Dragon Soul - just as bad as ToC? Discuss

[Slashgordon]

Ok so people HATED ToC. It's been pretty well documented how disappointing that raid was, following as it did the majesty of Ulduar. That circular room with no trash got very old after the first couple of weeks.

However, I would like to present the following argument: As a raid, Dragon Soul is just as poor as ToC, if not moreso. ToC suffered from several things:

1. Totally boring architecture / art style. Pretty obvious one this, I mean it was the same circular room, until the floor fell away for the last boss revealing another circular room.

2. A totally messed up difficulty curve. Normal modes in ToC were INCREDIBLY easy for the most part. That is an issue but not necessarily for the reasons some people might think. The problem was the heroic modes. These were such a vast order of magnitude harder than the normal modes that it was extremely difficult for many guilds to get into them. You would kill anub on normal fairly easily, and then think "ooh, lets try heroic mode!" Then you'd run into the heroic Northrend Beasts encounter, a colossal cockblock of a difficulty wall, with tanks getting floored in seconds and other such nasty things.

3. Faction Champions. Nothing more needs to be said about this really, I'm sure the majority of raiders will have, at one point or another, experienced the fun of having all of their plate melee DPS suddenly turn onto your warlock / generic clothie and cut him to ribbons before the healers could so much as think "OH FFUUUUU"

These are just a couple of reasons why people didn't like it. However, consider this:
The bosses in ToC were actually pretty interesting. The Northrend beasts was a 3 phase fight where each phase was very different, requiring good healing / tankswaps and burst DPS in phase 1, solid positional sense / awareness and DPS in phase 2, and more good positional awareness / ability to run very fast away from an angry yetiomg in phase 3. Jaraxxus was a fairly fun fight as well, with add control, a new mechanic in the fire debuff that followed people around requiring your raiders to not be stupid with where they left it, another new mechanic in the form of the "reverse bomb" effect, requiring snap burst healing on a specific target and obviously the solid burst requirements to kill the adds before they overwhelmed you.

Faction champions was, despite it being the most hateful thing in existance at the time, was arguably a pretty interesting fight, in that it required your raiders to do more than just go through their DPS rotation. Long forgotten buttons like disarms, stuns, snares, roots, offensive dispels, silences and other such forms of crowd control were dusted off. All this combined with the need to be able to turn on the dps in a pretty big way to blow down your chosen target before that stupidly OP resto druid made a mockery of your dps.

Twin valkyr also added a new mechanic in the form of the orbs that people always seemed to get hit by despite them moving in one direction and never following people. It needed snap burst, solid DPS overall and was, on the whole, a decent ish encounter. Anub arak was also a fairly interesting fight, with the last phase in particular presenting healers with a different kind of challenge, and the burrow phases needed good awareness and movement from your raiders.

Say what you like about the pure numbers involved and the way they affected the difficulty, but from an encounter design standpoint, the raw mechanics of the fights themselves were in no way bad in ToC.

Now lets compare this with Dragon Soul, the final tier of the expansion.

1. Artstyle - not much to say here really, its just using environments recycled from the previous expansion for the most part, and the bits that arent are re used from levelling content in Cataclysm. Hardly groundbreaking

2. Difficulty curve - Can't say much for the heroic modes as I have only killed Morchok so far but on normal modes it seems pretty easy overall, and heroic morchok doesnt seem wildly harder than normal madness, so in terms of how it leads you into its heroic modes you could argue the difficulty curve is better on the whole.

3. The encounters themselves. HERE is where things go bad for Dragon Soul. Forget the numbers, think about the mechanics of the fights. I propose that they are FAR less interesting than the ToC fights. The majority of DS fights have very few interesting mechanics, and mostly boil down to "stack up, and spread every 30 seconds or so." As with ToC I am only really talking about normal modes here, as the core mechanics dont change too much on heroic IN GENERAL.

