Here we are in the final legs of the Dragon Soul 25 man race, with seven guilds having finished it already. Tier 13 has been a really...uh...let's say "interesting" one, to be sure, and there have been many twists and unexpected results. We sat down with Arx from DREAM Paragon, who are the EU first and World 4th guild in the Dragon Soul progress race, to see what exactly happened and why this tier was so interesting.
Madness of Deathwing Killshot
Ahh Dragon Soul, what a weird race it's been. Let's start at the beginning, with the LFR ban. How much would you say it has impacted the progress race, whether directly through the one lost reset or indirectly by reducing morale or even willingness to go for it?
There was no lack of motivation, but the suspensions ended up having a pretty big effect nevertheless. Besides the mostly lost reset, people had scheduled their vacations on the first heroic week, which obviously didn't end up working all that well. As for how much impact the lost reset had, most guilds seem to have spent about the same time on Madness so the deciding factor for this tier was Spine. In general, the more gear you have, the less flawless your comp and execution needs to be, and that certainly holds more than true on Spine as well. Ultimately none of the suspended guilds could work around the gear deficit, and the Spine kills were delayed until the next reset -- after Madness was already down by KIN.
When you finally got to go into the instance on the second week of hard modes and got to see the bosses in action, did you think you could make up for lost time?
We at least expected to catch up much more. We knew Spine was a block, and the longer it took, the smaller the advantage would be. Frankly, we didn't anticipate a kill on that reset yet.
Would you say the first six bosses were about the same difficulty as the first 6 in Firelands or were they at least a little bit tougher? And of those first 6, were the encounters better/more fun here or in Firelands?
As a whole, it felt pretty similar. There was no real Baleroc-style (25) challenge in the first six though -- Ultraxion was simply easier. Interestingly, I personally think Gunship in 10 was the hardest encounter up to 6/8 in either mode. I prefer the DS encounters, but some still suffered from the same problem that the first part of Firelands had -- no meaningful dps check, with the exception of Yor'Sahj, Gunship 10 and Ultraxion 25.
Spine of Deathwing: the first real challenge in the instance. It took 9 days for the first non-banned guilds to down it and 8 days for you guys to get it after you started hard mode raiding. What was special about this encounter, was it really just a matter of gear and alt setup or is there more to it?
After you find your solution for tanking/kiting the bloods that spawn at a rapidly accelerating rate, the encounter boils down to a series of ~20 second dps burns. Class balance on that is about as good as heroic Nefarian before changes, so the raid comp plays a huge role in the fight. Additionally, you need enough ranged burst to interrupt Fiery Grips in a timely fashion before someone dies, which is especially crucial in 25-man where the ability is cast twice as often. Whichever way you go about it, it's incredibly dependent on the setup and the gear you have available.
This is the Spine killshot. No really, you're just going to have to trust me on this one,
it's TOTALLY different from the Madness one.
What was specific about the Madness encounter?
We took a 3-day Christmas break, so it took us three disconnect-ridden raid nights. And I expect everyone else had a similar learning curve and timeframe to it. Essentially you spend the first night evaluating the kill order and working out the problems, and second night executing it and making tweaks. The right solution ended up being much too straightforward, and it felt like there weren't enough ways for an individual player to mess up -- compared to Firelands, Madness felt like doing Ragnaros without the last phase. Spine was the main course, and Madness was dessert.
How do you feel about this progress cycle in general? Where would you rank Dragon Soul with all the other instances released in WoW so far?
The first six bosses played out ok, but I'm definitely disappointed in how both Deathwing encounters were more about the setup and execution than solving the puzzle. As an overall experience, DS wouldn't fit into my top three, but it's certainly not down at ToGC-level either. As for progress itself, with the LFR suspensions and the resulting Christmas timing, it somewhat feels like instead of answers, we're left with more questions. Nevertheless, it's nice to have some fresh (if not new) faces around, and hopefully instead of endless bickering, this tier will end up leading to fiercer and even more interesting races in the future.
Just incase anyone thinks we alone in what we saying, I am not the only one thinking this.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1056204-The-big-wow-to-rift-migration-need-some-info.
Alright Elamigo I believe actions speak louder then words, obv I don't know your status as a player and if your in a raiding guild what your role is, but in a months time when your guild is battling to find players to raid with just think about the posts made by myself and a couple others below.
To viperbass, I don't know if I'm supposed to take you serious with this "no one wants to raid because everyone looks the same" comment. If anything barely anyone looks the same now due to transmog, not just that but the analogy with TBC is even funnier. Lets say there was no transmog, the difference between a Heroic raider and a LFR raider is not just the item lv but the color of their gear.........so if even that's an issue then I guess we can all hate on TBC for making raiding obsolete since all pvpers had the same gear but just different color. Also quit playing a game to show your superiority to others that play the game, it's meant to be fun not to be a use of putting people down because they don't dedicate as much time as you.
The feeling is different this time even for players that are quiting. Before it was I am going to quit for now but can't wait for the next expansion. Even though wow has the best endgame LFR for a lot of player has killed the epicness of a instance for guilds that aren't going for world 1sts. It's a fantastic feature for casuals and players that work shifts. The segment of players mostly being affected is the semi hardcore players. Something I didn't realise was that over 1.5 million raiders downed marrogwar normal and cleared anub 25 normal just on 25 man format alone. Just over 500 000 raiders have downed shannox normal in both 10 and 25 man raiding guilds. Obv we don't know about pugs but I imagine because of shared lockouts it was less then in cata.
