Really think they should have doubled the hard mode loot for each boss after ToC released. The value proposition for ToC vs Ulduar isn't even close, you get double the amount of relevant items for only a third of the time investment to clear.

For me, an inexperienced raid leader of a rather casual (but willing) guild of Czech countrymen, leading my group of friends to an eventual, hard won Algalon kill is something I'll never forget. Living my childhood dreams whils now being in the center of those scenarios has been a very fulfilling experience.

The only boss I didn't like was iron council. The boss delaying his rune and then casting a death rune immediately afterwards happened way too often.

Im so early UBRS is still endgame content

Ulduar was overall a great raid, but the high difficulty and certain encounter designs that had made progressing the raid fun also made farming it for months a huge pain. The increased item level of gear certainly helped, but certain bosses always required you to "try-hard" even after killing them 20 times, which was exhausting.

It was an experience it was basically Disney world in Wow. Lots to do, but man, going back because you bought the pass gets boring

I raid in an actual dad guild and Ulduar had the most satisfying progression BY FAR. The non-linearity and possibility of mixing up normal and hard modes at will elliminated the frustration of being stuck on that one boss (screw you, M'uru). We finally cleared Algalon mid-April and it felt amazing.

This is a raid that if you cleared it it was "super fun" and if you didn't clear it it was a slog. My problem with the raid was: 1. Only 1 loot per HM clear on 25 made it feel like shit to do all that work only to get a Holy pally piece of HM loot for the 35x. 2. Multiple bosses were just annoying on HM. Vesax takes 6 mins to start the HM, IC puts runes down at random times, XT sometimes spawns additional robot adds, Hodir is just a troll with whom it puts the storm cloud buff on, Freya requires too much precision on knock backs and Dsac timers. 3. Alg being locked behind Mim HM is such a troll when its easier than most other HMs.

A miss the old Willie video intros where it was, “Hello ladies and gentlemen. Willie here” and then there was the challenge of trying to find the bald headed gnome somewhere in the frame

When I did ulduar in a hardcore guild it was by far the most fun in raiding I’d had. When I did ulduar in any pug/gdkp/less try hard form it was miserable and made me angry. Definitely bittersweet to never have to raid it again

As for having buffed the ilvl of HM items, I think it has worked a treat. In P2, 25 HM items felt like an hefty reward and a massive power upgrade, and now in P3 we still have fun and bants hunting those few BiS pieces casually destroying the bosses that used to be massive challenge for us just a few months ago.

It's a really enjoyable raid. Was more challenging than I'd anticipated as well, basically the first raid that can be tricky for good players to clear in Week One. However, I've more or less had enough of it now, phase length was about right.

I raided almost every reset of ulduar and by the end I was realy burnt out on that raid. The Ilvl change was good enough, now people still do skip run ulduars. Though, togc has been a really nice change of pace. 1 hour raid and get bis loot, I've never raid logged as hard as on wotlk.

You already know the answer, its severely overhyped because of nostalgia. We saw it repeatedly in classic's launch and this is the pinnacle of "good old wow." But its an evolving game, you can never have "Good old wow" back as you remember it. You can visit places you liked and go through the motions but never truly have it back. Edit: lol I was actually talking about ICC but didnt put down enough hints. These raid hype cycles are interchangeable, is the joke.

Ulduar delivered in atmosphere and difficulty and because of that we had people go to Hardcore kek

From what I remember of Wotlk back in the day, whenever you entered Ulduar, specifically 'The Antechamber of Ulduar' - you got this feeling of that you shouldn't be here. That it was forbidden or something haha. Now I was a kid of maybe 13-14 years back when I did Ulduar for the first time, so it might be because of that I don't know. But I remember having the exact same feeling when I did ICC for the first time aswell. Since Blizz made Arthas as a perfect vilain it felt like I was completely chanceless to go up against him and his forces. I am not able to relive this in classic even if I tried because I'll never have 10+ or something people from school to play with. And that was the whole heart and soul of my Wotlk experience back in the day. Good times.

For pre-Cata raids Ulduar, ICC, Naxx, BT, TK and Karazhan were the best raids ever. Cata took raids to a whole new level, then WoD was the next big step in raid quality.

Glad to see a video that isn't about hardcore wow.

I agree but MOP had great raids too. SoO and ToT was amazing.

