It's been a long time, and for the most part a pretty good run, but now that dragon soul is officially off the raiding roster for me I wanted to take a detailed look at each boss and the raid tier as a whole and highlight the good and the bad. One last thing before we get started is that I highly recommend people take a look at the new crafting stuff for MoP. There is a phenomenal change regarding raid craftables.
So the raid tier as a whole was pretty short. 8 Bosses, only 5 of those had trash. The loot distribution was interesting and I've decided the idea of a "grab bag" drop is pretty lame even if you do it right. It's a nightmare for raid comp (ensuring all loot goes to someone) because your entire raid is going to say "I need something from the grab bag." I did like the interaction with VP trinkets and spine o' deathwing. I'll talk about the way spine and madness dropped gear when I get to them.
Morchok/Kohcrom. These guys were pretty cool. I've always wanted a fight where you'd have to split the raid up into two and go function individually. I was hoping for something a bit more seperating but it's a good start to showcase that it's a decent mechanic. Sure it's the first boss and anyone who can get to heroic modes can get heroic morchok down in a few goes, but I think the fight was entertaining. It's simple and straightforward, good for the first boss, and still requires people to be doing the right thing. I was also a fan of the tanks getting something to do (at least while "progressing" on it). Interesting loot drops, hand of morchok really bothered me but I'm going to wait until I get to madness to talk about that one. Good amount of trash, a bit unfortunate that on heroic you had to clear the sides, or at least we did but it was interesting and fit the lore/flavour of the instance.
Zon'ozz. We did some crazy strat for zonozz that didn't matter much to me being a tank but I think the setup of the fight generated a whole lot of opportunity for cheese. I really enjoyed the way heroic black phase functioned, in fact even on normal it was pretty interesting. The stacking dmg taken mechanic was interesting and fun for great numbers but the fight outside of the black phase was mostly uninteresting. Decent fight but felt almost like filler. Lots of hinting at old god influence but it really stopped here and at yor'sahj without counting DW himself. In summary, meh.
Yor'sahj. I really really liked the concept behind this fight. A few critical decisions about the fight design made it wonderful. First, all the abilities that were given to the globules, now referred to as oozes, combo together in some way. Yellow is giant in that every abilitiy except blue gets a benefit. Blue is terrifying in that you have no mana, red wants you to stay close while green wants you to spread out. All these things I find really cool on their own but planning for dealing with groups of them is awesome. The added ability to pick, or the requirement for some burst dmg to get rid of the oozes is a huge addition to the fight. Cooldown usage is hugely important since the spawns are ~1m 40s apart meaning your 2m CDs wont be up for for two phases in a row. The randomness makes it so you can't just plan the whole fight out and have to react. Lastly the fact that you can only kill one before the others go immune is something that could be debateable. It'd be something to help with farming it, which is always good in my opinion, but I can see why it wasn't there and both options are quite valid and an integral part of the fight. Just imagine how different it would be if you were allowed, and in many cases still unable due to dps requirements, to kill more than one. Size of the room was important. All in all, great fight and I wish we could see more of this level of design in encounters.
Since those last two bosses are non-linear meaning you could take 'em out in either order their difficulty was pretty spot on. There was no obvious order and without looking at exact kill numbers I remember many guilds going each way at the same time that we were progressing on it. I know we spent a fair bit of time progressing on each before getting either one. I don't even remember which one we settled on killing first though I think it was zonozz and the yorsahj the following night or something. My one problem here involves weapons again. Specimen slicer is a relatively early drop in the instance, more on it when we reach DW weapons.
Hagara. Another fight I think was really well designed, which the numbers were tuned a bit better and the lightning phase was a bit less buggy. One problem I had with the fight was lightning phase required so much pre-fight setup, not as much after doing it for 8 months but it probably added maybe 15 minutes to our raid every week, possibly more, trying to get everyone in the right spot. It's a touchy subject because you need to have some sort of pre-fight planning going on but hagara felt excessive. I liked the flow of the fight, even focused assault, though I wish there wasn't such an imbalance in tanks for that mechanic. I'm sure it'd be fine now, post 5.0 with all the changes, but before it was so bad that I got sat for our dk tank. That and our dps was a bit on the low side and it was a 1-tank encounter. I'm not opposed to 1 tank encounters but since the numbers are so small it's basically either both your tanks get competitive dps sets, which they can't because raid optimization forces you to send the dps gear at the dps, or you sit half your tanking roster because of a 1 tank fight. We did zonozz with 2 tanks because of the second claw tentacle but we probably didn't need to. Dps wasn't an issue for us there, so we opted for a second tank. I'll probably go on for a long time if I don't save that topic for another day. Summary, not a bad fight. Some bugs made it rough. Ice phase was trivialized by cheesing mechanics that I really hope were just overlooked. A simple ramp up on dmg from inside the bubble would have removed the stack up in the middle and nuke the crystals strat. Fun fight but clearly lacking in some areas.
