Aberrus is an interesting raid for a few reasons.

Firstly, I think I should say this up front – I enjoyed this tier overall. It’s certainly not a bad raid and I think the gameplay aspects of the raid were a fair bit of fun. Some frustrating mechanics aside, the raid has some interesting ideas and evolutions to WoW’s raid design and encounter design. However, in the encounter design, the game also reveals a shortcoming of Dragonflight that makes the talent system, from the raid perspective, feel a bit off-putting. Let’s discuss.

Capturing Madness

Thematically, Aberrus reveals an interesting part of Neltharion that hasn’t really been in the story before – the idea that he was, perhaps, a little more mad and Old God-crazed sooner than we knew. His Dragon Isles sanctum being this place, with twisted experiments, the brutal nature of finding Scalecommanders of the Dracthyr, and the inner sanctuary of Void, all paint a clearer picture of Neltharion’s growing madness and paranoia. The fights cover a good range of ideas around that theme – experiments, twisted abominations, captive Zaqali warriors being used as fuel, and the invasion of the Void all serve as good backdrops that help give the raid visual identity that isn’t just “Black Dragonflight science lab part 3.”

In terms of encounter mechanics, everything works in service of this goal, from Kazzara falling apart visually and mechanically as you whittle her health down to Rashok’s drain mechanic. The raid uses strong thematic ties in mechanics, from the intermingling of shadow and flame on Amalgamation Chamber, the use of actual Evoker abilities on Forgotten Experiments, through to even how Sarkareth as a fight works all have this feeling that conveys the raid’s plot and story intentions. While the lore this is in service of is, perhaps, not ideal (we’ll discuss that more in a future post), the raid itself, taken in isolation, is an excellent piece of content that weaves themes and gameplay together into a cohesive whole, and I like that.

Mechanical Execution and the Difficulty Curve

As a tier, Aberrus is slightly easier-feeling than Vault of the Incarnates was overall. The big things I would identify are this – Vault had more execution-heavy encounters, especially stuff like Broodkeeper and Raszageth, and Aberrus is slightly less stringent on that front while also being coupled with a more generous item level curve than the game has ever offered before. With the upgrade system, Aberrus was easy to outclass in item level earlier than prior tiers, both for raid-only players and those who raid alongside Mythic Plus or PvP activity. Normal is something you could outpace via world content, and you could match the best Heroic item level gear from Normal with the upgrade system, provided you could get a source of Wyrm’s Shadowflame Crests outside the raid. The design of the raid clearly wasn’t quite prepared for this and so encounters generally curve a little gentler compared to the item level players actually had access to, which makes some fights feel a little anticlimactic, especially on Normal. It was pretty easy to brute-force some things because of this, and so while mechanical checks are still decently tight, you could potentially plow through them anyways, like with how Sarkareth having an enrage timer is likely an unknown to most groups because hitting it is a difficult task in its own right.

Overall, fight design learns a bit from player preferences, especially in end fights – while Raz was a 10+ minute slog with 3 phases and two transitions each laden with mechanics, Sarkareth is a tight 8 minute fight with 3 phases that twist and modify mechanics slightly from phase to phase, and while phase 3 is a big shift with a lot of attendant chaos in setting up the phase and sticking the landing, it feels better than how Raz phase 3 could often feel. There’s definitely a mechanical ramp overall as you progress from start to finish inside the raid, with later fights packing in more dense mechanical layering, but not in a way that’s incomprehensible or too much. Overall, the experience feels pretty good and pretty well designed overall. Well, with one exception.

Raiding’s Failure to Engage Talents

Adding the old-school (or close to) talent tree design back into WoW with Dragonflight has been a key selling point of the expansion. The past few expansions have been marked with more build flexibility than ever (since you can just swap talents while out of combat at any time) but in Legion, Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands, this flexibility in talents was offset with inflexibility elsewhere in borrowed power systems – Legion had you locked to artifact traits and the path you chose, with the legendaries locked by luck, BfA locked you to the Azerite traits on the gear you had and the Essences you had (coupled late with Corruptions for another layer), and Shadowlands had you locked to Covenant, Soulbind, and Conduits – many of these could be changed, but it required layers of inflexibility – going to a specific location to change them, having limited options based on acquisition and prior choices, and limiters like the early Shadowlands Covenant locks or being bound by the gear options you had for Azerite in BfA.

Dragonflight’s talent system is great, and it overall offers supreme flexibility for WoW – you can change talents anytime out of combat and you can make granular choices to optimize for specific aspects of an encounter or gameplay scenario. Great!

