Original Naxx 4 Horsemen hardest encounter ever?

[Shiinji]

It was only hard because you need multiple tanks that were geared. It wasn't a complex fight. Stealing tanks from other guilds... I've never killed this boss in vanilla and I'm not counting the part where a gm came to "help" us. That doesn't count as a kill. I miss the old days where's gm would pop up. Even in bc gm came when I was tanking prince and I "fell through" and hit prince until he died LOL

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I'm not sure about the 8 tank strat either. Never did that. But I agree with above poster. A lot of people never experienced naxx back in the day.

[Natureseer]

Lol please don't listen to all the people trying to compare it to more recent fights, they have no idea what raiding was like in vanilla and they never will.. The fight was very difficult though probably not the hardest encounter ever, as I think KT was actually more difficult. However it was one of the most difficult fights of all time, based on the difficulty at the actual time of doing the encounter.

[Duronos]

It was only hard because you need multiple tanks that were geared. It wasn't a complex fight. Stealing tanks from other guilds... I've never killed this boss in vanilla and I'm not counting the part where a gm came to "help" us. That doesn't count as a kill. I miss the old days where's gm would pop up. Even in bc gm came when I was tanking prince and I "fell through" and hit prince until he died LOL

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I'm not sure about the 8 tank strat either. Never did that. But I agree with above poster. A lot of people never experienced naxx back in the day.

You literally knew the right people didn't you.

[Angelicat]

It's really not possible to compare fights in vanilla to fights now. The playerbase as whole is definitely better, though I think the fact that you had to have 40 people kind of meant that you were going to be carrying some pretty bad players in your raid.

It's not even that mechanics wise, the fights are harder now - because they are. It's more the fact that classes played like night/day difference compared to how it is now. While mechanics were easier in the day, you were given a lot less tools to deal with various situations. Vanilla was definitely hard in it's own right for a lot of reasons.

[Deleted]

It's really not possible to compare fights in vanilla to fights now. The playerbase as whole is definitely better, though I think the fact that you had to have 40 people kind of meant that you were going to be carrying some pretty bad players in your raid.

It's not even that mechanics wise, the fights are harder now - because they are. It's more the fact that classes played like night/day difference compared to how it is now. While mechanics were easier in the day, you were given a lot less tools to deal with various situations. Vanilla was definitely hard in it's own right for a lot of reasons.

I don't raid mop-wise so I'm just gonna quote cata but could you explain how heroic morchok or ultraxion are harder than twins or c'thun ? Cause from where I stand they definitely have far easier mechanics

[Duronos]

I don't raid mop-wise so I'm just gonna quote cata but could you explain how heroic morchok or ultraxion are harder than twins or c'thun ? Cause from where I stand they definitely have far easier mechanics

From the videos I've watched of raids taking on C'thun (after the fix so he was actually possible) he looks complicated, especially for 40 people.

[Deleted]

From the videos I've watched of raids taking on C'thun (after the fix so he was actually possible) he looks complicated, especially for 40 people.

He was, what I'm trying to say is just that some classic bosses have more complex mechanics than up to cataclysm bosses (can't say for mop). People that didnt play classic often say that it was easy and they refer to MC bosses, but it's just ridiculous.

[Deleted]

Twins emperors? Was LFR level for most of the raid (did it as a hunter. Not even LFR. 5 man level). And somehow was ohmygod so hard. I still think the problem was not being able to carry half the raid.

[Deleted]

I pugged most of heroic ds before nerfs (not killed the last bosses obviously), only 1 raid per week. I think that says a lot more

[Azshira]

I was in Naxx/AQ (did bit of both - easier bosses in Naxx etc, and I recall from the higher guilds on the server at that time that finding the 8 geared tanks was their biggest downfall, although others claimed it could be done with less; 8 made it 'much easier'. The sad thing is you may of only had 3-4 tanks in the guild, 5 at a push perhaps... stealing was very common from the highest guilds. Months later TBC would come out and if you still had those 8 tanks, well 4-5 of them would of had to go "cya" more or less.

