10 most difficult bosses in TBC

[Sword_of_Doom]

Thought it would be fun again to rate the bosses in TBC now that i have had the priviledge of finishing all current content. Just to give a little hope for those that think only 5 day guilds complete all current content. My little guild has 30 high attendance raiders. We raid Tuesday 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM, Thursday 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM and Sunday 2:30 PM to 9:30 PM. On 12 to 14 hours a week we have cleared all the raid zones the game has to offer. It can be done if you have very similar like minded people (we even have a Vivendi Universal dev who raids with us that will remain nameless )

1. Kael'thas--Pre pre nerf Kael'thas was undoubtedly for me the most difficult complex boss in the game. There are 5 phases to this one and each phase offers its own challenges and obstacles. It took us 5 weeks to learn each of the phases and eventually put it all together to down this boss. This boss really taught my guild how to raid so there was some incredible lessons learned.

2. Lady Vashj--Another very difficult raid boss that took our guild 5 solid weeks to learn. Lots of things can go wrong on this fight and unfortunately there seems to be some randomness to this fight. The kiting aspect of the fight in phase 2 seems to be the main obstacle and took us a while to figure out a good strategy that was repeatable and worked. Once we got that down we consistently got into phase 3 and had to work on our dps because it wasn't enough for phase 3.

3. Illidan--Easily the most epic fight of the game. But in terms of difficulty it only took us 2 weeks to down the consumate end game boss in the game. Its a very complex difficult fight but by the time you have reached him you should have a very experienced polished raid force. Its a heavy movement fight which may challenge people who like to remain stationary but easily one of the most thrilling fights i have ever been involved in.

4. Archimonde--A very interesting fight with a lot of tricky random elements to deal with. Personally i didn't find this fight difficult as our raid leader came up with a strategy that made it retard proof and took out a lot of the random elements. This again is a very heavy movement fight and relies on the individual to play their part to perfection. Each death makes it harder to beat this boss but is doable with one or two deaths. Essentially if a person dies the raid force takes damage and if you have 2 together at the same time its a wipe.

5. Teron Gorefiend--A very creative fight that i love. But if you have people who don't know how to operate the ghost to kill the constructs it can make for a long night. We still wipe a lot to this guy because of who gets selected to play the ghost. People are getting better but it can be frustrating

6. Gurtogg Bloodboil--I would say this is the most healing intensive fight in the game. For a small guild like ours with only 30 active raiders its the only fight we stack healers for this fight. We bring 8 healers for this and usually get one of our Shadow Priests to respecc Holy for this fight. There is constant raid damage through the duration of the fight and is stressful for healers. Its a doable one shot fight but never seems to happen for us.

7. Illidari Council--Similar concept to the 4 Horseman. A fight i love because i get to tank Zerevor with my Mage and i can get to 14k hp. Took us a bit to figure out how best to handle the 4 council members but afer a few days of attempts managed the kill. We still wipe to these guys as people seem to not be able to avoid Blizzards and Flamestrikes.

8. Magtheridon--pre pre nerf (nerfed trash and cubes now). For some reason as a guild we have never one shot this boss. Granted we have not done Magtheridon since May but it was a boss we immensely struggled on. First difficulty was getting the dps to get the channellers down. Second difficulty was the cube clicking. People constantly panicked or forgot it was their turn and wouldn't click. Easily the most frustrating boss i have faced in the game. Relying on others to get it right can be a painful process.

9. Prince--Yes i hate this boss to this day. The random infernal placements can drive you mad. Everyone seems to have the ultimate strat for this fight but it is by far the most random in the game.

10. Hydross--We never attempted this boss until well into SSC. This was tank learning fight as it took a while for the tanks to get used to the transitions. Once they figured it out the fight got easier.

[Jester]

Interesting. Do things change at all if you ignore "pre nerf" stuff? I've only seen a handful of bosses on that list, and while it might be neat to know what bosses were like "in the day", I'm more interested in how they are after tuning, since that's how I'll see them (if ever).

