I like "lets tank nefarian for 2 hours and res 4 dead every 30 mins so we can manage phase3", but new fights are all dps checks :/

As a healer I can easily say that what I find most boring is all fights that consist of repetitive heal spam/cancelling on one or a few targets. For example, just about every boss in BWL is like this. I've often done BWL half asleep just pressing flash heal and then cancelling over and over again.

Then comes AQ where the boss designs are a little better and most bosses have some kind of unique twist. Worst boss in AQ for me as a healer was definitely Emperors. Nothing worse than heal spamming for 14 minutes and then someone makes a mistake just to start all over again.

The really good designs start with C'thun and Naxxramas. What really separates the fun fights from the bad is that you don't tire of them. Every C'thun and 4H kill felt fun to me, even in the end.

So far in TBC there is nothing that compare to the greatness of Naxxramas in my opinion. I really hope later bosses are better but it seems like the designers have lost the touch.

Our funnest times in Naxx were our stone ghetto Faerlina kills.

Our MC priest had a habit of getting completely blazed before raids, and he would handle the mind controls. Most of the time, he'd completely forget that he was supposed to wait to explode adds. I can't tell you how many times we've fought an enraged Faerlina from 50-45% on and still win.

I liked to classify it as a "blatant disregard for the design of the fight". We're talking swiftness pots, gentlemen, and lots of them. Oh shit tank is down, Faelina's at 30%....burn burn burn. All you see is one dude swiftness potting while the entire raid runs behind stabbing the widow. When she catches up, on to the next guy. Raid wide kiting with swiftness pots = hilarious wins. We basically did the fight like Red Riding Hood is now.

My Personal Favourites are:

Overall Vanilla Wow: Sapphiron (Great fight mechanics everyone has to play well and no one die...much)

But I also liked 4HM for the precision timing needed

TBC: So far Magtheridon is actually a really really fun fight and really enjoyable, a pain in the ass when people aren't awake but when they are its soooo much fun.

Complexity and Execution.

4H is prolly the best example pre-BC, KT also. A complex fight for everyone, and if you fuck up the execution, someone (or everyone) dies.

Mualgor, Fathomlord, Hydross. Those 3 come to mind for me in BC. Complex, not overally difficult, but require some damn good execution to pull off a kill.


Something to add to the topic, Things that make encounters terrible:

Luck. To base any encounter around the RNG is fucking awful.
Uncontrolable Aspects of a Fight (Insta-Kills). C'thun 1.0 is prolly the best example.

Enough challenge to know it's beatable without being a cakewalk, and enough variety in each fight execution to keep it interesting without being so random that a single RNG is the difference between a win and a loss.

That's odd, I always felt Sapphiron was the pinnacle of retardedness, even more so than Loatheb.

It's hard to say what really makes for a fun encounter. Challenging encounters such as Twin Emps back in the day can be much fun to do, and having been the guild tactician god knows I loved to work encounters out, a very big part of the fun for me. Yet there's certainly place for simple and straightforward tank'n'spanks aswell, type Patchwerk. Any specific mechanics don't really make a fight fun or unfun as such.

I can think of only 3 factors which are very important for me personally, which are:

1) It needs to be challenging enough, so that even after 10 kills, concentration will be needed. Grobbuluses just don't feel very exciting.
2) It needs to be logically repeatable, so that players sufficiently experienced with the encounter can eliminate any random factors. No "woops MC broke" please.
3) The outcome of the encounter shouldn't be decided by just 2 people while 38(or 23 nowadays) pray for them to do their jobs. Everyone should have a meaningful role in the encounter.


Edit: Oh, and consumables shouldn't play too much of a role and world buffs even less so, but hey that's just a pipe dream nowadays.

Different, unusual event, where there's lots of elements and movement involved and everyone plays a part. An event that requires learning the various elements of the fight, but one that can be beat by any decently geared group appropriate for the zone without too much difficulty once they know the fight. I hate so called 'gear checks'. All they really do is delay a group because some members don't have the latest and greatest. That's fine for a zone end boss, not for the 3rd mob or first progression boss.

Karazhan bosses are pretty fun and imaginative, but I do think they should be tuned down some, to make the zone accessible to any raiding crew willing to learn the fights. On the other hand some heroic bosses are just silly. They are very simple yet deal so much dmg they are purely a gear check where you need no strat other than an overgeared crew with consumables willing to wipe a bunch to get them.

Most annoying (classic wow)

Razuvious - nothing made the night suck more than clearing Spider Wing/Patch/Grob/Noth with no wipes just to walk up to this guy and have a MC break and him run out and shout the raid. Special (+hit) gear helps but theres always that 'it might break at a really bad time' we never liked.

Fav Fights

Patchwerk - Once people got it down it was just a normal fight, perfect execution (healers not sleeping) Granted I'm a dps so I'm probably biased on this fight.

Little Red Riding hood - most fun I've had in a long time (after 3 straight weeks of RnJ) How can you beat a wolf chasing a speeding girl in a little red coat? Is it hard? No, but It's fun.

