Why do you like Battle for Dazar'Alor

[erifwodahs]

Good overall . I won't remember it for too long tho. Mythic only.
1st boss. No emotions
2nd boss no emotions
3rd boss really like multisided strike idea. Would like to see something like that in the future
4th. Cool boss, quite easy, playing with gems is nice.
5th it would be nice, bad thing - doing too much damage makes the fight harder.
6th really like realms and portals idea. Good fight overall
7th I hate this in pugs, I love this on mythic with my guild. A lot of wipes because of personal mistakes, but I like whole flow of the fight. Really nice. Don't really get the fuss about being colour blind. I mean icons are icons, benching is a lazy choice.
8th hmmm... nothing really outstanding. I guess could be more interesting if I had to clean the floor?
9th. Annoying on the ship but really enjoyable in later phases.

[Poe]

I'm not a fan of boss mechanics that can't be avoided by the player that make the player unable to use their abilities.

Champions - This boss is fine

Grong - This boss is fine.

Jadefire - Multisided Strike. I'm actually okay with this mechanic on mythic because it rewards the player with a buff if done perfectly.

Opulence - This boss is fine.

Conclave - mind wipes, dumb mechanic. Getting stunned when targeted by the jumping tiger from kimbal's wrath, dumb mechanic.

King Rasta - Mind control totem, dumb mechanic

High Tinker -I think this fight would be so much more rewarding if the player was given a buff for successfully completing the robots quickly. Perhaps 30% damage/healing buff if they are completed within 5 seconds, 20% if within 10 seconds etc. etc.

Blockade - Tempting song, dumb mechanic.

Jaina - This boss is fine.

[Nitros14]

Jaina was always a badly designed encounter.

Phase 1 had way too many absurd swings in difficulty pull to pull with a number of autolose scenarios (three ballistas on fire and she delays avalanche/freezing blast)

Phase 3 has always been a mess. There's a mythic mechanic no one saw until repeated nerfs (split elemental) and Blizzard's nerfs show they wanted a tactical phase 3 taking turns breaking people out of ice blocks but the tuning was way off so they just gave up and let the dumb zerg strategy be the method of killing her. During progress they actually fixed it by making the elemental actually cast ice nova then people watching Method bitched and bitched and they changed it back.

Then we got that stupid version of Jaina forever where if icefall landed on you in phase 3 you wiped because you'd have to move and the boss would sit still and chain cast for 10 seconds then crystalline dust the raid and even if you didn't get dusted the melee not dps-ing for 12 seconds is a wipe anyway.

Not to mention the invisible icefall in phase 2, sure you could technically counter it with farsight but that's extremely finicky and not reliable so sometimes you just died with not much to do about it.

Then they finally threw up their hands and made phase 3 an easy non-phase like it is now.


The rest of the raid is pretty undertuned (especially Champion of the Light, easiest mythic boss ever created by a lot) so the fact that Jaina was so stupid makes the raid pretty bad in my eyes. Jaina was one of the least fun end bosses to progress.

[cparle87]

1. The environment
While I am playing 90% Alliance and only 10% horde I already saw most of the raid A LOT before. Almost all terrain and textures are reused -> Very boring. And since I am in Dazar'Alor a lot (even as alliance, getting my welfare epics for alts ;-) ) the visuals of this raid are extremely underwhelming (except Jaina)

3. Faction change: Getting changed from faction A to faction B for half the instance. I understand why it is done. It is a nice idea for story telling. But once again: I really do not like it. I want to play MY character, not a random one from the other faction. It invalidates visual character progression (e.g. transmogs). This a problem, because for example for the last 2 1/2 months basically my guild did nothing except raid logging twice a week, so everytime I play, I am not playing my character, I am playing a character of the other faction.

5. Story: The horde part is told nicely, showing the new pact from Talanji and the loa of death. From the alliance side nothing makes sense of course - killing the king and then running away without pushing the advantage. But story was never the strong part of bfa.

So, taken all this points together I come to the conclusion that the raid is one of my most disliked ones ever.

Help me out here, please: What makes the raid great for you? Why do you like it so much?

1. Did you have the same complaints about other raids which reused locations, like Dragon Soul or Siege of Orgrimmar? If not, what is it about this particular one which makes it a negative?

3. Did you make the same comaplaints about the Caverns of Times dungeons where you were disguised if you were a member of a race who had no business being involved in those events? At least they made it interesting in BoD by changing up our racials.

4. What advantage was there to be pressed? They threw away a huge army and a valuable artifact in Nazmir to lure the lion's share of Zandalar's army there with the intent of capturing King Rastakhan or forcing him to surrender. They failed at this objective and had to kill him. Then flee from said massive army that was now very enraged at hearing their beloved king had been slain. Their only option was flee or be crushed. They made their play and failed. A racial leader was crippled to cover their retreat, another was injured. Most times when I hear people complain about the story they haven't put much thought into it and just go with kneejerk reactions.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Fun fights, bright visuals.

