Epic Adventures: Buried Under Ulduar
An average World of Warcraft player's quest for purples
4/29/2009 5:58 PM | 8 Comments | Page 1 of 3
John Keefer
Status: Reading da Crispy content and playin' games.
"Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in!" -- Michael Corleone, "The Godfather" Part III" (1990)
The entrance to Ulduar, 10-man
You'd think Michael played
World of Warcraft, the digital crack that has more than 11 million players worldwide. Just as you start to get bored with the game and are ready to step away, a new expansion or content patch comes along to suck you back into Azeroth.
I've been playing the game for just over four years. I started late -- five months after the original game was released in November 2004, because I didn't want to get hooked on a massively multiplayer online game. There were too many other games to play. But, in a weak moment, I played. Except for short hiatuses for
Civilization IV,
Mass Effect and
Fallout 3, I haven't stopped.
I was ready to walk away this time.
Wrath of the Lich King had been fun since its release in November, but after getting my third character to 80, raiding Naxxramas and other 25-man instances weekly, and farming daily quests for gold, it was getting old. I liked PvP, but I never enjoyed the arenas that much, so the allure of a new season of gear didn't have me excited. I was going to quit this time, and even the looming "Secrets of Ulduar" 3.1 content patch wasn't going to draw me back in.
The staging area in Ulduar
Then I saw
the 3.1 trailer. I had read about all the changes from players on the Public Test Realm (PTR), but nothing prepared me for the story-driven video that Blizzard released just a few days before the patch. I'm a sucker for story, and it's that Warcraft lore that has kept the previous new content interesting for me.
So when the patch hit April 14, I installed it and played. And in a surprising revelation, I haven't enjoyed it ... yet. I'm not sure why. Yes, Ulduar has lots of new content to see and experience. Yes, there are new achievements to gain, dual specializations to try and new gear to covet. But this time in
WoW, there was no wow for me.
Blizzard didn't help itself with almost three days of problems after the patch hit. Lag, server crashes and game hiccups were the norm, and even hot fixes seemed to cause more problems than they fixed.
Maybe it was also the fact that the new heroic Ulduar instance is tough. Blizzard made
Wrath of the Lich King incredibly accessible to casual raiders with the relative ease of instances such as the 25-man Naxxramas and the varying difficulty levels of the Obsidian Sanctum. Even the Eye of Eternity became rote once you mastered the drake phase against Malygos. Maybe I was lulled into complacency with the easy content.
We have to kill all these AND the towers?
Now, raiding normal or heroic Ulduar has been -- for me, at least -- an exercise in tedium, with wipe after wipe. My guild understands the learning curve, and a brave group of souls has regularly attempted the 10-man version of the instance to test strategies and modify them. It has made solid progress, having killed the first four bosses. I've attended a couple of the 10-mans and learned the strategies, but I have usually walked away frustrated. This past Tuesday, when we downed five bosses in one run, was the first time I actually felt like we accomplished something. And let's not talk about the two attempts we've had at the 25-man version. Disheartening, to say the least.