I think the number of people quit the game during Ulduar is more than your graph shows. If you show the number of unique accounts that are still playing you'd be shocked. I know for a fact a large portion of people clearing are Alts. My server had a pretty high population at one point but not anymore. That makes Ulduar a disaster in my opinion.

8:46 Actually that's easy to answer. Ion hazzikozstas. there was a recent interview in which he stated he was in charged of making pretty much all bosses design encounters on ulduar including hardmodes. he also stated he had to recycled codes from other previous bosses so far in order to make something new back in those days. that's why Ulduar along with TOC/TOGC and ICC felt so simple (Yet lackluster) in term of mechanics and boss design.

Great video my friend

My biggest flex of all time was healing solo algalon back when we had a timer limit and gear not better than naxx 25. Fyi managed to do "He feeds on your tears also"

As someone who started around march as a hpal who didnt do uld back in the day I had a great time, especially when it came to alg because you're a crucial piece of the fight so you had to be on point - the cherry on top was the timer which added a whole new layer of stress that was unmatched. 50/50 attempts in togc isn't nearly as stressful comparibly I'm shocked 239 was the old hardmode cap, didn't realize uld got such a big boost to ilvl no wonder it died out back in the day The only fight I thought was disappointing was yogg, anything other than zero light there isn't any kind of healing challenge - plus maybe it's the nostalgia talking but cthun felt way more epic as well

Was my first time seeing Ulduar and luckily I have a great guild so progression wasn’t soul crushing. I was happy to do something I never got to do when I was younger but for me the high water mark was SWP. The fights were so fun and fast and the raid itself was beautiful. And call me crazy but M’uru was actually quite fun!

Overall? I liked it. Never got bored of it, even if some bosses sucked. Now we're going back to farm certain items... its starting to outstay its welcome a bit. I still love XT, Mimiron, Iron Council and to a lesser extent Yogg - but a lot of the others are feeling very stale or frustrating now. Vezax being the prime culprit - he's just a very long and boring fight where any loss of concentration (while bored) can ruin a smooth kill. And he never drops Flare. Never. So he feels like an anti-fun roadblock now.

It's going to sound like I'm being hyperbolic here, but I'm dead serious. Context, I play a melee class. Once progression was over (it was only ok IMO), Ulduar proved to be my least favorite raiding experience I've ever had in Classic. I would prefer to run Mount Hyjal again, or farm Molten Core. Seriously, I dislike the HM system that much, and we had to suffer through it in both 10 and 25 man for 22 weeks. We essentially cleared 44 Ulduar lockouts on one character as mandatory power progression because BiS was tied to both sizes of the instance. The real kicker here is that we now have to raid Ulduar until ICC comes out, because they buffed the ilvl. It's a big reason behind why I've lost my passion for raiding in Classic and why I've exclusively raid logged for the last 3 months. Being in Ulduar is a genuinely uncomfortable time for me at this point. I'm so sick of it. On top of all of that, every boss had something about it that could ruin your parse. Ignis pots you as melee, repeated void bombs on XT, IC drops death rune right after dropping power/delays power rune for a long time, etc. Ulduar sits under AQ20 in my list. Most overblown hype for a raid I have ever seen.

I haven't played WoW since Warlords at all and stopped raiding seriously during Cata but I can honestly say that for my experience, Ulduar is still the greatest raid ever made. It was incredibly fun, difficult and when I led a 10 man group to defeat Algalon for the first time, it was probably one of the top 5 moments i ever had playing.

Designwise a beautiful, expansive and epic location. The problem with the game at this stage was that it was Ulduar and nothing else. At least in previous expansions there were three or 4 raids to occupy both casual and extreme players.

The problem with Ulduar is that if you perform an analysis of the raid by encounter, the encounters fail to live up to expectations. Ulduar is about pace... its about one encounter that stresses healers, then next stresses tanks, the next mdps. It is about flow. It is about the overall experience. Additionally, the normal vs hard mode allowed your guild to progress a hard mode encounter for 45 minutes or so and then just blast on normal. You get a little better at hard mode each week until you down the encounter. Compare this to retail mythic. My retail guild spent 6 hours on a single fight last week. Not nearly as good as an experience as Ulduar presented. Until I experience another raid with the flow of Ulduar, Ulduar is the GOAT IMO.

