The hardest final expansion encounter so far?

[OrcsRLame]

We had the US 121 kill on heroic 25 Garrosh on March 26th.

Exactly, March 26. Method killed him October 1st. 6 Months of extra gear and heavily proliferated strategies kind of makes a big difference.

- - - Updated - - -

player skill

I got a better factor

Loot acquisition rates

Vanilla - Very few items / Huge roster
TBC very few items / Smaller rosters
Wrath- Two loot locks to farm gear from and badges to get tier and gear WAY better then TBC badge items
Cata - Tremendous amounts of loot dropped from encounters
MoP - Coins added along with tremendous amounts of loot
WoD- I'm sure you are all aware
Legion - Even more loot aquisition rate than WoD

So Hardest?

Archimonde Mythic not only legendary ring and logistical nightmare early but between MULTIPLE difficutlies loot locks / Legendaries / Caches/ AND Coins.

Go ahead and take away the seperate loot locks and make it one and remove caches and coins.

Try hitting those Mannoroth and Archimonde checks.

While gear is certainly acquired at a ludicrous rate nowadays, Method didn't have a ton of gear when they killed Archimonde. It's not like they farmed HFC for months and months. Furthermore, I think gear in Vanilla was far less important. The difference in ilvl between T2 and T3 was a paltry 12-18 depending on the slot. The difference between Naxx and AQ gear was even smaller. And with how much top guilds play these days, they would have certainly had split runs ready by the time Naxx came out. If you took Serenity and other English speaking guild in the top 10, like Limit, merged them, (for the sake of having 40 players) and sent them back in time to 2004, by the time Naxx came out each one of them would at least have BiS on their mains. The gear funneling would be insane. Doesn't matter if the boss only drops 2 items for 40 players if there's only 5 mains to a raid.

Any other deficiency in gear would be made up for by absurd levels of class stacking and people not sucking balls. They would literally have Naxx cleared day 1, probably within just a few hours.

[Goldielocks]

Anyone who thinks Madness is the hardest needs their head checked. When I progressed in H DS back in the day, Spine took so many attempts I lost count, but Madness took like 5 lol

[Pu3Ho]

Exactly, March 26. Method killed him October 1st. 6 Months of extra gear and heavily proliferated strategies kind of makes a big difference.

- - - Updated - - -



While gear is certainly acquired at a ludicrous rate nowadays, Method didn't have a ton of gear when they killed Archimonde. It's not like they farmed HFC for months and months. Furthermore, I think gear in Vanilla was far less important. The difference in ilvl between T2 and T3 was a paltry 12-18 depending on the slot. The difference between Naxx and AQ gear was even smaller. And with how much top guilds play these days, they would have certainly had split runs ready by the time Naxx came out. If you took Serenity and other English speaking guild in the top 10, like Limit, merged them, (for the sake of having 40 players) and sent them back in time to 2004, by the time Naxx came out each one of them would at least have BiS on their mains. The gear funneling would be insane. Doesn't matter if the boss only drops 2 items for 40 players if there's only 5 mains to a raid.

Any other deficiency in gear would be made up for by absurd levels of class stacking and people not sucking balls. They would literally have Naxx cleared day 1, probably within just a few hours.

New noob and bad player spotted I totally love to see people who spill bullshit on encounters they never actually tried. LK was the hardest (LAST) boss BY FAR (M)Archimonde is not even a shade of him in terms of progression difficulty, literally every single player who actually did both will say that, it's not even a question honestly.

[Hctaz]

Exactly, March 26. Method killed him October 1st. 6 Months of extra gear and heavily proliferated strategies kind of makes a big difference.

I'm not sure how that matters? The strategies are generally figured out before the tier even comes out from the high end raiders on the PTR. Generally speaking, most people follow those strategies and only deviate from them if something super weird pops up that literally nobody thought of.

And as for the gear: Yeah it might matter if we had killed Siegecrafter back in October and then Garrosh in March but we didn't. We started 25 mans late in general. We full cleared normal 25 man on November 26th on our first week. We then downed all the bosses on heroic up to Iron Juggernaut on the 27th of November. Cleared Jug and Shamans on Dec 3rd, Nazgrim and Malk on Dec 5th, Spoils on the 12th, Thok on the 24th, Siegecrafter was January 28th, Paragons were Feb 20th and Garrosh was Marth 26th. Not sure why we had so little attempts on Garrosh though. I forget what was going on back then.

[OrcsRLame]

New noob and bad player spotted I totally love to see people who spill bullshit on encounters they never actually tried. LK was the hardest (LAST) boss BY FAR (M)Archimonde is not even a shade of him in terms of progression difficulty, literally every single player who actually did both will say that, it's not even a question honestly.

