I like lists. I’m a sucker for lists. So…we’re gonna do more lists.
Last night, for some reason, I fell asleep thinking of World of Warcraft. Specifically, I was thinking of my favorite raid fights. WoW isn’t like Final Fantasy XIV, which is about story and characters. WoW is all about game play and it’s something that they did very well. They may still do it well, but it’s been a decade or so since I’ve played, so keep that in mind.
I played the original game through the first four expansions (up through Mists of Pandaria), so there may be better fights in the more recent expansions, but I can only go with what I know. First, a few honorable mentions:
Opera Hall (Karazhan) A very silly, chaotic fight in one of the best raids in the game. Be sure to pay attention to the dialog between the NPCs.
Onyxia (Onyxia’s Lair) Like most fights, this was impossible until suddenly it wasn’t. Onyxia was a one-boss raid, but it was very well balanced and a lot of fun when you did it right. Or when you failed spectacularly.
Valithria Dreamwalker (Icecrown Citadel) An unusual healer-focused fight where you don’t kill the boss, you heal the captive dragon. Way better than the final fight against Arthas IMO.
Thorim (Ulduar) Another candidate for best raid in the game, Thorim was the most interesting fight in the raid. It was a split-the-party fight and I am a sucker for those.
C’Thun (Ahn Qhiraj) The first of the Lovecraftian final bosses, this was a deeply unfair fight but I had to admit it was different an interesting.
Here are the five that I remember most fondly from my time playing.
Gothick The Harvester (Naxxramas, Vanilla/Wrath of the Lich King)
Naxxramas was a weird one. It was originally released as part of the original game but then withdrawn when the first expansion came out, and then re-released in the second expansion. I know this post is about individual fights and not entire raids, but Naxx was probably my favourite raid. It had 15 boss fights, and they were all good. Each one of them was memorable and they all felt like challenging but fair fights.
The Gothick fight probably had the most interesting mechanics. The raid was split into two separate rooms. The first group had to fight wave after wave of opponents and then Gothick, being a necomancer, would turn the corpses into undead in the other room. They monsters were slightly easier as living creatures, which mean you could kill them faster, which in turn meant you could wind up overwhelming the second group.
Once the minions had been dispatched, Gothick himself would join the fray and zip between the two sides and make life miserable until the barrier between the two rooms fell and you could clobber him. It was in some ways the most typical of Naxxramas fights in that, if you just beat on the boss without considering other things, you were doomed. You had to coordinate 40 (vanilla)/25 (WotLK) people in a fairly delicate dance to keep either side from getting buried, and it was immensely satisfying to finally beat.
Garrosh Hellscream (Siege of Orgrimmar, Mists of Pandaria)
OK, I’ll be honest, it’s not that great a fight. It’s incredibly busy and very punishing, but it’s not really fun. I suppose it’s an appropriate end to an expansion, but it’s not really as interesting as, say, Illidan Stormrage in the Black Temple.
However, it was a personal grudge match for me. The writers did a fantastic job of really pissing me off and wanting to kill Garrosh. You see, I played a Tauran shaman (Taurans being huge bull-people, like minotaurs but goofier). Garrosh killed the Tauren lead, Cairne Bloodhoof,, in a duel. It was probably an accident as someone poisoned his blade, but the thing about Garrosh was the he was exactly the kind of guy who never should have been made warchief of the horde. It was in-character for him to kill allied leaders because that’s just the kind of guy he was.
Plus, he created an order of “dark shaman” which, speaking as a shaman…”dark shaman” is not a thing. It’s like being an “anti-druid” and going around killing every plant you find because you’re just that evil. His “dark shaman” were abominations and their existence got under my skin more than it should have.
So, for the raid, I transmogrified my gear into the traditional shaman starter kit look and when we finally took Garrosh down, I had a four-macro speech I recited over his body decrying everything he’d done. My guild thought there was something wrong with me, which was very perceptive on their part. Anyway, it felt good to kill him even if it wasn’t the greatest fight.
Spine of Deathwing (Cataclysm, Dragon Soul)
To be fair, this one may not have been the greatest fight, but it was a good one. The raid takes place on the back of a dragon. The dragon is too heavily armored to harm, so your job is to remove some scales from its back to allow a giant weapon to fire on it and presumably kill it (“presumably” because it doesn’t quite work). There are several damage gates where you have to do X amount of damage in Y time or you’re boned.