Couldn't have said it better myself. The raid is pretty good but I think the main reason its remembered as this legendary tier raid is because it was way better than 99% of the stuff that came before it. These days after years of great raids it is just one of the good ones. Around top 10 imo.

cries in "ONE SINGULAR COMETS TRAIL" dropping to this very reset

love that cozy music from howling fjord :/

Hard modes started in AQ40 with the Council fight there

Not playing anymore but I really enjoyed clearing alg and all the hc fights with my guild, but Togc is resident sleeper and I was pugging togc 25 (rip guild) and it’s kinda resident sleeper af. (Playing RSham/enhance)

Ulduar was fun...for a while. It became tedious to do the same stuff week after week praying that that one item from HM you need drops. After a while of that I just gave up and stopped playing, as did most of my guild. We were notoriously unlucky with our loot since TBC launched, waiting on key items for our casters to just never have them drop. ToC as a transitional raid is fine, and I hope we manage to get enough players to come back for ICC.

Ya my biggest gripe with ulduar by a mile was hard mode loot distribution is just dog shit

Proggin Ulduar was one of the most fun experiences I've ever had playing a video game. It was a time when I had free time to run multiple raids a week 10 and 25. 10 man was not super challenging (except alg) but not boring. It was just super fun. The loot system was very frustrating, took me 4 months to get runestone. The armor pen legs only dropped once the whole tier and our casters got maybe 2 flares from 18-19 resets we had killed on HM. We got that dumb leather chest piece every week and that dumb leather crit gloves from hodir every week. I enjoyed flame levithan too. That being said about the loot system, you could still get very geared on an alt from 10 man HM gear, 232 teir, boes and normal mode loot. Would've liked to see 10 man used off-tanks more. seem by the last half a prot pally could just solo tank the whole thing.

Heroic Rag in FL is legit no joke.

this is always the outcome when people whine for harder content, they dont really want hard content they want prestige and extra goodie bags. the next step is always to whine that the loot isnt good enough. honestly, I would delete the hard mode gear off the loot table and institute individual achievements for each hard mode similar to Mythic does with each boss and a meta raid achievement which awards a title and a mount. have something like " the Starcrossed" and instead of having the sparkle pony as a cash shop mount it could have been attached to the achievement for defeating every hard mode. then Algalon could have had a special item drop for all players "Starcrossed Locket" that transforms your weapon into a Starcrossed Weapon with a similar model to the mount and Algalon, it has no timer and lasted until you right click it off, and can be re-applied by clicking the locket again.

The ICC 10HM airship fight has a trinket that sims just as good/better for most casters and is much easier to farm. I'm personally waiting for that one to pair with my Reign of the Dead rather than going to Ulduar with either 120k in a GDKP or rolling vs 14 other people every week.

still hands down the best raiding experience I've ever had

Hey WillE, have you had a chance to play Baldur's Gate 3? I know you tried branching out with Final Fantasy and New World, but Baldur's looks like it could be fun to see you do a couple videos since it's a fresh new title.

David Lance Arneson October 1, 1947] - April 7, 2009 was an American game designer best known for co-developing the first published role-playing game (RPG), Dungeons & Dragons, with Gary Gygax, in the early 1970s. Activision Blizzard posted a tribute to Arneson on their website and on April 14, 2009, released patch 3.1 of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, The Secrets of Ulduar, dedicated to Arneson. "Blizzard Entertainment would like to dedicate Secrets of Ulduar in memory of Dave Arneson. We were greatly saddened by the news of Dave's passing. His work, passion, and creativity helped give life to an entirely new genre of gaming, and our fondest memories of playing Dungeons & Dragons continue to inspire us. Farewell, Dave, and thank you. You will be missed."

I was more stressed out tanking some of the buffed ulduar bosses than mythic KJ

its by far the hardest raid for classic for sure. And with the ivl adjustment the progress curve is very healthy. You have to admit Blizzard did a great adjustment.

Ulduar was very fun. Def was not the most fun unfortunately and didn’t live up to the hype. I compared it to SWP and I personally enjoyed SWP more. We’ll see with ICC but for me BWL i enjoyed the most so far .