I started in patch 2.4 playing on my friend's laptop actually. I'm not going to claim to be some top player, but I cleared 13/13 mythic pre 7.0 and my logs are generally fairly competitive. Even have a few top 50 logs.

Anywho, the bolded, it's funny how far you've just stuck your foot into your mouth, because Slootbag literally said the exact opposite of that on his stream two nights. Imma go find the timestamp and link his drunken rant about how hard the game is, just for you.

- - - Updated - - -

New noob and bad player spotted I totally love to see people who spill bullshit on encounters they never actually tried. LK was the hardest (LAST) boss BY FAR (M)Archimonde is not even a shade of him in terms of progression difficulty, literally every single player who actually did both will say that, it's not even a question honestly.

Found it! Starts at 9:50:00 when he starts talking about Gul'dan. He goes on to talk about other bosses a couple minutes later. https://www.twitch.tv/slootbag/v/83408773

- - - Updated - - -

I'm not sure how that matters? The strategies are generally figured out before the tier even comes out from the high end raiders on the PTR. Generally speaking, most people follow those strategies and only deviate from them if something super weird pops up that literally nobody thought of.

And as for the gear: Yeah it might matter if we had killed Siegecrafter back in October and then Garrosh in March but we didn't. We started 25 mans late in general. We full cleared normal 25 man on November 26th on our first week. We then downed all the bosses on heroic up to Iron Juggernaut on the 27th of November. Cleared Jug and Shamans on Dec 3rd, Nazgrim and Malk on Dec 5th, Spoils on the 12th, Thok on the 24th, Siegecrafter was January 28th, Paragons were Feb 20th and Garrosh was Marth 26th. Not sure why we had so little attempts on Garrosh though. I forget what was going on back then.

First off, the bolded, that's only partially true. A lot of innovation gets done on bosses when they're live. Also, last phase Garrosh was untested. If I recall, Method actually thought they killed the boss the first time they got to P4.

Furthermore, gear will not affect every encounter the same way, so it absolutely matters if you had an extra 6 months of gear.

[Life-Binder]

The thing is, I think we have it straight from the devs that HFC was not designed with the ring in mind; it was supposed to be something you get to help with progress. So if you are to consider Archimonde, you need to consider him without the ring. And without the ring, he probably wins the contest especially considering that after him the next pick is LK which while certainly a very compelling encounter had its difficulty inflated by limited attempts.

Garrosh was hard but Siegecrafter was harder. Madness was quite easier than Spine and not comparable to Ragnaros. LK probably was harder than Alone in the Darkness (in that the fight was so challenging from start to finish). Kil'jaeden was hard, but not as hard as M'uru. So yeah imo, Archi wins over LK and the rest are not even competing.

^ this

[PowerOfTwo]

Eh, the topic is sort of unfair, they were all a product of their times..... Mechanicaly archimonde is definetly the hardest one so far, as i'm sure then end boss of Legion will be even more mechanically difficult.

Arthas is another wierd one, ye literarly noone killed him pre-nerf but then again he also had limited attempts.... how many pulls does an endboss take to kill nowdays? 250-500? .... yeeeah that wouldn't realy work for arthas unless literarly the whole guild had 10 geared 80s to practice with. Blizzard had this wierd period starting SWP - ICC where they tried to save raiders from themselves gating content somehow. SWP had staggered release, Algalon had limited attempts, there was Tribute to insanity wich was also kinda a gear gate, LK had limited attempts.

There's also the fact that end bosses somehow tend to fall flat to earlier bosses for some strange reason. Archimonde was extremly hard during progresion, but once Ring cheese became a thing arguably progressing Mano was much much harder, Plus (in)famosly Vanila 4H, M'ure, Spine etc. Bizzarely it's the mid tier bosses that tend to take the spotlight, Illidan > KT > KJ, Ragnaros >>>>>>>>> Madness. Lei'Shen was pretty tough to, tho prolly heroic Garosh was harder.

[Deleted]

Probably Heroic LK. A lot of other expansions penultimate encounters were the more difficult ones. I.E. 4 Horsemen in 40 man Naxx required the tanks to all have a large amount of the Dreadnaught tier, Muru in Sunwell was more of a cockblock than Kil'Jaedan was etc.

4 horsemen required 2 tanks in each corner of the room iirc, grand total of 8 tanks when most guilds had focused on gearing probably 2 main tanks. What a fucking gate that was.

[Life-Binder]

Also this topic is discriminating against Ragnaros, Yogg-sharon and Lei-Shen.

everyone forgets poor Halion !

he may not have been as hard but he came AFTER that emo boy Arthas

[Deleted]

It's interesting, that people have different oppinions on difficulty.

