Hodir Articles

Starting with this week, and continuing for the next four weeks, we'll be releasing strategies and videos for the four Keepers as part of a "Road to Algalon" project.

This week is the first: Hodir

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Got these via the rumor mill:

• On Kologarn, putting all the melee right in front of Kologarn's face will prevent them from ever being targeted by Eye Beams.

• On Hodir, sometimes you can be frozen when in a snowdrift because the game decided you moved "into" the snowdrift rather than "onto" it. Do a quick jump when you get on a snowdrift and it should make you less likely to be frozen.

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Chaud of WotLKWiki has been data mining today's new PTR push, and contained within it are the new Ulduar raid achievements. Here are some of them, reposted for your convenience:

Hodir

(check out our Hodir strat!)

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On tonight's PTR, Hodir has had his HP reduced 11 million points. Additionally, the amount of time before he destroys each Rare Runed Cache has been raised (not quite sure to what). No changes to the NPCs have been determined thus far. Essentially the fight has become much easier on "easy" mode and the "hard" mode DPS requirement has been significantly reduced. As an aside, the areas where Snow Drifts will appear during Flash Freeze are now significantly more visible for those players with the 'Projected Textures' video option turned on.

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(This is a follow-up to previous posts in the blog about Hodir. If you're not basically familiar with the mechanics of the fight, some of this post may or may not be gibberish- check out our previous Hodir coverage.)

I made a post on the WoW R&D forums regarding my feedback on the Hodir fight from our experiences last night. Armchair game design is always fun and I do see some things with the fight that need fixing. I'm reposting here with additional commentary as naturally brevity was of the essence on the WoW Forums thread.

After some discussion the WoW forums thread seemed to settle on the assessment that the the fight is too easy in its current form. I disagree. Yes, it's quite easy to beat the 9 minute enrage- though still harder than most or all Naxx fights. That's fine and probably intended behaviour. The 9 minute timer is fairly generous, requiring only 66,666 RDPS to defeat. Raids who are up to Hodir (who could be as late as the 8th-11th boss done in the instance) will probably be geared enough to handle this without the aid of the NPCs. In fact, on 9 minute you can basically choose to ignore the NPCs and still make it, and some guilds on PTR last night did just that, reaching health thresholds like 20% before Ulduar came down for the night. Ostensibly, the fight design is that you must utilize the NPCs to make the 6 and 3 minute checks, but don't need them for 9 minutes. There's nothing bad about this per se; it's actually pretty elegant. However, there are problems with the hard mode tuning and design.

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