Ulduar Nerfed

I just got onto the blogsphere about this subject and it is raising mixed feelings in me. Nothing beats live testing by millions of players around the clock and it is inevidable that many things needed to be tweaked. However, the reason I was personally very excited over Ulduar was because it represented a step up from Naxxramas, as far as difficulty curve was. It was exciting for the very reason that it was suppose to be difficult.

This is my main grudge here. Seems Blizzard is nerfing Ulduar too much now and it is just becoming another Naxxramas, a farm instance for any uninitiated raiding guild, when it is suppose to represent finess and skill for those who clear it.

Please do not get me wrong, I applaude to the idea that raiding has become more accessible to people who have jobs, children, and life outside the game and who do not claim to represent the highest elite of gamers. This is a good thing because raiding is a natural part of a character's evolutionary process and everyone should be priviledged to experience it.

However, there should still be a line I think, from where on out the game actually gets harder, even for raiders. The difference in 10-man and 25-man versions makes sense. There is a really tangible shift when you move from one to the other, with many Naxx encounters becoming really hard on 25-man versions.

In Ulduar, I would expect the 10-man encounters be on the par with 25-man Naxx and the 25-man encounters to go beyond the hardest of what Naxx 25 has to offer. But now it seems this simple logic is becoming escewed and no one anymore knows what the difficulty curve is. The fact that most bosses also have what's called a Hard Mode only adds unnecessary complexity to it. We already had a mechanism for that in place pre-3.1.

This was the achievement system. To get an achievement to run heroic encounters in a more difficult manner or finishing a wing of Naxxramas with less than nine people already provided what we needed for gifted players to set themselves apart. Sounds to me that Blizzard is just trying too hard. All we really needed was another Naxx size raid instance, which Ulduar delivers beautifully, with an increased level of difficulty and better gear drops.

Let us hope Blizzard doesn't break by fixing what just doesn't need fixing.