So to be fair blizzard has done the right thing for the majority of players but the 100 000 raiders who want to do normal + heroics will find it increasing difficult to do so because the game is screaming you should be casual. Raiding Guilds will find it increasingly more difficult to recruit good players as the pool of potential recruits diminishes until in a couple years time even guilds like Ensidia will battle to find good players.
The question is will blizzard do things like making lfr only being able to clear current content in stages like with ICC but over a 2 month period to give the guilds who want to finish normals and heroics before the rest of the playerbase is allowed to see the content for free.
I'd just like to jump in the conversation and mention that all this talk of quitting is pretty normal after a final instance in an expansion. At the end of Vanilla most of Nihilum "quit", basically after we downed Kul'thuzad we didn't raid any more at all and most of the guild didn't even show online for a long while. And then we were back for BC and that worked out pretty well :D.
This time it MIGHT be different because WoW is really getting old and there are several promising new MMOs coming (and I mean really promising, not AoC, Warhammer, Aion type promising), so people will probably try those out. Up until now it's frequently happened that people "switched" to a new MMO, but they always came back to WoW eventually and to be honest that might not change this time either. The Old Republic, for example, to me seems like the perfect "filler" MMO to play until MoP - it has a really strong leveling experience and the endgame won't really be that great for a while yet.
But some people will leave for good, some have already, it's just the way things go. Announcing such a...let's be kind ad say "different" expansion like MoP might have been a bit of a misstep from Blizz, because no matter how you look at it, MoP doesn't really scream "hardcore", does it...
What would go a long way to encourage players to do heroic modes is give them titles that get removed each expansion like you had in burning crusade and up until Ulduar, the problem is since ICC you are able to get all mounts and titles in the next expansion making them useless.
Old school players like myself prefer Hand of Adal, Champion of Naaru anyday over light of dawn yet our guild put hours into killing this and a pug at 85 gets the same thing just for clearing the instance in half a night.
I agree with Crypto there is just no reason to do heroic modes for your average guild since everyone is dressed the same and you don't get any special titles for your efforts, just a timestamp which people only look at if you applying to another raiding guild.
That's a neccesary evil. Do you want to earn gear once then never have to upgrade it? That would make raiding feel even more pointless in my opinion.
If you don't understand why people are leaving to other MMO's could be because they are wanting to do something different. I myself have been at this game for about 6 years running and I find that I need to do something else once in a while. To dis on a game that just came out is both wrong and out of line. Now to get back at the matter at hand with the DS. Personally I felt like I was robed of something that could have been better in many ways. I mean what is the point of working your rear off when in less than a year you'll be replacing everything with greens. The end game content in my view has become lack. Wooowoo... We killed Deathwing... Now what do we do? Nothing because there isn't anything else to do because we can have everything beaten in 2 weeks or less now days. So were does that leave people that are looking for things to do. That's right people. We go play other MMO's until new content comes out on WoW.
Yeah that's a really good point Crypto.
Unless your in a top 20 guild that has a chance of getting world 1sts which is a major incentive for these guilds to push hardmodes the rest of the guilds doing heroic mode don't have that incentive. Before there was enough motivation for your hardcore guilds not in the top 20 to do this.
I have been raiding since the end of vanilla in a guild that always clears content just before a new patch hits and DS has been a huge let down. Players just can't be bothered and would rather just be casual in wow now and try out other games or just quit completely.
Right now you to question is it really worth putting hours and hours of your life into doing heroics for no benefit when you can be casual do the content in LFR and get to experience other games and spend more time with family and friends. Hell it was worth doing in burning crusade up until toc.
I don't understand why people quit WoW to play games like SW:TOR. The end game is horrible in that game and if you are bored with raiding in WoW you gonna have to wait a lot until SW:TOR team get everything in place and manage to make raiding content worth your while, if it ever happens that is.
Yeah I don't know about that. If anything a mass quitting within ranks 10-50 will be good for the race since nobody cares about them and the good players that still want to play might join the top guilds instead. I'm also pretty sceptical of anyone claiming to "know lots of people" that are going to do something. He even says himself it's nothing more than a guess.
Mione from silent
To talk about my own quote: We're quitting WoW, some members will go on TOR/GW2, some members will keep playing WoW in other guilds, some members will just stop MMOs.
I know many individuals from various top guilds who also plan on quitting WoW for various reasons. I hear here and there from these same people that some guilds have no plans for MoP (I'm not talking about Method/Paragon style guilds there, more like top 10 to 50 ones). I had never heard so many people being quitting at once, at as such, while it's nothing more than a wild guess at best, I wouldn't be surprised if more guilds than usual were disbanding with MoP.
I also can confirm refuge quit and few top guilds on my server.
What top guilds aside from FtH are quitting? Hell, it's not even certain they are.
Not to be a buzz kill but so many guilds are disbanding after DW heroic, the game has lost it's purpose I am affraid and the only reason this world 1st got so much attention was due to the bans, so to me Paragon and Ensidia were the top guilds at the right and best times in wows history. Was a great game but the players with a IQ over 80 are quiting this game for good now.