I’m totally feeling the pain here. I LOATHE PvP, except WG, which isn’t really. And I’m totally through trying.

You have the option of either killing each boss the “easy way” for loot and telling friends “yay, we downed Yoggy!” but if you want more of a challenge your guild can go for hard modes for bragging rights and better loot.

It fills the needs for the hardcore raiders and casual raiders without having to overtune an entire encounter just so the hardcore raiders have something to brag about.

Everyone has downed Sartharion, but add a drake or three in the mix and it was one of the most challenging fights in the game. Lots of people, myself included, felt that Naxx and a majority of the rest of the raiding content that was available for release was entirely too easy but the only encounter available with hard modes was Sartharion.. now we have that option for an entire raid zone.

Time will tell!

l still think of “hardcore” as those die-hard min/max’ers who are racing for server firsts and raiding four or five nights a week for 4-6 hours at a time — not my motley crew of ostensibly casual gamers, who raid for three hours at a time three days a week (and even then, only if there isn’t a hockey game on >.>).

I’m not even sure I can live up to my guild’s “serious raiding on a casual schedule” tagline these days, lol. I am, after all, the “nutsy shamlock” who accidentally healed Razorscale in her enhancement offspec last night! (Come to think of it, that was the exact same fight that our Disc priest healed with a fishing pole equipped. We /fail. So. Hard.)

So, I don’t know. 19th on the server just doesn’t sound hardcore to me. Casualcore, maybe!

But your point is well-taken: it’s all a matter of perspective.

“I’m not hardcore and I’m not an elitist (I raid 25-man content for a maximum of 10 hours a week),”

Raiding 25-mans for 10 hours a week IS HARDCORE.

I think you’ve phrased this well. The raid design has definitely changed focus, and it really isn’t the same game as before. I can understand why Blizzard is making raids more accessible, but I haven’t had time to determine whether I personally like the change.

I’ll need a few more weeks, then we can try the hard modes and see how those go. I’m not sure whether that’ll do it for us; re-running an encounter in “hard” mode isn’t quite the same thrill as a first-time boss kill is. (Relmstein had some related thoughts, posted at Ulduar and encounters with multiple difficulty levels)

While I agree that Ulduar is a noticeable step up in difficulty from Naxx, it’s nowhere near the step up that SSC and TK were from Karazhan and Gruul’s Lair. It’s a challenge now — we’re wiping a “few times” on each new boss, too — but it won’t be a challenge in a month or two, and that’s what disappoints me. Call me a masochist, but I miss wiping for weeks at a time on a new boss, because I miss the thrill and sense of shared accomplishment that accompanied the eventual first kill.

I’m not hardcore and I’m not an elitist (I raid 25-man content for a maximum of 10 hours a week), but it frustrates me to no end that guilds that have forgotten how to wipe (or never learned how to wipe in the first place) have cried foul … thereby inspiring Blizzard to nerf the first new raid content we’ve seen in six months before I had an opportunity to experience and overcome it.

I also don’t find hard modes as personally satisfying as new content. I understand what Blizzard is trying to accomplish with the introduction of hard mode encounters and accept them for the compromise they are … but the nature of a compromise is that each side gives a little, and what I feel like I’ve given in this case is the challenge that kept the old endgame so interesting for so long, not to mention the novelty of new encounters (not merely new modes) to progress to.

Call me crazy, I want my epics to feel epic. I want to fight for each new tick on our progression bar. I was fine with Naxx being “easymode,” and was thrilled with Ulduar when it first came out because I thought it was the step up we were waiting for … but the truth is that each successive nerf makes it lose a little of its luster for me, and I’m occasionally left wondering “what’s the point?”

I don’t think it’s fair to imply that Ulduar is easy mode. It’s harder than Naxx, the fights require more coordination than Naxx, and there are many more hard-mode options to complete once you clear it. Saying it’s a different game than you started playing is kind of obvious. When I started playing, there were no expansion, hunter pets were all unique, there were hardly any flight points anywhere, leveling was much harder as was raiding.

The game has changed in every single aspect over the years. Why are you surprised that raiding is changing?