The View From Down Here

Karazduar

It doesn’t seem like a week has passed since our first foray into Ulduar, but it very nearly has. So far, I’ve seen five bosses and beaten four of them. Ignis was the only one that defeated us, though to be fair, we didn’t spend very long on him at all. So, what are my thoughts on the instance as a whole, rather on any of the bosses?

It’s all very Karazhan. And for all the bitching, and the moaning that I made about the place after seeing it week in, week out for over a year, it was still a fantastically designed instance, far more than any of the other raids in the Burning Crusade, some of which seemed to have no story at all (Zul’Aman) and some of which just didn’t seem as epic as they could have (Shade of Akama in particular).

No, there’s a polish there that seems to have been lacking in my raiding for a while, and I like it. The difficulty level is maybe pitched just a little on the wrong side of “easy” for some of the regular modes, but not so much that I’m overly complaining.

Doing Kara before patch 2.1 felt a lot like doing Ulduar does now; there’s a dead easy boss first up (Attumen / Flame Leviathan), followed by a set of harder bosses only some of which need to be defeated to progress. The trash is a threat -we even wiped more times on Assembly of Iron trash than we did on the Assembly themselves (so, yes, I think they’re probably too easy).

I only worry if the rate at which Ulduar gets easier week-on-week is the same as Kara. Hopefully Hard Mode can put paid to that.