Only thing I dislike is the faction swap. 100% improvement on Uldir all around, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it the best raid ever. I still love the fights of BRF too much.

[Tojara]

Cool fights and concept.

Boring raid in regards to visuals and atmosphere though, especially if you're Horde. The only really cool part was fighting on a frozen sea. Atmosphere wise I draw comparisons between this raid and ToGC. Basically it's meh, then you get dropped into a cool room at the end (Anub'arak).

I like BoD for the raid encounters and nothing more. As an entire product it's pretty meh and loses points for me because it's linear and boring to look at. Also Blizzard is allergic to adding skips in the instances now apparently, which is pretty disappointing.

If only every instance was designed like BRF or Naxxaramas.

[Spotnick]

I honestly didn't find anything fun in that instance.

I miss meaningful loot for once, and the trash is mostly terrible to a point where we prefer to do death runs. Those trinkets in there were mostly horrible, and I dearly miss the class set bonuses we could farm.

Also.. I'm kind of sick of the pyramid.. we've been in that place for a full year now, a change of scenery would have been good.

Also I hated the race change.. missing my arcane torrent as a healer made me want to kill puppies.

[Biomega]

I feel like I'd love the raid far less if I wasn't playing Boomkin, Shadow Priest, and Demo Lock.

The only boss I really don't like is Jadefire Masters, because Multi-Sided Strike is not a good mechanic for a WoW raid for various reasons including color/contrast issues, lag on teleports, and trouble correctly orienting the character without addons. Too much twitch precision for an antiquated engine like this.

The difficulty curve could have been better as well. First boss is the typical freebie, but it doesn't really ramp from there. Number tuning aside, bosses 1-5 are closer to heroic than mythic in terms of mechanics, and even bosses 6&7 are not spectacularly difficult for a well-coordinated group. Blockade is fine in terms of mechanical complexity, but would fit better in the middle of the raid rather than the end. And then of course there's a monstrous leap in difficulty for Jaina (though shortened after the nerfs to be sure). This could have been tuned much smoother.

Overall, though, it's a decent raid in my view. Not the best, not the worst, upper end of medium I'd say. Which puts it miles above BFA in general.

[Accendor]

1. Did you have the same complaints about other raids which reused locations, like Dragon Soul or Siege of Orgrimmar? If not, what is it about this particular one which makes it a negative?

Yes, Dragon Soul was actually the worst offender here from my feeling. SoO had at least some mix of locations and more "new" stuff (in percent) than BoD did, but yes, in general I also had a big problem with those.

3. Did you make the same comaplaints about the Caverns of Times dungeons where you were disguised if you were a member of a race who had no business being involved in those events? At least they made it interesting in BoD by changing up our racials.

Yes, I also had that problem there, even before transmoggin was a thing. Don't get me wrong, but if I want to play a gnome, I am picking my gnome character. I don't want to be turned into one for the whole instance.
And changing up the racials is actually bad, because they are part of the reason why you pick a certain class. Like it or not, it is part of the min/maxing process and taking it away is annoying.

4. What advantage was there to be pressed? They threw away a huge army and a valuable artifact in Nazmir to lure the lion's share of Zandalar's army there with the intent of capturing King Rastakhan or forcing him to surrender. They failed at this objective and had to kill him. Then flee from said massive army that was now very enraged at hearing their beloved king had been slain. Their only option was flee or be crushed. They made their play and failed. A racial leader was crippled to cover their retreat, another was injured. Most times when I hear people complain about the story they haven't put much thought into it and just go with kneejerk reactions.

Literal quote from the game: “Press the attack as the Zandalari mourn their fallen king? That would make us no better than the Banshee.”

[Sithalos]

Mekkatorque alone makes BoD one of the worst raids they've ever shat out.

[cparle87]

Yes, Dragon Soul was actually the worst offender here from my feeling. SoO had at least some mix of locations and more "new" stuff (in percent) than BoD did, but yes, in general I also had a big problem with those.


Yes, I also had that problem there, even before transmoggin was a thing. Don't get me wrong, but if I want to play a gnome, I am picking my gnome character. I don't want to be turned into one for the whole instance.
And changing up the racials is actually bad, because they are part of the reason why you pick a certain class. Like it or not, it is part of the min/maxing process and taking it away is annoying.



Literal quote from the game: “Press the attack as the Zandalari mourn their fallen king? That would make us no better than the Banshee.”

Yeah, from the Alliance side. The narrative on the Horde side is quite a bit different. Which makes you wonder if either side is what's really going on or if they're going for the whole "unreliable narrator" trope. Remember, their original plane was to secure Rastakhan's surrender. Killing him was only if he was obstinate. Of course the Horde believe coming to kill him was their original plan. Also as I said it didn't work. Instead of falling into mournful depressing they only got fired up even more.

[Zantera]

Great raid. As an alliance player, invading a horde city reminds me a lot of Siege of Orgrimmar which I also really liked back in the day.
As for the bosses:

Champions - OK intro boss fight. Not anything special but we've had far worse intro bosses in the past so I would say it's ok.

