So what are your impressions so far?
Since I play on an EU-server the patch hit us today and my guild just finished our first night in the new raid.
We downed 5 of the 8 new encounters. 2 of those in our first try. This left me feeling slightly disappointed. While my guild was 6/7 HC before 4.3 and we have better equip than the DS normal encounters are tuned for it felt too easy. The first 3 bosses have about as much mechanics you have to be aware of as your generic 5mann HC boss.
The 5th boss was the first who demanded at least a bit attention. But after 4 or 5 wipes we had him too.
And yeah, HCs will be harder (I hope). But I just think of the first 3 bosses as total pushovers. And the 4th and 5th are not that much harder.
Blizz I am disappoint.
Edited, Nov 30th 2011 6:06pm by TherealLogros
·Theme
- Forums
- World of Warcraft
- General Discussion
- The Dragon Soul Raid
The Dragon Soul RaidFollow
It was the exact same thing with Firelands. Normal was easy enough that it was accessible by the majority of players, and then Heroic content was a majorly steep increase in difficulty.
I wish it wasn't such a huge jump, that normal content started out this easy on the first boss or so, but then quickly escalated in difficulty. I want it to be a challenge to reach Deathwing, but it looks like that's not the case.
As for actual fights, I found the first fight to be nothing but a loot piñata. Second and third fights were fun with a cool mechanic, but nothing really challenging.
Fourth fight is where skill starts becoming involved, but only marginally. All the fourth fight is is a failcheck. Can you dodge ice waves? Can you attack the right target? Can you line up successfully? Etc.
Fifth fight is a gearcheck. A surprisingly imposing one at that. This fight is the one with the "PRESS THIS BUTTON TO LIVE" in neon flashing letters, but we still had a bunch of people die to the mechanics. The only issue we had with it was getting tanks to stay alive during the Hour of Twilight. We ended up using both me and another Shadow Priest to rotate dispersion cooldowns to live through it so the tanks didn't have to. It wasn't bad at all, but I feel like it was something that wasn't intended.
That's as far as we ended up getting last night, we'll be continuing again tonight.
Edited, Nov 30th 2011 8:13pm by IDrownFish
I wish it wasn't such a huge jump, that normal content started out this easy on the first boss or so, but then quickly escalated in difficulty. I want it to be a challenge to reach Deathwing, but it looks like that's not the case.
As for actual fights, I found the first fight to be nothing but a loot piñata. Second and third fights were fun with a cool mechanic, but nothing really challenging.
Fourth fight is where skill starts becoming involved, but only marginally. All the fourth fight is is a failcheck. Can you dodge ice waves? Can you attack the right target? Can you line up successfully? Etc.
Fifth fight is a gearcheck. A surprisingly imposing one at that. This fight is the one with the "PRESS THIS BUTTON TO LIVE" in neon flashing letters, but we still had a bunch of people die to the mechanics. The only issue we had with it was getting tanks to stay alive during the Hour of Twilight. We ended up using both me and another Shadow Priest to rotate dispersion cooldowns to live through it so the tanks didn't have to. It wasn't bad at all, but I feel like it was something that wasn't intended.
That's as far as we ended up getting last night, we'll be continuing again tonight.
Edited, Nov 30th 2011 8:13pm by IDrownFish
Hmm I don't know if it was intended to be done that way but we ended up rotation CDs for the 5th bosses Hour of Twilight too.
Our maintank took every one with always another DD or sometimes a healpriest (with Guardian Angel me thinks). My Dispersion was also in high demand. :)
Yeah FL normal wasn't extremely hard either. But was it really that easy? I honestly can't remember but I don't think we downed 5 bosses when we had our first raid night there.
Our maintank took every one with always another DD or sometimes a healpriest (with Guardian Angel me thinks). My Dispersion was also in high demand. :)
Yeah FL normal wasn't extremely hard either. But was it really that easy? I honestly can't remember but I don't think we downed 5 bosses when we had our first raid night there.
My guild has 3/7 FL down. We are by no one's standards "Good". We take our time and have members who regularly miss raids and are forced to pug....