For instance, Hydross stumped guild after guild before he was nerfed, but we one-shot him on Terenas last night without much trouble, and we've yet to even see 7 of the encounters on that list.

(On a minor note, what is "pre pre nerf"? Pre means before. Before the time that was before they nerfed the boss?)

-Jester

[Jester]

Double post, delete.

[Concillian]

For instance, Hydross stumped guild after guild before he was nerfed, but we one-shot him on Terenas last night without much trouble, and we've yet to even see 7 of the encounters on that list.

Yeah, Hydross is pretty easy now. Before, he did a lot more damage AND was a bit of a DPS check (or an 'are you coordinated enough to be able to AoE the adds' check). He still has the DPS / add check, but now his damage is so low that healing is not particularly challenging. It's now a 'learn transitions' fight, which is probably about where it should be given the level of content (I'd still consider it early 25 man raiding)

[Skandranon]

Thought it would be fun again to rate the bosses in TBC now that i have had the priviledge of finishing all current content. Just to give a little hope for those that think only 5 day guilds complete all current content. My little guild has 30 high attendance raiders. We raid Tuesday 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM, Thursday 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM and Sunday 2:30 PM to 9:30 PM. On 12 to 14 hours a week we have cleared all the raid zones the game has to offer. It can be done if you have very similar like minded people (we even have a Vivendi Universal dev who raids with us that will remain nameless )

1. Kael'thas--Pre pre nerf Kael'thas was undoubtedly for me the most difficult complex boss in the game. There are 5 phases to this one and each phase offers its own challenges and obstacles. It took us 5 weeks to learn each of the phases and eventually put it all together to down this boss. This boss really taught my guild how to raid so there was some incredible lessons learned.

I'm not sure how meaningful this list is if you include past versions of bosses. At first, I was going to just reply with my own list, but all ten places on the list wound up being pre-nerf boss versions (all but one from the horror that was 2.0 raiding).

A list composed of boss encounters that no one can fight any more has a certain academic interest to it, but probably not relevant to most people who never saw all the prior versions and never will.

Anyway, I'll do a list of current version difficulty later, but here, in brief, is my list for top ten hardest boss fights, all versions.

1. Kael'thas 2.0.
2. Vashj 2.0.
3. Al'ar 2.0.
4. Mother Shahraz 2.1.
5. Leotheras 2.0.
6. Magtheridon 2.0, pre-hotfix.
7. Gruul 2.0, pre-hotfixes.
8. Hydross 2.0.
9. Lurker 2.0.
10. Nightbane 2.0, presuming the Blessing of Protection exploit is not used.

[Sword_of_Doom]

I'm not sure how meaningful this list is if you include past versions of bosses. At first, I was going to just reply with my own list, but all ten places on the list wound up being pre-nerf boss versions (all but one from the horror that was 2.0 raiding).

A list composed of boss encounters that no one can fight any more has a certain academic interest to it, but probably not relevant to most people who never saw all the prior versions and never will.

Anyway, I'll do a list of current version difficulty later, but here, in brief, is my list for top ten hardest boss fights, all versions.

1. Kael'thas 2.0.
2. Vashj 2.0.
3. Al'ar 2.0.
4. Mother Shahraz 2.1.
5. Leotheras 2.0.
6. Magtheridon 2.0, pre-hotfix.
7. Gruul 2.0, pre-hotfixes.
8. Hydross 2.0.
9. Lurker 2.0.
10. Nightbane 2.0, presuming the Blessing of Protection exploit is not used.

Ya i guess its true that its hard to evalute past and present changes. Its just that Blizzard constantly nerfs bosses so its hard to evaluate anything anymore in its context. But your list is somewhat similar to mine.

Just curious, what did you find difficult about Mother Shahraz? When we attempted her it took 3 tries and literally 20 minutes. But i am certain there were changes made to that encounter that made it quite trivial for us. We went in to that encounter with 325+ SR every member of the raid so we were well prepared.