For me artificial gating, like gear, class stacking, consumables does not count in terms of difficulty.

On the other hand fight mechanics, complexity, timers, tactics does. That's why in my oppinion HC LK was the first really difficult fight and perhaps the hardest, because since that the devs at Blizzard learned a LOT about fight design. (Altough that didn't show in Cata, where most of the tactics revolved around stack up and spread out )
In my oppinion the hardest fights are always the ones, that require the most individual responsibility.

Also comparing player skill levels of different expansions is pointless. If the game would've been harder and more complex, the players would've adapted to that level.

[OrcsRLame]

It's interesting, that people have different oppinions on difficulty.

For me artificial gating, like gear, class stacking, consumables does not count in terms of difficulty.

On the other hand fight mechanics, complexity, timers, tactics does. That's why in my oppinion HC LK was the first really difficult fight and perhaps the hardest, because since that the devs at Blizzard learned a LOT about fight design. (Altough that didn't show in Cata, where most of the tactics revolved around stack up and spread out )
In my oppinion the hardest fights are always the ones, that require the most individual responsibility.

Also comparing player skill levels of different expansions is pointless. If the game would've been harder and more complex, the players would've adapted to that level.

But, wha, I... Are you fuckin' with me mate? On an individual level Lich King was fucking brainless compared to Archimonde and Blackhand.

Laurcus.exe has shutdown. Rebooting...

[Deleted]

But, wha, I... Are you fuckin' with me mate? On an individual level Lich King was fucking brainless compared to Archimonde and Blackhand.

Laurcus.exe has shutdown. Rebooting...

This post alone shows that you have no idea what you're talking about and haven't done LK 25m heroic (maybe after prepatch but I doubt even that).

High individual difficulty level on archimonde? AHAHAHAHA - There are two bosses in HFC that have a higher individual skill requirement than him.
Why are you talking on a forum about things you clearly have no clue about? You're just quoting and believing everything your hero slootbag says.


Nevermind you believe blackhand was challenging because of mechanics and not tuning. - LOL

[Lepa]

Omgz i killezed final bosses in this expansion(like so many others) and they are like the hardest ever, everything before was shit easy and ppl were nobs.

On a serious note, its true the bosses now have more mechanics and you could say they are technically harder, but they have to be as all other aspects of raiding or running a competitive raiding guild have been dumbed down or removed.
Over the years tanking and healing roles have been made substantially more simpler to play, raiding rooster has a much smaller impact(alts are easy to gear and lvl, spec change on fly),gear is given out like candy in general, raid composition and class synergy requirements are non existent unless your cheezing a mechanic, corps run was removed, consumable farming was removed ( hai there thistle tea ), bosses a readily available on ptr, you fight same bosses on multiple difficulty so you get the hang of most abilities while doing it in trival mode and getting gear at the same time, and ofc talent and gear customization was dumbed down into oblivion(i know less knowledgeable still copy pasted builds but you had lots of options to tweek and optimize for specific mechanics and encounters).

So to sum it up and as someone already mention old bosses were harder to prepare and organize for while newer have more mechanics, and its ignorant to say that todays raiders would just faceroll old raids on day 1 in the raiding environment that was present at that time.

[Berengil]

heroic LK 25man without the buff. freaking insane

[OrcsRLame]

This post alone shows that you have no idea what you're talking about and haven't done LK 25m heroic (maybe after prepatch but I doubt even that).

High individual difficulty level on archimonde? AHAHAHAHA - There are two bosses in HFC that have a higher individual skill requirement than him.
Why are you talking on a forum about things you clearly have no clue about? You're just quoting and believing everything your hero slootbag says.


Nevermind you believe blackhand was challenging because of mechanics and not tuning. - LOL

My Hero Slootbag (TM) is a more credible source than the great Koenigstiger. If you have an argument other than, "Lol you're dumb kekekekekek reeeeeeee!!" though I'd be happy to discuss that.

First off, I'm actually really curious which two bosses in HFC you think have a higher individual skill requirement than Archimonde. Maybe Xhul if your ranged are eating retard pills and don't keep Void Fiends under control? Certain individual players had some punishing mechanics to deal with on other fights, like the ones that break the souls out on Gorefiend, or the dank tanking mechanics of Tyrant.

And secondly, I never said that Blackhand was hard because of his mechanics and not tuning. You made that up, or you can't read, not sure which. Blackhand's mechanics certainly didn't help guilds kill him though. Method were the only ones that figured out the proper positioning for P1. Look how clean Method's P1 is compared to Paragon's, or the clusterfuck that was Midwinter's P1. It also took guilds quite awhile to figure out P2.

