We're Not in Azeroth Anymore, Toto

It may seem silly, writing an impression of Ulduar having only been inside the place for only one week before the raid team dissolved, but I've found that my first impressions frequently don't change that much over time. They may get tempered a bit in terms of "like" vs "dislike" --Karazhan certainly comes to mind*-- but my overall first impression has stuck with me. 

Outside of this video, of course.

Yes, I can be a stubborn bastard. Just ask my family or my questing buddy (and her husband).

If you want to skip the rest of the post, here's my TL;DR: Ulduar is the sort of instance that would be more at home in Wildstar or Star Wars: The Old Republic than in World of Warcraft.

***

My only previous time spent in Ulduar was once back in Mists when I poked my nose in there and had absolutely no idea what to do. All those Dark Iron Dwarves come pouring out of the place, and while my overpowered Rogue had no problem dispatching them I had no idea what to do next. All I did was kill Dark Irons for about 15-20 minutes and realized that --like Blackwing Lair-- there's some trick to getting past the initial area that unless you read a guide or watched a video you would have to die repeatedly just to puzzle it out. 

Given that I wanted to go into the place and simply explore what was considered one of the best raids that Blizzard had put out up to that point, I wasn't inclined to "do my homework" and read up on a Cliffs Notes of the raid, because that would puncture my immersion balloon** of trying to stop Yogg-Saron from escaping and destroying Azeroth.

So, I kind of knew the basics of what I was getting into on the week's run up to entering into Ulduar for the first time: there's a gimmick at first which leads to a fight with Flame Leviathan, and then you proceed onward from there. Luckily, being ranged DPS --and not having any 25-person raid gear on me-- meant I was going to be a passenger on the vehicles for the Flame Leviathan fight. I was supposed to go grab the fuel lying around on the ground after we shot down the flying machines, and...

/record scratch

Wait, what?

WTF is this, Mad Max: Fury Road?

I mean, the Mad Max movies would make a great post-apocalyptic RPG campaign, but inserting vehicle combat into Ulduar like this is Blizzard's way of saying "This isn't your effing Vanilla WoW, motherfucker."

Oh, and did you know that you don't target the flying vehicles to shoot them down --leading them via AA fire like you're supposed to do in aerial combat-- but to grab the fuel lying on the ground you have to select them and then hit the "grab" button? The tutorial video that I watched*** kind of glossed over that latter fact until my driver called me out and said that I had to click them first. 

So... inconsistent mechanics for that fight... Gotcha. 

The Flame Leviathan fight itself was, shall we say, underwhelming. If you ever wondered whether a solved raid presented a challenge to a reasonably geared group, Flame Leviathan didn't exactly show it. I'll freely admit that I was probably one of two people in the raid who'd never seen Ulduar either back in the day or that week, but I wasn't impressed.

My opinion of the place didn't exactly improve once we got past Flame Leviathan. 

The inside of Ulduar appears huge, designed graphically to present you with the overwhelming vastness of the titan complex, the entire raid itself isn't as nearly long a run as AQ40 was. That's because Blizzard embraced one crucial SF element all over the damn place: teleporters. 

Now, portals in a World of Warcraft raid aren't exactly new: you can find them in Karazhan and AQ40, to name two raids I'm familiar with.**** However, those raids only had one portal each, and those portals were only unlocked once you finish the portion of the raid that unlocks the destination. An NPC would port you to where you were supposed to go, basically to cut down on runtime when you wipe. Naxxramas had portals too, but only after a wing was finished. Again, an unlock, but you wouldn't use a portal to get back to a place you've already cleared.

Ulduar, however, integrated teleporters into the design of the raid itself, so you can use those teleporters to blip around the entire damn place and go where you want to go. 

When I realized that, I suddenly also realized that I should have watched the entire freaking video, because we could skip around a bit rather than do bosses in order.

    ::cue Cardwyn cursing rather inventively at my lack of preparation::

Well, I figured, I could wing it. After all, I'm not likely to be the source of a wipe.

    Narrator: He wasn't.

From a practical standpoint, the teleporters made perfect design sense. Runbacks from a wipe are the main reason why raid nights can feel like forever, and minimizing those runbacks is a huge boon to any raid team. That's likely why Naxxramas was designed the way it was, unlike AQ40 with its huge winding path through the instance, but instead 4 rather semi-compact (compared to AQ40) wings: finish a wing, go back to the beginning. 

Okay, the practical bona fides aside, those teleporters pretty much establish that we're firmly in Science Fiction territory here, not Steampunk, and definitely NOT Fantasy.

We're basically in a raid that feels like the deeper parts of the planet Belsavis from SWTOR.

***

With each successive boss, the more I heard from people in the raid who'd been there before about how fantastic Ulduar is.

Not was, but is.

Some of them were reliving the past, to be sure, but by far the raid team really liked/loved the raid. It was fun, with interesting and innovative mechanics that Blizzard reused in later expansions. People liked the volume of gear drops, and that everybody was running the place all at once.

Except me.

I kept my opinion to myself, of course, but I felt that Ulduar was a lot like, well... I have to borrow a comparison from my prog rock days: Ulduar felt a lot like Yes' Relayer album. It felt like Blizzard was trying too hard to be too different, too hip, and too unlike World of Warcraft.