There’s just one problem from the raiding perspective – of Dragonflight’s 17 boss encounters to date, 16 of them are best solved with a straightforward single-target damage build for DPS and tanks, and healers often have so few talent choices to specialize for damage profiles that there’s a sort of standard healing build for each spec to take into raid.

You might look at the fights and say, “well hold on, there are plenty of fights with multiple targets!” and yes, that is true. However, because of how encounter mechanics work, the damage profile needed for each of these fights is generally single-target funnel damage. Primal Council in Vault encouraged an AoE build because being able to hit all 4 bosses at once and keep them burning in parallel was a boon to the fight, but no other fight in Vault or this current tier offers that. Assault of the Zaqali looks like a multi-target AoE fight, but when your damage matters, it is single target funnel – into the Mystic to pop the shield, into the main boss to stop him from blowing up the door. Kazzara, Magmorax, and Rashok are pure single target fights. Short of Normal difficulty or Heroic with god-tier healers, Amalgamation Chamber is single target because you’re only hitting one boss at a time. Forgotten Experiments? One boss at a time, and the add mechanic on Heroic and up is still a funnel mechanic where you’re hitting one enemy – the orb or the boss. Zskarn? Funneling the boss or a golem, but rarely cleaving or true multitarget. Echo of Neltharion? Either the boss or the add, with rare chances to cleave (rarer on higher difficulties due to the Corruption mechanic). Sarkareth? Pure funnel with only small chances to AoE or cleave – and on Heroic and up, the adds are still priority damage into a single add at a time, especially once you hit P3 and the adds are healing so much per second that cleaving gets erased.

In Vault, this was also the case, save for Primal Council, and it feels like a failure of the raid design to engage meaningfully with talents. Raszageth encouraged some small shifts towards control abilities, especially on Heroic and beyond where dealing with Sparks was a big task that required a whole raid to bring their kit, but that was all class tree tweaks and minor ones in most cases. Aberrus has nothing comparable to even that, and if you zone in with a single-target build, you can keep it exactly as it is for the entire raid and be at your best. In the past, raid design has emphasized why build diversity is a fun thing in WoW and why it makes the game engaging. There is a spark of joy in being able to make talent choices and optimize in a way that brings more performance and sharpens you for the encounter, and past WoW raids have often made good use of a mix of encounters where damage profiles across a whole raid zone would call for some single-target, some cleave, and even some pure AoE builds. In fact, that encounter diversity is a part of why borrowed power systems became frustrating – while talents were flexible, they were such a small overall part of your total loadout and build that the flexibility offered mattered a lot less. Now we have a talent system that is extremely flexible with a lot of granular choices, and raid content just…doesn’t ask us to make those choices, save for a small margin of one true AoE encounter and a couple places where class tree modifications yield good results.

This is pretty exclusive to raiding, because Mythic Plus has a lot of build diversity given certain affixes, dungeons, and group comps, and PvP offers some choices you can optimize around coupled with the PvP talents adding another light layer of customization that works. Raids this expansion have just overwhelmingly been designed in an almost cookie-cutter fashion of single target optimized builds such that customization of choices for them isn’t nearly as much of a thing as it should be. And sure, you could argue that the “customization” here is just copy and pasting builds from Wowhead, Icy Veins, or a class/spec Discord server, and sure, that’s true, but at least the customization there still results in different gameplay, differences which the current setup restricts. You could, sure, also go unoptimized and just take whatever talents you want, but I think anyone raiding past LFR takes it at least seriously enough to understand the power of each choice point and that, typically, leads to a small number of viable builds.

This tier lacks even a Primal Council or Raz-styled fight where talent tweaks and different builds lead somewhere good, so you can zone in with one straight-up “raid” build and be pretty well optimized all the way to the end. To me, this is a big disappointment, because it means that talents are just not a thing you consider inside the raid at all, and that means the gameplay falls a bit flat for it. Getting talents back in this form was a big win and something that has the potential to make engaging with the game more, well, engaging – but this raid, moreso than even Vault, just does not have mechanics or fight design made to create that interaction. To be clear, the alternative of needing to fiddle with talents every single fight is also not ideal, but I think there’s a satisfying middle ground where I can save, say, a single-target, cleave, and AoE build and have at least one encounter per tier that engages with each of these build options. I played parts of this tier on 3 different classes and 4 specs and talents just never factored in past making sure I had a “raid” build, which sells short the potential of the system to create interesting gameplay friction. Tank, heal, and DPS – all that mattered was having a base set of choices.