I agree on the Little Red Riding hood thing. The first one got get the debuff actually got killed by the Wolf cause half the raid was afk laughing.

My experience in Karazhan sofar is that the fights are pretty friggin' easy. A bit too easy for my liking. I prefer a sense of accomplishment over "uh... did we just oneshot the Curator the first time we saw him?". Hopefully Nightbane and Netherspite will give us that.

On a related note, the placard at my desk at my old job read "MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE" in capital letters. I kid you not.

Well, I didn't do any high-end endgame in 1.0. Only did BWL once and did MC 2-3 times. I did run a lot of AQ20 and ZG. I felt both of those had more exciting/fun bosses in them (at least for hunters). For me, fun bosses require more than tank-and-spank. The require coordination and some thinking.

Every boss in AQ20 was loads of fun for me (even Ossi; who our runs had yet to down when we said "screw it" and stopped) because each boss had something unique. Circle-tanking with Kurinnaxx, the waves on Rajaxx, Buru's eggs, Ossi's crystals, etc.

My all-time favorite so far is still Hakkar; if anything because it gives hunters some responsibility with Son pulls, and keeps it from being endlessly spamming dps. Also, after being involved in one run that took, literally, 14 tries to down him, there is a sense of accomplishment that he is totally rapable now. A good portion of that instance requires hunters to be on their game with pulls and whatnot, so I still love it.

We're organizing a Naxx run now to help gear people up for Kara a bit (and because a bunch of us haven't seen it yet), so I'm looking forward to seeing the bosses in there.

As for BWL, we never got past Firemaw, but even endlessly wiping on that fight was fun because I got to see how raids progress through boss fights in a given instance.

I never got why so many complained about Razuvious. The randomness there is controllable and early breaks don't mean wipes. With both MCers wearing some +hit you would only get breaks like once per fight. And when you get an MC break you have rogues evasion tanking him. Always works and very seldom leads to wipes.

I donno, it may be group makeup, gear or luck, but I don't see how any group can get to curator and find him easy. Personally I've been blocked on both Curator and Romulo for a while and it's not from a lack of trying. Several evenings of wipes with a semi-balanced group, using (at least some) consumables and knowing the strats pretty well by now. Something just always seems to go wrong.

I agree with a lot of things people are saying here, so I wanted to add my take on another aspect of raid encounters that can bump something from 'neat' to 'sweet!': the little things.

Moroes, for example. A monocle-clad undead gentlemen and his coterie enjoying conversation after an evening repast. You interrupt their festivities to hear a distinguished voice proclaiming in an English accent, "Unexpected visitors? Preparations must be made" as they descend upon what they see as their next feast. And during the fight, even after the fight ('How clumsy of me.'), the little touch of Moroes' character, voice, etc. is just hilarious and really brings you into the encounter. Curator as well, Aran, etc.

It's the little things (why does that remind me of another thread, even another EJ thread...) that can turn a decent raid encounter into one you tell your friends about.

Of course, these don't save a poor raid encounter, which as many have touched on tend to be the ones where it's closer to 25 dice rolls than 25 people that are participating, or ones that are blatantly obvious in their banality (Flamegor? Tank, Tranq, and Spank... /yawn).

Fights like Little Red Riding Hood or Chess are also fun for their simple creativity. It's not some complicated, nerve-wracking situation... it's more like 'we at Blizzard still distantly recall this notion of fun.' LRRH is like a silly kid's game "omg! X is RRH... RUN!" And being Chess pieces in a little game is just neat. Those are good intermissions, of a sort, that let your raid kick back and enjoy the show a bit once in a while.

Oh, almost forgot. While converse to the topic, a situation that further exacerbates a player's lack of fun is the perennial Resist encounter of an instance (or encounters). For several reasons that oppose notions that make encounters fun, and another reason I have some distaste for Razuvious in another sense despite finding it a refreshing change of pace. Raz bothers me because it's not so much a gear check in the literal sense ("are you qualified to even be here?") but a uniquely particular gear check ("have you collected any +hit gear?"). I was a pure healbot priest throughout all my raiding, and suddenly I come to a fight where I'm almost punished for not having certain gear I don't even want. Sure, throw a bone to the Shadow Priests, I'm fine with that. But what if nobody was? What if nobody wanted +hit gear? Suddenly you are placed in a situation where you are forced to scavenge for things you don't even want.

What makes a fight fun is it in a way rewards you for how well you've worked at building yourself up. It rewards you as in "you've done an impressive job fine-tuning your character, you'll work hard but succeed in this fight!" As opposed to Raz or resist encounters (Maraudon NR farming yay!), for example, which basically say "Oh I'm sorry, you need to go collect a bunch of things you'll never use again because you must have it to do this fight." It's a slap in the face to the players.

I really like Jin'do - never got to experience anything in 'classic' past ZG and the first boss of AQ20, but I thought the whole thing was very well designed.