Jade Masters - Really enjoyed this one. Multi-sided strike and the maze gave this fight some new interesting mechanics and I enjoyed it.

Grong - OK fight, another patchwerk-type fight and it's not one of the best but not one of the worst either.

Opulence - Despite spending way too long on this fight because I was in a mediocre guild before I switched, I do think this is a pretty good designed fight.

Conclave - Another solid fight.

Rastakhan - I didn't particularly care for this fight much myself but I did think it had some interesting mechanics.

Mekka - One of the best designed fights in recent memories and was very hard to progress and very rewarding to kill.

Blockade - I thought I would hate this fight going in but actually found it to be pretty fun.

Jaina - Really well designed fight that I'm currently wiping on. Really hope we can get her down before next raid.

[ddsad2212]

Do people highly rate it. I see it consider a sort of middle of a road tier in terms of quality. Its fine over all but not amazing. The bosses are also pretty unique. We never seen anything quite like Jaina. Mekka is fun in guilds. Rasta is a solid right. Most of the other bosses were fine, no real bullshit if your guild is ok with Mekka.

Its a fine raid, perfectly ok to progress. Wouldn't say its great by any means

[quez]

The only boss I really don't like is Jadefire Masters, because Multi-Sided Strike is not a good mechanic for a WoW raid for various reasons including color/contrast issues, lag on teleports, and trouble correctly orienting the character without addons. Too much twitch precision for an antiquated engine like this.

The lag part i agree with, certain weakauras caused extreme lag.. But even with the 5fps i had the mechanic was still doable. But what kind of addon would help in orienting your character? All you really have to know is that they always come in the same order by color, blue -> green -> orange -> green -> blue.

Jadefire was an odd boss all together and i didn't really enjoy it either. By killing the monk as fast as possible the fight became a joke, literally nothing happened for the last minute or two which is never good for a raid boss. The difficulty should always increase towards the end, not decrease.

[Arainie]

I think it's an okay raid but not one of the best either. In my guild I'm raid leading so I don't really get this "mechanics are confusing" perspective since no matter what role I have I'll always make sure to understand all aspects of the fight. I find it very hard to grasp how someone in a Mythic raiding guild still doesn't know how the Grong orb works for example, even though I've only used it in LFR myself.

The only major complaints I have is the random nature of a few things in the raid, especially on Jaina (pre-final-nerfs) but also things like the number of Liquid Gold debuffs you can get in a row on Opulence (try 5 subsequent Liquid gold with 0-10s downtime between each, reeeeeeeee). As far as I understand the OP started Jaina progress after the majority of the RNG was removed, so it's understandable you think that Jaina is a great fight. I myself don't think she's overtuned at all anymore (rather undertuned after the RNG nerfs and the P3 change tbh), and my guild generally struggles more with Mekka re-clears than Jaina tbh.

I really did not except that so many people would agree with me here.

You've got 2k+ posts and you didn't expect a negative opinion about something WoW related to be backed up?

[Farabee]

Having a boss that requires voice comms and punishes color blindness is a nope for me. Doesn't matter how good the other encounters are, the fact that Mekkatorque is a thing in BOD makes it one of the worst raids ever designed for me.

[calanos]

I thought BoD ended up being an OK raid tier, but not great. The 2nd half was WAY better than the first half, overall.

-Champions was too easy, I HATE the new "first boss in mythic is puggable week 1" difficulty level
-Grong was fine for a 2nd-boss Patchwerk
-Jadefire was probably a cool fight, but tuned so badly that it was essentially not a boss
-Opulence was a cool idea that didn't really work for me. We struggled hard on Op, I think it just needed less rooms, or gems earlier, or the beam to actually tell the person it was targeting that it was one them....but overall I just hated that fight

-Conclave was fun, the good kind of clusterfuck
-Rasta was a cool fight overall
-Mek was interesting, not for everybody but a decent fight
-Stormwall was harder on Normal than Heroic, and didn't feel like a fully fleshed out fight until Mythic. But was good on Mythic
-Jaina was a terrible fight, but if they had gone the Deathwing route and made that 2 fights with some extra stuff tossed in I think I would have liked it way more

[shyguybman]

I have never killed even Heroic Mekka on an alt outside of a guild group because I can only imagine how bad it is in pugs. As soon as we killed rastakhan I leave.

[Fred Skinner]

I never played it.

LFR sucks due to large queue times and toxic people.

And organized raids suck due to its meritocracy and turning playing with friends into playing with performers.

For me, blizzard did everything wrong with the raiding game.

[hulkgor]

Pretty good raid, very fun encounters (i personally love Opulence and Mekkatorque) and culminates in a very, very good encounter (pre-nerfs) of M Jaina.

I think the difficulty curve was also adequate.

Only disappointed with the Rastakhan encounter. It was supposed to be further in the raid, but with the faction-swap, story-wise gimmick they used, he had to be nerfed to be an appropriate mid raid boss, whereas i think the encounter would have been a lot more exciting with added mechanics or difficulty.