Cataclysm, the Expac that shook the world. Dragon Soul was a very hefty raid and to this day, over ten years later, one particular encounter remains troublesome for those looking to solo and hopefully get their hands on the Blazing Drake to complete the achievement to get the coveted Emerald Drake.
I’m talking about Spine of Deathwing. Visually the encounter is unique, but this unique encounter also causes much unneeded stress for players with coordinative disabilities. Hand to eye coordination as well as visual queues on screen are something some people may have difficulty with managing. Having to do so much during this encounter as well may also cause some people to have sensory overload. There are also those who may not suffer from these disabilities but still have difficulty completing the encounter.
Speaking from experience as well, I suffer from social anxiety and always feel like a burden asking for help from others to get past spine. There was one instance where I did tag along in a duo and due to my dyspraxia, I caused us to wipe three times to spine. Due to those wipes and previous encounters I have yet to run Spine again.
Dragon Soul is the least talked about raid when it comes to proposing Raid Skips and I’ve been a fierce advocate for it in previous posts I’ve made, so now I propose a skip for at least the spine encounter of Dragon Soul.
If anyone wishes to relay their difficulties with Spine feel free to post below!
I do agree that this Raid encounter is quite aggravating at times to complete. When attempting to do it on my Warlock it definitely is so due to cast times while attempting to do the dance from left to right, and my imps auto attacking things.
This dance/mechanic is much easier to accomplish on a Warrior. Where one can just stand on the middle of Deathwings back, spam “A” and “D” on their keyboard while spamming the whirlwind until enough dead globs are on the ground, then you run over kill a tentacle, have the elemental run over all the dead globs, go nuclear, kill spine attachment, and rinse/repeat.
I do wish the spine was a little more forgiving for solo caster players.
Following up on this; Some people have no issues with the encounter and no one class should have an advantage at completing legacy content that’s meant to be farmed several times to be rewarded.
The fact remains though a majority find spine difficult regardless of the class they play and it is more often than not the one encounter that prevents someone from farming Dragon Soul and making their attempts at the Blazing Drake/Life-binders Handmaiden.
I’m glad they haven’t made any further encounters like Spine (unless they have and I’ve just not run the raid.) and I hope they consider never making one like it again.
I agree, it’s a shame that the Warrior class truly is the best class to do old raids on. You can literally walk thru an entire old raid doing nothing but spamming whirlwind and win. Whereas other classes have to slog thru it, stand still and cast abilities, wait for cooldowns on their AoE’s so they can down that massive group of enemies, and the list goes on. (To Clarify, incase someone takes this the wrong way. I AM IN NO WAY INCLINING THAT WARRIORS ABILITY TO DO THIS SHOULD BE REMOVED/NERFED. It is the other way around, other classes should be raised to this ability).
I don’t think we’ll ever see the likes of the Spine encounter again. Especially considering the hatred it caused is causing to this day the extreme hatred of LFR. LFR launched with Dragon Soul, and this singular encounter nearly caused its demise. And even though it’s been 11+ years since it’s launch, Dragon Soul’s effect on LFR is still felt. We will never see LFR launch with all the other difficulties again because of Dragon Soul. I sure wish we could move on after 11 years, but even with this expansion Dragon Soul’s hold on LFR remains.
With SoO finally getting it’s skip to the end boss next patch, could we finally work on a skip to Final Encounter in Dragon Soul?
I’ve said this before but I’m tired of people complaining about past content that is soloable but just takes time getting skips before even earlier content like Spine that people like me still struggle to solo.
So I attempted Spine of Deathwing to try to help others visualize why this encounter is so difficult for me and potentially other players. It took me 40 minutes to complete the encounter of Spine due to my disability.
To start the area of battle is very small. When a lot of mobs start showing up from the pools of magma on his back it tends to get difficult to see whats going on and for me a sort of panic sets in my mind making it difficult to function and kill the things I need to kill. I tend to tunnel vision at this point and fail the encounter by falling off due to the amount of mobs congregated around me or on the field. My mind just overloads and I tend to just tunnel vision and shut down the process of hand to eye coordination where I use my keyboard to move around and use attacks. It’s not like an anxiety panic attack but more an “Oh sht, oh sht, oh sh*t” feeling like you don’t know what to do in the spur of that moment despite knowing how the encounter is supposed to go.
It’s not that we don’t understand the mechanics or how the encounter is supposed to go, it’s literally the fact that so much is going on ontop of the threat of being thrown off if we stay too long on one side. It’s easily a harder encounter to manage when you have a coordinative or cognitive disability.