As of a recent patch or hotfix Dragon Soul has been improved for people who wish to solo the raid more quickly:
After the first 4 bosses have been killed and when it’s time to protect the Dragon Aspects and Thrall, the Twilight Dragons will start attacking. However you now only need to kill 5 of them, instead of the previous 15 dragons.
At Warmaster Blackhorn the Twilight Dragons who carry the adds now spawn almost instantly instead of roughly almost 1 minute in between each spawn, and after 6 dragons are killed you can damage Gariona and then kill the boss. It took roughly only 1 minute for me to kill this boss, as opposed to several minutes before.
Spine of Deathwing is now extremely shortened as well. Start by killing the tentacles like you’d normally do, and then one of those fire oozes (or blob). Now you only have to kite the Hideous Amalgamation into one of the fire pools spawned by an ooze, as it instantly provides 9 stacks of Absorbed Blood on the Hideous Amalgamation add.
Much needed improvement for people who are farming the raid, who like me think that it previously took too much time to clear. Thankfully now it’s a thing of the past.
I try this later.
I did a DS run yesterday but wasn’t paying attention so didn’t notice much difference. But I tend to alt tab to forums during all the RP bits anyhow.
SoO got a portal to last boss, why not that here? That would have been much better.
OK, tried it again (paying attention this time).
The ship fight is a bit quicker and smoother.
Spine is a lot quicker and smoother.
So good chance overall. Especially Spine, that was so annoying. Being able to get the 9 stacks with a single ooze is great.
Things they could still do (if they weren’t going to add a portal to last boss):
Make portal to the Eye be available once you fly to the top of Wyrmrest.
Have Thrall be able to start the fight once you’re back from the Eye.
Ultravox should appear once you’ve killed the five dragons (keep Deathwing ranting if you must).
Thrall could be able to start the fight once you’ve landed after Spine.
A few simple changes that would knock another 5 minutes of waffly RP and make running it smoother. I might not even alt tab out at all if these were done.
The RP when you fly to the top of the tower is still there.
The RP when Deathwing yells “Mere Whelps!” still happens.
The RP when you return from the Eye before Thrall can start the either fight is still there.
Three fights are quicker and smoother. Biggest change is Spine which is a lot faster.
So they could improve this a bit more and save me a few months of alt tabbing.
Just ran this on an alt that had ti set to Normal for some reason and the changes weren’t active.
I assume they think only Heroic is farmed for mounts etc. But players will do Normal (Blazing Drake drops in Normal, if it drops which I’m not sure it does anymore).
Off topic, but something I noticed while doing Molten Core on my Hunter was that when I killed a boss in the raid and looted tier pieces that does not belong to my class, I actually got the appearances! It seems as if we are finally able to get tier appearances on any character, regardless of class.
Not sure when this was implemented but it certainly is a very desirable feature, thank you Blizzard!
Yes but normal drops the right one while heroic can drop a version i dont need. But i could just try it. For me its the skin thats nice. I am not sure what drake the achievement looks like. Also i saw the drop is around 4% thats high for a mount drop imo.
I have every mount in a dungeon or raid up to the end of Cata, except Blazing Drake and 2 from Firelands. I’ve not tried hard on the Firelands ones yet but Blazing Drake I’ve been running for years. Even Invincible and Ashes only took me a few months.
I only ran Tempest Keep once a week on my druid and got it.
I ran Ulduar once a week on my hunter (used a saved lockout so only had to kill Yogg).
Deathcharger took a while and that was every day on my warlock for months. I liked doing it on warlock as I could send the pet into the ziggarats to kill the guys down there so I could stay outside and kill the guys who spawn. Laziness.
But DS is on many toons every week.
I wonder if I went back to my Ashes approach of once a week the game wouldn’t sense my desperation so much and it would drop…