[Warstar]

The hardest part about C'Thun was spreading out with 40 people around you. A badly grouped up section would be wiped out with a single eye beam.

Hell even running into the room was hard since he aggroed the moment someone walked across the front of his door. I remember practicing just running into the boss room (when has that ever happened again?) in small groups so that he wouldn't lolazer our whole raid dead with one beam if we ran in together. Our typical strat was to have a hunter in full nature resist gear run in first with his nature resist aura up and soak the first couple of eye beams while the rest of the raid trickled in.

I think the only similar instance was when the four horseman bugged out on us and there was no one to tank zeliek so he used his holy beam of death on our whole raid stacked up at the front of the room but over all as long as there was someone in range of him that never happened (unless the melee bads ran in together and group died on him lol.

[Deleted]

I wonder if all the people saying 4 horsemen just required 8 tanks actually did the fight.

There were a lot of things you couldn't mess up that could quickly lead to a wipe. Not saying it's the hardest fight ever like OP is saying but you guys are really understating the difficulty.

Yeah, but just reposting the same myth that everyone posts is a lot easier than actually learning about the fight.

"easy lol just need 8 tanks in t3"

It's amazing how many people claim to be experts on 4H when so few guilds even saw it at the time and most of those players quit by now.

[Deadhank]

I never raided in Classic, but from what I've seen, heard and was told it was just one more classic vanilla fights that required DIFFERENT mechanics. In this case, the mechanic was having 8 tanks. It didn't have that much RNG to make it unpredictable. From there, if you had 8 geared tanks and the rest of the raid knew what they were doing, it was a kill!

But in terms of actualy hard mechanic, I think that Yogg 0, prenerf C'thun/M'uru, 25H LK and Heroic Rag were probably harder.

Yes, most vanilla fights were hard, but they're remembered as being impossible due to the lack of knowledge of the game from most players and things like that. Like bigfoot1291 said...

I like to put fights in perspective. Ra-den now? Considered a joke by all who get to him. Ra-den if he was introduced in vanilla (and scaled obviously)? Would likely be near impossible.

...some fights were hard THAT time. If the same fight was to be introduced today it would be a joke. I agree that some fights were indeed REALLY hard (I can't confirm because I didn't raid, but still), but some were hard due to what I said: lack of skill at the time from most players. You needed 40 people doing their job and maybe just 10 were good players. You know the rest, haha.


TL;DR: Some fights in Vanilla were hard at that time due to being a new game. If those fights were presented today - scaled -, they'd probably be easy (and vice-versa @Ra-den example).

[Eranthe]

let me preface this by saying I did not raid in vanilla. I started in karazhan.

just because a fight doesn't have reflexively used extra action buttons, or borderline platforming skills involved, doesn't mean it's any easier. people that keep saying these fights weren't that hard mechanically just do not understand that they didn't NEED to be mechanically hard when just playing your character at 80% efficiency due to mana constraints, or spell limitations (melee range taunt that can miss/resist for example), ZERO raid cooldowns for oh shit moments, was hard enough. Add the fact that there weren't many widely known class guides like there are now, as well as the mechanics not being displayed for everyone to see on a dungeon journal, and maybe you can begin to see what made it hard. Add to that the fact that the encounters were balanced around spammed potions/resist gear/silly little flame caps and stuff for 40 (FORTY) people and it becomes a little overwhelming.

If you set these facts aside and say they don't matter, you're missing the whole point. These things made it harder.

Instead of continuing to make logistical challenges and tight enrage timers and limiting individual effectiveness, blizzard decided to exacerbate individual one-person-fucks-up-kill-the-whole-raid mechanics.

[Warstar]

If on every boss fight people did what they were supposed to and maintained a proper dps rotation and avoided all avoidable damage there really isn't any "mechanic" that's hard in the game aside from buggy ones (like the dark summoner in the brawler's guild spawning a ghost right on top of you instantly killing you before you have time to move). If everyone was perfect no one would die, encounters would be simple and people would breeze through all heroic content that wasn't a strict gear check in the first day.