Going into Amirdrassil next tier, my hope is that we get some encounter diversity with those 9 new fights and get some proper AoE and cleave fights to break up the single-target monotony of Dragonflight raiding to date.

Gear and That Damn Legendary

Gearing in Aberrus has been great, genuinely. The upgrade system changes game-wide have made raiding more rewarding and kept raid item level more competitive and in-line with Mythic Plus rewards, allowing Mythic Plus to retain its item level granularity and reward philosophy while raiding feels less shortchanged for it. I still think loot could be more plentiful inside the raid, but overall, it’s not awful and the upgrade changes alone fix a lot of my beef with raid gearing. Super-rare items continue to be a bit of a bizarre issue, as this tier those item often remain powerful but are also generally more common, such that my raid was giving Rashok polearms to alt-specs and we have full spread of the Chromatic Essence trinket now. The Neltharion trinket remains perhaps the one outlier, as we’ve seen I think maybe 2 of them in total across both difficulties we cleared and a double-digit number of Echo kills, but overall, super-rares are less rare and slightly less super this tier, which is kind of nice if only because farming them endlessly is less of a thing now. Raid has some game-changer trinkets as was the case last tier, with healers fiending to get Rashok’s Molten Heart, the Neltharion trinkets being generally quite good, and superstar use trinket Beacon to the Beyond replacing last tier’s superstar use trinket in Manic Grieftorch.

But for as improved as raid gearing feels in Aberrus, there’s one exception, and it is, of course, the Evoker legendary.

A legendary in this design paradigm should be hard to get, sure. I don’t disagree with that. Having an item that takes a lot of effort to get is fine, provided the effort is clearly guided and something you can work towards as a goal. The problem with Nasz’uro is that, well, it’s just a random drop to start. Crafting the finished legendary is work and a lot of it – it requires around 250,000 gold worth of materials, a max level Engineer, Jewelcrafter, and Blacksmith (and arguably maxed-out Alchemy with the Dracothyst recipe as well), and is a group-level investment. Here’s the thing – the group investment parts are kind of neat and add this feeling of solidarity to a guild working together to facilitate crafting the end product. You’ve got social friction that makes it easier to play the Evoker alongside the crafters if you want to finish the weapon crafts ASAP, there’s a raid component and a freeform gameplay choice component, and the final part – getting the raid together and streaming the quest to each other to share in the win – is really cool. But starting that journey with a semi-random drop is incredibly frustrating for a lot of reasons.

For one thing, the drop rate is controlled by a Blizzard-obsession opaque semi-random system, where you have some miniscule chance at the item per difficulty per week, where if you do the raid in ascending difficulty order you get just that difficulty’s roll chance on the item but if you start the highest you can go, it smushes the chances together into a bigger roll. After some hotfixes and a lot of yelling at Blizzard, the system now has some opaque bad luck protection baked in, where each time you do Sarkareth on Heroic or Mythic difficulty, you get a higher chance at receiving the Cracked Titan Gem on all subsequent Sarkareth kills. What’s the rate per difficulty? Nobody knows. What increase does the bad luck protection offer? Nobody fucking knows. It’s a black box, which Blizzard loves because it means there is an encouragement for Evokers to keep running the raid every single week and for raid teams to want to run the raid every single week, even if everyone is done with all other gearing and there is almost zero reward or benefit to running it besides the camaraderie.

Secondly, without Master Loot existing in Dragonflight, the Evoker gem is just randomly looted to someone in the raid who is eligible to receive it. You have no real way to control who gets the drop, and while that’s sort of okay, if you have someone who isn’t playing as much or is contemplating quitting the game or raiding, it is a real buzzkill if they get the gem first because you can’t just redirect it. Whoever gets it, gets it, and that’s that. This is almost minor in the grand scheme of things, but it still impacts teams, especially when the raid tier winds down and people start dropping off – losing the weapon feels like a nerf (and functionally is).

