Today marks the release of Lost Caverns of Ixalan (the latest Magic the Gathering set) along with the launch of Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope, which is the final raid of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.
I'm going to touch on the latter more - while what little I've played of the new Magic set seems cool, it always takes a few weeks to get a real sense for the impact of the set on the Standard format (which is what I almost exclusively play).
However, after some helpful videos from Ready Check Pull, I hopped in on my main and checked out the first part of the raid.
LFR sends us to the universally first two bosses - Gnarlroot and Igira (whose shards one might recognize from the previous patch) and then launched us to what is, on other difficulties, one of the raid's last bosses, Smolderon, the new Firelord that replaced Ragnaros as the elemental lord of fire (given that we kill him in the Dream and not the Firelands, I assume he's still around, but likely not going to be much more friendly to use than his predecessor).
On LFR, the bosses are relatively easy to steamroll, though we did have one wipe on Smolderon.
I won't get into the specifics of each fight - from a tank perspective, the first two are pretty normal taunt-swaps and other than facing the boss away from the raid on Gnarlroot, positioning seems pretty forgiving.
I'll confess that I'm... not in love with the grand temple complex in which all three of these boss fights takes place. Given that we're fighting in the Emerald Dream, I'd have expected more naturalistic environments. I think the Emerald Nightmare raid from Legion did a good job of ensuring that its locales were both natural and also dream-like. A Moonglade that is slanted down and being sucked into the Rift of Aln, or the shattered Thunder Bluff - these were very cool environments.
But we're really into the endgame at this point. Players on higher difficulties have beaten the final boss and seen the end cinematic for the raid (I haven't watched it). There is some additional content coming in later patches, and we'll get a Season Four that brings in things like Fated raids.
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