Naxx (80)
DS
TotFW
Altough i don't agree with your opinion, i really respect the explanations .. +1 for that
On topic i'd say:
1: Naxxramas 2 (I never did the original one, but i've heard incredible stories about it, the difficulty and the prestige in defeating things in there and the story) - Reusing things is just plain retarded imo, and it wasn't harder than Violet hold
2: Ruby Sanctum - It took forever to come out, and when it did, it was extremely bugged for ages (at least felt like ages) and the one and only purpose of it, was that ICC had been boring for to long
3: Dragon Soul - What mostly ruins this raid for me is .. Rogues, at least 110% of all rogues i ever saw had Fangs (which i think is quite bad). And LFR was so extremely easy that it should be able to do it while sleeping, yet i spend ½ the week wiping in there (i do realize that's not the raids fault, and i actually liked the concept and the fights, but that still burns inside me when i think of "Dragon Soul")
Last edited by SalcN; 2012-12-05 at 07:18 PM.
ToC
Dragon Soul
Third is either anything else from Cata or ICC25/Ruby Sanctum depending on the day of the week, Mayan Calendar etc.
The only reason firelands isn't listed specifically is simply because there should have been another raid in that tier, but blizzard was too busy designing add fights and daily quests to bother giving a shit.
From Tier 5, Leotheras and Al'ar were both pretty memorable. In MC I remember Garr and especially Geddon. People blowing up the raid and wondering why one of your groups was suddenly gone? While annoying at the time, priceless later. Also, anyone who was doing breakthrough raiding... i.e. extremely early Vanilla where you were one of the first raids to set foot into MC and work for days on Lucifron to finally down him was priceless, and thus... while simple, is a very memorable boss.There is a strong argument for your case and the common perception agreeing which perhaps is also tied to the idea that only 20% of bosses will be better than average. The more bosses a tier has, the more likely it is to have one of those memorable bosses and thus for the tier on a whole to be remembered fondly. For example, TK wasn't great and SSC was also relatively average, but because of Vashj and Kael that tier tends to be very fondly remembered. Same goes for MC - the tier and environment are nothing special, but the Ragnaros fight was so memorable that it adds value to the whole tier.
I think the "lots of bosses" is a mix of both memorable boss fights and having lots of easier boss fights as well, because it feels good to get easy bosses between the hard ones.
The short tiers are either too easy (ToC) and you're left feeling like "What now?" or they're too hard (Sunwell) and you have guilds hemorrhaging members and eventually disbanding because of them.
Last edited by Cthulhu 2020; 2012-12-05 at 08:39 PM.
2014 Gamergate: "If you want games without hyper sexualized female characters and representation, then learn to code!"
2023: "What's with all these massively successful games with ugly (realistic) women? How could this have happened?!"
ToC, EoE, Naxx 25
Going to judge them based on when they came out, not how they held up to the test of time:
1. ToC: First, the raid was a "filler" raid and it showed it. The story behind the raid was wonky (sending the best to fight against the Lich King). The raid was also very short, both in size (2 rooms total) and in bosses (5). At the time, everybody was waiting on ICC to come out, not this. Large disappointment
2. Dragon Soul: Again, this was not a very long raid, with only 3 of the bosses having trash tied to them. Some of the boss fights didn't even feel like they were in the same instance (traveling to EoE, on a boat, on deathwing's back, then a fight at the maelstrom) with zero feeling of actually traveling to these locations, with cutscenes tying the locations together. The boss mechanics were a joke on some fights. Huge letdown for an end raid.
3. Naxx 10/25 (80): The level 60 version of the instance was great. The level 80 version was not - mostly for one reason: they tweaked the 60 version and gave it back to us as "new" content. All of the mechanics behaved the exact same way (in 25 - some changes to 10 man). They changed some of the models on gear, but left everything else almost exactly intact. The 60 version was an end-game raid (read: difficult) while this felt closer to an LFR version of the same raid.
Honorable mention:
Flame Leviathan - if this fight was in its own instance, it would probably be one of the worst MMO raids ever. Forget all of your class mechanics and ride a vehicle.
Malygos (EoE) - At least we didn't have to ride the drake for the whole instance. The vortex (to me) is one of the more interesting fight mechanics I've seen at least. Good thing we can now burn Maly down before getting to the drakes. (#4 on my list - at least Blizzard tried to make a new raid with EoE)
Shazzrah (MC) - Nothing like having a good chunk of your raid (Rogues/Warriors) pull out their bandages just to be useful in a raid. Significantly too much melee hate. (Also, after building a FR set just for some bosses, who really wanted to build an Arcane Resist set just for 1 boss?)
Gunship (ICC) - At 80, 1/4 of your raid could go afk for a sandwitch and you would have about the same odds of success. The difficulty just did not fit the rest of the instance... almost like having a halftime for an instance -but with loot.
*travels into the future*
1. Siege of Orgrimmar - WHAT A REHASHED PIECE OF ****
2. The Burning Citadel - The Sargeras fight was so dissapointing... just fighting adds on his head
3. Dragon Soul - Even after so many years.... it is still one of the worst raids