Operation: Mechagon brings Ulduar-style difficulty curves to 5 player content

The folks over at Wowhead have found a neat new wrinkle in Operation: Mechagon, the new megadungeon coming in patch 8.2, and it’s fascinating. Now, it’s not entirely unheard of for a megadungeon to have a secret, more difficult boss — Nightbane was an extra boss you could encounter running the Return to Karazhan megadungeon back in Legion — but what’s interesting about Operation: Mechagon’s approach is that it takes a page out of Wrath of the Lich King raid dungeon Ulduar.

Specifically, when completing the dungeon, you can kill the first three bosses in a specific order, one indicated by following the fourth boss on the map, the HK-8 Aerial Oppression Unit. By killing each boss when the fourth boss is overhead patrolling, you make the fight with the boss you’re on more difficult due to the HK-8 interfering in the fight and dropping unkillable Walkie Shockie X1 mobs on your group. If you finished the first three bosses with that additional difficulty, several aspects of the fight with HK-8 have been changed to make them harder too. The opening mob you fight as part of the encounter is buffed and has more dangerous attacks, and there’s a special debuff on the healer of your group in phase 2 requiring you to change your approach to the mechanics of the fight.

It’s all very similar to how Ulduar hard modes worked — there’s no switch to flip or toggle, you just do the fights differently and that changes everything. Since there are another four or so bosses in Operation: Mechagon, we don’t know yet if there’s another series of Hard Mode choices to make the whole dungeon harder and what, if any, the result of doing things like this will be. Will there be extra loot? A cool mount? Will it be necessary for some other reason? We don’t know yet, but it’s still interesting to find out there’s a way players can make the dungeon more difficult for themselves through emergent gameplay.

I’m getting Firefighter flashbacks to my old days raiding Ulduar. Definitely interested to see how this ends up on the live game.