So, How's the BFD Raid in Season of Discovery?

Blackfathom Deeps is one of my favourite vanilla dungeons, and one in which I've had many interesting and hilarious adventures. You can read about at least some of them in old posts on here if you check the Blackfathom Deeps tag.

Naturally, I was both excited and curious to see what Blizzard would do to it in the process of turning it into a raid for Season of Discovery. And I can say right away that I think they did a good job. Obviously they re-tuned things and added a whole bunch of new boss mechanics, but the general look and feel of the place was largely left intact. They just moved some named mobs around to improve the pacing.

Baron Aquanis for example has become the first boss of the raid for everyone instead of being an underwater summon for Horde only and located later in the instance. In fact, his fight takes place in the room with the stone platforms you have to jump across and you need to jump back and forth on them during the boss fight. It honestly blew my mind the first time I saw that.

I don't think Blizzard made any changes to those platforms either; players are just so much better at the game nowadays that you can expect them to just make that jump easily. However, I still remember wasting so much time in that room back in the day, just trying to get everyone across and people falling into the water over and over again.

Anyway, the second boss is a gigantic Ghamoo-ra, which immediately made me wonder what he'd eaten to get so big now. It was only later that I realised that he does indeed appear to have eaten one of the other dungeon bosses, Old Serra'kis, who does not feature in the raid except as a half-eaten carcass on Ghamoo-ra's little island. Turtle boy also drops variants of Serra'kis old loot table, so yeah... I thought that was a funny little detail.

Lady Sarevess is still fairly unremarkable, while Gelihast puts a new spin on the problem of "too many murlocs", with several phases of indestructible "shadow murlocs" ambling across the room that you need to dodge or take damage from.

Lorgus Jett gets to enjoy being upgraded from a quest mob for Horde only to a proper boss (and also appears to be a human shaman?!), while Twilight Lord Kelris has become known as the pug killer. My guild struggled with him too, though I didn't get to see any of that for myself since they had him on farm by the time I hit level 25 on my priest.

On my first run I asked for explanations and was told that as a healer I basically just had to stack up for most of the fight and drink a Free Action Potion when he enraged (I had been prepared for this). As such, my first time went super smooth, though on a subsequent visit I messed up by drinking a mana potion and putting my FAP on cooldown, causing me to die near the end, but the rest of the group still came through somehow. I wonder if I should look up what's actually supposed to happen in that phase...

Finally, Aku'mai has had some pizazz added to his poison attacks, but feels almost easy after Kelris.

He also drops an item that you can hand in for a piece of gear in Thunder Bluff and that also triggers a new world buff unique to Season of Discovery, called Boon of Blackfathom (I think for Alliance the hand-in is in Darnassus). This was pretty cleverly done, as it gives people a reason to hang out in what's usually the faction's least favourite capital in Classic (though I've always loved both Thunder Bluff and Darnassus personally).

Because there are so many people running the raid, said world buff is also popping almost non-stop, and it's not a bad idea for a levelling character to hang out in town for a bit just to get buffed up for your next session of questing, not least because the boon increases your run speed by 20%.

It's honestly comical just how many times you'll hear Bashana Runetotem do the yell starting with "Denizens of Kalimdor" during a short session of running errands in town. I always imagine this message being delivered in the same style as Rhonin's "Citizens of Dalaran!" from Wrath - which makes me glad that there isn't an actual sound cue for it, as otherwise the city would be awash with it non-stop.

Even without the buff, the spoils from BFD are pretty amazing in general, at least for casters. I don't know if it feels quite as good for melee, since they already had some pretty sweet loot available at various points in the levelling journey in Vanilla. However, for casters their best stat (+spell damage/healing) was practically non-existent outside of endgame, so my level 25 priest having about +50 to damage and healing after two trips to the raid feels absolutely insane.

So do I like the BFD raid? Hell yeah. I hope I'll get to run it a few more times before phase two drops, which we now know to be in less than a month. The only thing that kind of gave me pause about it is the difficulty. It's not hard exactly, but... compared to actual vanilla raids, it's closer to Naxx than to any of the others in terms of mechanics, which is weird. Obviously a ten-person group is much easier to organise than a forty-man, and there doesn't seem to be a hard gear barrier to cross, but in terms of how much is going on, this is no Molten Core.

I guess that's a good thing, since the modern Classic player base expects more from raids nowadays, but it also makes me a little worried about what the raids in the next phases will be like. I mean, those shadow murlocs on Gelihast were borderline stressing me out already... I feel so old.