Hardest, Most Notorious 5man instances in WOW

[D3athsting]

5 man Zul Aman/Zul Gurub any1?

[Deleted]

3. Wrath - Halls of Lightening

Halls of Lightning was easy and not particularly broken.


Halls of Reflection, that was a nightmare when it was new. Too many people did not understand simple things like LoS.

[Deleted]

The Oculus, it must have been hard because the few times i had the fortune of getting it everyone instantly left.

[Sigxy]

Old Hillsbrad Foothills on Heroic Mode.

It was the only Heroic in TBC that I never beat. ;_:

[Kalisandra]

What was the most notorious 5 man instances in wow?

What i mean by notorious i mean by hard, buggy, broken, unfair mechanics and class stacking etc?

Now if i had to make a list from each xpac i would say

1. Vanilla - Stratholme
2. BC - Shattered halls
3. Wrath - Halls of Lightening
4. Cata - Grim Batol
5. Mop - Shado Pan Monastery
6. WoD - Grimrail Depot

Vanilla - I agree with you on Stratholm, but think that BRD deserves an honourable mention for being so stupidly long and convoluted.

BC - Shattered Halls was horrible in many ways, but Magister's Terrace and Steam Vaults also needed class stacking in a major way when new - you needed good CC. That meant Mages or (if the player was good) Hunters. Accept no substitutes. SLab was just a pain, with all those really touchy pulls. OTOH TIME FOR FUN was worth it. But all BC heroics were hell before they were nerfed. Trash that hit like trucks. Trash that hit like trucks, with Mortal Strikes, and Bleed. Trash that mind controlled. Trash that feared... Thrash that mana drained the healer... Getting to a boss was sometimes a relief. Sometimes...

Wrath - The back end of HoL, with those nasty pulls, and then Loken (got a Pally healer? Good luck, you'll need it). The snake boss in Gundrak could be rough if you didn't LoS the poison nova or get the cheat right. People forget these because LK was the first expansion where scaling was massive within the expac, and in which everyone experienced it, not just progression raiders.

Cata - Grim Batol, yeah. Lost City if you had a Shaman healer (the last two bosses would OOM a Shammy pretty easily before they got some fixes in so their healing actually worked).

MoP - I didn't think any were especially horrible.

WoD - Grimrail was rough, agreed. All those nasty LoS problems, and trash that liked to set people on fire when there was nowhere to run out to. The only other thing that really stands out to me is the wind gauntlet in Skyreach.

[klaps_05]

Vanilla - Baron runs
TBC - Shadow lab
Wotlk - Oculus

[Blackmist]

The only Wrath dungeon that everyone avoided was Oculus. It wasn't hard, but guaranteed if LFD picked it, somebody would ditch the group.

[ItachiZaku]

Vanilla would be Dire Maul, still don't know my way around that place. BC was fairly easy until Magisters Terrace, and that was only hard if you had new people that didn't know one bad pull meant pulling 40 mobs. Which brings me to Stonecore and that big fuck room before Ozark. I love that crazy shit though, it's why we always say Blizz should make it a requirement that people PVP, as it'll pretty much force you to learn your class. In doing so, 40 mob overpull is less of a big deal as you'll learn to use your entire toolkit and that situation becomes so much more mana... fuck, gotta release spirit. /QuitGroup

[Deleted]

There are no hard 5mans, only stupid players and I don't think you can really quantify content "hard" if the reason it is hard is hunters pulling extras like in Grimrail or people wiping to trash since they afked in 10man Stratholme between bosses or if they couldn't kill the correct mobs in Shattered Halls, just to mention a few examples.

[Halyon]

No Oculus? Really? At least Halls of Lightning was doable with a random pug group, most people just straight up quit Oculus.

[Kalisandra]

IMO BC was the only time where 5 mans were painstakingly difficult.

Shadow Labs, Shattered Halls, and Black Morass made me want to rip my eyeballs out 9/10 times I ran them.