Thirdly, what about Lich King was hard from an individual execution standpoint? I mean, if you're this uber leet badass raider that makes Slootbag look like a chump, surely that wouldn't be hard to explain, no?

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

You realize those addons were made by players, right? As if those same players wouldn't be able to make addons for older bosses to make the already pathetic mechanics auto pilot mode. Also, huge difference between doing Archimonde with no legendary rings, no valor upgrades and like 2 resets of gear compared to what Archimonde was like just before the pre patch. Especially when you consider that P3 is a ramping phase

Exactly, addons or WA strings have gone out of control and enabling us to remove more and more from encounters which in turn makes them easier than they were couple years ago when we didn't have those WA strings or addons. Since we didn't have these excessive addons at LK (well it was disabled by Blizzard) it makes LK harder than Archimonde. If we didn't have the WAs or Addons we had for Archi, yes he would be harder. All encounters since WotLK, MoP, Cata... whatever has been increasingly harder to do (in general) as they have more mechanics to know and do/counter, at the same time our class/specs have become more complex (before pruning to shit).
If you want to look at the hardest bosses just look at the time for kills in number of days, there's one problem with ICC because of limited attempts, obviously, but you can even calculate those limited attempts.

- - - Updated - - -

But, wha, I... Are you fuckin' with me mate? On an individual level Lich King was fucking brainless compared to Archimonde and Blackhand.

Laurcus.exe has shutdown. Rebooting...

What was hard on Archimonde?
During progression (before ring and gear made the fight a joke) 4 people had to soak fire on a timer.
Everyone needed to learn how to deal with chains and break them correctly.
Grab a ball for a protection buff/debuff to mitigate damage, whoa... hard.
Try to spread out/not stand behind people during lasers. (actually the only hard mechanic before addons made it a joke)
Last phase has:
- A floor "dance" routine (yawn)
- Target switching (x2)
- Splitting into 4 groups to soak "bombs" (also yawn)
- Target swap on a tank "grab". (such innovation, yawn)

To make it worse there was a WA and Addon showing up the same week as top 5 world guilds killed it making ALL the mechanics trivial.
Yes if we had the same WAs or Addons for LK or KT or Yogg... whatever, they'd be easier but since we didn't they weren't easier.

Winning a war against ISIS would be hard if we had the technology of 1642 but we don't, we have the technology of 2016, tech makes things easier.

[OrcsRLame]

Exactly, addons or WA strings have gone out of control and enabling us to remove more and more from encounters which in turn makes them easier than they were couple years ago when we didn't have those WA strings or addons. Since we didn't have these excessive addons at LK (well it was disabled by Blizzard) it makes LK harder than Archimonde. If we didn't have the WAs or Addons we had for Archi, yes he would be harder. All encounters since WotLK, MoP, Cata... whatever has been increasingly harder to do (in general) as they have more mechanics to know and do/counter, at the same time our class/specs have become more complex (before pruning to shit).
If you want to look at the hardest bosses just look at the time for kills in number of days, there's one problem with ICC because of limited attempts, obviously, but you can even calculate those limited attempts.

There's nothing in LK with even half the complexity of Wrought/Focused Chaos. WA or no WA.

- - - Updated - - -

What was hard on Archimonde?
During progression (before ring and gear made the fight a joke) 4 people had to soak fire on a timer.
Everyone needed to learn how to deal with chains and break them correctly.
Grab a ball for a protection buff/debuff to mitigate damage, whoa... hard.
Try to spread out/not stand behind people during lasers. (actually the only hard mechanic before addons made it a joke)
Last phase has:
- A floor "dance" routine (yawn)
- Target switching (x2)
- Splitting into 4 groups to soak "bombs" (also yawn)
- Target swap on a tank "grab". (such innovation, yawn)

To make it worse there was a WA and Addon showing up the same week as top 5 world guilds killed it making ALL the mechanics trivial.
Yes if we had the same WAs or Addons for LK or KT or Yogg... whatever, they'd be easier but since we didn't they weren't easier.

Winning a war against ISIS would be hard if we had the technology of 1642 but we don't, we have the technology of 2016, tech makes things easier.

I would ask the same of you, what was hard on Lich King?