What's difficult is getting a large amount of people to all do the correct thing without any mistakes. Be honest with yourself and think about how many times you've had an absolutely perfect boss fight. As dps you had 0 wasted resources, 100% up time on a boss and a 100% perfect rotation neither overlapping spells or redotting before a dot was up or anything like that but a completely perfect fight. Or for healers and tanks having a completely perfect fight mitigating ever damage output done by the boss perfectly and doing relatively 0 over healing?

The fact is that players tend to tunnel vision. They don't pay attention to boss timers, they don't have perfect raid awareness so they take extra damage that could have been avoided and most of the time they need extra gear to help over compensate for this unless they're in in a world 1-3 raiding guild.

Player error is the hardest mechanic to overcome in on any boss that isn't a gear check and then it's just a putting in your dues thing and getting people enough gear that they can get past it. This is the main reason why I'd say that the 4 horsemen was if not the hardest one of the hardest fights because you had to have so many people doing something and if any of the key people died it was a wipe and you had to start over. If any of the pairs of healers running around healing tanks died to a void zone or something it was a wipe. If any tank died it was a wipe. If too many dps died it was a wipe. If dps didn't push it hard you hit the enrage timer and wiped so it was a hard balance of forcing yourself to take extra damage but not too much that it killed you which put a pretty big strain on the healers.

And for all the people out there who never actually did old school naxx and are spouting off all these random facts keep your opinions to yourself unless you actually have first hand knowledge rather than "my friend told me that he heard that these one guys tried out a strat this one guy saw on a video of these one guys doing". For instance the warrior issue wasn't the biggest issue there was on the fight. Most warriors had a tank set and most warriors were fury so they had a weapon to tank with and a random shield. From the lowest piece of gear in molten core ilv 61 to the best piece of gear off of kel'thuzad ilv 89 there was all of 28 ilvs of difference so the gear difference wasn't as bad as it is now. A tank with a set up of bwl/parts of naxx (aq warrior gear was all dps for the most part with a very small bit being good for tanks) had a good enough tank set to tank 4 horsemen. All warrior tier pieces had defense stats on it so any warrior who was gearing up had tank stats baked into his gear and just had to swap around a few pieces from pure dps to tank and semi under geared tanks could tank on this just fine. So unless you actually have first hand experience please keep your opinions to yourself since they're just a complete fantasy that you made up.

So much of this game has changed that people just don't know what it was like to play back then and the limitations people had. There were no smart heals where you push a button and you aoe heal the entire raid. If the raid took a massive damage pulse then you had healers single target healing the raid up with down ranked spells. Also who here even knows what the 5 second rule is? Is there any healer here who remembers having to coordinate with other healers to stagger your heals during patchwerk and that if heals happened at the same time instead of staggered the tank would usually die? No, everyone here just randomly clicks random people and spams heals with a 50-75% over heal rate and backed up by a crazy mana regen + cool downs. A lot of people use heroism now a days to get through the hard part of a fight. They have raid healing cooldowns to rotate to mitigate burst damage. There was none of that. It was people being smart and avoiding damage or dying. It was dps having to leave the boss to go bandage themselves to save healer mana. People who didn't pay attention tended to be dead people. Standing in the fire usually meant you died not stood in there for 5 seconds and let your massive HP pool drain a bit and then get out. Anyone who raided in naxx40 and says that it was easy back then is either delusional or lying about the fact that they were there... and trying to compare naxx 40 with naxx 25 and thinking you know whats up is like buying a calculator and saying you have gaming PC.

[Deleted]

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I do not agree.
Bad players is NOT a mechanic of the fight. This thread is about the question if 4H was the hardest fight. No it was not - one may have struggled on it a lot more, but that doesn't make the fight itself harder.
Also raid cooldowns and the new utilities that expansions have introduced, do not make the fights easier. Fights are balanced around these --> it's not like you cheat a fight by using those. This new stuff introduced personal responsibility and also encouraged planned usage of those.

