My thoughts on Dragon Soul are mixed.

Speaking as the guild master of a guild that hadn't finished a raid in a timely fashion since TOC, with our one LK kill coming five weeks before Cata dropped, the fact that our Madness kill with the buff at 10% was only the eighth Horde side kill on my server pleased me. Going 4/8 the first weekend it was out was simultaneously a sign of my guild becoming a bit more competent and of how easy Siege really was. There's a lot to like about Dragon Soul; I do agree that it does bring together the remnants of Deathwing's forces for one big knock down drag out, and has some nicely epic moments in it.

As for the fights themselves-Morchok seemed designed to answer the complaint that the introductory fights of the tier 11 raids were initially overtuned, a ridiculously easy fight. Zon'ozz is hell on earth just for that damn glitchy ball; it was hard enough getting the people in melee to run out and the ranged group to position themselves properly, but add in the ball glitching out and it turned ugly. Yor'sahj is almost as boring as Morchok, because once you know what ooze to kill and what to do with each ooze combination, you can sleepwalk through it. Hagara is the same thing: know where the ice walls spawn? Congrats, you've got normal down.

Ultraxion is, yes, the DPS and heals check. But it seemed, initially at least, to be a bit high of a wall for casual guilds to climb (we got him before the nerf, but it took a miracle) and the literal PUSH THIS BUTTON OR YOU DIE, HOPE YOU DON'T LAG mechanic of Heroic Will was annoying. Blackhorn is chaotic good fun, the last boss we got before the nerfs hit, and my annoyances with that fight stem more from my raiders. Ranged and heals seem to not get that not only can they get hit by Shockwave, they're actually MORE vulnerable to it.

And Spine and Madness are, to be sure, epic looking and interesting as IDEAS, but the execution is sorely lacking. If you kill Spine and Madness in back to back one shots, you spend approximately half an hour doing the same thing three times in a row on Spine, then you do something else four times in a row on Madness. Once you get Spine, you're 8/8, it just may take you a few attempts to get rolling.

With all of those complaints, though, Dragon Soul is my favorite raid in Cata. Firelands buries you with FIRE, NOTHING BUT FIRE, though Ragnaros is far and away the best fight in this expansion. BWD has some fun fights, and taking down Nefarian is pretty epic, but overall it's lacking to me. I imagine someone who raided BWL in Vanilla has a different opinion, though. BoT has two good fights in Halfus and Cho'gall, and two I'm indifferent to, and Tot4W is so bland I just went there for the tier 11 clear achievement. That a flawed raid like DS is my favorite Cata raid says a lot about what went wrong in this expansion.

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