When you hear Brann Bronzebeard on a freaking communicator telling you where to go and what's going on, you've left where WoW was, and are heading toward a place where WoW's Retail is today. Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning offered 5-person instance runners a taste of Ulduar, but Ulduar itself was like watching the end of Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.#

Remember when I posted about immersion breaking parts of Retail, with a pic of Goldshire as an example? Ulduar is like that. I mean, if you're going to break the Steampunk and semi-Fantasy mold and go full on Science Fiction, you might as well go all the way. The thing is, we're running around with swords and spells like the old D&D module S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but without the ability to pick up any of the SF gear lying around. Well, except for the vehicles for Flame Leviathan, I guess, but at least in that D&D module you could pick up and use the stuff on the crashed spaceship. 

Back in the day I had no idea what I was
in for when our DM ran me through this.
This is the Goodman Games'
conversion + homage cover.

Now, before somebody stands up and says "Hey, what about Krull? What about that last fight against The Beast??!!" 

Thank goodness for YouTube!

Yes, you have a point. Yes, you can have a fight --or a raid-- and keep your high fantasy gear and tropes around, and yes the ending of Krull shows the power of love in a fight even against an advanced tech fueled enemy. However, we don't see the effects of this culture clash on the society at large years later. Unfortunately for Azeroth, Blizzard has been happy to keep areas that would have changed over time due to such exposure completely static, as if a First Contact had never happened. 

***

But the biggest thing about Ulduar that just doesn't fit with me is the tone that Blizzard took with it as a raid. In Vanilla Classic, you went into AQ40, Onyxia, or Molten Core as a raid, not a raid led by an NPC. Up through Tempest Keep, that remained the same in TBC Classic. But I do know that by the end of Sunwell Plateau, at least, the tone had begun to change. An NPC was the de facto leader of the raid, and they got the in-game scenes at the end. I believe that might have been the case at Black Temple as well, but I have absolutely no clue about Mount Hyjal. 

Wrath Classic brought with it Discount Naxx, which didn't have any NPC changes of that sort, but The Eye of Eternity certainly did with Alexstrasza putting in a guest appearance. And with Brann in constant communication with the raid throughout all of Ulduar, the raid becoming just a tool for and led by an in-game NPC has come front and center. There is simply no going back, and Ulduar was that tipping point.

***

I suppose I should be glad that my raiding time in Wrath Classic is over, because the vision in my mind of what Ulduar would be like made the reality a bit underwhelming. Nothing, it seems, can match the Vanilla Classic feel of 40 people all doing something greater than themselves. And to be fair, my experiences in Wrath Classic only served to remind me that TBC Classic personally ended so piss poorly. The raids I wanted to finish I never did, the gear I would have liked to have gotten I never did##, and the stress of having to prove to myself and others that I belonged in the raid rather than "being carried because you're on the raid lead team" was too much.###

Ulduar could become like Karazhan for me, in that I could grow to love it over time, but I doubt it. There's too much of what became Modern WoW in there for me to truly embrace it.

*Despite my dislike of the instance itself from a practical standpoint --once a scientist/engineer ALWAYS a scientist/engineer-- I've grown fond of it because of all those months of my raid leading the Friday Night Karazhan Run. That has almost nothing to do with the raid itself but the people involved in the raid. Alas that a few of those people are no longer playing WoW, and moved on to other raids.

**If there's one thing that drives me nuts, it's that even in Retail you as a raider are expected to follow guides and what comes out of examination of the Public Test Realms. It's as if you were planning a trip to Gatlinburg instead of entering into a new and unexplored area. Then again, if you wanted to explore and experience the "newness" of something, MMOs are definitely NOT it. They're filled with --and cater to--people who have to have control over every last detail as if we were a bunch of mathematical exercises. Okay, video games are at heart just that, but their developers try hard to use mathematical modelling to enable the illusion of freedom. By breaking down the game back into its mathematical components, we're left with a dexterity fueled Algebra problem set for homework composed of shiny pixels. Assuming you even look at the game rather than your button bar and all of the addons and whatnot that overlay the game. Or, as they put it in the Folding Ideas video about Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft, "Players make World of Warcraft look fucking ugly."

***It was a requirement for the raid, so I didn't have much choice in that. But like at work where every "required" training course I had to take I'd resist as much as possible, I waited until the last moment to go and finish. As in, 1/2 hour before raid. I figured we'd only get to about 4-5 bosses anyway, and I'm not under any true requirements to do much more than bring the Arcane heat, so why sweat it?

****Remember, I haven't done Mount Hyjal, Black Temple, and Sunwell Plateau. If there are portals there, I'm not aware of them.

#I haven't watched the whole movie, but I was unfortunate enough to be walking through a Best Buy or another one of those stores and the ending happened to be playing on televisions. 

##The gear I would have liked to have gotten I always stepped aside and let others have because:

• As Loot Master/Raid Leader, I felt it would have been unfair to get gear ahead of the rest of the raid. I'm a leader, and to lead means to do so by example. You put your people first. I'd been in semi-pug raids before where a tank finally got what he was looking for and decided to stop going to said raid, basically torpedoing everybody else's fun because he got what he wanted.
• I knew I didn't have the physical skills to compete with the best DPS players, so I felt they should get priority on gear over myself. Even when I ran the Friday Night Karazhan, I refused to roll on the ring that dropped from Malchezaar because if someone else could use it in a future raid they should get priority over myself, who was just doing Karazhan for fun. That it was a significant upgrade over my own rings didn't enter my thoughts. To me, desiring something just because I wanted it was simply being greedy. 

###Nobody ever said it to me, but I said it to myself. Constantly. I could hear the voice of self doubt every time I logged into the game, knowing that my DPS wasn't up to par. 

EtA: Corrected a grammatical error.