Too little too late

People still won't run Oculus. I know this not just because they added a bunch of new carrots to the stick today to get people to run it but also because last night I watched as nine people dropped group after getting randomly assigned to my Oculus run before we got five willing to stick it out. Even then, that group couldn't get the final boss down and wound up splitting up in frustration.

The problem of course being the drake fight.

And the problem with the drake fight is that it makes no sense. The tank drakes can't hold aggro, the dps drakes main attack doesn't do much damage and the healers die if they try to heal two people back to back.

Sure, if you take the trivial amount of time to learn how to use these mounts you discover that it's actually been quite easy all along, and that the 3.3 nerfs made the fight a cakewalk for a group that knows how to run it, but the fact is that in any given random pug group you're lucky to have one or two people who know what they're doing and the ones who don't just make life hard on those who do.

The answer to obtuse and unintuitive drake abilities - free rare gem for beating the boss. Really?

If Blizzard wanted people to stick out Oculus they could change the drake abilities. Give the Ruby drake a taunt and passive mitigation, give the amber drakes an iwin nuke, and give the emerald drakes a heal that they can spam without dieing. In other words, make the drakes play as a simplified, efficient extension of your existing role mechanics. Get rid of the stacks of this ability in order to trigger that ability, get rid of the need for the healer to let one party member die whiel dpsing for enough health to save another, get rid of tanks having to trigger their damage reduction ability, because all of these mechanics are going to mean spectacular failures in groups who don't know the fight and don't bother to read or listen to directions - which is to say all of them.

Alternately, if they simply must keep their abilities as designed, have the drake you're riding offer useful advice during the fight, use this ability now, or don't you think you should add some more stacks of that ability first type messages. Maybe this sort of in-game tutorial wouldn't prevent a wipe on the first attempt, but it might help in repeated tries.

Even still, create a high-quality guide for the official site and hype it through the launcher. Even people who will never visit a strategy site or research the fight are potentially going to click through to an official walkthrough.

But don't simply hand out a couple of more badges and an unwanted gem. When groups give up on the badges they're getting now, are completely at a loss for how to do the fight, and have no hope of finishing the event tossing around a reward that will go unclaimed as often as not is not an incentive. Worse still, should the incentive actually work and people become more and more proficient at completing the instance over time it will become a contentious instance, wherein people who don't get it in a night's random queueing resent and kvetch about the people who did - and got extra badges and a gem for doing no more work than the people who didn't.

Clearly, the least helpful and possibly most harmful approach was taken here. Even leaving it alone, letting people who didn't want to do it sit out on their cooldown (thus relieving some strain on the instance servers mind you) and letting those who did or were willing at least to try see it though would have been a better appraoch than a reward which is at best infrequently attained and at worst a source of friction would have been better.

I look forward to my extra badges, but I wish it were otherwise.