Rogue Main & ive never seen the IC shoulders drop on 2 Rogues

Hello, Willie here. Miss those days

A lot of people dislike the RNG component of some boss fights. That really is a matter of personal preference. For me personally I like bosses with RNG elements (such as Iron Council) as it keeps you guessing so that you can't just rely of set formular responses with any confidence. A lot of people who play other games with heavy rng "unfair" mechanics would probably feel the same way. /cough Dark Souls. But RNG is going to be a divisive feature. I really liked Ulduar and I liked some of those more divisive bosses. But I do wish it only ran for around 12-16 weeks. When bliz upped the ilvls to keep it relevant, what I expected was for Ulduar to run a regular number of weeks but still have reason to run it after TOGC released (which is a very short raid). Instead, it meant running Ulduar for double the length of time and then releasing a very short raid such that we end up probably running it for triple the length of time ... just complete overkill and it ruins the experience imo. Much like listening to your favourite track over and over again a hundred or so times. You end up hating anything with that level of saturation.

I really enjoyed ulduar itself minus a boss or two... but the phase went on too long and in the latter 1/3 our guild started running into nasty roster boss issues and then progression stagnation due to it. They also really should have made some of the 25hm loot more accessible after toc dropped. I get why they didn't put 25hm loot in 10hm but stuff like flare that's still bis for many casters and vold that's still a big upgrade for 2h users (saw 0 of either) are already locked behind one of the most aids encounters in the raid, guaranteed 5 val shards but they're locked behind the 2 hardest encounters so if you weren't already consistently clearing them get screwed I guess, etc. The post loot changes only helped extra casual and extra hardcore guilds, didn't do much for the middle of the pack guilds

After 7 resets of Togc I have gotten 1 upgrade to drop for my dk, the plate dps pants, all other upgrades were from badges and throphies. Something seems off with the drop chances where we are de-ing tank look already, but most of the dps players have had only a few upgrades so far.

Is it the best no there are some fights that are a bore(cat lady,kolagron) a few more are annoying, but it is one of the greats and is fun just to go though again on a mage for the first time(was an ele shaman main in retail wotlk).

Well got some fun there, maybe like first 10 weeks, then stoped 2 go there, like all mains was around 5k+ and i dont give F about full bis gear.

Ok, now compare the amount of participants in Naxx vs Ulduar, and tell me if it is a good raid.

tbh i liked the idea of hardmode not as a setting but as something that you could do to spice things up and make the fight more challenging. I mean i was ok with the setting but it just makes more sense that the fight would just be different if you took a different approach to it, instead of just being "different" just because. Ulduar was an amazing raid to me but i still prefer icc. Toc was just an alright raid, not too good, but not too bad either

It was the best because it came after Naxx and the mechanics were something we never saw before.

MoP had some bangers. Throne of Thunder and Siege of Org are objectively better raids.

Yea the loot is a serious problem, it shouldn't be possible there's still so many pieces my guild hasn't seen drop and its been on farm for awhile. Bedlam bracers off Mim, Bracers and neck off of Hodir, Legs off of Yogg and a couple pieces we didn't see until the last 1-2 resets.

If you’re an endgame focused player, I think you’ll find the content vastly more enjoyable and challenging from Cataclysm through Legion. I quit raiding a few weeks into Tomb of Sargarus, that was the point I feel that raiding became too convoluted with too much personal responsibility.

Imagine seeing death's verdict...

the only thing that was a horrible idea was the itemlevel boost in my opinion, made the raid too easy and gave characters so much stats that even togc now is easier because of it. all bosses are fun to do except Vezax as i find it boring to wait for animus spawn every single time you attempt him. overall very enjoyable raid for the most part.

Ulduar is a good mixture of raiding. Fantasy. Robots. Vehicles. Dragons, Giants (titans). Only the first part was annoying with the vehicles and towers imho

it definitely could have been 3 or more resets sooner for togc to come out, gonna still keep running LULduar for valanyrs and trinkets until icc comes out probably

Ulduar has become the first raid in classic so far that I dread entering. Hardmodes were fun to progress, but they stopped being fun shortly after the first win.

Ulduar is considered the best because it was the first to introduce HM in a fun way and designs and overall raid was amazing, every step back than was considered a achievement getting gear, to titles, to mounts. It felt like you actually progressed it sucks cause back TOGC came too quick I feel like

The Rng on hard mode iron council was infuriating in the begining

How is ICC clear time Vs Ulduar?