Thirdly, there’s some vague idea that this legendary will remain best in slot for Evokers throughout Dragonflight, with some theorycrafting setting the item’s actual value roughly around item level 480. This is fine to a point – if I had to grind against a bullshit opaque acquisition system and spend 250k in gold to get this thing made, it damn well better stay good for a while – but with Season 3 information trickling out now, we know that item level 480 weapons are already going to be a thing in this upcoming season of content, with M+ going as high as 483, crafted reaching the same ceiling, and Mythic raid going as high as 489 (and the upgrade system will likely make the Mythic raid item levels almost fully available to M+ players and even Heroic raiders). This matters a lot because to everyone, weapons are the biggest source of pure throughput available – melee and ranged Hunters because of weapon damage, and casters because the Intellect value on weapon-slot items is weighted substantially higher for the sake of keeping spell power growing at a rate that matches melee power growth from weapon damage. By making the legendary a weapon, this means that it will be outstripped relatively fast with this gear level shift we see in Season 3, because the proc of 500 main stats will be outweighed by the growth in item level on the Evoker themselves, where having a 1H weapon at 480 will confer more main stat than this weapon plus the proc and it will offer that to the Evoker themselves at 100% uptime, compared to the reduced uptime of this proc. Sure, it won’t offer that to allies in the party, but given the number of empower abilities you have access to per minute, this likely evens out – 500 main stats for 10 seconds around 3-4 times per minute, or around 600 main stats to the Evoker permanently. In practice, this means that only Mythic guilds, groups where the Evoker player with the legendary will run M+ to get a 483-level weapon or better, and groups in Season 4 and beyond, will outpace the weapon – but knowing that this is already on the horizon is disheartening. Now of course, the catch is that a group not doing Mythic, and/or whose Evokers aren’t pushing high keys, will actually get more use out of it, as it will likely remain a competitive choice for the proc until that 480+ item level bracket. However, given the changes coming to the upgrade system, even a non-Mythic raid team has a decent shot at pushing to the point where this weapon loses its luster already one major patch later!

So you have a system that will create some burnout by design (you can’t just call a raid break easily if there’s a chance your group can get the legendary for an Evoker), that creates this burnout with the possibility of never rewarding you the item, and that creates an item in a slot that is almost certainly going to be replaced within 1.5 tiers max after costing a raid team a quarter-million gold. Awesome.

Granted, my cynicism here is rooted in things remaining as they are now – that Nasz’uro stays 457 item level, that the proc remains as-is, and the drop rate isn’t eventually fixed or even set to be guaranteed given the amount of work after the drop that is needed. There’s precedent that some of these could change – Val’anyr, the healing legendary mace in Wrath of the Lich King, started life as a 239 weapon before eventually being upgraded in the next tier to 245 item level with no work required of the players wielding it – but I’m not holding my breath. Blizzard is learning that legendaries in this format are powerful retention mechanisms, as most raid groups I see are continuining on beyond the point of normal raid breaks they would do in order to farm the legendary for all of their Evokers, and they’re already announcing a new legendary for Strength two-hander players next raid tier and paying lip service to “lessons learned” here, but I am fully cynical of this, because I think this opaque and bullshit design serves Blizzard’s business case well and they’ll keep doing it if they believe they can get away with it.

Overall Impressions

I think Aberrus is an overall-decent to good raid tier with some fun fights, some novel ideas (Zskarn traps, Echo of Neltharion walls), and an overall well-executed theme and ludonarrative implementation. I liked a lot of fights this tier and I appreciate that Blizzard is finally stepping away from making every end boss a long slog of 5+ phases and multiple paragraphs of mechanics for each of those. However, I think raid loot quantity still needs some improvements, talent choice diversity needs to be emphasized in raid encounter design, and retention mechanisms like legendaries need to be implemented in a more respectful manner that recognizes the journey for the players eligible to get it and gives them a clear, no-bullshit way to chase the item, even if it ends up being exceedingly rare and difficult to obtain. I think some of my impressions here, at the end of the tier, are influenced by burnout (my raid team voted we keep killing Sarkareth on heroic weekly and I am tired of seeing his stupid dragon face) but still grounded in the fun I have had this tier. I want to see the 2-hander next tier be more respectful of players with a well-mapped and maybe even deterministic journey to the item, I want to see more diverse fights that ask me to build out multiple talent kits, and I want to see more loot dropping in raid to help that last front where M+ is still clearly better than raid. But in spite of all of that, Aberrus was still an improvement overall for me, representing a step forward over Vault of the Incarnates in multiple ways. It’s certainly not my favorite WoW raid ever, because there’s just too much value in places like Ulduar, Throne of Thunder, and Nighthold for me to shift it into that upper echelon – but Aberrus is still a solid raid in its own right that doesn’t feel too….aberrant (ha!) in the current landscape of WoW.

It’d be a lot closer to that upper echelon if the legendary was handled better, though!