Ultraxion. The standard "patchwerk" fight. I'm glad to see these every once in a while. Once per tier might not be the best frequency but with more bosses each tier it might not be a bad thing. I enjoyed the tank swap mechanic, made me pay attention. I really liked the way they made the dps pay attention while still trying to max dps. The more I think about it I really don't like the extra action bar buttons. I think instead I would have preferred something like "does x% of your max hp" on fading light to force people to use personal cooldowns. It could have been something like 80-90% so that they had to. Most classes have something to deal with it. Shields would be helpful for it as well. Hour could have been proximity like bloodboil was or like morchok stomp. I just hate the extra action bar thing even though it's a pretty neat solution to something like that. Nothing wrong with this fight, highlighted baddies who couldn't hit buttons or who didn't listen to mechanics. Not as much fun to farm but the fight was just tuned so well pre-nerf that I can't help but having a soft spot for the fight.
Warmaster Blackhorn. Aside from the buggy deck fire I think this was another phenomenal fight. I normally don't like dealing with add waves as part of the fight but they did it so well here. Every add had a well defined purpose in the fight and each person in the raid had a job to do. Soaking the barrages and onslaught I thought was a brilliant mechanic. This forces you to take damage while still letting you decide how much you take. It was an organizational nightmare but I think it was a brilliant mechanic. Optimizing how much of the damage you took was really important. Now with the nerf it doesn't matter because if you're good you can avoid deckfire on the first broadside, but during progression it was great. Again if deck fire wasn't bugged I think this would have been one of the best encounters in the raid. When blackhorn came down the tanks had to pay really close attention to basically everything they were doing. On heroic the two adds on the ground was probably more exciting than almost any other tanking job in the instance and it made me feel amazing when both tanks timed the swaps perfectly. I know it's not a huge deal but it just felt good. Goriona was interesting, especially her consuming shroud. The way people handled it was great, aoe heals only was pretty smart. There were some issues with things like bane of havoc cheesing and some interesting mage tricks soaking onslaughts. Great fight.
Spine of Deathwing. There are some truly great things about this fight and some real problems with this fight. First the good. I really enjoyed tanking this fight towards the end of it. I've never felt more active as a tank than that. I wouldn't want to do it often but damn it was unique and I really got to make a difference to the raid by being a good tank and kiting the adds well. The earlier part of the fight was pretty uninteresting especially when we hammered down the strat. We had issues healing but that was more a problem with us deciding to handle it poorly than any individual healer's performance. I think the fight concept was truly unique and exciting. The problem with the fight is that it was so tightly tuned, some might say overtuned that initially there were many guilds class stacking. Unfortunately not every class has identical dps over a 20s burst period. The fight was great in that it pushed everyone to their limits but the downside is it highlighted some class design issues. Unfortunately legendaries also made a huge difference which leads into a fairly large loot problem that comes up involving dragonwrath, fangs, spine trinkets and DW weapons. All in all this was another great fight with a huge learning curve. Better tuned than H rag (which was a fair bit overtuned imo) and more unique and iconic than H rag.
Madness of Deathwing. To put it simply I was really underwhelmed by this boss. The biggest problem is that it wasn't as difficult or intense as spine. It wasn't nearly as intense as spine. So many guilds got spine down and then felt like madness was the reward for killing spine. I think we took something like 10-15 attempts to get heroic madness down after nearly 10 times that on spine. We didn't actually fight deathwing either. We fought pieces of him that were falling off or pieces of the gold god corruption that were assaulting us. I thought the idea of the aspect buffs and platform order was interesting, especially with the meta achievement stuff that wanted you to start on each one. Ultimately the fight is just a bit of a wash. It's really lame considering it's the last fight in the expansion.
Lastly the loot issues with the last two bosses I'm actually going to save for another day as well. It's a pretty huge topic all on it's own and I think just examining the bosses is plenty for now. All in all DS was a sub-par raid with some really great highlights. I don't think firelands was great either but it had entirely different problems. Blizzard solved their difficulty curve issue for the most part. In FL you hit H rag basically completely unprepared for it. Spine wasn't nearly so big of a jump from warmaster. That said I think both of these past two tiers were a bit underwhelming and I can't wait to see the new exciting raid content in mists. MoP looks like they've basically taken care of everything I had an issue with.
Tanks changed a lot over this expansion and I think for the vast majority of it, it was for the better. Threat became trivial in exchange for focusing on survival and TDR. DKs got huge quality of life improvements. Paladins and warriors got probably the biggest upgrade to gear in that we actually have to pay attention to the stats on it instead of just stacking mastery and ignoring the rest until we stop having anything to gear for. I'll probably talk more about that later.
In review cataclysm felt like a giant test for a lot of things blizzard wanted to do. Smaller raid sizes turned out to be undesirable, content takes longer than they thought they could produce it. People wanted more things to do outside of raid, which there really wasn't any of in cataclysm. We're seeing a lot of these changes come into place and I for one am super excited about how amazing mists is shaping up to be.
That's the last you'll hear from me for a little while. I'm offline for the weekend, ISP issues, and starting sunday it's all about prep for the levelling extravaganza. I might do something like twitter to throw updates about levelling and whatnot but we'll see. I don't have the bandwidth to stream anything unfortunately but I will try and get some sort of update thing going on more to chronicle the adventure than anything else. Also expect more pictures on here come MoP. Catch you guys on the other side.
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