so yeah i just don’t see an issue bringing it inline with everyone other raid.
Yeah, that’s a good point. If it’s literally only changing the one raid, and that just brings it inline with all the other raids, then it seems fine, I guess.
I don’t remember if the wolf mount drops in heroic only or on normal as well? And I don’t recall there being that many interesting achievements; at least not like the other raids, where you got cool titles and/or mounts.
EDIT:
Actually, I guess the issues that I could see are if guilds think they can start with Heroic, and end up getting hard stuck on the first boss in week one, they won’t be able to do Normal, because they’ll be locked to Heroic. That’d suck. It’d suck even worse if they happened to get locked on Heroic on accident!
Doesn’t really matter either way honestly, since they made the trinkets unique equip, gives more time to run the required Ulduar to get all your non-disc healers the mace. Probably have to run uld at least HALF of the toc phase for them.
We’ll see how they handle it, if they switch it to the ICC model you’ll be able to downgrade to normal from heroic but not upgrade. So in that case they would attempt heroic, get stuck then finish on normal.
pritty sure thats false. From my memory it was tied only to the heroic end wign bosses to spawn heroic LK but if you could do the end bosses you would do all the bosses heroic anyways so was a moot point.
Even if they do it that way, if you kill 4 bosses on heroic, that’s 4 bosses worth of ilvl 245 loot you’re not getting that week that you would have gotten in 2009. And if doing it like ICC ends up not being possible for whatever reason, then a lot of guilds will be put in the position of having to choose between potentially killing zero current bosses for the week (IIRC, heroic ToC locked on starting like ZA due to the tribute system) or full clearing normal.