First off, splitting into 4 groups for Mark of the Legion was quite a bit more complicated than you're making it out to be. You couldn't just assign each person to a group and roll with it, because the boss didn't give a fuck about your group assignments. Say you had all your melee dps in group 2. You could potentially get marks on 4 of your 5 melee at one time. You would need one person to stay there while the other 3 somehow coordinate getting to other groups, and you'd need 1 person from each of those other 3 groups to head over to group 2, to keep the soaking even. You have 5 seconds or some shit before the first mark blows up, so that's a lot to coordinate in a very short amount of time. Addons made this mostly trivial, (DBM more than WAs) but those addons didn't exist when top guilds were progressing on Archimonde. Comparing direct progression to direct progression, you didn't need any of that fancy shit for LK, while for Archimonde people had to make shit on the fly. And even with DBM telling you which marker to go stand on, if even one person goes the wrong way, it's probably a wipe. Yeah, the same is true for several LK mechanics, but Shadow Traps and Defile are pretty generic don't stand in bad shit mechanics for the most part. With Marks at least you have to read the damn DBM text.

I guess now's a good time for my disclaimer: I have never felt truly tested by any mechanic in wow. I play a lot of Dark Souls, and the amount of time they give you to react to shit in wow is about 20x greater than what I'm used to. In 300 attempts on Archimonde I fucked up mechanics 3 times, and I was doing call outs. Take that how you will. Anywho, it's pretty obvious to me when a mechanic has multiple layers of complexity or requires you to do more than one thing at the same time. Take Wrought/Focused Chaos for example. It's simple enough in theory, but you live and die by your worst player. It's not a simple don't stand in the fire mechanic, because the fire moves, sometimes at the last possible instant if someone's eating retard pills like they're candy. For another example, look at third Infernals. You gotta separate them and keep them separated, which, that alone is more of a brain check than anything in LK. A few seconds after they spawn though, you have the dance. The dance comes up fast enough, that unless you're playing a high mobility class or you waste an immunity, you're going to die to the dance if you're out in East Bumblefuck when it starts. You have to be thinking one step ahead, positioning yourself in a centralized location while dealing with Infernals. It's not the individual mechanics that are hard, it's how they stack up.

I'd argue breaking chains correctly is more or less as hard as not standing in Defile, with the added benefit that you're taking a bunch of ticking damage during, so you may need to use a personal.

[munkeyinorbit]

...But I'd say Yogg no keepers was the hardest. Maybe it's the fight itself, but no other boss kill gave me the same satisfaction...

Maybe it was the L2Read boss.

The hardest boss to do was HC LK no buff. There was only 1 guild who killed him before the pre-patch where everyone got new kick-ass abilities that made content a lot easier. It took over 4 months to go from a 5% buff kill to a no buff kill. Doesn't matter that LK had monster HP for the time (over 100 million), still harder than KT/KJ/DW/Garrosh and Archie.

At the time there was a rumor that the best players were complaining that content was too easy (even though there was an "impossible" boss of no lights). LK was the answer.

[Bigbazz]

They were close the week before and the 5% pushed them over the edge around attempt 170.

Seriously, in terms of the actual number of pulls, Arthas is very low on this list. The limited attempts per week was the only thing holding guilds back.

After they got their world first Paragon then turned off the buff and got the kill again. Then they 24 manned it. Arthas's difficulty is way overblown.

It's not overblown though, you're ignoring the fact that every time they went in with better gear than the previous week. Instead of bashing their heads against it with countless more attempts while undergeared the limited attempts on Arthas forced them to have to wait until next week, but it also forced you to try again with better gear every time.

If Arthas had allowed unlimited attempts then the attempts to kill it would have been higher because guilds would have spent much more time progressing it with worse gear, where they would not be able to succeed.

[Pu3Ho]

I started in patch 2.4 playing on my friend's laptop actually. I'm not going to claim to be some top player, but I cleared 13/13 mythic pre 7.0 and my logs are generally fairly competitive. Even have a few top 50 logs.

Anywho, the bolded, it's funny how far you've just stuck your foot into your mouth, because Slootbag literally said the exact opposite of that on his stream two nights. Imma go find the timestamp and link his drunken rant about how hard the game is, just for you.

- - - Updated - - -



Found it! Starts at 9:50:00 when he starts talking about Gul'dan. He goes on to talk about other bosses a couple minutes later. https://www.twitch.tv/slootbag/v/83408773

- - - Updated - - -



First off, the bolded, that's only partially true. A lot of innovation gets done on bosses when they're live. Also, last phase Garrosh was untested. If I recall, Method actually thought they killed the boss the first time they got to P4.

Furthermore, gear will not affect every encounter the same way, so it absolutely matters if you had an extra 6 months of gear.

He said M'uru or kiljaeden twins/etc - not a single word about LK and indeed i aree with him TBC is actually a fucking joke compared to most of the current encounters, no clue what did you wanted to say by that tbh.