Changes to the design of the Amirdrassil raid that would have made it more immersive

I thoroughly enjoy raiding instances in WoW and it’s the core end game activity for me, so I’d like to share some thoughts that in my view would improve the degree of immersion instances could provide in future. An important disclaimer - I believe instances serve a key narrative role throughout all expansions related to defeating the key antagonists, while at the same time they create ground for fun and dynamic collaboration with other players. As such, instances should feel grand, boss fights should be engaging and epic, while all of it serving the purpose of telling a good story. I do not believe raid instances and raiding is an e-sport in the first place. It can be used as such, but shouldn’t be designed with that as a priority.
With this in mind, I’d like to share two ideas that in my view would have made Amirdrassil a more immersive group experience. First, it would have been fantastic if there would have been a boss or even bosses that would require us to fight on the back of a drake - similar to how it was in Oculus and the Eye of Eternity back in the WotLK. In my experience, Malygos fight was one of the most memorably designed fights throughout the whole history of WoW raiding and it made great sense from the narrative perspective that dragons would assist us in the fight of the mad aspect. I feel that it was a lost opportunity in Amirdrassil - a final raid of a dragon-centered expansion. Though it was a good decision to at least include a bit of dragonriding during the Tindral fight, but there could have been more of it - for example, there could have been even an inner-instance race where we would need to reach the seed ahead of Fyrakk.
Another idea is that during the Fyrakk fight the Aspects and Vyranoth should have been in their native dragon forms - it was underwhelming to see them standing on levitating platforms in the visages and having basically no role in the fight and no impact on it. Such decision breaks the immersion. In comparison, it was incredible during the Deathwing fight in the Dragon Soul instance to see them in their native forms actually fighting Deathwing and buffing the group of heroes. It made sense for them to oppose him as dragons and it made sense for them not to lead the fight as they were empowering the dragon soul.
In summary, I hope there will be more attention to the narrative design of the boss fights in future. Cheers :slight_smile:

Please never again. I would be down for some sort of dragon based trash event though, similar to the bombing run we got at the start of the expac, but no vehicle combat raid bosses.

I’m curious, what did you not like about vehicle based boss combat in the WotLK?

I’m not playing my class.

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