Last night we walked into DS and downed the first boss on the second attempt.
His fight mechanics are this:
Do you remember the Giants from the FL Trash?
Do the same thing you did with them. Every once in a while 3 people need to stand on a meteor thingy. Every once in a while you have to hide behind a wall.
Effectively they took one trash mob, one boss from Stonecore (Slabhide) and combined them. It was very anti-climatic for a group like us (No one had 4pc bonuses) to walk in and down him in 2 shots.
*To be fair, we went to the ping-pong guy and I proceeded to rack up a 120G repair bill....
Last night we walked into DS and downed the first boss on the second attempt.
His fight mechanics are this:
Do you remember the Giants from the FL Trash?
Do the same thing you did with them. Every once in a while 3 people need to stand on a meteor thingy. Every once in a while you have to hide behind a wall.
Effectively they took one trash mob, one boss from Stonecore (Slabhide) and combined them. It was very anti-climatic for a group like us (No one had 4pc bonuses) to walk in and down him in 2 shots.
*To be fair, we went to the ping-pong guy and I proceeded to rack up a 120G repair bill....
My guild was 2/7 Heroic FL pre-4.3 and we are just an average 25man guild. We oneshot the first boss, killed Yor'sahj (the ooze guy) on the second or third try on Tuesday and then wiped a bunch on Zon'ozz. Last night we went back in, did significantly better on Zon'ozz, but still took a few tries to kill him. We then killed Hagara on our 4th try and called it for the night. We had a lot of stupid issues in Firelands that caused us to struggle, and so far this raid seems a lot easier. It'll be nice to stomp through here on normal for a few weeks to gear people up, and then knowing our past experiences, we'll probably have a hard time on heroic.
We were 6/7 Heroic going into this week and dropped the first 5 on the first night due to time restraints. Then came back the next day, easily passed 6 and 7 and then wiped a fair amount on the last fight.
Deathwing thus far isn't so much difficult as it is we're just figuring out a strategy to handle his different mechanics. It's a pretty interesting fight and I'm glad I'm getting to actually think up strategies and then apply them as opposed to the oh so prevalent "Tankspot said blahblahblah."
Anyways, from the skills I have some ideas for strategy for first boss on heroic and I haven't thought much past there, but I could definitely see it getting a lot harder.
And as easy as normal is, LFR is a joke >.<
Deathwing thus far isn't so much difficult as it is we're just figuring out a strategy to handle his different mechanics. It's a pretty interesting fight and I'm glad I'm getting to actually think up strategies and then apply them as opposed to the oh so prevalent "Tankspot said blahblahblah."
Anyways, from the skills I have some ideas for strategy for first boss on heroic and I haven't thought much past there, but I could definitely see it getting a lot harder.
And as easy as normal is, LFR is a joke >.<
That image is hilarious!
Hab our 2nd raid night yesterday. We downed the 6th and the 7th boss and had a few tries on the final one.
The 6th boss, Warmaster Blackhorn, was really really easy. Took only 2 tries to down him.
Spine of Deathwing the second to last encounter was (imo) the second raidboss deserving of that description in Dragon Soul.
We spend 1,5 to 2 hours working on him and then when everyone was familiar with every aspect of the fight he went down pretty easy. At first a rather frustrating fight I found it fun in the end. Main problem for me as a DD was to get the Burning Tendons in my target fast enough. Since the raid has only 20 seconds to burn away the ~2,8 million HP (10man version) it's pretty important not to spend 5 seconds clicking supidly around. Sadly that's what I did the first couple of tries. :)
Then we went to face the Madness of Deathwing. I did like the fight and it's mechanics but for a final boss of a raidinstanz he is too easy. We had 3 tries and got him to 40%. Okay the period between 40% and 20% is the hardest part of the fight but that's what Bloodlust is for. ;) Which if we had used it prior to the mechanic leading to the wipe might have prevented it.
So all in all a nice raidinstanz but too many too simple bosses and even the ones with good mechanics are a bit undertuned.
