Farming for mounts in Dragon Soul just got a whole lot easier with these quality of life changes

In a stealth quality of life change, several of the least enjoyable aspects of Cataclysm’s final raid, Dragon Soul, have been adjusted in retail with patch 11.0.5. This is fantastic news for those of us who love running through old content to farm transmog apperances, mounts, and pets.

Dragon Soul is an eight-boss raid that is soloable on 10 and 25 player normal and heroic difficulty. You can also queue into the Raid Finder difficulty by talking with the NPC outside of the instance in the Caverns of Time. If you’re anywhere close to max level in The War Within, raids as far back as Cataclysm are a breeze — all of the enemies, including bosses, will just about fall over dead when you unsheathe your weapons.

The main headache of running this type of older content are game mechanics that were designed to engage and challenge a large group of appropriately-geared players through a 5-10 minute encounter. In the present day these mechanics range from time-consuming to annoying to outright impassable. The first four bosses of Dragon Soul are easily one-shot, but the following three have been giving players headaches for over a decade — until now.

Dragon nerfs now live

Before the Ultraxion encounter, players are tasked with defending the dragon aspects from Deathwing’s twilight drake minions atop Wyrmrest Temple. In the past this has meant an agonizing wait for fifteen drakes to individually spawn, but with the new changes you’ll only need to vanquish five. They also appear much faster, bringing the total time spent on clearing this trash way down.

The next fight takes place on the airship Skyfire, with Warmaster Blackhorn only jumping into the fray after three waves of dragonriding vrykul attack. These mobs now spawn almost immediately after the previous wave is defeated, meaning that you’ll need to spend far less time standing around on the deck and waiting.

The Spine of Deathwing encounter isn’t my absolute least favorite old raid content to get through, but it’s definitely in my top two. I’ll need to re-evaluate that list, because the new changes cut down the time spent riding on the back of the destroyer by a huge factor.

You’ll still need to keep your feet moving in order to avoid spending to much time on one side of Deathwing’s spine lest he do a barrel roll and send you hurtling off into the Maelstrom, but his elementium armor plates are peeled away much more easily. While a Hideous Amlgamation previously needed to collect nine stacks of Corrupted Blood before it could go nuclear and blast off an armor chunk, they now need just one.

These changes, at the moment, seem to only be applied to the Heroic and Raid Finder difficulties. Normal difficulty remains unchanged, in what seems to be an oversight — we’ll keep an eye out and let you know if we get a fix or hear that this is intentional.

Why would you even want to run Dragon Soul now?

While the first two changes will be a nice time refund, the adjustment to the Spine of Deathwing encounter will mean that many players who couldn’t (or chose not to) farm the last two bosses will now have a much easier time clearing the entire raid. This merits a quick rundown of the neat stuff that players can acquire by saving the world from Deathwing’s fiery cataclysm each week.

There are three battle pets to be had. The Faceless Mindlasher drops early on from Yor’sahj the Unsleeping, but you’ll now have an easier time trying for a Corrupted Blood from the spine encounter and an Unstable Tendril from Deathwing himself. These three will drop from any combo of difficulty and raid size, even Raid Finder.

You can also acquire three different dragon mounts, all of which will be easier to farm after the new changes. Ultraxion’s reward cache contains Experiment 12-B, a unique-looking pink drake with whitish-blue highlights. The final Deathwing fight can yield a Blazing Drake, a large rose-colored dragon with horns reminiscent of Alextraza herself. Both of these will drop on normal and heroic difficulty, but not in Raid Finder. Only on heroic difficulty will you be able to also loot a Life-binder’s Handmaiden from the final Deathwing fight, which shares a model with the Blazing Drake but swaps the pale pink for a vibrant magenta.

Don’t forget the tier set — each of the ten classes that were playable in the Cataclysm era has a unique armor ensemble that drops from bosses throughout Dragon Soul. The theme on these range from clockwork to Deathwing-inspired to hideously corrupt, but they’re all worth a look. Normal, Heroic, and Raid Finder all have their own color scheme. With characters able to acquire transmog from any armor type and tokens being Warband-bound, it’s never been easier to complete a set.

The final loot worth mentioning is the weapons, particularly the ones that drop from the final Deathwing battle. These are some of my favorite options to complete a transmog set, and the heroic ones in particular have a violet-tinged void appearance that’s perfect for heading off to continue our pursuit of Xal’atath in Undermine.