With Season 1, the first raid in WoW Dragonflight started, the vault of incarnations. MeinMMO editor Benedict Grothaus took a look at the raid and played it through directly – well, almost at least. Because a few places are really crisp.
Before the release of Dragonflight, I prophesied that after 12 years of dying, WoW would do everything right again. The new extension was released a little over 2 weeks ago.
In my first recap, I checked if Blizzard is back on track with Dragonflight. My conclusion was: yes, if you work on a few things. Now I’m pretty sure I’m right.
Because now Season 1 of Dragonflight is here and with it Mythic+ dungeons, new events and finally the first raid, the Vault of Incarnations. Of course, I looked at everything immediately and I’m thrilled, even though my guild and I really struggled. Or rather: precisely because we were really struggling.
In our special you will find all information about Dragonflight. The trailer once again shows the most important features at a glance:
WoW shows the most important features of Dragonflight in the gameplay trailer, fans praise: “Finally hype again”
The new raid is harder than any in years
As a progress guild, we have three raid nights per week: Wednesday, Thursday, and Monday. Immediately after the first evening, I had the impression that the vault is a good bit heavier than the raids of the last expansions.
Most of my guild colleagues had the same impression. In principle, this time we got as far as in Shadowlands: all bosses except for the final boss on the first evening, most of them on the first try.
Nevertheless, the bosses offer a completely different challenge. We fooled around less, we were very focused, just because we had to be. Prominent example: Sennarth, the frozen spider.
Not only does the boss constantly run away and we chase after him in the ring of an arena, there are also stairs (the end boss of every healer) and above all ice surfaces. But they don’t just make you slower, they subject movements to a new physics.
That means: acceleration is slow, but once you’re moving, it’s difficult to brake. You have to come to grips with this first, because:
The mechanic is pretty difficult, but pretty damn cool if you can master it. There is something similar with most bosses. But they weren’t the only point that made us feel like the raid was harder than usual.
Do you want to know what happens after Raszageth is defeated? Here’s the cinematic – with spoiler alert!
WoW shows new cinematic: This is how the fight against Raszageth ends
We die too often – “I’ll heal with you”
Healers are still struggling to heal at the moment, mainly due to the lack of equipment. It doesn’t help that many DPS players – including me – still trust that the healers will catch them if they make mistakes.
But they can’t.
Because in addition, healers generally have a harder time in Dragonflight. That’s what we wanted and planned, but up until the raid, none of us really had any idea how crucial that would be.
Everyone has an enormous amount of life points, but the healing spells don’t absorb as much anymore. So you have to pump more. So much that we had to stock up on healers, quite blatantly in fact.
With 30 people in the raid, we first tried the 2nd boss with five healers. After two attempts, I changed my specs myself – after all, I’m playing the new Rufer, a caster for the first time in 12 years. And I wanted to try healing anyway.
Even that wasn’t enough. Our raid leader, a shaman, ended up having to help out as well. Then it finally worked. With us it’s a running gag that the boss has to heal for it to work. That’s the only way we’ve managed to get a lot of first kills.
This time, however, the healing requirement was simply enormous. We’ll see if it stays that way. But I think it would be very cool if you had to mix things up more often in Dragonflight. As a side note, I actually got the most healing out of the kill try. The caller is just awesome!
Check out my guide for builds for DPS and Healer Callers. Gameplay is here:
3 minutes of gameplay for Rufer, the new class in WoW Dragonflight
With 8 bosses, the raid is comparatively small, which again suggests that the vault is a bit crispier than its predecessors. By the way, we haven’t been able to lay Raszageth in 2 raid evenings, but we’ve already defeated the first bosses on heroic.
By the way, I have to agree with Cortyn: Raszageth is already a better opponent than the Jailer was in 2 years.
I have to get used to Mythic+ from scratch
In preparation for the kill, we now have the task: farm M+. With Season 1 came the keystone dungeons, including 4 of the new dungeons and 4 from the expansions from previous years. There you can get really good loot again.
Actually, I should still be used to it, after all, Mythic+ is an activity that you grind to the end as an active PvE player. However, Dragonflight has increased the difficulty here as well.
At the moment I’m still nibbling on 10 keys, which is also due to the fact that I’m really unlucky when looting. And tanks seem to have quite a bit of trouble doing their jobs – which may be due to the fact that they’ve been heavily nerfed.
Nevertheless, I am really convinced of Season 1 so far and feel like playing WoW again. The new dungeons are fun, although I haven’t seen all of them yet, and I can already see the opportunity for crazy tactics and skips coming up soon.
Shadowlands has found a good conclusion with Season 4. Even big critics like Bellular think so. And Dragonflight builds on that. 2 weeks after release I have tons of things to do, can improve at all corners and at the same time I don’t feel like I have to pursue boring activities. I can do what I want and always get better somehow.
There are a few exceptions. For example, as a jeweler, I have to hunt down a fairly rare recipe that everyone in my guild needs. And it just won’t drop…but that’s nagging at a high level. So far I think: from a raider point of view, Dragonflight is a great success.
Amazingly, even Cortyn shares a similar opinion, though we often disagree. But our lore demon has a different approach:
I’ve played every quest in WoW Dragonflight – the expansion really is that good