Morchok starts the instance, and involves everyone stacking up, and hitting the boss. When he pulls people in to him you run away and LoS his AoE, which doesnt really hit that hard anyway. You also need a few people to stack on the crystals he spawns. That's it. hardly inventive, and far less interesting than anything in ToC. Zonozz - The way this is handled on normal is probably quite different to heroic, but on normal it basically boils down to "stack up, melee run away to avoid his AoE thing, then ranged run in when he summons tentacles." Again, interesting? No, not really.

Yorsaj is basically the same thing - you all stack up, then you kill an add when it spawns then you stack up again and heal. Hagara is possibly the most interesting of the first 4 encounters, but even then, its still pretty much just, "dps boss, dont stand in ice, kill the add, rinse and repeat." Again, I would argue far less interesting mechanically than anything in ToC.

Ultraxxion is an extremely boring fight, and sticks to the theme of "stack up" except this time you dont need to spread out. patchwerk 2.0

Blackhorn is probably the most interesting encounter in the whole instance, requiring abit of add control, burst dps and some positional awareness.

This brings us to the 2 Deathwing encounters. The final two encounters of the expansion and the culmination of all of the lore and questing up until now. The final showdown with one of WoW's biggest baddies. Except... it's a pair of add fights. Spine is, mechanically extremely boring, requiring the raid to stack up AGAIN, and just DPS adds. Sure it needs your dps to stop every once in a while, and the whole raid needs to move into one of the lava pols to get hooked on when he rolls but lets face it, this is one of the most mechanically uninteresting fights in the darn game.

Madness is another add fight essentially, not really requiring much more than your DPS to be able to attack the right targets. Sure it gets progressively harder, but all it boils dow to is "can your DPS hit the right add" and "can your healers heal the damage?" The final part is just slapping an inanimate head of deathwing while tanking and killing, you guessed it, more adds.

So, on balance, I would argue that DS is a FAR less interesting raid than ToC. people slam ToC, and alot generally say they thought wotlk was bad because of it, yet I would contend that actually DS is just as bad as ToC, if not worse, as the artstyle / zone itself isn't wildly more interesting, and the fights are way less fun to pull.

Thoughts?

[asharia]

no as bad as ToC

its just short, and feels rushed is all.

only deathwing has new models and zones. no new faction or rep. only 8 encounters

[fulkin]

the problem with DS is that on heroic mode the bosses require class stacking to an annoying degree. 10m needs a lot of it, 25m not as much but you need a lot of mages for spine, you need 2 hpallys 2 resto shamans for different fights etc. Not being able to stack your raid makes the fights much more difficult than they can be

[lunchbox2042]

It feels like they rushed it to get it out by the end of the year to make investors happy.

[Slashgordon]

It feels like they rushed it to get it out by the end of the year to make investors happy.

Or to make people want to keep playing just as TOR came out - they've done that before with other rival MMOs.

[stgeorge78]

All raids from now on will be designed for LFR first and then have numbers tuned up for Normal/Heroic with maybe 1 mechanic added. Blizzard will pick one fight to be "impossibly hard" for heroic to act as the gatekeeper between world first guilds and the rest.

That's how raiding is going to be. They aren't going to waste time designing a boss that can't be done in LFR - so expect more tank and spanks. Tuning will be to just increase the incoming damage enough so that the gear curve smooths that out. It will no longer depend on players being individually good.

[frape666]

I hated both ToC and DS made me quit raiding as of now,having completed the normal mode in just 3 weeks after release really says alot,and NO,i don't want to spend another 6 months of my life night after night doing the EXACT same fight with lets say 1 mechanic just for 13 ilevels which are pretty useless coming MoP.

In regards to the OP's question,id have to say that DS is far worse,taking into account that while ToC was horrible,we still could raid ulduar for various achievements including the mount,algalon,val'anyr for our healers,Alone in the darkness,and the gear being not-so-useless as with firelands now,which the only reason to go for it is pretty much a sissy caster staff.

[Slashgordon]

I think it's just that going back to Ulduar felt so much more fun than going back to Firelands does. You could go back to Ulduar for the weird, quirky achievements and you can't do that with Firelands because it basically only has the meta achies, none of which are particularly good fun.

[Twoflower]

ToC was way worse.

[Kelathos]

Compared to Firelands which had a small but wonderfully crafted raid, daily quest hub, factions.... DS is a disappointment.