Would've been better if they did it in wings imo, were some fights I absolutely hated in there like auriaya, freya and vezax.

Ulduar really changed the raiding scene forever with HM which lead to HC etc... But no way near best. I did quit my hardcore raiding in Legion so wont really talk about recent raids. But every expasion since wotlk have had atleast 1 raid that's been better imo. In cata I would say BoT and FL were better. MoP had ToT which is top 2 for me. WoD was a mess but HFC was great but BRF is just the greatest raid ever that I experienced.

Death’s Verdict has a chance to roll twice on the loot table. Might explain why there’s so many.

As a warlock, I really enjoyed XT hardmode because of almost constant multidotting with sparks. Mimeron firefighter is probably my favourite fight, multidotting, a lot of mechanics, keeping yourself alive, importance of positioning in the last two phases to get the most out of your dps. Yogg is also very fun for warlocks for obvious reasons. On the other hand, Thorim seemed way too long and boring, Hodir was kinda too RNG in the beginning, Vezaxx hardmode is horrible, Algalon seems to be only fun during progress, Razorscale and Ignis is mediocre and I hated FL of course… Iron Council was sometimes fun for affli locks due to the double-dipping to snapshot corruption on overlapping runes, Aurieyayaya kinda seemed all right because it was short enough( the same goes for Kologarn) and Freya was also fine I suppose, although a bit too long especially if you wipe closer to the last phase.

Droprates of certain items are such gargabe - we had 4 Flares in 28 raids...while havin what 10 caster + in the raid ... sure you know you wont get BiS in a phase but instead we got like 20 Dreambinder?! Blizz could change algaloot depending on the setups nowadays...

Great raid. But coming from being active in mythic raiding on retail, I really felt the age on many of the bosses, which was hugely disappointing. I'm not asking for even retail HC standard, but honestly some fights were just target dummies and felt dated.

Yeah hearing that this was the best raid ever then getting into it. It was a huge letdown for me

Vezax hard mode isn't a bad idea, it just gets old really fast on subsequent clears I have always said that ulduar is absolutely not the best raid of all time, and not even the best raid in wotlk. I still stand by that conviction now, and believe that ICC is the better raid through and through

Yeah I'm still waiting for Flare to drop. The fact that there are no better trinkets in ToC is even more a slap in the face

For the time i think it was very good and offered a lot of novel ideas. But then Throne of Thunder basically did the same thing but better -unless you were a complete smoothmind filtered by the snails and you have a grudge like 15 years later- and in retrospect ulduar is like classic wow in a way. You remember it being much harder than it is because there is a more modern version you have experience with thats sort of mixing the two in your head but then when you go back you realise it was never that hard you were just like 16 and now you are in your 30's.

changing the item levels and the length of the phase are the problem. People are sick of ulduar but now have to keep running it.

Until Ulduar Classic as a game held few suprises or upsets for me. Pretty much everything was expected from the hikes in difficulty between different raid tiers, to the obscure requirements for resistance gear back in Vanillia and BC and so on. Imagine my surprise then when Ulduar rolls around and its flagship feature, Hardmodes, turns out to be the exact opposite of what I remembered. Back in the day I remember loving Hardmodes, and seeing Blizzard move away from them in favour of a UI toggle for difficulty was disappointing. And don't get me wrong, actually doing something in the raid even if its as simple as hitting Mimiron's 'Big Red Button' will always be superior to a simple UI element when it comes to feeling like you're in an immersive game world. But the way that Hardmodes are systematically implemented is frankly awful. The loot RNG issues is one thing, but another is the fact that pretty much all the bosses that feature multiple Hardmodes like Flame Leviathan, Freya or Iron Council don't have any unique loot tables for doing any of the intermediate modes. Yogg-saron is the only exception in that regard. There is no reward outside of the normal mode loot for killing Freya with 2 guardians alive, if your Guild can't quite manage 3 yet. It felt incredibly demoralising. Not to mention the bizarre difficulty curve from boss to boss. In Normal the bosses progress in difficulty pretty linearly towards Yogg, but in Hardmodes they are all over the place. XT is for some reason one of the hardest DPS checks, while only being the 4th boss. Despite all this though, Ulduar remains a beloved raid to me, its music, atmosphere, lore, gameplay are all stellar thus far in WoW's life. It just blindsided me that a feature I remember loving so much and being sad to see discontinued, has had that opinion flipped completely in the opposite direction. I crave the more linear and understandable, and frankly better designed systems for Heroic Mode in ToTC now.

