[General]The hardness of hard modes

I get the weirdest flak from people about the oddest things, some times.

In an earlier article on removing crits from Thorim, I got called on this comment:

Would I do this? No. It's not that hard of a hard mode anyway, and if you don't already have the deadly gear it's probably not worth grinding for it.

Some folks thought I shouldn't say this given that we've not finished Yogg much less attempted any hard modes, and that's reasonable. Some thought I was saying it was easy - which I wasn't.

And some wanted to know what I meant.

Well, what I did was look at GuildOx's percent rankings at the time. I checked what % of raiding guilds had done each hard mode, and assumed that this corresponded reasonably to how 'hard' a mode was. There are some caveats to this, but it's a reasonable thing. Let's look at a snapshot from today to see what's up:

Flame Leviathan, 1 tower: 21.56% of all guilds (5800)
Iron Council Molgein: 5.44% (1450)
Flame Leviathan, 2 towers: 4.95% (1320)
Freya, 1 watcher: 1.73% (461)
Hodir: 1.44% (384)
Thorim: .88% (234)
Flame Leviathan, 3 towers: .75% (200)
Iron Council Steelbreaker: .47% (125)
Yogg, 3 watchers: .32% (85)
Freya, 2 watchers: .24% (64)
Flame Leviathan, 4 towers: .17% (43)
Freya, 3 watchers: .09% (24)
Vezax: .06% (16)
Yogg, 2 watchers: .03% (9)
Yogg, 1 watcher: .02% (5)
Mimiron: .01% (1)
XT: 0% (0)
Yogg, 0 watchers: 0 (0)

The numbers are either the total guilds that have done it or are the extrapolated number of guilds from the percentage. I do not guarantee their accuracy, but they should be close.

Of these, Iron Council Molgein is the first hard mode on the way to Algalon. Then Hodir, Thorim, Freya3, Mimiron and Yogg1.

What's interesting is that in a week, Hodir went from (IIRC) .4% to 1.44%. Why? Because they increased his enrage timer on the hard mode from 1:55 to 2:55 during that week, and I suspect a lot of guilds hadn't tried him yet or had already downed him by the time that hotfix got put in. It seems clear that of the 4 watcher hard modes that give the quest for Algalon, Hodir's the easiest.

I also suspect that XT is not that difficult relative to some of these, but no one bothers because he's a gate boss and they'd rather move on to better things. That being said, the hard mode for XT sounds insane to me; 150% more health for having already 24 million HP? Nuts. Same thing for Flame Leviathan; it's probably not that hard of a hardmode, but because you must do him before doing anything else, a lot of guilds are reluctant to waste too much time on his hard modes too early. That should be changing in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, I do not and am not saying that any of these are ridiculously easy. But I will say that if you're going to try for a hard mode, chances are Hodir is a good one to try for - and Thorim is next.