It’s also a movement fight. The trick is that you don’t want too many people on one side or the other of the dragon’s back, or it will roll in that direction and throw you off. You are ALWAYS moving. Which is great fun for everyone except shaman. We had no instant cast heals at the time, so my ability to do anything useful was very, very limited.
We tried over and over and over and kept failing and, to be honest, it was my fault. Sean’s druid and Jenn’s paladin (I think Sol was gone by this point) could heal just fine, but I was useless. Finally, we tried something a little weird. Instead of focusing on healing, I would be their battery. I would keep their mana topped off so they could cast more and heavier heals.
Weirdly enough, this wound up working. I always built my character for mana regen anyway and that included maximizing the regen for the other characters as well. It wouldn’t have worked if Sean and Jenn weren’t absolutely aces at what they did, but they were, so we got through it. It was extremely satisfying to try something a little out of the box and see it work.
Not actually the same fight, but much the same crew. #Liberalis
High King Maulgar (Burning Crusade, Gruul’s Lair)
Mercy. This was such a mess. The mechanics weren’t awful in and of themselves, but the trick was that it wasn’t one boss, it was several, and each of them had to be tanked in different ways. The mages had to handle one of them as he was immune to physical damage. It was awful.
This fight was all about the pull. If you got through the first ten seconds, you would probably win. It was all about positioning all the bosses far enough apart and surviving the initial onslaught. That sounds easy, but it was the most difficult initial onslaught I ever faced.
I was always with the main heal group assigned to the main tank, who would handle Maulgar himself. Maulgar hit hard. How hard? Two hits would kill any tank. One hit would kill anyone else. What this meant was that the main tank had to get Maulgar’s attention and then drag him over to where the healers were before they got hit twice. The hits came about a second and a half apart.
So, the healers had a second and a half to get the tank topped off before the boss hit the tank again. Most big heals, the kind you’d use here, took a second to cast. You wanted to time it so the first heal hit right after the tank got hit with the first blow and hope you could get a second off before the second. But…if you were too early, or if you hit the tank with too big a heal? Maulgar would go after you instead of the tank, and that was that.
And each group that was holding each boss had to do the same thing. Maulgar was the worst, but if any of them failed that initial dance? You all died and you had to run back from the graveyard (which was not close). This one was crazy, crazy difficult, and thus finally getting it right felt amazing. And if you liked Maulgar, you loved…
Vaelastrasz the Corrupt (Blackwing Lair, Vanilla)
“The Guildbreaker.”
That’s what everyone called this fight. They weren’t wrong, either. Our raid leader, Crawlpappy, made an announcement before we started this raid that “Everyone one of us is going to cause us to fail at some point. Don’t point fingers, don’t yell, just run back and we try again until we get it.” It’s a good thing he said it, because he was right.
Here’s the setup: A friendly dragon has been enslaved by the Big Bad of the raid and begs you to put him out of his misery. The dragon starts with his health bar down around 50%. In order to aid you, the dragon gives you a “blessing” that makes you move faster, gives you more mana, let’s you heal more and do more damage. Every 15 seconds, he gives one of your party a buff that makes everything you do go instantly. How can you lose?
Easily. And often.
The dragon is enraged by his enslavement and he’s sending out constant damage to everyone in the group. The buff that makes everything instant will also cause the player to, um, explode after 10 seconds. So, that person has to go run off in the corner so they don’t kill anyone else. Oh, and it’s only sorta random. Every second application of that buff goes on the current main tank. So, if you have 5 tanks (which was a LOT for a 40 person raid), you have 2:30 or so to kill the dragon or it’s all over.
Fortunately, you almost never last that long. Someone blows up, or the tank dies, or someone pulls threat off the tank (rogues could do a lot of damage very fast with those buffs) and the dragon would turn and kill everyone. Most attempts to kill Vaelastrasz ended in failure in 30 seconds or less.
Unlike Maulgar, surviving the initial pull was no harbinger of success. You could all die at any time. You had to be execute everything perfectly to pull it off. It was great when we finally did it. It we let out a bigger cheer for this fight than we did for Ragnaros.