I hope it does because karazhan was a bit of a fiasco but still I like the dungeon.
Fated stops there being a content drought at the end of the expansion. As a paying customer who raids every tier since wod I’m happy with this and it seems good. Would it be great to get a fourth raid then a fated season yes. Tbh I don’t see why they decided not to do a fourth df season so can’t defend that descision
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i never did fated raids and im quite excited for it.
I really liked fated raids.
Raiding is my favourite activity in WoW but I never liked how raids are only good for one season and then left behind forever until it is easy solo farming for transmog and mounts.
In SL I really didnt like sepulcher due to aesthetics and mechanics.
I did however love nathria and sanctum of domination except for a few fights.
I like to be able to relive the best encounters in the expansion before we leave it all behind for good.
And the best time to do that is at the end of the expansion.
I would also have liked more raids though, specifically 1-3 boss lair raids spread through out the expansion.
A dragon focused expansion with no dragon lair raids? Actually outrageous!
I don’t enjoy fated for two reasons, I hate affixes in raids and I don’t like recycled content.
I presume on the whole the concept was well received which is why we will probably keep seeing it going forward.
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BFA, Legion, Cata, WotLK and MoP all had small sized raids inbetween.
Of course Fated is better than 4-5 months of nothing, but given how it is the new standard apparently, compared to the old standard of getting at least 4 raids each expansion, it’s abundantly clear that we’re getting Fated as a replacement for a fourth raid.
Yes, I agree, Fated is better than nothing. But Fated is also worse than a fourth raid. And up until Shadowlands, we’ve got 4 raids each expansion, at the very least, except for WoD, which was up until BFA widely considered the worst expansion ever.
Covenants aren’t raiding. Domination shards aren’t raiding. Renown isn’t raiding.
In these ways, Dragonflight is better than Shadowlands (see “Dragonflight is in many ways better than Shadowlands”).
But if we’re looking at the number of bosses, Dragonflight is worse than Shadowlands. No argument there, no matter how much you try to pull other topics into the topic of raids.
I don’t know, timewalking raids are somewhat of an attempt at that and they leave a lot to be desired as well. That being said, given the small timewindow that timewalking raids are available, it’d be silly to invest more resources into them, so if they’ve actually spent some development time there, it might actually become a good thing, who knows?
Nope it does not. We don’t get any new raid content, whatsoever. There’s not a single new raid boss, not a single new encounter, nothing. That is the very definition of a content drought, specifically regarding raiding.
Fated is the very definition of a content drought. It’s just slightly less bad than not getting any patches at all.
As a paying customer who raids every tier since wotlk, I’m unhappy with this and it seems awful.
Agreed.
I’m gonna be very honest here. I expected to absolutely hate Fated raids back in Shadowlands and I didn’t. I enjoyed them much more than I expected. But I did not enjoy them nearly as much as I would’ve enjoyed a new raid, which is the alternative.
Everybody and their mother talks about the alternative being 4-6 months of nothing at all, but why is that? What went wrong at Blizzard that apparently creating more than 3 raids per expansion has suddenly, since Shadowlands, become impossible? And why have these issues not been fixed over the past 4 years?
Bobby got 390 Million Dollars for how good of a job he did, so clearly there’s at least 390 Million Dollars leftover after they’ve spent all they could to improve their games, so money can’t be an issue.
Fated is not an alternative to nothing, Fated is an alternative to a fourth raid.
I liked experiencing the best encounters 6 months ago, I don’t really have nostalgia for something that happened in the past 6-12 months. Especially not when there’s bad boss fights such as Sylvanas as the final boss every third week.
Very true, also where’s the dragon boss that has a cleave, a fear, a tail swipe and a fire breath? What happened to the original dragon bosses?
Timewalking raids are abit different in a sense that they offer no gear or boss progression. I think that this difference will be enough to make it interesting for a whole season (even if shorter).
Well, those things were needed for raiding, this is why I count them for making raiding worse 
.
Oh no, if you talk about number of bosses sure, no disagreement there. Was talking about quality of bosses.
In the above graph it shows the duration of patches of wow. S3+S4 of SL are counter together and have more or less the duration of the yellow graph.
We are saying that we got fated instead of a 4th raid cause if you see the duration of S3+S4 is more or less the same than other seasons.
The difference is that in SL and DF we have longer seasons 1+2. Other expansions before had small raids between seasons to break it up a little bit, while in SL and DF we kind of lost them.
I am 100% on board with that. In fact I WISH that we got a small 2-4 boss raid in a fated season (with new dungeons and higher ilvl), although I do not feel that the reason we lost that was the fated season, but because of the design of the previous patches.
Content drought refers to content in general, not just raiding. Fated season brings in WAY more than a raid. Other dungeons, new gearing system, the raid/affixes, pvp season. It might be subpar to a regular season, but still way better than what you are giving it credit for.
Refer to the graph above.
EDIT: Sorry for the long post.
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fated season is a good time to play other games
in my opinion
so many to choose from
Yeah I agree, the concept does have potential, I’ll give it that at the very least and I kind of like the idea too.
