Project Lore

Blizzard first chopped up the difficulty settings of World of Warcraft in vanilla WoW with optional bosses, or new loot tables for killing a boss in a certain way - effectively the first hard mode before that label came to be.  The idea was taken a step further in The Burning Crusade with the introduction of Heroic Mode dungeons for every 5-man instance.  Wrath has made as much an impact on the perception of difficulty with the introduction of certain achievements, numerous hard mode bosses and the recent quadrupling of Trial of the Crusader (10/25-man normal and heroic). I'm sorry but running the same raid four separate times in a week isn't fun for anyone.  Quad running ToC was an unintended side effect - that Blizzard had to see coming - but may go away in the near future, according to Bornakk.  The news came by way of Bornakk's announcement that our assault on Icecrown Citadel will feature a new difficulty design philosophy. "In the upcoming patch we are adding a new feature to the Icecrown raid instance that allows the raid leader to change the instance's difficulty setting on a boss per boss basis (emphasis mine). The way the raid leader chooses to switch is the same as now, by right-clicking on the character portrait." Bornakk detailed the new technique a bit further, explaining that it only becomes available after the Lich King has been defeated on normal mode, and there is no heroic version of trash, only bosses.  The blue fell short of callingToC's method a mistake, claiming that the size of IC lead to a different direction, but Ulduar's design was picked on. "We didn't want to use the Trial of the Crusader method, and have four versions on a raid of this size. We felt the Ulduar method of having to know a certain trick to do on the boss was difficult to communicate and tied too heavily to achievements" he continued. Bornakk closed the update by saying ToC may change to the new technique, one would assume that it would depend on how successful it does in IC.  However, "Ulduar and Naxxramas will likely never change." I wasn't a fan of the quad running method at all, but Ulduar's "tricks" reminded me of Zelda's boss fights, undefeatable unless you know exactly what to do.  Something that I will always cherish.