Why do you like Battle for Dazar'Alor

[Accendor]

Your opinion about Dazar'Alor

So, many people that I know really like the current raid. This is also the opinion of almost all content creators on twitch or youtube. A lot of people even say it is one of the best raids ever created.

So... I don't agree with that at all. In my opinion Dazar'Alor is the exact opposite: One of worst raids ever created.
First of all let me start with: I respect the opinion that the raid is great and realize that probably most raiders agree with that. Thats fine, I am not here to say "you are wrong for enjoying this", I just would like to discuss why I have a different opinion and would like to know your opinion about the raised points:

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)

2. The bosses
When I talk about bosses I only talk about the mythics versions - I do not really care of anything else.
Champions of Light: Boring, but "ok" for an entry boss. Well except the annoying Damage-Stops.

Jadefire Masters: One of the most annoying mechanics ever implemented (Multi-Sided Strike). Really not a fan of being teleported somewhere and then having to instantly reorientate to a mechanics that very easily kills you. In general this wouldn't be a problem, but the colors of the ghosts are also not easily disginguashable from the background. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but find the execution really lacking. Again, with just a little bit of gear the fight is not hard at all, its just not fun.

Grong: Meant to be a classical Tank'n'Spank encounter he has a very weird mechanical issue: 90% of the people in a raid don't have to bother with the only important mechanic in the raid (the Orb. You don't even need to know about it or how it works, but if you fail a try you usually are only wondering WTF just happened, because everything seemed to be going well and suddenly WIPE. And you can not even influence that, if you are not the orb person. That being said, the color of the orb is basically identical to the "bad" ground effects, which makes it hard to see for no reason.

Opulence: Actually a very cool Boss concept in general, but the mechanics are so annoying that it is hard to enjoy. You have displacements, undodgable semi-one-shots that you can not influence, damage stops and no bad-luck-protection for unlucky mechanic streaks (who doesn't enjoy being target by every mechanic every single time?) In addition to that there are glaring camera issues all the time while fighting in the tunnels, no indication who is targetted by the laser, weird hit boxes for flames of punishment and crush and waaay to many random elements (nothing is more fun than all the ruby people getting a debuff

Conclave of the Chosen: Well, this one is ok I guess. Only problem I have is that Player A gets punished for mistakes from Player B and that the punishment is one of the worst mechanics ever (Akunda debuff)

King Rastkhan: That fight is actually really good. Interesting mechanics, nice little lore during the fight, it is clear all the time what is going on... Only exception being the teleport to the "underworld", but thats still easily managable.

Mekkatorque: Don't even start me on this one. It is literally one annoying mechanic after another with the absolute hype that we had to bench our two colorblind players. But even ignoring that everything about this fight is annoying. Badly visible effects due to how small the boss is compared to the clusterfuck of melees that is fighting him, the robot mechanic, while being original, is extremely chaotic and therefore annoying. Yes, I understand that it is SUPPOSED to be that way, I just don't like it. In my opinion this is one of the worst fights, if not THE worst fight, ever designed.

Blockade: This boss was bugged so long, its unbelieveble. Ignoring that, the fight is fine. As long as the mechanics work. Which is... still not always the case.

Jaina: Awesome fight. Everything about it is great in my opinion. I have still not beat her, perhaps never will (never = before the next raid releases), but I can appreciate the fight. But here a much bigger problem shows: She was EXTREMELY overtuned all the time and got nerfed several times. This diminished the sense of accomplishmed when you beat her later than sooner and it is basically only done to tune the raid for world first. I really have a problem with that and think it should not be the case. I do not like stuff being nerfed over time outside of the regular character progression through items.


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.


4. Lack of tier sets and interesting items: That is a bfa problem in general of course, but there was not a single item I was excited about in the raid.


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?

[Relapses]

Fun fights, just disappointed the only fight that was remotely difficult (on Mythic) was the last one. And much of that encounter's difficulty seemed to be artificial barriers set in place by poor encounter design.

I like BoD overall and it's easily better than anything I played from Legion. I'd probably keep it in my top 10 but it's in the lower half for me. Solid 7/10.

[peter92q]

I actually quit WoW midway through BoD. Not because the raid is bad but because I burned out. Not even sure if I'm gonna come back for 8.2. Either way the point I'm trying to make is that even tho Blizzard isn't slacking off in terms of raid quality I still can't find the drive to keep going anymore. Sad times.

[Greyvax]

It was a good combination of known names from the expansion story , loot pinatas, and interesting environments

[Battlebeard]

I loathe the raid, one of the worst they added in a very long time. It's a boring atmosphere, too much trash, avarage bosses funwise, one of the worst bosses ever (mekka), and worst of all, it's linear.

WHEN will Blizzard learn that linear raids SUCK. Let us chose what boss we wanna do! Uldir was so much better than this, cause you could at least chose between 3 bosses.

The best raids ever are the more non linear ones, Naxx, ICC, BRF, Blackwing Descent, and Ulduar, and the biggest reason is that they were much more non linear.

Though, the raid I hate the most is throne of thunder, it had the exact same problems as this one, but worse bosses. This might be the second worst raid ever (not counting 1-2 boss raids).

[Nathasil]

I don't. I think it is among the worst raids in 15 years of WoW.

Three reasons:
1) The architecture. I already know that pyramid in and out. The only new part is the Jaina battle.
2) The only Boss in there i like is Oppulence. Mekkatorque+Jaina may be special/challenging in some way but i don't think they are fun. All of the other bosses are nothing special in any way.
3) This is the "Declare your Allegiance!!!!!" expansion....and i cannot finish the raid on my character. Instead i am forced to fight my own faction. Feels so incredibly awesome. It is fine to see the other side in a non-interactive cinematic or even play it for a short time in a quest....but litterally the end boss of a raid being only available OOC? No, Blizzard. No. Never again.

