My whole wow career I've been seeing comments like "boss XZ is so much more fun than XY" and "boss Z is just plain boring" etc.
That makes me wonder what kind of boss encounter mechanic / features makes the fight "fun" for you and which doesnt.
I guess pretty much everyone hates too much random factor in certain encounters but besides that im quite interested what kinda of boss fights people prefer and for what reason.

For example - I hate damage aura fight types, the feeling that my whole party is permanently taking damage and someone gotta care about them doesnt make me feel comfortable in that boss fight.

On the other hand I like organization heavy fights like 4H where there was lots of things you could improve and then feel that you are getting significantly better in that and optionally ended up killing them.

I enjoy movement fights with fairly precise placements with a VERY minimal amount of randomness. Thaddius- movement fight, one random element (charge). Anubrekhan, movement fight one random element (spikes). C'Thun movement fight a few somewhat standardized random elements. All high quality fights... all I think I could have had a lot of fun with if I hadn't been quite as strung out on coordination. I LOVE the first big boss in heroic Mechannar. That's *fun*. Serious fun.

I like being able to make a direct difference in the outcome and a certain amount of rythmn in the fight is most excellent!

oh, movement fights are kinda specific - I like them personally cause the movement isnt really a problem if wow isnt your first game (and sometimes its not problem even if it is your first game ever) but they made me cry when there were "slower" people in raid and you just couldnt afford to replace them for various reasons.

Lots of things:

- Difficult so you can see yourself winning eventually, and not bang your head against the wall, we are never going to kill this.

- Does not require raid stacking or encourage.

- Does not require heavy consumable usage, EXPECIALLY to learn the fights and the mechanics.

- Has a very important role for everyone in the raid. Nightbane for example has DPS almost as an afterthought.

- Emphasis on individual responsability.

- A random element that can be compensated with skill. Ctun's eyebeam is a good example, fights that are always predictable are boring, fights that are too random suck.

- Multiple phases.

There's plenty more, but there is far too much to list. Blizzard's dev team does a fantastic job with them, and I really have no complaints about the design of bosses.

I've always liked C'Thun fight. Who wouldn't love a giant eyeball shooting laserbeams, spawning tentacles and occasionally sending you to it's stomach?

Also fights that introduce a seldom used class skill to a key role... Suppression room with trap disarming, Razuvious' mind controlling etc.

Suppression room was the worst thing ever, specialy those slacker rogues (me) that never carry a thiefs tool around and get mocked for it!

There are alot of things that make an encounter fun.

To make the perfect encounter Blizzard would have to combine the execution perfection that was needed at 4HM with the part time stress you had at C'thun and add some phat dps elements/buffs like Loatheb or Thaddius (God damn I love the jizz numbers in those fights) at the same time as the remove random factors like sucky Shatters at Gruul and add some slight but preventable random stuff like C'thun green beam.

Personaly I must say that C'thun and 4HM are two of the most awesome bosses that Blizzard ever created and Naxxramas overall was an awesome raidinstance. Lets cross our fingers now that Blizzard makes Hyjall or Black Temple even better (and remove all the f***ing antimelee bosses ).

I was more thinking about certain mechanics rather than overall setup of the fight. Im pretty sure most of us will like encounters with the right amount of luck factor but not relying on it too much etc.

some mechanics which I can remember right now (probably missing loads and messed quite some together)

-Selective Fear
-AoE Fear
-Hp% Enrage
-Damage Aura
-Adds Zerg
-Adds Zerg with more organization (gothik like)
-Multibosses with various abilities (4H / Maulgar / Bug Trio in AQ)
-Wipe Enrage timer
-Dps burn
-Global Movement (heigan)
-Healing effects reduced
-Kiting
-Positioning (firemaw)
-Avoidable Death Touch
-Unavoidable Death Touch
-Weakening
-Phases fight
-Standart Debuffs raid scaled (mana burn, shadow word pain etc)
-Chaining Damage
-Aggro Issues
-Periodic AoE
-Random AoE
-Specific Events (thaddius / cthun / sapphiron's ice blocks etc)

I guess thats not even half of it :x

I think it's easier to specify what makes fights not fun, rather than what does. Most fights have the potential to be fun, but a few poor elements can "ruin" a fight rather quickly.

From my experience, generally the fights people find the least fun are the ones with random, mostly uncontrollable elements which can wipe the raid without a "fair" chance of reacting.

MC breaking on Faerlina 1 second before the enrage? Not so fun.
Vael using BA on 6 healers in a row? Not so fun.
Infernals spawning around Prince in the worst possible pattern known to mankind? Not so fun.

Random, in and of itself, can work fine... Random class calls you have to deal with on Nef? Pretty fun. Random itself isn't really the problem, so long as it's "fair" in some way. In the case of Nef, he can never class call the same twice in a row. There's no way to get a "string" of Priest or Warrior class calls, for instance. Or "wtf, we got 5 Warlock calls in a row and AEers ran out of mana before the zerg," type complaints.

