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

[Resentful]

It was a fucking awful raid is all I'm going to say to it like it was so awful I retired from HC raiding. It was like gouging your eyes out with a rusted spoon over and over. Madness was one of the most underwhelming HC in terms of the hard version ever made and all spine was... stacking subtly rogues and arcane mages jee what a great concept that was blizzard.

God I'm mad just thinking about it.

[Faroth]

I really hate to jump on the bandwagon with the whole "grr I hate Dragonsoul! Worst raid ever!" but I really do hate it and oh god were Spine and Madness a huge let down for an end boss.

I liked Spine as a set up, but I gotta agree, Madness didn't deliver on an epic "battle against Deathwing" expectation. Even his speech was ill placed. His whole "I am Deathwing, I am the Cataclysm" when he was near beaten and his head resting on the rock? Sounded more like it would be the START of a fight, not the "he's down to the last phase and weak" part.

[Deleted]

It was fine, for the first 6 months, I actually liked spine and madness (quite unique bosses).

But at the 10 month mark I was close to wrist slitting.

If there had been other amazing things to do in 4.3 it would of been ok to be longer, but the 3 5 mans (which is all the 5 mans that people ever run) got very old quickly as well.

[Noorri]

While it had problems such as lasting for close to a year, I think Dragon Soul is the best raid overall that Blizzard has made so far. It didn't have loads and loads of bosses that were there just to make the raid longer, the difficulty was fairly well balanced and it had the debuff that actually allowed people who got stuck on a boss something to look forward to.

But the most important thing is that the raid actually told a story as you ventured through it.

[Deleted]

I liked firelands much more but I don't think dragon soul was that bad either.

[Mammoon]

Sure, it was a bit too easy and 4.3 had a massive lack of things to do. But DS itself was a fun raid, I liked the reused wrath setting because it kind of made it feel like it was wrath (my favorite expansion) again. It was a far less boring and bland raid than firelands was.

So what I am hearing is that you liked DS because it reminded you of Wotlk? Is there anything else you based your opinion on?

And comparing DS to Firelands is not a good comparison at all considering both raids were complete trash outside of heroic rag pre 4.3.

[haaku]

Worst fucking shit i have ever done

[Deleted]

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.

Hunters was pure horseshit on tendons. Every single top guild benched their hunters on that fight.

[pmgbro]

Dragon Soul in my opinion was easily the worst raid ever made. Only 8 bosses with reused models and braindead mechanics. Wyrmrest and EoE were already used so it took away the immersion aspect with the raid. Madness probably the worst final boss fight I've ever done in the 8 years that I've played the game. Spine was in no aspect hard other than the fact that you had to find every mage with a legendary and sub rogues. Just thinking about it makes me cringe.

[Prokne]

And lawl @ people complaning about old area and whatnot, storywise it made way more sense than conjuring up some other area for the sake of it being a new area. I liked it, felt like the world actually changed abit, not only every 7-8 years.

It might have been better if they had phased or changed the area in the actual Dragonblight zone. Otherwise there is a serious disconnect with what the place looks like and what is actually happening in that zone. I dont think it would have impacted any questing or the other 2 raids there.

They also should have put the raid entrance at the southern tip of Dragonblight about where the raid starts instead of CoT. Were not time travelling to get there so it should not be in CoT. Same with the entrance to the last HoT heroic, should have been in DB. Putting everything in CoT just seems lazy and doesnt make much sense.

The Deathwing fight was pretty underwhelming also. There was no fight against the human form which could have been cool. Spine was interesting and pretty unique mechanics wise but it doesnt really seem like you are fighting DW. Same with Madness, you are just fighting his toes while he gets flushed down the toilet. In both of these fights he doesnt have any real powers or even seem that dangerous, he is just big and all you really fight are adds.

The other bosses are ok but they are just filler with no real backstory that could have been built up during the expansion. A lot of raids are like that though. Cata seemed worse, the only bosses with anything being Chogall, Nef(rehased), Al'Akir, Sinestra, Rag(rehased) and DW. To compare ICC alone has 6 bosses with buildup: Saurfang, Putricide, Blood Princes(rehashed/setback), Blood Queen, Sindragosa, LK.

[Morgomir]

i'd venture to say that Trial of the Crusader was a better raid than Dragon Soul and that's saying something. At least the fights in there weren't completely brain-dead easy

[Volitar]

i'd venture to say that Trial of the Crusader was a better raid than Dragon Soul and that's saying something. At least the fights in there weren't completely brain-dead easy

Everyone be dissing on TOC but Anubarak was one of the best fights I've ever done.

[Flaks]

DS wasn't bad, it was just around for far too long.

So was ICC. And ICC was miles better than DS in literally every quantifiable way. Hell, ICC is still one of the best raids made.