[Shandas]

Meh, i remember wanding whenever i ran out of mana and rotating healers because you got zero mana unless you stopped casting. Ofc i cant comment on 4horsemen since my guild only killed 4-5 bosses in 40man naxx. I had quite happily forgotten all about mana oil and nature resist gear for Aq ;( What i do remember though is getting hitgear for mc'ing on instructor in naxx 40 I loved that fight.

[Outofmana]

let me preface this by saying I did not raid in vanilla. I started in karazhan.

just because a fight doesn't have reflexively used extra action buttons, or borderline platforming skills involved, doesn't mean it's any easier. people that keep saying these fights weren't that hard mechanically just do not understand that they didn't NEED to be mechanically hard when just playing your character at 80% efficiency due to mana constraints, or spell limitations (melee range taunt that can miss/resist for example), ZERO raid cooldowns for oh shit moments, was hard enough. Add the fact that there weren't many widely known class guides like there are now, as well as the mechanics not being displayed for everyone to see on a dungeon journal, and maybe you can begin to see what made it hard. Add to that the fact that the encounters were balanced around spammed potions/resist gear/silly little flame caps and stuff for 40 (FORTY) people and it becomes a little overwhelming.

If you set these facts aside and say they don't matter, you're missing the whole point. These things made it harder.

Instead of continuing to make logistical challenges and tight enrage timers and limiting individual effectiveness, blizzard decided to exacerbate individual one-person-fucks-up-kill-the-whole-raid mechanics.

Finnaly someone who gets it, it was the whole picture, not just 'lol have 8 tanks and gg'. People like Sorindor who claim that it was that easy while not even having played vanilla should really log a healer on a private realm and try to keep up a group, I bet they can't. Healers these days don't even know what real mana management is anymore. The fact that you went for 3/4 seconds without a heal doesn't mean healers didn't have shit to do, they were desperately trying to get a tick of mana while communicating with other healers so the tank wouldn't die in the meantime. Naxx being hard on the damage meant reverting to mp5 and chainpotting because you didn't have time for the 5second rule. (The only people that had time for it were the shitty 'spirit priests' , who healed for nothing but didn't have to chainpot, gz guys, gkick).
Pretty sad that the manabar has basicly turned into an energy bar, making the healer-job so much easier.

I admit I personally always was like, lol if we go back vanilla now, it will be SO easy. Well I did try a pvt realm to try healing again (and to be the pro again, "would be so easy !") and it hit me like a brick wall, you just cannot imagine the difficulty if you don't try it yourself. the things that you have to keep in mind, even casting 1 spell too many hurts. I thought it would be so much easier being 8 years further but it was just as much of a pain as back then.

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Meh, i remember wanding whenever i ran out of mana and rotating healers because you got zero mana unless you stopped casting. Ofc i cant comment on 4horsemen since my guild only killed 4-5 bosses in 40man naxx. I had quite happily forgotten all about mana oil and nature resist gear for Aq ;( What i do remember though is getting hitgear for mc'ing on instructor in naxx 40 I loved that fight.

And still the damn MC broke 1 second after :P

[kosechi]

why has no one mentioned the stupidity of resist fights yet?

[Dazzy]

I don't raid mop-wise so I'm just gonna quote cata but could you explain how heroic morchok or ultraxion are harder than twins or c'thun ? Cause from where I stand they definitely have far easier mechanics

You're comparing the two easiest heroic bosses in the last 5 tiers. Heroic rag vs twins or cthun? No debate. Twins really? Clearly you didn't raid back then, twins was the heroic ultrax of vanilla. It was not hard, people made it sound hard with all their whinging about having to run 50 yards every 60 seconds.
As many others have said 4 Horseman was NOT hard. It was not even hard to find 8 tanks. Servers were alive back then, people knew who could kill it, or had a chance to. We never had any trouble filling in tanks when it was necessary. Getting 40 competent people online at once was the only hard part.

Mechanics wise, there haven't been anything I would call "hard", nothing that the above average player couldn't do with pretty minimal effort, avoid stuff, stand in stuff, hit a keybind at a certain point etc. Finding competent people is the only truly hard boss in wow.