The Dragon Soul and Raid Finder

Well, I've been really busy trying to get the most out of Patch 4.3  - with the Dragon Soul and the Darkmoon Faire taking up a bit more time than I'd anticipated. Today I just want to touch on the Raid Finder and Dragon Soul raid dungeon in general.

Having now cleared the Dragon Soul raid on normal, and done some of it on the new Raid Finder difficulty, I feel comfortable is saying it seemed a bit under-tuned. The Raid Finder, in particular, is a joke, and I don't think it's introduction is really a good thing for the game. Just following the blue-tracker (a tool that highlights Blizzard's post on their forums) on mmo-champion, I've seen a few posts with players absolutely gushing about how much they love the Raid Finder and how they'll never go back to normal. I think these people are deluded. The Raid Finder isn't difficult in the slightest, but it's working as intended. It's tuned to be so easy as to allow a group of random players succeed. Blizzard is basically tearing down a wall that seperated players who put forth a minimal effort - in terms of gameplay, teamwork, gear, and use of consumables - from those that aren't willing to do so. Going in to a Raid Finder raid and being successful is the equivalent of giving every child on the peewee football team a trophy at the end of the season. Players are rewarded just for showing up - just for participating. The loot is a step down from the quality dropped in normal raids, but it's still too generous. I'm not saying a Raid Finder type system is inherently flawed, but I would rather have seen a system that stayed true to the raid experience in terms of the effort required. Lazy players who queue up and under-perform or can't follow a simple strategy shouldn't be rewarded with success. Their take-away should be "I really need to improve if I want to clear this content" instead of  "Now I can finally get all the gear and see all the content I'm entitled to."

As for the normal mode content, and the design on the raid in general, it seemed rather bland up until the Spine of Deathwing encounter. Most of the dungeon feels recycled because it takes place in places we've already seen. The first boss takes places south of the Wrymrest Temple in the Dragonblight. The second and third bosses take place inside the old-god inspired sarlac-pit type areas we first saw in the Twilight Highlands. The third boss encounter takes place in the Eye of Eternity (where we dispatched Malygos). The fourth takes place on top of Wyrmrest Temple, and the Fifth is on-board the same gun-ship (loot-ship) from Icecrown Citadel. It's painfully obvious that all of the environmental artists are hard at work on Mists of Pandaria content at this point. That being said, the Spine of Deathwing encounter was great, and the Madness of Deathwing encounter was decently challenging and left a lot of room for using different strategies.

I said I feel the Dragon Soul was under-tuned, even on normal, primarily due to the high number of guilds that cleared it on normal within the first two weeks.(On my realm, it's something like 20 guilds). Next week my guild will begin working on hard-mode progression, and I'm torn about what to expect. Part of me thinks this is where we'll face some real challenges, but on the other hand, I'm not a huge fan of incredibly difficult, R.N.G.-dependent, 50+ wipes-to-down ecounters. And as of yet, I've only seen reports of the first 5 or 6 encounters being cleared in Heroic mode by the best guilds in the world, and those guys usually cruise through anything that isn't damn-near-impossible. I realize that this is the last major raid tier of this expansion and so the content needs to last at least 6-8 months ... perhaps even a year before Mists of Pandaria will give us all something new to do; However, I've also been raiding long enough to know that being stuck on one boss or another for weeks at a time will inevitably stress people out and make for some truly unpleasant raid nights.