[Belloc]

I liked Dragon Soul quite a bit, but it'll never be looked upon fairly since it was the final expansion of the raid. Just like ICC, people only remember it with zone nerfs/buffs and they don't remember how much they enjoyed it when it launched -- focusing, instead, on how boring and repetitive it got after months of farming.

It was a great raid.

[pmgbro]

Everyone be dissing on TOC but Anubarak was one of the best fights I've ever done.

Yeah H Anub I believe is one of the hardest and most rewarding bosses I've ever downed. ToGC in my opinion was waaaaay better than Dragon Soul.

[Trassk]

I found half the bosses generic and dull. two old god generals like we've seen before. a large purple dragon, which we've seen dozens of dragons before. An orc woman?.. sigh.. A rock elemental like what we saw in stonecore...

Actually strike that, 70% of the bosses were copies of older ones, and I had no feel for wanting to know anything about them.

Now ones like the blood council, queen lana'thel, sindragosa, putricide and his two 'kids', marrowgar, these bosses had something special to them, they felt like characters instead of just repainted models. And Dranosh Saurfang? Man that was heartrending to see Saurfang weep over his sons corpse.

Also, firelands had more depth in terms of well designed bosses.

Only plus in dragonsoul? Deathwings back was original (though a little boring after you figure out the turn mechanics), and the deathwing encounter was epic to see.. if not rince and repeat.

Sigh... I miss Arthas .. and Yogg saron.

[PBitt]

There are a small percentile that do, sure. I'm glad you liked it but I thought it was a piece of shit. For the last tier of an expansion that we waited a good amount of time for, I was severely dissapointed, about as much work went into it as ToC and at least that was just kind of a random raid they decided to throw in vs the last tier which should be the best or amongst the best for the expansion. Almost no orginal boss models, no original artwork for the zone whatsoever, and most of the boss fights were either terrible or meh compared to what Blizzard could do before and after DS. The two deathwing fights had some originality, sure, but I still don't think either were all that great. I felt like I never actually fought Deathwing, we were riding around on his back one moment and the next moment we are fighting what felt like an old god with a bigass chin.

[Viscoe]

I enjoyed it for some time, and then it got really old after we had done it SO MUCH. I'm not in a top-end anything sort of guild (by the time MoP hit we had one set of rogue legendaries and had downed Morchok, Yorsahj, and Ultraxion on heroic, thanks to the nerfs because we're not even close to bleeding edge... or even within a thousand feet of the edge really) but I had fun with my friends when we did normal and our few heroics, and we felt like we were accomplishing something, coming off of having TONS of trouble killing normal Ragnaros. So as a not-really-fantastic raider, I enjoyed it.

My favorite part was wiping on Cataclysm for the first time. Very chilling, just fading to black.

[Lanthanum]

I thought that DS was an uninspiring raid. Simplistic boss mechanics and a very lacklustre fight against the main antagonist of the expansion. As someone mentioned a few posts earlier, I enjoyed ToC more than DS.

[Deleted]

I disliked it. You know why? Because it was mediocre. It didn't come out through anything:
-surroundings - some reused, some new, but many were totally unimaginative, for example the fight on the skyship, around it what did you see? clouds. Remember Icecrown now, in that fight what did you see on sides? A huge zone, much of it not even from game... so the surroundings screamed lazyness not because they reused Dragonblight, but because of the surroundings around some of the other fights. I mean think, the faceless bosses were just sitting inside a giant mouth ... what's there to admire about the art there? What about Deathwing's spine and the skyship? clouds around...
-mechanics - some bosses were bosses for the sake of needing more bosses, but they were not boss material. Spine of Deathwing is the perfect example, it didn't feel like a boss fight, it felt like a gauntlet corridor. It felt like fighting trash.
-I'd also like to point that at some point they seemed to have gotten bored and started making portals from boss to boss, thus making the whole thing feel disconnected. Ok, you killed the first guy... then (I admit I can't remember order) you are ported to Hagara, then to Ultraxion, then the ship... it feels like they're not even part of the same raid but something stiched together.
-lore - it was just bad, reused plot. Deathwing felt more like a dumb villan then an actual one and the ending with him turning into sparkles was so anticlimactic. Furthermore, the point put on Thrall's future baby as an ending was just annoying, and the mortals taking their own reigns was a plot point reused from the end of warcraft 3... only it won't play out and they'll forget it after MoP giving us again super demi-gods to help us.
-the cherry of the cake - this was the end-raid of an expansion. This wasn't ToC. It was supposed to be some amazing finale to Deathwing, it was not, it was just Thrall lazering him until he turned to sparkles, it was just boring, and the fact that it lasted for 10 months only made it worse. At least ICC, even if it lasted for 12, it was good and had 4 more bosses.