Ensidia Interview, New Website Launch, and Yogg-Saron Kill Video

Ensidia Releases Yogg-Saron Kill Video; New Website

When Ensidia first formed back in November of 2008, they promised a new website would be coming.  That time has finally arrived, as Ensidia has released their functional website with a main page, forums, and more.  It's still a work in progress, as you'll notice a lot of placeholder text, certain features not working, etc. but fans who enjoy tracking their progress through content should find it much easier than before.

In addition to this, they've also released a video of their Yogg-Saron kill.  The video is from 4 different perspectives: Eoy - Shadow Priest, Zkygge - Death Knight, Meka - Restoration Shaman, and Kungen - Protection Warrior.  You can find out more here, or watch the stream below.

Interview With Mackzter of Ensidia

Shortly after Ensidia defeated Yogg-Saron, I got in touch with Mackzter and Meka to chat about Ulduar, its difficulty, and Ensidia's overall thoughts on the instance.  Many will remember their vocal discontent with Wrath of the Lich King's initial tier of content -- saying it was too easy -- but this time it seems Blizzard may have gotten it right, especially with the addition of Hard Modes.  Read on for the interview.

First of all, congratulations on the Yogg-Saron kill and a full clear of normal mode Ulduar, being the first in the world to complete Heroic: The Secrets of Ulduar.

Now that you've cleared normal mode, how would you compare Ulduar in terms of difficulty to Naxxramas.  Is it an appropriate step up?

From what we have seen so far it is definitly the correct step up, most hard modes are reasonably hard and hopefully Algalon will feed on our tears! The only thing we would mention is that our our minds it should be that the first couple of bosses are easy and the difficulty increases along the way, that doesn't really apply with all bosses on Normal mode(for example General Vezax being one of the easiest). Yogg-saron normal mode is also in our opinion on the correct difficulty level, looking forward to beating the hard mode of the encounter! The game should be taking a gradual increase in difficulty as you progress Naxxramas -> Ulduar -> Ulduar Hard. Blizzard seem to have achieved this pretty well so far.

And for players that weren't aware, Magtheridon had lots of server issues after 3.1 was applied (as with many other servers).  About how much of the time since 3.1 did you spend working on Ulduar?

We are really proud of everyones performance, because of that together with lots of preparation we managed to clear it in about 12h of actual raid time. It's the hardest thing to just sit outside the instance not being able to zone in and not want to just go and do something else. Magtheridon had pretty awful issues with mainly instance server and world server but most other servers had a lot of issues also.

You spent quite a bit of time on the PTRs.  Did you find any encounters you think were bugged, or did the public testing help out and fix those issues?

We didn't really come across any noticable bugs at all almost, the main one was at Ignis where he hits the target he picks up sometimes. Considering they did Yogg-Saron and Kil'Jaeden without any public tests at all we're really hoping that they will decrease the amount of public PTR testing for future instances. Overall the PTR testing did weed out a lot of bugs, we just think that a lot of that could have easily been done with internal testing to stop the instance being spoiled to the level it was before it went live.

How do you feel about the overall difficulty of Yogg-Saron?  About how many attempts / how much time did you spend on it over the course of the day?

We really would say that he is at the correct difficulty level and a lot of guilds will have problems with him when they reach him, it is normal mode after all. Roughly we spent about 2.5h hours on the first raid day, then we took a 4.5h hours sleep break. After that it took us about 2h before we killed him, so all in all about 4.5h. Once we had the strategy sorted it wasn't a really tricky "skill" encounter. It's more about making sure you organise and split up your raid correctly plus understanding his abilities.

Lots of players have asked me to find out about this.  Were there any scripted events aside from the visions during the encounter, to build upon the story of Wrath of the Lich King for future Northrend raid instances?

Personally we're generally not really that interested in the "lore" side of the game but some of our players were a bit dissapointed that when the boss dies, he just falls over and nothing really happens. He is after all an old god and should maybe have some RP like Kil'Jaeden did!

With the fact that Yogg-Saron didn't die immediately and actually took some learning, does this give you hope that the hard modes will truly be challenging?

The bosses we got to test on PTR on hard mode were infact pretty challenging and we're really looking forward to next week where we'll go for hard modes and hopefully Algalon. So far there are only positive things to say about Ulduar!

We've yet to see most of the hard modes in their release form, but if they stand up to Blizzard's claims of being challenging, do you think this model should continue so that the base content is as accessible as possible, and the hard modes are there for the hardcore guilds?

Hard modes are a perfect way in making the content accessible to more guilds. However we do think that they should make it so you have to kill the boss on Normal mode before you can attempt hard mode, to make the progression path clear for every hardcore guild. Let's say Yogg-Saron normal mode drops an item that makes all hardmodes available for example!

What do you think about the shift in itemization so that even end bosses drop the same ilevel loot as the rest of the instance, instead of a tier up like they have since the beginning of the game?  Is this a good change due to hard modes, or does it kind of take away from the epic feel of fighting these end bosses that are usually more challenging and the most dynamic in the instance?

Yogg-saron should be dropping items that is quite a bit better, considering the difficulty level on Yogg-saron compared to some of the other bosses on normal difficulty but the overall theory isn't a bad one.

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