Hodir, PTR, Strategy, Tactics, Ulduar

The Joys of Testing

We got word late yesterday that Hodir would be available on the PTR at 7PM EST and we quickly rushed to rally the troops. Given the general instability of the PTR and the throngs of people waiting for their shot to tackle some test content, we knew it was going to be painful. And painful it was.

It was more than two hours of disconnects, server crashed, lagging, and bugginess before our first real pulls began. I would assume by this time that many had given up on even trying because the server couldn’t keep itself straight for more than five minutes at a time. This is the downside of PTR testing. You often have to go through a lot of bullshit to get any benefit out of it. But the up side…

Hodir Impressions

First off, if you’re looking for detailed fight information or strategies, check out the Hodir strategy on StratFu. It’s an excellent write up mainly by Kyth by with contributions from many of our excellent strategists. New fights with zero information available are always a flurry of activity and discussion. Also if you want to watch our raiding live streams and listen to our vent streaming check out our Streams Page. Last night we streamed our entire raid and vent which is pretty cool considering 90% of our strategy discussion happens in real time on Ventrilo.

First off, Hodir in his current form is relatively easy. With 35 million HP and a 9 minute enrage the DPS timer is relatively tightly tuned but nothing hair raising. The easy part is that the strategy is very simple and the raid damage isn’t bad at all and highly controllable. Most of the damage on the fight is avoidable once your raiders are trained how to avoid it and are used to the fight.

We got four good attempts in and by the fourth attempt had a complete strategy down and got imh to 60%. If we had another 30-60 minutes to attempt him he probably would have died. It’s not that the fight is drop dead easy, it’s not. It’s just that it’s simple and the raid damage isn’t bad. It is most definitely an endurance and DPS optimization fight because doing 35 million damage in 9 minutes with the amount of movement needed isn’t trivial. There is a ton of room for optimization on the part of your raiders because avoiding the raid damage while maximizing DPS can be greatly improved with both skill and practice.

Hordir Hard Mode Musings

From what we could tell, there’s two potential hard mode avenues. One, there’s some chests which he he breaks every 3 minutes in the fight. They have no function in the fight itself so either they are bugged (and I doubt this) or they simply are extra loot chests. If the “hard mode” of this fight is to beat this fight in less than 3 minutes then that’s going to take some pretty incredible DPS. I hesitate to say anything is impossible because of how much crazy shit I’ve seen done in this game, but I don’t know that 35 million damage in 3 minutes is possible even with full Ulduar gear. This is even given the buffs that the NPCs provide. There may be a gimmick to it or there may be missing mechanics on the PTR though.

The other potential “hard mode” or least an achievement would be to ignore freeing the NPCs. Right now the NPCs honestly don’t do a whole lot and may actually serve as a net DPS loss considering the time it takes to free them and the pitiful buffs they provide.

Anticipated Fight Changes

It’s hard to tell if they want to change anything because it highly depends on the desired difficulty. Right now Hodir is firmly in the “easy” category of fights. Bugginess and completion wise the fight is very good. There’s a few small bugs with it but nothing that hugely impacts the fight. The fight feels complete and feels like all the mechanics are correct and in place.

Difficulty wise and achievement wise, I would say they need to increase his HP and the contribution of the buffs from the NPCs. Right now I see the ideal strategy being to basically ignore the NPCs completely and burn him. Being able to ignore the NPCs and the buffs they provide very much reduces the complexity of the fight and turns it into yet another “avoid the fire/stand in the fire and burn the boss” fight. It’s not very interesting or difficult if the NPCs and their buffs are ignorable.

Significantly buffing the NPCs and his HP and/or the raid damage would make the route towards creating a hard mode of the fight much easier. Using less/no NPCs would be how you would earn the achievements and due to their potency would make the fight much more difficult.

Final Thoughts

The PTR is always a mixed bag. On the one hand it’s frustrating as hell to have you entire guild beating their heads against the server just trying to crash hop to the instance only to have it crash even more and lag out and cause all sorts of weird problems. On the other hand, it is exhilerating to be seeing the boss right as the first eyes in the world are seeing and to be figuring out the strategy for in front of a live audience of over 2000 people. The rush of figuring the fight out in a frenzy of activity on voice chat. The frenetic pace of figuring your own strategy out while keeping in communication with other top guilds on IRC to see their progress and pick up any potential hints to how the fight works. There’s nothing else like it in the game and it’s what we all live for.