[prwraith]

I just want a non insane raid tier after this dude.

Pulling Jaina 400 times after pulling g'huun 300 times has been back to back rough last bosses. Please for the love of god let me have a raid tier where we finish early and relax for a few months.

[Doffen]

Love Battle of Dazar'alor. The environment, and especially the music is a big winner for me. When you fight those bosses and that epic zandalari fight theme starts and you keep fighting the bosses, even trash, it does a lot for me. Tired of the depressing music we had in Uldir, and CoS doesn't have the most fun music either, even though the music in itself is good.

Some fun bosses there, Rasta being my favorite, High Stinker, Opulus, Conclave are also fun fights.

Also like that you swap faction in there on 3 bosses. Overall a raid that I enjoy doing.

[McNeil]

Not a huge fan of it personally. I like that they tried to do something different from a AvH perspective, but it feels like they could've done more without having us switch over to the other faction to do their bosses. The first 5 bosses are way to easy and the last 3 stupidly overtuned, at least the last time when I raided. Its also not interesting for a Horde to be raiding their own capital city. And I don't like that Jaina is the final boss and just runs off without even a scratch, feels very underwhelming despite that the overall fight is pretty good.

[MrExcelion]

I will say it's honestly really easy to pick at the majority of bosses and find some annoying flaw based on the initial pre-hotfix/nerf forms, which is still a valid complaint of course since I'm about the prog experience than the farm.

I think it was a decent raid, but I'm a bit tired of these short tiers (a trash mob and then 8 bosses). And the difficulty disparity between the first 8 and Jaina.

Mekkatorque was definitely too ambitious, especially on Heroic, but the mythic version was fitting with all the mechanics. I would have still toned it down a bit and given players more than 25 seconds on mythic to do the bots, to account for color-blindness and all that.

Just wish they'd add good tier sets and trinkets back into the raids so it didn't feel so blah. Yeah Sliver was good but frustrating or impossible to use on some fights.

I would have definitely preferred a larger raid like Nighthold and Blackrock Foundry, and no Crucible/ToV 2.0

Significantly better raid than Uldir and Tomb though, but gets beat by a lot of the raids before that

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Really unique fights, really unique setting.
That's why I love it!
Easily in the top 5 raids ever.

Hoping that trend will continue with Azshara's Palace.

[Sanguinerd]

I don't like the location, never have. A couple of the fights are interesting though but I feel most of them are just complicated for the sake of being complicated and not that much fun. Uldir had the same problem with G'huun but I suppose Blizzard is just running out of ideas on how to make bosses fun and just make them tedious instead like in CoS.

[Azalar]

I like BoD because of the lore, but dislike it because of the encounters. Too much RNG and extremely punishing mechanics that quite often end up wiping up the raid.

The first 3 bosses are largely unmemorable. Jadefire Masters is quite fun for me though.

Opulence is cool, but the first phase is far too long and annoying because it feels like the real fight is phase 2 and phase 1 is a glorified trashpull.

Council is quite chaotic and is overall okay but the curse mechanic is horrible, you need people who can actually dispel curses or you're down.

Rastakhan is okay, just maybe the intermissions (or maybe the whole encounter itself) take too long.

Mekkatorque is one of those bosses that sounds great on paper but in execution just don't turn out that well. He's one of the memorable guys, but sadly he'll make it as the most annoying and frustrating boss ever.

Blockade is simple and somewhat fun if we don't take into consideration add managing.

Jaina is overall okay. The only bad thing is having to go through all the previous pile of disappointments to reach her

[Dystemper]

Why raid when you can get heroic level gear for basically doing nothing? I unsubbed at the start of 8.1 , only plan on coming back for classic. BFA is beyond hope of fixing . MAybe 9.0 will be better, but I wont buiy it till 9.1 or 9.2 if at all

[SaneOstrich]

Why raid when you can get heroic level gear for basically doing nothing? I unsubbed at the start of 8.1 , only plan on coming back for classic. BFA is beyond hope of fixing . MAybe 9.0 will be better, but I wont buiy it till 9.1 or 9.2 if at all

Unpopulair opinion: Because gear shouldn't be the (only) reason why you raid.

[FuxieDK]

Fights are average, with the exception of Mekka.. That's a fun fight.

But what fails BoD as a whole, is the faction switching.. I absolutely HATE being de-evolved into an ugly Nelf and then forced to kill my allied faction leader.

[Accendor]

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

[GreenJesus]

Unpopulair opinion: Because gear shouldn't be the (only) reason why you raid.

That's like saying sex isn't the (only) reason why you have a girlfriend... but come on you want to have sex. Lol

[MrExcelion]

I liked BoD in a lot of regards, but I agree that it was awful to pug on heroic. Need to add skips back, Mekkatorque should have been toned down significantly from the start, and just more meaningful loot in general that keeps people sticking around instead of cherry picking one boss and leaving

[trm90]

I'll agree with you on the Environment. As far as WoW goes, this felt like the least flashy raid ever, and the faction-swapping felt really disjointing (even more than Antorus, which was 80% portals). Jaina and Opulence were the only fights which felt epic, and even then, Jaina P1 (the hardest part of the raid) was just like... a claustrophobic boat??

Shame because Uldir looked 10x cooler then BoD, but probably had less interesting fights.