At least one boss (the first) we will try on HC next ID, maybe more than one. Depends on how hard these fights are tuned.
The 6th boss, Warmaster Blackhorn, was really really easy. Took only 2 tries to down him.
Spine of Deathwing the second to last encounter was (imo) the second raidboss deserving of that description in Dragon Soul.
We spend 1,5 to 2 hours working on him and then when everyone was familiar with every aspect of the fight he went down pretty easy. At first a rather frustrating fight I found it fun in the end. Main problem for me as a DD was to get the Burning Tendons in my target fast enough. Since the raid has only 20 seconds to burn away the ~2,8 million HP (10man version) it's pretty important not to spend 5 seconds clicking supidly around. Sadly that's what I did the first couple of tries. :)
Then we went to face the Madness of Deathwing. I did like the fight and it's mechanics but for a final boss of a raidinstanz he is too easy. We had 3 tries and got him to 40%. Okay the period between 40% and 20% is the hardest part of the fight but that's what Bloodlust is for. ;) Which if we had used it prior to the mechanic leading to the wipe might have prevented it.
So all in all a nice raidinstanz but too many too simple bosses and even the ones with good mechanics are a bit undertuned.
At least one boss (the first) we will try on HC next ID, maybe more than one. Depends on how hard these fights are tuned.
TherealLogros wrote:
We spend 1,5 to 2 hours working on him and then when everyone was familiar with every aspect of the fight he went down pretty easy. At first a rather frustrating fight I found it fun in the end. Main problem for me as a DD was to get the Burning Tendons in my target fast enough. Since the raid has only 20 seconds to burn away the ~2,8 million HP (10man version) it's pretty important not to spend 5 seconds clicking supidly around. Sadly that's what I did the first couple of tries.
/target Burning
Most of our DD had set up a macro but for some reason it would work 2 out of 3 times and then unpredictably it wouldn't work. After some tries of fail I just targeted our WL who uses DBM and thus gets an extra unit frame for the tendons. I use Big Wigs so I just switched to his target once he had it. Not the most elegant way but it worked. I still lose ~0,5 seconds but that was fast enough.
My first impression is disappointment.
I was out of town and afk for the patch. So, last night was my first look at DS. I joined a guild 10-man group that had downed the first two bosses. We downed the third and fourth bosses with only a couple wipes on each. We did this with a mixed second-string group, most of whom had not seen the encounters before. (Background - most of this group is 6/7 reg FL). To me, it seems like the mechanics are a lot easier than FL bosses. Maybe it gets harder in the later DS bosses, I don't know, but if people are blowing through these bosses this quickly, this soon...it seems like a bad sign. I know it took our group longer to get deeper into FL, for sure.
I was out of town and afk for the patch. So, last night was my first look at DS. I joined a guild 10-man group that had downed the first two bosses. We downed the third and fourth bosses with only a couple wipes on each. We did this with a mixed second-string group, most of whom had not seen the encounters before. (Background - most of this group is 6/7 reg FL). To me, it seems like the mechanics are a lot easier than FL bosses. Maybe it gets harder in the later DS bosses, I don't know, but if people are blowing through these bosses this quickly, this soon...it seems like a bad sign. I know it took our group longer to get deeper into FL, for sure.
I'm hoping that this will play out that DS-normal is tuned at 5/7 or 6/7 FL pre-nerf. That should allow about 25% of the raiding population to complete, and if that's not enough, hopefully they'll be able to tune with a gradual ICC-style, rather than an in-your-face FL style rebalance.
The top 10%-15% will hopefully get enough of a challenge out of heroics (we'll know more in a day or so). By lowering the bar to completion of normal mode, they can set heroics on a completely different difficulty track. We'll see if they do.
The top 10%-15% will hopefully get enough of a challenge out of heroics (we'll know more in a day or so). By lowering the bar to completion of normal mode, they can set heroics on a completely different difficulty track. We'll see if they do.
Recent Visitors: 234
All times are in CST
Anonymous Guests (234)
- Forums
- World of Warcraft
- General Discussion
- The Dragon Soul Raid
© 2024 Fanbyte LLC