I never found those ones that bad. However, I mainned a pally tank, so by virtue of being one of the specs that you 'stacked' they were okay for me. Having to round up a mage and then another mage or a good hunter or rogue for Steamvaults or MgT though, that was a pain. Especially the hunter bit - finding hunters that could manage traps well was sometimes quite hard - our guild had a several, but if they weren't available and one had to pug, one really hoped to find a second mage.

[Lysiander]

All when they were current and fresh. Some of them were made significantly easier when overgeared, though none became truly easy.

1. Magister's Terrace. The amount of CC required was horrid and the pvp event punished not having CC.
2. Shattered Halls. Several gauntlets required very coordinated fighting and resource conservation while the rest required CC. All combined with a speedrun.
3. Arcatraz. Few people ran it at all and those that did rarely knew the instance well. Mind control, lots of patrols and not so easy bosses.
4. Halls of Lightning. Many hard hitting mobs. (Almost) Instant Kill mechanics and large packs. Often made harder by idiots that thought they'd "help" with pulling.
5. Gundrak. Unforgiving mechanics with a small margin of error, shortcuts that were great when used properly and horrible when someone forgot to send off the pet, etc.

I'm told the cataclysm instances were pretty hard at the start, but I missed the Cata launch, so I can't comment.

- - - Updated - - -

No Oculus? Really? At least Halls of Lightning was doable with a random pug group, most people just straight up quit Oculus.

Occulus was easy. People quit because it was slow and boring and few knew how to play the dragons well.

[Nero Stormchester]

Any bc heroic was hell. Shadow labs probably the worst. Anything wrath onwards is cake and requires 0 skill to finish

Go on , show me an instance of you finishing a +20 mythic - cause it's sooooo easy and doesn't require any skill..

[Deleted]

.... MoP? Wrath?

[Machismo]

In vanilla, Strat was the pain in the ass, and scholo could also be tough depending on mob pathing and the final boss. The issue with those instances wasn't necessarily the difficulty level, but with the length of the instance. It took a dedicated party to do a full BRD run.

The hardest dungeons I saw were heroic Shadow Labs and Shattered Halls. The sheer damage output onto tanks was pretty damn high. CC was a requirement for many pulls, and shit went sideways in a hurry.

The heroics in Cata were difficult the first couple weeks, but that was mainly because they screwed up healer mana. It wasn't so much that the mobs and pulls were difficult, healers just had no damn mana to work with. Heroic Stonecore was damn tough at times.

Every other heroic was easy, and WoD heroics actually felt easier than normal instances.

[Deleted]

Prenerfed BC heroics were by far the hardest +5 content ever made. The most guys just remember the "must have"-ones for all the attunement quests (like shattered halls, shadow lab, arca), but also old hillsbrad, the second ssc-dungeon (underbog?), auchenai krypta, bota, BF, sethekk halls... all of them were absolute nightmarish and not a single dungeon after this period were equal on difficulty.

[Mendzia]

Vanilla - alot of ppl are saying Stratholme. It was hard but i had more problems with Scholo if i remember correctly
TBC - most of them were hard but SH takes the cake
WotLK - all of them were easy. Loken or waves in the HoR were just 1 level above the rest
Cata - Grim Batol or Stonecore were painful but amazing at the same time. no loot for scrubs in pugs
MoP - did not play alot at that time but i don't think there was anything close to be hard
WoD - Grimrail Depot or UBRS were slighty challenging at the start

[Deleted]

I remember my pug groups would always tell me to los the mobs. I'm like, im a tank, i don't hide behind walls. Needless to say, HoR was rather simple, even on release. All Wrath dungeons were far too simple.

If you did not have raid equip HoR was fairly difficult, and people would die quickly if they did not LoS.

Sure, later on I just jumped in and dealt with the mobs standing over the whole room. But that wasn't an option when the instance was fresh, at least not for the majority of people.

Sure, after one year ICC things were quite different. But not right away.

[Lolsteak]

Pre-nerf Durnholde Heroic

[Deleted]

I guess we have to much fresh blood without experience in the first true heroic dungeons in tbc. Everything after (incl. the nerf of them) was and is like lfr-dungeon-mode