I found Ulduar to be good to great, not amazing though. Good vid

The majority of people straight up dislike Ulduar. It was basically overhyped and the ilvl buffs were done only for the high end players. No one benefitted from this change. On the 5th week we already started losing members due to burnout. ToC is bad, but Ulduar was by far the worst tier in Classic I've ever seen.

I was bis on 2 chars with a tanking and dps specs before trial came out

I can see why people at the time thought this was the greatest raid ever. It was something new and way harder than seen before. But there is a reason HM bosses didn''t stick around, Normal/HC/Mythic is just a better system for both casual and more hardcore players. Glad I got to experience it, but not the best raid in my opinion.

I loved every raid in wrath

I'm sure the harsh tuning heavily contributed to virtually all of my best in-game friends I've made since TBCC launch quitting. I still play, it's my favourite game, but it's no longer my happy place.

For me Classic has been great even tho i played and raided back in the day i play now at a casual level i've done everything i could'nt do back in the day

I played during 2008 wrath the raid was pretty good overall but best is subjective

It was a good raid but doesnt make the top 5 of my favorite raids released so far in classic

I've never rly played wow (tested the free version once until lvl 20) and started wow classic a few weeks ago. I actually love and hate it. It's boring, tedious, and some stuff is extremely outdated. However I can sink in a lot of times. Still I wish I could lvl a bit quicker. I'm already at 50h and only at lvl 31 with my warrior

The week 1 clear stats mask the fact that Ulduar ended up far, far easier than SWP/SSC/etc - once you got the buffed loot starting to rack up.

I did Ulduar like 10 times in total probably (25 man) and even more 10 man's and yet I have failed to get a better weapon to shoot with and am still stuck with my naxx bow. Yeah it was fun but no thanks, haven't had the oppurtunity to raid ToTC yet but I will most likely try it, seems like a cool raid to me. Ulduar was nice but just so repetetive and long and the loot was just trash. 5/10 from me here.

I quit because they wait too long to release the "new" raids. Phase 1 was brutal with how long it was. Its hard to keep a raid team together when literally everyone in the raid is bored to tears after having done the same thing 20 weeks in a row.

I really liked Ulduar, even if the raid felt a bit long. Especially the way they implemented hardmodes I think was really fantastic - not you Vezax, your "wait for 90 seconds doing nothing before the hardmode starts" can go fuck itself. I do think that despite it being a great raid, it's a little bit overrated - but probably for a good nostalgic reason. Have to remember that this was the first 'real' wotlk raid compared to the laughable naxx 25. My biggest problems with Ulduar were the rng in some fights like Iron Council (the wildly random timer on rune of death), and Yogg-Saron (Getting constricted into a crusher tentacle). + a more general wotlk issue where things on the ground and auras take up to a few seconds to register that your character should/shouldn't be affected by them (getting silenced by emergency fire bots for 3 seconds even after they're dead).

the thing i liked about classic was that it was possible to raid without minmaxing and raidlogging etc.... Ulduar HM ruined that. Everyone wants HM and if you dont do x amount of dmg or healing then you will be replaced. Cant wait for ICC with just normal and heroic mode... that way it can still be a chill enviroment. :=)

Ulduar is a fantastic raid but some of the fights are really dated. Vezax being a great example. Why do i have enough time to pour a drink and take a piss before Animus spawns on Vezax?

Ulduar was the best raid of Wrath, but that's not saying much. Most of the expansion was nerfed for the casuals. I liked how hard modes were implemented.

Surprised you didn't mention another annoying thing about Vezax. Not really so much an issue anymore, but while progressing his hard mode, a wipe was almost guaranteed to take 5-6 minutes to happen since the only dangerous part of the fight is at the very end. This just compounded with the stupidly long run-back and made him waste a ton of time. I do love ulduar overall, but vezax hardmode is really stupid.

It was perfect for the skill level of the player base at the time.

Completed content back then but this time peeps clear n log. So our server (Remulos) is freaking dead, so I have not come anywhere near clearing ulduar this time. Oceanic is dead WTH do we do with only 900 ally and 32 horde.