World of Warcraft Encounter Journal to detail boss fights, Firelands raid previewed

The new Encounter Journal has landed on the World of Warcraft test realms, providing full details of the boss fights in the upcoming Firelands raid. The Journal is set to act as a one stop, in-game wiki that will provide in depth information on every raid boss, gathering the huge amount of information normally only available on sites like WoWhead and WoWwiki into one official document.

The Firelands is a top level raid set to be added in the upcoming 4.2 patch. It will be available as both a 10 and 25 player raid at normal and heroic difficulties. It will contain plenty of tough bosses, not least the region's ruler, Ragnaros.

Every Firelands encounter, including Ragnaros, is listed in the new Encounter Journal. MMO Champion's preview of the journal dishes out every detail of the Ragnaros fight, including information on each stage of the battle, and a list of every attack Ragnaros will use at each stage. Thanks to the new Journal, you'll know exactly what you're in for before you even see the new raid.

But is this a good thing? You might say that the WoW community will mine a new raid's data a day or so after it comes out and make the information public anyway. Listing each bosses abilities will let groups get straight to making strategies, without the frustrating trial and error period spent learning boss patterns. However, for some, the Journal could ruin the sense of discovery that comes from learning a new raid. What do you think?

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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.