It is not ToC though.

[Slashgordon]

ToC was way worse.

But WHY though? That's what this thread is about, actually putting forward some real reasoning. My point is that I think people have gotten so fixed in the mindset that ToC was the worst thing to happen to raiding since forever, that they've lost sight of really WHY they hated it. My argument is that if you look at ToC and DS dispassionately, in the cold light of day, you could see that, in all honesty, ToCs fights were far better from a design point of view than Dragon Soul's are. I accept that ToC being one small room with no trash made exceedingly visually dull, but could you not level the same criticism at DS? Apart from the two Deathwing encounters (which are such bad encounters that the artstyle doesn't matter) the entirety of DS is recycled areas from either a previous expansion or levelling content in this one (Yorsaj and Zonozz, both of which are in the same, identical recycled room). It's not even cool recycled content. I mean WOTLK had some amazing looking zones and areas in it - like Algalon's room. Lets face it Dragonblight is hardly the most interesting place in the world.

So, what was it ABOUT ToC that made it "way worse?" - That's what this thread is for, some proper discussion, not just "X was worse than Y."

[Chronnos]

I took a break from raiding for a while recently so my opinion on DS might not be the most trustworthy but i do have quite a few friends and guildies that are already burned out by the raid.

[joeer]

ToC was amazing, it was 100 times better then dragon soul....

[Tesk]

i think ToC was better than DS

[Raptoos]

Bad, but not as bad as ToC.

DS have, at last, different raiding locations, and some trash before Morchok. And HC mode is pretty nice there...


But comparision is understanding, DS and ToC both are trashlack bosses, and gimme-gimme loot system in LFR

[StaeleAilar]

I'm not sure i think DS is worse than ToC, however i concede that ToC did have more interesting elements to it in terms of boss encounter mechanics.

ToC was still kinda boring (i only raided it a few times - wasn't a "raider" back then). Comparing it with DS however, i have a tough time establishing which i would say is worse. I kinda hated them both, but ToC you had to do more than just stack and spread, as is the case in DS. Now being a resto shaman as a main, the stacking part is nice for my epeen (although still thrashed by holy paladins /angry fist) but it does get boring and tedious. Especially when one of the easiest things someone could do to keep themselves alive, isn't done, they die, you wipe and then you have to repeat the entire encounter again >.>

[TimeTravel]

Every raid going forward will be worse then ToC, since LFR makes it easier then ever by a mile to clear all the content. So challenge for seeing content is out the window.

Basement dwellers who have nothing else to do for NO REWARDS ANYMORE push heroics for absolutely NO BENEFIT like there was in burning crusade and Ulduar.

After ICC no titles and mounts were removed from the game so any monkey can get them at 85 now.

[Viglante]

DS is worse than ToC, a lot of the ToC hate stems from the simple fact that it was the "filler" between yogg and the lich king, hell appart from the last boss your not even killing anything "worthwile" as they are all already "captured" enemies who Tirion just kept alive to serve as training dummies.

[nwo]

ToC was meh... but at least it (the fights, not the scenery) was dynamic and the fights were somewhat interesting. I think that if most of the fights didn't take place in the same room, it would have been rated a lot better.

DS is just boring. It doesn't require much thinking or mechanics and it basically comes to whether or not you have the dps/heals for progression. The fights are extremely simple as the OP mentioned. Most of them come down to: staying out of crap, killing/switching to add(s), and massive aoe healing. After a short while the fights get very very repetitive and boring.

I miss fights where you would have to use your situational abilities/CDs and fights that require interrupts. OK, maybe not so much the interrupts, but you get the point... the more (situational) abilities you have to use, the less boring the fight should be... Mashing your buttons in the same boring pattern on just about every single fight with some occasional target switching and/or movement is extremely boring.

[Slashgordon]

Also, just thought I'd add, as much as I didn't like ToC's total lack of trash, I prefer that to the shit we've been given in DS. I mean that pre ultraxxion trash is about the most obnoxious thing they've done since, well, the sindragosa spider room but even that was far more interesting