A few things to keep in mind. My guild raids normal only and really has no interest in heroic mode. I'm only talking about my experiences here. I might bring up a few larger questions but I'm well aware that I'm but one voice among millions and by no means do I believe my preferences should dictate game design for anyone else. That being said ...
LFR ruined raiding for me.
Dragon Soul being the first raid available in the LFR format, it's hard to talk about one without talking about the other. Now, I'm not saying the LFR in and of itself is bad. It's not. Many many more people are using the LFR than I would have predicted, and large numbers of people are getting to see the content that Blizzard has spent all this time producing. That's a good thing. Is it raiding though? I'm not so sure. It's more than five people, so game mechanics wise it's a raid, but most of us have come to associate raiding with some sort of challenge, some sort of difficulty and LFR, correctly, doesn't have that. Other games call it story mode. I think that's a good way of thinking of it.
So why did LFR ruin Dragon Soul for me? By seeing the fights and cinematics in the LFR before I saw them in normal mode, it cheapened the experience for me. I didn't feel like I had accomplished as much because it was something I had already seen. Silly? Maybe. I'm still going over it all in my head, but I can't deny how I feel. Some would say the easy answer here is to not do the LFR and just stick to normal mode, however, due to the gear upgrades in LFR, and the gear requirements for fights in normal mode DS, I would be doing the guild a disservice by not going after all the upgrades I could. I also think the nerfs came a little quick, and I'd love a way to set them granularly, but that had more to do with our declining attendance, and really it's a minor point.
What can be done? In single player games, you often see a better ending or experience something different by playing at a higher difficulty level. The heroic-mode only boss idea. I'm not sure this is a good way to go. If the idea of the LFR is to give a story mode, hiding story behind higher difficulty level defeats the purpose. To me, the only way to make it work, is to make it such that there is no reason to raid any other difficulty level than the one you want to. Heroic mode raiders shouldn't have to raid normal. Normal mode raiders shouldn't have to raid LFR. There should be no point in doing so. I understand Blizzard wanting to give us all a reason to raid LFR when it started. They had no idea if people would take to it and wanted to give it every possible chance to succeed. But now that it has been proven to be successful, I think they should incentive it less for raiders of other difficulty levels.
What of Dragon Soul apart from the LFR? It's wasn't my favorite raid, but it wasn't terrible. I'd rather more bosses and more optional bosses, basically Ulduar, but for what it was it was fine. Seems like a lot of people felt it borrowed art and reused models, but none of that bothered me really. The dragons fighting over Wyrmrest Temple made sense. As did the lieutenants of the Old Gods getting involved. The top of the temple, the gun ship, the back of the dragon, the maelstrom, it all worked for me. If I had to nitpick, I'd say, the bouncing ball on Zon'ozz was a little wonky. And the way the camera works in WoW didn't do the final two encounters any favors. Riding the back of a giant dragon should be epic and yet it felt claustrophobic. I only ever saw the sky flying by when I died. Madness also should in theory be epic, dragon falling apart, attacking aspects, but your view of it is so limited, it takes away from it. Not entirely sure how to fix that though.
Now if we could only kill Ragnaros.
Edited to Add - What's making me happy this week: Three bosses down in the last two weeks. Hard to beat that. Also enjoying Circadia on my phone. Bought Bang and Ticket to Ride for the iPad this week with the intent of playing them with the family over Easter and am pretty excited about that.
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