[Lissa]

Just curious, what did you find difficult about Mother Shahraz? When we attempted her it took 3 tries and literally 20 minutes. But i am certain there were changes made to that encounter that made it quite trivial for us. We went in to that encounter with 325+ SR every member of the raid so we were well prepared.

This one I can answer as I talked with Skan quite a bit about it. There were a number of things that were at issue here, Saber Lash being one, teleports into objects so you couldn't move away from the raid when getting the fatal attraction debuff (or whatever the exact name was), and their was one other that is escaping me right now, but there were 3 that were at issue.

[Lissa]

Interesting. Do things change at all if you ignore "pre nerf" stuff? I've only seen a handful of bosses on that list, and while it might be neat to know what bosses were like "in the day", I'm more interested in how they are after tuning, since that's how I'll see them (if ever).

For instance, Hydross stumped guild after guild before he was nerfed, but we one-shot him on Terenas last night without much trouble, and we've yet to even see 7 of the encounters on that list.

(On a minor note, what is "pre pre nerf"? Pre means before. Before the time that was before they nerfed the boss?)

-Jester

Pre-nerfs, Hydross was normally the 3rd or 4th boss fight learned in SSC with Lurker, Morogrim, and Karathress typically being learned before Hydross. Now it pretty much should go Hydross, Lurker, Karathress/Morogrim (up to your raid which you tackle first), Morogrim/Karathress (which ever one you didn't go after first), Leothorass, Vashj.

[Skandranon]

Just curious, what did you find difficult about Mother Shahraz? When we attempted her it took 3 tries and literally 20 minutes. But i am certain there were changes made to that encounter that made it quite trivial for us. We went in to that encounter with 325+ SR every member of the raid so we were well prepared.

Mother Shahraz, 2.1 release version, was one of the worst (quite possibly the worst) raid encounter ever designed. Right now she's pretty pushover, like Tidewalker difficulty, and I'm happy about that, but I can see how people who never saw the old version don't understand.

Let's go into why 2.1 release Shahraz sucked so much.

Beam selection: The current Shahraz selects a new beam from among four every 3 beams. The old Shahraz reselected every 5. The major issue here is that long streaks of the mana burn beam can basically end your attempt. Ten mana burn beams in a row is 10000 mana burned off at least some of your healers, and no one can absorb that kind of burn in a short period of time. Obviously, over time, one-quarter of the beams being mana burn is acceptable since over that long period of time, regen and mana potions and shadow priests etc. have time to get your mana back up. Ten in a row right at the start is lethal.

The old Shahraz, if she had selected mana burn beam, had a 25% chance to do five more right after her first five, making it ten in a row. The current Shahraz reselects every 3, so to get 10 in a row after mana burn is selected once is a 1.5625% chance. A 1.5625% chance to wipe the raid is exponentially better than a 25% one. (The old Shahraz had, as well, a 6.25% chance to beam mana burn 15 times in a row, whereas the new one's chances of doing that are negligibly small.)

Fatal Attraction damage: A fact that is moderately well-known is that the first tick of Fatal Attraction occurs instantly as the debuff is applied: in other words, there's no way to avoid the first tick, and unless you have godlike reflexes, you're not avoiding the second tick either. Nowadays, the first tick does 750 shadow damage, and the second does 1500, scaling up to 3000 by the fourth tick and staying 3000 thereafter. In 2.1 release, Fatal Attraction damage was 3000 per tick, period. The first two unavoidable ticks were 3000 each instead of 750/1500. Across the three FA'ed players, that's the difference between 18000 raid damage in 2 seconds and 6750 raid damage in 2 seconds.

