Professor Putricide is one of my most loved hard mode encounters. It feels, going back to regular mode on alts, like the fight keeps slowing down or stopping. There are big pauses where I’m looking around for a plague target to swap with or repositioning for a double ooze.

I loved reading about hard mode changes the first time around and thinking “wait… and we have to do what?” Reading about Blood Princes for the first time and thinking about the added challenge of limited movement got my heart racing.

In Cata, i hope for more carefully tuned heroic encounters. I’ll even forgive Blizz if the regulars feel slow or choppy

However, the extra boss is more the exception rather than the rule. Typically, you see a scaling up in the levels and the addition of more boss mechanics.

I’d like to see Blizz tweak things a bit more in Heroic mode so that it isn’t a 20 minute cruise control event as it is for the ICC-25 geared toons. Maybe having a scalable Heroic mode, where the software gauges the party’s gear and scales the levels and mechanics of the bosses appropriately, would do the trick.
Redbeard’s last post: and the theory crafters go bonkers

Some of the early hardmodes – Sarth + 3 and Heartbreaker definitely felt like they were designed in hard mode first, then simplified. Thorim + Sif too maybe?

Seriously, this is a nice post. I wonder if there’s a correlation between normal and heroic 5-man runs too, but my first guess is that Blizz built the 5-mans with normal mode in mind first, then added the heroic stuff later. With the raids, it sounds like you could make an argument that they worked on the hard modes first and then adjusted to normal mode.
Redbeard’s last post: and the theory crafters go bonkers