I’ve counted them towards making the expansion in general worse, rather than raiding, but it’s all just semantics and I believe we mostly agree.
I’d argue that, up until WoD, those last patches often had additions that shook up raiding a little during them. MoP has had the introduction of Mythic and Flex Raiding, Cataclysm gave us a new Raidfinder difficulty and WotLK has had ruby sanctum.
BFA also had 5 raids in total, with the addition of the corruption vendor halfway through the final patch, which by my own argument doesn’t really count towards raiding, but is worth a mention nontheless, imo.
But I get the argument much better now, thanks for sharing that graph with me!
I’m fine with just calling it a raid content drought, rather than a general content drought, since my main point was that I care mostly about raiding to begin with and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t mind a Fated season.
Yup, the argument makes a fair bit more sense to me now, again thanks for sharing!
Don’t be
Oh yeah it is but I’d love to play WoW during that time and have a new raid regardless. I enjoy playing WoW and raiding a lot.
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Great! Plenty of time to farm out and get all the old collectibles before TWW hits! 
I enjoyed reading these posts, good discussion.
It would be nice if Blizzard announced their content cadence in advance so you know what you’re getting, but unfortunately things can change unpredictably, especially in 20 year old software projects, so its understandable they don’t want to commit to an exact content cadence one year before the expansion even goes live (they possibly haven’t even settled on an exact date for that yet).
I will admit I do feel a bit disappointed by not having a fourth tier, but it is what it is. To me, the difference is if it was an honest schedule slip, or they had planned a fated raid as replacement content when they could have added 10.3 if they wanted to. The end result is the same, but the latter feels worse.
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The end result may be the same but the way they got to it isn’t.
In my opinion Fated raids exist already so the only thing needed is balancing. If Blizzard do .3 patch as a new season the raid has to be made from scratch which takes time and resources maybe. So they decided not to do it anymore. Something like the dungeons. In Wotlk they are 16 and the last 2 expansions only 8 + a mega dungeon.
Blizzard are cutting content where they think will work and in my opinion it is working. I enjoy it atleast.
I don’t know but s4 of shadowlands runing m+ was kinda fun.
I think S4 DF is also going to be FUN
I don’t look at things like you do you know
OMG i need new shiny boss all the time or raid all the time
what if people just wants to play the game with a twist and have good talk on DISCORD?
Like they are giving as everbloom right now in s3 as a m+ do i think it’s new and fresh? no
do i hate their decision? no
because yes it is a WoD dungeon but it was changed so it will be little bit different then people remember it
You don’t need to have new stuff all time
sometimes rework is enough
I agree. However we don’t get any reworks, we get the same raids, with a miniscule mechanic, called an affix added, that makes the bossfights easier.
I understand these things can be incredibly difficult, but whether or not Fated is the new standard and is something we can “look forward to” in the future should be something that’s very clear at this point in development.
To me it feels very much like they’ve seen that people didn’t absolutely hate Fated in Shadowlands, so they decided to make it the new standard, so they can cut costs.
Blizzard are cutting content where they think they can without people minding it so much that they stop paying them.
And that isn’t something positive, in my opinion. Less content and / or less quality for more money is the opposite of what I, as a consumer, want.
I imagine the fated season won’t be that long, just like last time.
6 months per tier, with the fated one probably being like 3-4 months.
I agree it would be better if we’d get an extra raid tier, but if I may be so blunt: I really couldn’t care less. I mean I used to raid, but I’ve got to say that the raids in this expansion have just been sub-par, not because they can’t structure and design raids, but because I just don’t feel anything for these raid dungeons. They strike me as pretty boring.
So… if this lets us get to a new expansion faster with a different theme, I’m okay with that.
Sounds like general they want to move out expansions faster.
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They probably do have some idea of what they plan to fit in, but why would they show that information to customers and expose themselves to risk when they don’t need to since people buy it anyway? If expansion sales start to fall off and they do market research to see why, they might address this then.
You may not think its positive, but unfortunately its the market that determines whether its positive or negative and it feels like most people don’t have a problem with it.
I will explain to you what is my way of thinking and why I find Seasone 4 as a positive. In the end of an expansion there is always a content drought. Which I hate and the worst was Siege of Ogrimmar and WoD. I won’t mind a little down time at the end of an expansion so I can do other things too. In my opinion season 4 accomplishes that. Legion and Dragon Flight have well made pacing of the patches.
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Quality over quantity
SoO implemented Mythic raiding halfway through, it was entirely fine for everybody who was willing to enter Mythic raiding.
But why does that mean we have to skip a fourth raid? Why not add a fourth raid and have the same downtime afterwards?
And we get neither 
Who said anything about raiding? It is the lack of content I am talking about at the end of MoP. What was it a year without anything? WoD was the same with all the cut stuff. Blizzard are trying to change through Season 4. That is what I am seeing and the most important thing is that people are fine with it. If that was not the case fated raiding would have been in the same boat as war/titanforge and borrowed power (which means removed).
This can be answered by Blizzard only but I think it is less work to balance already existing assets than create new ones.