This difference only grows if Fatal Attraction teleports people on top of other people, since non-FA'ed players take damage from all three FAs. Then it becomes the difference between 18000 damage and 6750 damage per player teleported upon. Needless to say, if you got an FA port on top of your main tank or on top of your main tank healers, it was an instant wipe, no matter how well you'd played up to that point. Simply, the two ticks of FA that people are most likely to take did 4x and 2x damage, respectively, in 2.1 release. If you weren't topped up and were selected for FA, a single bad resist roll meant that you would die effectively instantly, before you or anyone else could react. Finally, Prayer of Mending, the clear best way to heal this damage now, treated Fatal Attraction as a "friendly" effect and did not trigger.

Saber Lash immunity: In 2.1, Saber Lash failed to confer immunity to Fatal Attraction and Sinister Beam if the Saber Lash did not hit the target. Contrast now, where merely being targeted by Saber Lash is sufficient. The two offtanks had to turn their backs to Mother Shahraz in order to avoid accidentally dodging or parrying Saber Lash (incidentally increasing the heal load of this fight significantly). The main tank had no such recourse; furthermore, even with backs turned, there was a ~7% chance that Saber Lash would simply miss an offtank.

Where Sinister Beam, the vertical knockback, was concerned, this meant that Shahraz could Sinister Beam the main tank, knock him vertically into the air, and then Saber Lash him mid-air for the full amount (76000-84000 damage), instantly wiping the raid. Alternatively, she could Sinister Beam a missed offtank, Lashing the remaining two for sufficient spike damage to generally kill both. Or she could bounce both offtanks if both had been missed, and then Lash the main tank to death.

Similarly, a missed Saber Lash could cause deaths by way of Fatal Attraction. Shahraz cannot FA the main tank, but if an offtank was missed, she could and did teleport them away and Lash the remaining two tanks for lethal damage. In the worst case, and I observed this once, both offtanks had been missed and she teleported both away before Lashing the main tank for the full amount and death. The only workaround for the Sinister Beam portion was to pin all three tanks underneath a couch so they could not be knocked vertically very far; there was no workaround at all for having a tank ported away.

Fatal Attraction teleport locations: The workaround for Sinister Beam described above leads to the next point: Fatal Attraction could teleport people inside benches, trees, pillars, and other objects, rendering you immobile and therefore incapable of escaping FA, consequently leading to death for all concerned. Pinning the tanks under a couch often led to people who got teleported into the couch to kill all the tanks as well as themselves.

Adaptive Prismatic Shield: Nowadays, Shahraz randomly selects an element and takes -25% damage from it, and gives a bonus of +25% to the opposite element. In 2.1, Prismatic Shield was adaptive, stacking -10% damage debuffs (up to 90%) depending on how much of which element's damage she was struck by, and granting no bonus whatsoever.

What this meant was that Warlocks and Shadow Priests typically by way of dots and damage built her Shield up to -90% shadow damage taken and left it bouncing around -50% to -90% thereafter. She calculated and shielded elements independently, meaning that if she was hit with a lot of shadow, fire, and nature damage, her next shield phase would be -90% to all three. It was possible for her to have a -90% shield to every element. What this meant was that shadow priest mana returns were cut to about one-sixth of what they usually are and that casters of all kinds suffered an average 60-70% drop in DPS. That meant that the fight took about 50% longer than it does now, which is more strain on healers, and more chances for one of the many above things to go wrong and instantly wipe the raid.

I have above described at least seven independent ways for Shahraz to instantly wipe the raid regardless of level of execution. You also needed good execution to survive every survivable FA with the damage levels that high. What it meant was that you needed to match up a perfect-execution run with a run where none of the random ways to wipe the raid occurred, and that made Shahraz painfully, agonizingly difficult. All of these issues were corrected or significantly reduced in severity in 2.2, leading to the current Shahraz, and as much as I, as a bleeding-edge raider, occasionally resent the nerfs applied to raid content, I really have no problem with what was done to Shahraz, because no one should have to go through that.

[oldmandennis]

The hardest part about Hydross for most casual guilds is....


Getting the tanks with resist gear to show up all at the same time.

Also getting the SP's to not dot him back across the line.

[Klaus]

Also getting the SP's to not dot him back across the line.