C'thun was the best wow vanilla fight. It required no consumables, but you could use them to make things easier on your DPS. Everyone had a specific job or jobs, you had to think on the fly, and it mostly lacked conventional mechanics (tank n spank). 4H would have been fine, but the fact you needed 8 geared warriors to beat it ruined the design in my mind. It would have been fine in the new era of better druid and paladin tanks. Vael was also very fun for his time, purely because of the GOGOGO factor that a short-time buff gave you.

As far as modern fights go, Aran and Netherspite are excellent for the same reasons as C'thun, really. Maulgar is actually pretty great too.

Now, my bias here is probably obvious: I think MMOs should be evolving past the tank n spank design. And I don't mean just Golemagg style fights, I mean the entire concept of having a boss with such stupid AI that it decides to attack your most durable member(s) without just slaughtering the support. Fights that manage to "simulate" having some actual intelligence are much more interesting to me. I know concepts like "threat" and "agro management" are staple MMO ideas, but really it would be cool if the mobs we fought were more inclined to start thinking like super intelligent dragons rather than single-minded chumps, and design the game and classes around that.

Curator has massive variances between groups. The first time I killed him, I thought killing him after one evocation was perfectly normal, and was surprised to see people happy about how they had enough dps to kill him after 3. Little things like being able to kill a spark in 7 seconds instead of 8 increases the time you spend on the boss by 50% despite it only being 15% higher dps. If you have that 15% more damage, he's incredibly easy. If you don't, you're struggling to ever actually damage him.

I think people would overall be far more positive about the raid game if every instance had a Chess-style encounter midway through. It's not just the free loot -- Grobbulus was free loot, and people still complained about it. It's that after hours of killing difficult bosses and clearing somewhat excessive amounts of trash, Chess is almost like a present from the designers, with a chance to unwind with no fear of failure, despite that it's entirly possible to fail. No death penalties at all would probably cheapen the game, but specific encounters with no death penalties is great.

That's too bad, there were a lot of fights like this in BWL I feel. Razorgore was always fun, it was the first fight that really broke up the 40 man raid into small teams with specific goals. By the end of the eggs phase, life was always chaos and every player was doing whatever they thought best at the time to control the situation. Just an amazing fight, with lots of flexibility. Phase 2 could be done with half your raid up as long as you had the infrastruct (2 key priests alive or something, and 2 tanks).

Chromaggus was like this as well, a lot of DPS could die along the way, and it was kinda chaotic at the end, but not doomed.

Nefarian was very much death-insensitive. On bad nights you could lose half your raid to a missed fear - shadowflame, and another half after the skeletons. Nefarian phase 2 always felt very much like Onyxia. Shit is happening all over the place, but actual dmg on the tank is light and there is no timer, so a few skilled players can scrape by even in the worst of situations (unless, of course, no AOE is alive going into the zerg ...).

BWL was some of the most fun I've ever had (considering the light and non-respawning trash!)

This is something I felt, but didn't realize. What an excellent point.

I enjoy raid encounters on which I feel I can contribute meaningfully.

Take something like C'thun, for example. I move around, I DPS, I kill/interrupt things that otherwise would kill other people, and my contribution is based on my skill, not merely my gear.

Then, look at something like Chromaggus. Yeah, I can run in and out for breaths and do a bit of DPS, but the overall success of the fight has almost nothing to do with my specific contribution (even, as happened in one raid, if I do 20-25% of the raid's total DPS), so much as it does with dispelling/healing/decursing/tranq (yeah, a sore point, I know).

One of the most fun things I've ever done in WoW's raid game was stunlock-tanking a Flamewalker Healer on Domo with another rogue when we didn't have enough mages. Another was, strangely enough, evasion-tanking the melee emperor if something bad happened to occur during the fight until the next transition.

Progression, though, is the most important thing. Whether it be skill (ie. not have half the raid dead at C'thun phase 2, collapse properly for rag, learn to fucking assist train for Nef) or gear (beat a DPS timer, have tank survive enrage, have healers not go OOM in the middle of the fight), it's the feeling of improvement that really made me enjoy raiding.

In general, fights where you feel your individual performance matters makes them fun. For example, fights where healers have individual assignments. Solo-healing something in a raid is much more fun than spam-aborting on one tank along with 15 other healers. I also like fights that encourage *intelligent* use of your classes different abilities, so you feel like you are making good decisions when you choose to use them, as opposed to tranq shot.

One fight I enjoyed a lot that hasn't been mentioned is Huhuran. Ignore the resistance gear farming fiasco: The super-enrage was a really fun mechanic at that point in the game. This was basically a 30 second raid boss, and I really enjoyed setting up and healing it.

I also enjoy some of the new encounters with randomness in them, but as other have mentioned, randomness is fun when its fair. The player should be thinking: "Ok, I'm not sure whats going to happen, but I know if we react and execute properly we will surivive" not "I hope another infernal doesn't drop right on top of us so we can kill this thing this try". When certain Prince attempts feel like god damn Ossirian from AQ20 with the raid running around the room, randomness is not cool. I still think Chromaggus should have been permanent Time Lapse + Another Breath.