Heading into this last raid tier in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, I was hopeful I’d enjoy the tour more than I did when we did this in Shadowlands. For one thing, Castle Nathria was the only raid I enjoyed in Shadowlands, which made revisiting those raids less than fun. However, I liked every raid in Dragonflight, and although certain fights were more frustrating than fun, overall, I had a lot of fun with it. With that in mind, I thought I’d enjoy the Awakened season. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, and I have some thoughts on why that is.
Raiding has been my main interest in World of Warcraft since The Burning Crusade, and the highlight of every raid tier is learning the new boss fights and finally killing the last boss. As we progress, it becomes more about spending time with my friends, and the content often becomes far less of a focus. Yes, getting bosses down for the first time is still a blast and often an incredible feeling of accomplishment. That can only carry things so far, and as much as we love spending time together, our raid team also values breaks between tiers. If Shadowlands taught us nothing else, it taught us how vital those breaks are to prevent burnout.
These end-of-expansion seasons completely lack the newness factor, and for the most recent tier, in particular, patience for returning has already been low since we were just there. Plus, the end of expansions is when we generally take the most extended break, and our guild looks forward to that rest. Additionally, as a casual guild, summertime is already hard for many of our players because many of us take vacations during that time. Add a repeat tier to that mix, and keeping people’s attention becomes even more challenging.
I was very wrong with this Awakened season because I thought the raid rotation would benefit a small guild like mine, which only raids twice a week. I felt that having the rotation would help prevent the season from getting stale as quickly, as it would keep us moving to a new raid each week. Unfortunately, it very quickly became burdensome when we would only have one or two bosses left in a raid to finish because we knew it’d be another two weeks before we could return.
The rotation isn’t a terrible idea for one or maybe two rotations at the most. After that, every raid should be available as Awakened (or whatever the next thing will be). Of course, there should also be a way to deactivate these for anyone who wants to run the unbuffed version of the raid for any reason. I’m honestly astonished that wasn’t an option this time around since it is something that wouldn’t hurt anything but would allow players to accomplish various goals, like trying to farm mounts. Regardless, three months of a rotation was way too much.
Another area where we ran into issues was going back to get bosses when players would miss a raid night. We are a casual guild, and sometimes people have real-life things that would pop up, or they’d need to leave a raid early. It was not a huge deal in general; however, it was far more frustrating when they missed a boss at the end of a wing. Considering access to M+ and Bullion gear, it was rare for anyone to want gear from bosses beyond the first week or two. So, another frustration was having to run through and kill bosses no one cared about just to get the one we needed.
This was also not helped by the fact all three raids in Dragonflight had the same basic layout - one or two intro bosses, two wings with a few bosses in each, and the the final path to the last boss. It was not a huge deal throughout the expansion, but it really stood out when they were all stacked up next to each other. In a perfect world, it’d be neat for these last season tours of victory to have the freedom to do or skip bosses as we choose. As lovely as that would be, it’d likely be a whole ton of work while Blizzard is busy trying to get the next expansion out the door. At least having more variety in raid layout in an expansion would help a lot.
Another idea for making these final seasons a bit more fun would be to add something similar to M+ affixes to them so they aren’t just leveled up, but the fights are also slightly different. I’m not much of a fan of that idea, though. Relearning fights we’ve already done before might be fun for a week or two, but it would get frustrating quickly. Nothing is hurt by having the final season be a bit easier and just rolling through it. If mythic players want a challenging final season, do that, but normal/heroic can safely remain a fun romp for the last season.
I’ve landed on the side of hoping we don’t do this extra season where we revisit all the raids thing again. However, the upsides to doing it for Blizzard are obvious. At the very least, I hope next time, if we have to have a rotation, we only go through it once, and then all of them will be available with a way to deactivate each raid if you choose.