The fights that people have the most fun are the ones where they feel like they have something to do which is important, but it's not "out of reach." People don't like dying due to issues they feel they have tried their hardest but still can't control. Using your skillset and overcoming a hurdle is fun, so long as it doesn't cross into the realm of tedium.

But I don't think the mechanics have anything to do with how fun/unfun a raid is. A raid can have a DT mechanic and be very very cleverly done like Vael, or a horribly stupid DT mechanic that you cannot do anything about (Cursed in EverQuest, pre-nerf Emperor Ssharaze in EQ etc ).

Mechanics alone are completely meaningless depending on how well they are implemented in the fight, and if they fit 'naturally' in the fight, or they are obviously thrown in to give a bone to some classes - like melee only skeletons on nightbane.

I think fun is a subject term, and relative to your enviroment, but I will try my best.

First off I can tell you whats NOT fun for anyone: Being unable to affect the outcome of the situation is VERY unfun.

1. Rogue Stunlock before you can come out of stun? Check
2. Warlock Stunlock before you can come out of stun? Check
3. Old School Cazic Thule death touches in plane of fear? Check

It isnt very fun if you can not do a damn thing to save yourself from 1 situation or another. But like some people have said, if you have the option of saving yourself, and get a feeling of accomplishments then its fun.

For any raid encounter I'd rate accessibility as a prime condition.

Onyxia in the late game, implying BWL gear, would be my favourite encounter still.
Whereas Patchwerk would be an excellent example of the most boring and frustrating encounter ever.

There is a lot going on at Onyxia; three distinct phases, and an adversary anyone, even those new to the genre, can understand as well as a ton of abilities that have devastating results if not properly understood and accounted for.
There is significant leniancy in the raid composition to allow ample deaths and talent choices; which adds to the epic feel of the fight where you combat the dragon admist the corpses of your friends.

What makes this encounter interesting at that gear level is that you can still have screwups (like dragging in an Onyxian warder) and live through that instead of demand a picture perfect execution concept.


Patchwerk for example is, for me, a tiring ordeal where essentially you're not playing the game but instead function like a dull ADD or MUL in a spreadsheet.
It's also totally not apparent why people die unless you somehow see the pattern a bunch of green bars taking a dip. Even if you do see the dips it takes obscure knowledge of concepts like threat and how it can upset the proper order in which bars need to take dips - and that requires a particular user made mod to analyse properly.

What makes this encounter boring and frustrating is that there isn't anything visible at all - Patchwerk is a very stale fight.

Personally, what makes me amazed is not only the combat design. Being in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj is the only think which ALWAYS makes me amazed. That's the only place where i enable the game music.

And technically, about the combat concepts; the ones i like most are those which bring me to the edge of survavability and also require talent. Apart from this, my favourite fight was Huhuran which "always" had a potential to blow the raid. The Twin Emperors was fun tho, especially where Vek'nilash's tank gets killed after a "dodge / dodge / parry" sequence at the pulling, with an image of 40 ghosts running into the temple afterwards.

In TBC 5mans, my favorite is Grandmaster Vorpil. And the funniest raid encounter of my experiences is, no doubt High King Maulgar.

These two are the most important. Everyone in your raid needs to feel that they're there for a reason, and that without them, the encounter would be much much harder or possibly impossible.

Being an intellectual, I really really love fights that have very finely tuned design and mechanics that have to do with more than just raid numbers vs boss numbers. Fights that leave you with the impression that "holy cow, the guy who came up with this is a genius".

After some long thoughts on this, I've come to the conclusion that the majority of these fights are where a boss can potentially do insane amounts of damage, heal themselves, etc, which is prevented by execution of the raid. I've coined up a term for these kinds of giths - allowance fights. Basically for me, fights where you get that satisfying feeling that the boss is only capable of doing what you allow it to do, are much more engaging than straight-out numbers fights.

For example, everyone said C'Thun. I totally agree - the fight is all about preventing green beam chains, and preventing people from taking too much other random damage while burning everything down. The entire strategy a guild builds revolves around this - group positioning, intra-group positioning, having silences/interrupts spread out over the room for giant eyes, etc. Basically, the raid doesn't allow C'Thun to bring his millions-damage beams to bear.

Another fights with extremely well-thought out mechanics would be Anub'Rekhan... even the dimensions of his room, his movement speed, and the duration of Locust Swarm are perfectly tuned that execution makes the difference between taking 100,000 raidwide damage from Locust Swarm and 3000-4000 on the MT.

Thaddius? Same deal. He can wipe your raid in 5 seconds, but you don't allow him to. Heigan? Ditto with the dance phase.