Priests shouldn't be an issue, period. It's warlocks I worry about.

Personally, I move to the "front" side before each transition so that if I do get aggro, he stays on the correct side of the line. But I run dots 100% of the time and just fade at transition. Works like a charm.

[Lissa]

Priests shouldn't be an issue, period. It's warlocks I worry about.

Personally, I move to the "front" side before each transition so that if I do get aggro, he stays on the correct side of the line. But I run dots 100% of the time and just fade at transition. Works like a charm.

Warlocks shouldn't be an issue at all. As most Warlocks are realizing, Affliction/X does not scale at all as such the only reason to have an Affliction Warlock along is to give the tank some DR from Shadow Embrace on the mob from a DoT being there. Raiding Warlocks are pretty much Destruction/Demonology (0/21/40 or 1/21/39) or Demonology/Destruction since both of those builds scale well (Dest/Demo is the best scaling period).

[Kevin]

Priests shouldn't be an issue, period. It's warlocks I worry about.

Personally, I move to the "front" side before each transition so that if I do get aggro, he stays on the correct side of the line. But I run dots 100% of the time and just fade at transition. Works like a charm.

Yep, if for some reason I get a miss/parry/dodge on my shield slam when he changes phases and my timing on the heroic strike (since the warrior should have 100 rage saved up for the transitions using HS + SS as the first things to hit) is bad so that I lose aggro for a little bit, it's never been to a shadow priest. Most of the time it's been to a hunter because something went wrong with the misdirect (the transition was slower/faster than they expected so MD was down/not on yet or MD just failed like it would do in some patches). The next most common culprit is a mage who started AoE too soon anyway. After that he is generally still on the other phase tank or the pally who is consecrating to grab the spawns. Occasionally he has targeted a healer and a few times it's been a lock, but our locks have been good about not putting more DoTs on after a certain point. But since I try to be a little towards the raid side of him, if that SS and HS don't get him the next HS and the devastate that are the next attacks in all but 2 cases have gotten him looking back at me and then it's standard aggro generation (well not quite standard since you can't block his attacks you leave out the SB spam so you actually have more rage to work with for aggro which meanns that you can HS more often than normal and you sometimes don't have revenge available on every cooldown). The transitions aren't that hard.

I've actually always been amazed by how many really good raid tanks suck at movement while tanking. But I guess a lot of tanks didn't grow up tanking 5 mans level appropriate and having to move because of mistakes with focus fire or because of placement of CC. A lot of really good raid tanks have also been really bad at multi mob tanking as well. But then raid tanking isn't that hard, and depending on the quality of your DPS or the design of the fight you sometimes don't even have to work at aggro. If you play with a group like the folks on Terenas who aren't asses and don't ride the tank for little mistakes and play with a tanking crew that is really good with making sure the gear goes to the tank that will get the best use out of it so that you have a well geared corps of tanks it can actually be kind of relaxing, the most stress I've gotten from tanking has been because of other people more or less being jerks and that didn't happen on Terenas. It's easier than many forms of raid healing (raid healing on we are all overgeared farm night is one of the easiest things in the game though but raid healing on brand new bosses where it's hard to know what to anticipate or what the mana situation might be like it one of the most stressful things in the game) and I think it's easier than hunter DPS even though more keys are involved. :)

Anyway just some comments.

I can see how pre-nerf Hydross could be an issue though since the healing needed was A LOT higher, the spawns alone are doing about 1/3 of the damage they used to do which is part of the reason why we can use the strat we do on Terenas even without our pally having the gearing he should. And yeah as mentioned you need to have the tanks that have the resist gear there and that can even be an issue for us. Though since Hydross doesn't hit as hard as he used to either not being at the resist cap and tanking him wouldn't be as big of deal since you aren't taking as much damage and the rest of the raid isn't taking the damage of pre-nerf Hydross either. Minor transitional mistakes were magnified pre nerf. That mage pulling the add and getting hit is dead pre nerf now they survive it, stuff like that. We did pull Hydross a few times when he was more buff than he is now, I think we even killed him once before he was in his current state but the nerf bat has hit him at least twice and I think it was actually 3 times.

