Am I the only person who actually liked DS? >_>

[Rivin]

I liked DS. It was a nice raid with mostly fun fights. But it obviously suffered from a lack of attention; we know that Blizzard put a lot of effort into the look and feel of Spine, but otherwise you can tell that Blizzard had already moved most of the various teams to working on MoP.

[Rivellana]

I liked it, but it just went on way too long.

On top of that, I enjoyed having LFR available for my alts to get gear and I used to run it on five characters per week which ultimately burned me out on top of my guild raids on my main. Not sure why on earth I thought it'd be a good idea to do that much of it, but needless to say these days if I do LFR it's only on one character per week if at all.

[Wafffles]

As with anything else in WoW, ignore the most radical 5% in either direction and you get a pretty good idea of the community consensus. No, it was not the "OMG greatest raid evar" and no it was not "an entire year of play and development alike down the drain OMG dumbest thing in the werld". Ignore the hyperbole and you get a reasonable assessment: it was a decent raid tier that likely would have been remembered as somewhat above average if it wasn't a final tier, if it wasn't the conclusion of "the most epic confrontation modern Azeroth has seen", and if it wasn't being directly compared to fond memories of the epic Lich King fight concluding the previous expansion.

I've come to think of it lately as Godfather 3 or Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Both were 'fine' movies that would have been objectively entertaining but flawed and soon forgotten had they not had the burden of living up to what came before. Compared to 2 of the more beloved movies in cinema history, both were crushed under an avalanche of hate, and suddenly 2 'okay' movies were the 'worst movies ever made'. Same with Dragon Soul: what would have been a 'good, not great' raid if it was perhaps the second tier will instead go down as the worst conclusion to an expansion and a fantastic failure compared to Lich King.

[TJ]

I played a hunter a mage and a prot warrior (killed with all in seperate groups) on my sv hunter I was third highest on tendon damage under the two rogues in a 25man guild with plenty of staffs. Hunter's didn't get screwed you just had to actually be good (manage your cd's like no other) to get it done.

You played with terrible players, Hunters were garbage before they were buffed and got Heroic Vishanka. Mages, Rogues, and Paladins (depended on rng) took everyone to school on tendons.

[MOEEEE]

Haha, nope. I loved Dragon soul, especially Pre-Nerf! =)

[Hubbl3]

One of the worst raids ever and Deathwing was a huge dissapointment in every way possible and one of the worst boss designs ever (both Spine and Madness)

[britishbubba]

It was a good raid, just lasted too long and WAY too nerfed in the end. 5% was ok... 10% eh... Anything more than that and that place was stupidly easy.

Also the madness encounter was... lacking. Imo warmaster should have been swapped for another part of the deathwing fight (Human form DW > Spine > Madness) and it would have fit the end boss part of the encounters much better.

[Notos]

I hated that we had to raid it for a year. Then again I felt the same way about ICC.

[Melorandor]

I thought Dragon Soul and the three dungeons in 4.3 were wonderful and blizzard did amazing work on them.

[Susej]

We all agree DS was alright.

We all agree DS was our 'current content' for about nine months too long.

[Wildberry]

Dragon soul was terrible.

- An 8 Boss raid that was supposed to last us a year.
- Almost all the bosses were reused models (2 even looked the same lol!)
- Reused locations. Wrath Zones, malagos area, malestrom etc.
- Sprine was an overall bad encounter. Just fight adds for 10mins and hope your dps can take our that add that you only had a few seconds to dps. You were forced to stack chars with legendary staffs to have a shot.
- Never actually got to fight Deathwing, another fight where you basically fought adds the entire time.
- If you were a caster I hope you were lucky enough to get a legendary in firelands, otherwise GL joining a heroic raiding guild.
- Hunters got screwed during the tier because they were the only ranged without a legendary.


I mean compared to raids like ICC / Ulduar / ToT etc. I don't see how you can say it was that great. Maybe if the tier only lasted 5 or 6 months I could have lived with DS but to make it the only content for almost a year was just horrible.

Basically this sums up everything I had to say with much less ranting about it. DS was awful imo and had 0 redeeming qualities, it will be remembered just like the rest of Cataclysm, as a stain on the history of WoW (It's literally so bad Nostalgia won't even go near it.)

[Deleted]

I didn't like it. Only speaking about Heroic modes, there was one fight that I really enjoyed and three fights that I thought were 'acceptable' as Raid bosses.

Warmaster Blackhorn (lootship 2.0) was the one I enjoyed. You had plenty to move both into and out of, while having several targets up at a time. Phase 2 was okay, not really much to say about it.

Hagara had some nice mechanics in it. The normal phase I felt was quite good, with the channelled Ice Shards, the Frost Phase wasn't the greatest and the Lightning Phase was pretty boring for everyone but the Healers.

Yor'sahj had some nice ideas in it. I liked the idea of killing oozes to change the mechanics of the boss but unfortunately most combinations just resulted in stack up and AoE adds.

Madness also makes it to my list as an 'acceptable' fight. The first four platforms were pretty fun, especially as it got on and you had less buffs. The last platform was also pretty fun. The problems with it were that it was a very steep change in difficulty over the course of the fight, it started off very easy and then got much harder. This meant that you'd spent the first 10 minutes or so without really being challenged, until all of a sudden you're having to pay attention to stuff. It made progressing on the fight difficult too, as you were most likely wiping towards the end of the fight, meaning that you had to spend all of that time to get back to that stage, making it hard to practice it. The other problem with Madness is just that it's the fight where we're killing the 'big baddy' of the expansion, but just involved adds.