I'd say 4 horsemen and KT fit very well into the category of control fights as well. You don't allow the horsemen to run to the center and obliterate the rotations. You don't allow KT to nuke the tank, and each element of the fight is negated by execution to minimize the adverse effects done to the raid.

I'd say this is why Aran and Netherspite remain hands down the best fights in Karazhan to me. They're complex, they're both capable of dealing uncope-able damage to the raid in seconds, but you don't allow them to.

The other side of the spectrum from these would of course, be the fights where random elements come into play. There's good random elements and bad ones. C'Thun's eye beam is a good random element - no matter who he targets, damage is preventable. Ground Slam is an example of a shitty random element. Yes, of course, it can be minimized. However, it's just... not intuitive.

I'm pretty indifferent about straight-out numbers fights. Patchwerk and Loatheb fall into this category. They do stuff which is countered by the raid in a mechanical fashion. Dealing with Hateful Strikes and Dooms prevents deaths but there's no way to disallow the boss from bringing those weapons to bear, if you get what I mean. They have their place... but they just aren't as enjoyable as the allowance-style fights I described.

Any fight that requires high execution, is viable from multiple tactics and preferably has a gimmic.
BWL: Vael (rogue... <3)
AQ40: C'Thun, Twin Emps
Naxx: Thaddius (big numbars!), 4HM, Patchwerk (was a DPS class.. <3), Grobby (chess of naxx)
TBC: Aran, Netherspite, Chess

I think the 'gimmic' part, something that makes the encounter really different from normal ones helps the most on making things fun, it seems like a new type of fight that sort of makes you feel 'sparky' and excited about it.

I agree with this to a certain extend. At one end of the spectrum, a gimmick can be something that sets a fight apart (we all got bored of straight tank&spank amirite?), but on the other end, a fight that revolves ONLY around a gimmick is pretty boring to me too, once you've beaten it.

An example would be Buru in RoAQ. Just dps the eggs, drag the boss to them, rinse-repeat. While I liked it the first time, the replay value of that is tiny. How good or bad your group does on him is ONLY related to 'can you time the destruction of the egg to when he stands on top of it'. There's no challenge there at ALL.

I still really like the fights in ZG; they require execution, and all have something unique, but if your group sucks, you're still going down.

Random elements that are far beyond your control just turn me off. Not exactly a raid boss, but the Hydromancer in heroic Steam Vault is such a fight. I hate it for the clouds, which either wipe you or let you manage to scrape through. Warlord Kalithresh on the other hand is in my cool-book.

Movement, alternate game play ( mage tanking on maulgar, kiting ), competing with other ( 2 groups during nef p1 remaking the old Legolas - Gimli helm's deep sequence , same with Thaddius ), no raid stacking / full consumables, and last but not least : very unusual moves to do during encounters ( ie DDR on Heigan, god it would be so cool that 25 raiders jumping all at once could avoid gruul knock back ^^ ).

Right now my top 5 would be :

- Heigan
- C'thun
- Maulgar
- 2nd heroic mechanar boss ( minithadius )
- 3rd mechanar boss.

Good lord do I ever love Netherspite. It fits perfectly following Aran in karazhan. Aran has elements of signficant group coordination with his 3 big skills; you all have to do the same thing at the same time to be successful and if you don't you're taking totally avoidable damage. Netherspite relies on individual players doing different things all at the same time. Being able to go from wiping in one or two phases due to individually poor play to killing him comfortably when everyone clicks in a single night was probably the most satisfying and fun time I've had in wow.

Fights with unique quirks ala c'thun, netherspite, etc usually rank up as my favorite fights.

Following that are fights with a high level of rising tension. The only fun part of Gruul is the very end when cave ins are doing a lot of damage your MT's HP is in a constant state of ping-pong.

Vael is probably still my favorite fight because of how well it combines the above two. I actually liked when it had the 1 hr despawn.

I also like when fights actually seem like a group of people fighting some kind of creature rather than an equation or something like that. Aran fights like a mage should, and Onyxia definitely gives the sense of actually fighting a dragon. Then you have fights like firemaw where aside from him lacking any character at all, you have the flame buffet LoS which feels so artificial.

Phat loot. Fun is for casuals.

I was convinced that intellectual was a label that society conferred, not that one chose for himself.

But that just might be my point of view as a genius.

Fights that are fun when you first do them might not be fun in 6 months because it's a static thing, kinda like Rag or Onyxia. I think that "fun" fights are hectic as hell and require a load of thinking and brilliant performance. Bosses like shade of aran or c'thun are really fun for me as a healer because I have to do umpteen different things at once while watching my chat log for emotes and like 7 other things on my screen at the same time. Those are the fights I love. In my opinion Naxx was Blizzard's shining moment in boss fight design (except Maexxna) =P