[Bolty]

Boss "difficulty" for me is determined by a simple formula:

How many people in the raid need to perform excellently to be successful? Or rather, how many people need to not screw up for the attempt to go well?

These are what I call "points of failure." The more points of failure a raid boss is, the harder it is. This is because we are human beings, and we make mistakes. Depending on your guild, there will be a certain number of mistakes made by its players on every attempt. The fewer opportunities there are for a mistake to be made that wipes the raid, the easier the boss is. Concordantly (omg big word), the smaller the player pool that needs to play very well to prevent a wipe, the easier the boss is.

Back in the Molten Core days, the points of failure involved the tanks and healers for pretty much every boss. That's what made it easier. The game evolved over time to include low DPS output as a point of failure for many bosses, but it wasn't until TBC when this became canon.

The reason Shade of Aran was such a block for so many raiders was because it was the first boss in TBC to include all members in the raid as potential points of failure. All 10 players had to move out of Blizzards; all 10 players had to stop moving for Flame Wreaths; all 10 players had to run from Arcane Explosions. Add to that the CC'ing of water elementals and the interrupts on spellcasts, and it proved very very difficult, especially to inexperienced or unskilled raiders. He got nerfed a ton, but many of the points of failure are still there.

A boss like Teron Gorefiend is "easy" in that it doesn't have too many points of failure - the people who are ghosted need to perform well to eliminate constructs, but for the rest of the raid it's a straight-up tank-n-spank burndown. Compare that to Archimonde, where any player death can often immediately wipe the raid, and it's night-and-day. Magtheridon has many more points of failure (cube clicking) than Teron Gorefiend, when you get right down to it. Thus, I'd rate Magtheridon as harder than a Black Temple boss!

A lot of it likely depends on your guild. If you are in a raid force where clicking cubes is a joke, then Magtheridon is a joke. If you are in a raid force where asking 10 people to perform a specific task at set time intervals is difficult, then Magtheridon is brutal.

Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider are absolutely insane with organizational requirements and points of failure. This is why countless guilds are 5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK. It's just so easy for one person to make a mistake over the long course of these fights that wipes the raid. Even after the KT nerf, it takes, what, 15 minutes total to down Kael'thas? Archimonde as well requires the raid to not screw up for about 10 minutes (T6-decked guilds probably have him down to 6-8 minutes). Archimonde is basically C'Thun, except anyone dying would buff C'Thun with a raid-wide silence and a 4k damage hit to the whole raid (at level 60). Yikes.

I still find it interesting that the raid size reduction from 40 to 25, hailed as a boost to "casual raiding," has had exactly the opposite effect. Naxxramas (hi Gort) may have been the hardest raid instance ever, but the average difficulty of raiding in TBC is far greater than pre-TBC by a mile. This is probably due mostly to a lack of a Molten Core style easy intro raid instance, and hopefully Blizzard realizes this and corrects for it in the next expansion. Sit back and think about how much more difficult Gruul and Magtheridon are compared to Molten Core - how exactly is a newbie supposed to learn raiding under that environment?

-Bolty

[Treesh]

how exactly is a newbie supposed to learn raiding under that environment?

-Bolty

Trial by fire! I really was surprised at how quickly the Terenas Lurkers who hadn't raided before the expansion picked things up. There were some nights that were better than others because of how many experienced raiders we had over non-experienced raiders, but there really isn't anything quite like trial by fire, as long as the experienced folks aren't complete jerks about simple mistakes.

[oldmandennis]

I still find it interesting that the raid size reduction from 40 to 25, hailed as a boost to "casual raiding," has had exactly the opposite effect. Naxxramas (hi Gort) may have been the hardest raid instance ever, but the average difficulty of raiding in TBC is far greater than pre-TBC by a mile. This is probably due mostly to a lack of a Molten Core style easy intro raid instance, and hopefully Blizzard realizes this and corrects for it in the next expansion. Sit back and think about how much more difficult Gruul and Magtheridon are compared to Molten Core - how exactly is a newbie supposed to learn raiding under that environment?