The Raid also didn't have a very good feel/environment to it. I liked that we were back in Dragonblight, that was a good idea. What I didn't like is how we were ported all over the Raid, instead of actually rushing to different areas to defend it. For Yor'sahj and Zon'ozz, their rooms should've been emptied and you should've had to fight adds that were in between the Temple and the Maws, so that you actually felt that you were fighting your way towards the boss.

[Dhomeli]

Dragon Soul is one of my favorite raids. Even if the Deathwing fights were not crazy complex, they still were very cinematic.

[Confirm Deny]

No, but you're still crazy!
It was insightful to see - when my friends made me level a rogue for the guild - how each fight had at least one cool little trick that rogues could help on (Also somewhat responsible for the spread, stack, spread, stack mechanics on a majority of the fights) from a design standpoint, but that was not long and ultimately I think they should avoid those kind of gimmicks in favor of actually tuning classes.

[Kantoro]

Probably not, the very vocal minority doesn't like anything. They are the instant gratification generation who will never like anything and complain about everything.

I liked DS just fine, the bosses were different, the mechanics were interesting, overall I would give it a 7.

[Deleted]

I loved DS from an alt perspective. You could just get together with a few guildies on your alts and half-pug DS HC. It was quick and easy which made it a fun thing to do with friends or even solo-pug. It was my favourite thing to do in T13, rushing alts to 90, gearing them up and getting them 8/8 HC. Good times.
The same thing is just not possible in T14/T15. These days you need rep to buy valor stuff, i still don't want to understand why blizz did that.
But those are very personal reasons i guess. Objectively, i couldn't give the raid more than 5 out of 10 stars. 8 bosses, 5 of which were killed during day1 of progress, the 6th two days later and the 7th blocked for a month and gave way to a bugged and not that difficult endboss. it wasn't all bad though, i enjoyed hagara, blackhorn and madness. anything with lots of movement or extra buffs and clever extraactionbuttons usually gets me going

[Fullgore]

I loved it. Could have been more original but it sure was fun

[Kurzior]

The first time through DS? Yeah, cool stuff. New bosses and everything. After that though, when you really start looking at how it stacks up against previous (and now future) tiers of content, you notice some things.

- DS was the smallest and shortest end-expansion tier of any to this point except Sunwell. Even though Sunwell had 2 fewer bosses, it was much harder and took many more weeks to clear, even for top end guilds, than DS did, which fell in something like 3 weeks, with normal mode being cleared in under 24 hours.

- The prevailing boss mechanics in DS were 'stack here, heal, and burn things'. The only true exception to this was Hagara.

- The instance just felt tiny, which is impressive considering the amount of geography it covered. You walked in, walked a couple hundred yards to the first boss, then got portals and dragon rides between bosses. Trash was only an afterthought so that you would have something to do other than bosses. Some people might like the fact that you just moved from boss to boss with no interruption. You know what other raid did that? Trial of the Crusader. And that's still regarded as an abomination of a raid, even by blizzard's developers.

- Tier 13 in general boasted a grand total of 3 things to do in the game if you were a PvE player. You could raid (but only dragon soul because LFR nullified all value of tier 11/12). You could do 5-mans (but only the 3 hour of twilight heroics because they nullified the value of all previous 5-man and tier 11/12 content). Or you could level alts. Outside of those categories, available content in the game was basically limited to 'hang out in a capital city until something interesting happens'.

- Burnout and stagnation of content. Measured from the first heroic madness kill to the release of the next major content patch, tier 13 lasted a grand total of 9 months after all content had been cleared. The longest of any content tier ever, including ICC. Because of content gating in ICC and the attempt per week limit on the last 4 bosses, there were only 7 months of ICC between the first heroic LK kill and the release of patch 4.0. And that's not counting the mini-patch of ruby sanctum which would cut that time to only 4 months.

- Massive disappointment in a final boss. Let's look back at past end-expansion villians. Vanilla had Kel'Thuzad, the servant of the lich king himself who was positioned to wipe humanity from the face of Azeroth. Killing him effectively prevented this (temporarily). The burning crusade saw us turn back Kil'Jaeden himself as he attempted to enter Azeroth through the sunwell. In Wrath, we found ourselves staring down the business end of frostmourne, wielded by the Lich King, on of the most powerful beings to ever walk the face of Azeroth, not to mention a character practically dripping evil. In each of these cases, we fought directly against some of the biggest threats to the world and killed them, effectively saving the world. Those fights felt epic because you were face to face with incredibly powerful characters. Now enter Deathwing, the Aspect of Death, the Destroyer himself. And what do we do? We get to fight .... his toenails. Think about that for a second. One of the most dangerous characters in WoW lore, and we're given the task of effectively stepping on his toes to get him to fall back into the maelstrom. At least to my view, it was one of the most disappointing bosses ever created simply because the players were not really ever tasked with actually killing or removing deathwing as a threat. We just poked away at his claws and those .... puss-filled blood things .... until he .... falls over .... and then Thrall (who astral recalled away at the beginning of the fight, mind you) comes back in time to kill him.

That's it. Rant over. Take it for what you will.

[Imbasawrus]

Worst part about it is how they hyped up the deathwing fight on blizzcon(I believe).

"Oh it's such a good encounter that we had to split it up to 2 fights!"
And then it turned out to be a backrub and then kill adds/limbs for 10 minutes.

[Deleted]

i didn't mind the encounters, what made it boring for me was how long it lasted, it was nice for a while, but it lasted so long!

---------- Post added 2013-04-30 at 08:58 PM ----------

Worst part about it is how they hyped up the deathwing fight on blizzcon(I believe).

"Oh it's such a good encounter that we had to split it up to 2 fights!"
And then it turned out to be a backrub and then kill adds/limbs for 10 minutes.

oh yeah, and that. was really looking forward to facing deathwing, and all we did was stand on his back killing tenticles for 5mins and then attacked his legs. was a bit dissapointed in that.