Well the difficulty of MC was in getting people organized. For the large majority of people it was their first time raiding. Getting people to understand DKP, getting to raids on time, etc. In terms of first zone in to final kill I'd be surprised if it wasn't easily one of the hardest for most guilds - rerolls and new servers excluded. I'd be pretty disappointed if there was a dungeon in WotLK where 80% of the stuff fell over once people started doing their jobs properly. Even a crappy dungeon takes a lot of time to design, do the boss models, itemize, do the item art, etc. even if they don't spend a lot of time thinking of creative mechanics. New Naxx is supposed to be a starter dungeon - at least if that's a throw away they woln't have to waste a lot of time on the models/art.

As far as training new members - I think 10 mans are a great way to do that. For newb rogue001, what would a Golemagg 2.0 teach him other then how to hit backstab without falling asleep? In an intro 10 man, say the bottom 1/2 of Karazhan, he can learn all about CC, awareness, and DPS rotations someplace where the (hopefully experienced) raid leader can keep a very close eye on him.

[Tamorrax]

Trial by fire! I really was surprised at how quickly the Terenas Lurkers who hadn't raided before the expansion picked things up. There were some nights that were better than others because of how many experienced raiders we had over non-experienced raiders, but there really isn't anything quite like trial by fire, as long as the experienced folks aren't complete jerks about simple mistakes.

I totally agree with Treesh. The only raiding experience I had before raiding with Lurkers on Terenas were a couple of bad ZG and MC runs with Jenjan on our old server with a guild that can best be described as well-meaning but inept. And I'm not afraid to say that I was probably contributing to the ineptitude. Yes, you can level a hunter to the level cap and even help down some bosses in MC without knowing about shot rotations. Proof right here. *puts on Huntard hat*

If you can successfully raid 40-man dungeons with a bunch of people who haven't really learned to play, then there is no incentive for these people to improve their performance. Then TBC hits and suddenly everyone realizes that they have to do the dance otherwise the entire group is going to fail. Not wanting to let people down is great motivation, at least for me. No one wants to be "that guy" that moved during the flame wreath. I'm okay with "that guy" when it happens, but I'm not okay with being "that guy". I mean, Jester brought me into the guild... the least I can do is try not to embarrass him.

TBC raiding is sink or swim, and most of us, in that situation, will swim. Or at least manage a passable imitation.

[Icebird]

I haven't done anything beyond Gurtogg Bloodboil in BT, and I haven't done Archimonde in Hyjal yet (although the guild killed him after 4 nights of attempts). I also haven't done anything in Zul'Aman beyond the first two bosses.

Kael'Thas and Vashj would top of the list of the bosses that I have done.

Phase 2 of Vashj is probably the single most complicated sequence of combat for any boss I've done in the game. It's unusual in that you have seperate groups of people all doing different things, but everyone needs to have a view of the "big picture" and everyone needs to do their job or the attempt fails. It takes a while to develop a strategy that works well for your guild, then longer to perfect that strategy. Phase 1 and Phase 3 are no walks in the park, but they seem a lot easier in comparison to the middle phase. Phase 2 tests your tanks, your healers and your DPS to the limit.

Kael is slightly different. The fight keeps changing from phase to phase, and each phase has different traps for the unwary. Before the HP of the advisors and weapons got nerfed, phases 2 and 3 were brutal dps checks. The length of the fight means you have to maintain your concentration for a long time. Even in the "easy" stage 5, its not hard to accumulate gas cloud stacks then get insta-gibbed by Kael's ranged attack.

After those two I would probably put Magtheridon. Killing the channelers required high DPS and lots of crowd control, and before the mental exhaustion change, the cubes were very unforgiving on clicking mistakes.

Chris