Lich King 25HC toughest boss in WoW History?

[Deleted]

4hm was pretty damn hard 2!

No it was not hard.

It just required 8 warriors all with the taunt set bonus.

That does not make it hard.

[Deleted]

Took longer to kill =! Harder

Nearly all Classic Bosses in this list took so long to kill because they were UNKILLABLE until Blizzard made some Bugfixes and then they fell after a few days or even hours.
There were no things like PTR or Feedback-Tools for Players at this time. Only the fights Naxx40 were killable from Day 1 though so this was the first properly tuned instance. Of course Sapphiron was kind of a contentblocker because you had to farm all the Frost Resistance Gear first. Still fights took a long time to kill because even Hardcore Guilds at that time werent THAT hardcore as they are today... even the best 40man Raids had lots of bad people in it, raiding schedules even for hardcore guilds were quite "normal" with raids only in the evening for 5-6 hours and people in general weren't that great at raiding at this time.

Same goes for a lot of the early TBC Bosses in TK and SSC... the Fights were buggy and overtuned like hell (and overtuned isnt hard, its just abilities that for example onehit someone and you cant do anything). The Bosses were either killed with exploits or shortly after being hotfixed. You have to know that in theory you could enter Black Temple and Mount Hyjal from Day 1 of TBC if you managed to kill Kaelthas and Vashj... of course the Instances weren't even finished at that time so Blizzard had to make the Bosses pretty much unkillable to later make them killable with a hotfix after finishing the Instances.

So the "real" Top 10 list would rather look like this: (again not the hardest but what fight took the longest to beat "legit")

#1 Yogg-Saron, Alone in the Darkness - 70 days from Stars' first pull. 7th July 2009
#2 The Four Horsemen - 56 days from Gothik's death to D&T's kill. August 25th 2006
#3 The Lich King (Heroic 25) - 42 Days from Heroic Putricide's death (first pull). March 26th 2010
#4 Heroic Al'Akir 25 - 36 days from Heroic Conclave of Wind's death. January 22nd 2011.
#5 Magtheridon - 29 days from the first level 70 25-man raid. 24th February 2007
#6 Loatheb - 14 days from Heigan's death. 17th July 2006
#6 tied Heigan the Unclean - 13 days from Noth the Plaguebringer's death. 3rd July 2006
#8 tied Hydross the Unstable <Duke of Currents> - 13 days from Gruul's death (Unlocking Serpentshrine). 16th February 2007
#9 tied Heroic Cho'gall - 13 days from Heroic Ascendant Council's death. 15th January 2011.
#9 tied Heroic Nefarian - 13 days from Heroic Atramedes' death. January 9th 2011.
(#11 Archimonde <The Defiler> - 10 days from Azgalor's death. 9th June 2007)

1.Yogg+0 surely was hard but lots of guilds didnt even bother to try him at first because everybody thought it was unkillable. Moreover you should rather count the time from Algalons death to Yogg+0 Death which would "only" be 1 month.
2. 4 Horsemen was kind of contentblocker because you had to bring 8 Warriors and most of them had to have T3 5pc (or was it 3pc?) to realistically kill him. Moreover Naxx40 didnt have a linear progressionpath, iirc pretty much all guilds went to kill Loatheb after killing Gothik. So you rather have to count the time from Loatheb to 4h which again would be much shorter.
3. LK HC definately is one of the hardest fights ever, but it only took so long because of the "Limited Trys" Mechanic. Otherwise he would have been killed much earlier.
4. Alakir same problem as a lot of other fights in contents without linear progression... people simply went on to clear BWD/BoT first after killing Conclave which was kinda freeloot. Alakir itself wasnt that hard.
5. I'm not sure about this boss anymore... maybe he was unkillable at first too, i dont remember.
6. Loatheb is legit, but Heigan only took so long because Noth was one of the first bosses you killed in Naxx40 and most guilds went to Kill Meaxxna and Thaddius first before returning to Plaguewing.
8. First Gruul kill was an exploit iirc so most guilds actually reached SSC much later. Boss wasnt hard as such.
9. Non-Linear progression!
11. Legit.

So in the end the bosses that took the longest actually would actually be: 4H, Yogg+0, LK HC, Loatheb, Archimonde.

On Topic: Hardest Fights:
1. Ragnaros HC
2. 4H (Classic)
3. LK HC
4. Yogg+0
5. Muru

[spekkiebig]

Ahhh finaly a man who has experienced the same as I did... SUPER hardcore Vanilla! No fucking addons like today.. I used stopwatch on example sons of flames... Alot of people today only focus Ilvl and shit! I remember the time having a few blue/uncommon was OMG YOU ARE PRO!....
THOSE WERE THE DAYS!
Farming for MONTHS/Years after Forors compendium! to get Quel!
Controling 40 people, doing 20man like ZG / RoAQ and be SUPER happy when taking down bosses and get some blue SUPER cool items... Using hours on trash! HAHA!
Now everything is epix.. Why the hell cant they make them Uncommon/ a few rare.. just increase ilvl...
UBRS was 15man, scholo/strat 10... We needed to work hard! Today kids dont know SHIT! Have been playing WOW since the start, seeing how people FREAKS out if you have to low ilvl just makes me sad... As i always say...
**Gear is obtainable, skills only to a certain level!**
I would 100000times more have a undergeared skilled raider, than a full geared decent player... Since items are SO easy to obtain to the one who lack items... THEN we will see who tops dmgmeter with equal gear!
OMG KIDS THESE DAYS!

BTW C'thun was the badest mofo ever... 4hm was pretty damn hard 2!

Vanilla was just more of a grind, nothing to do with hard (and no, bugged bosses arent difficult, they are bugged).
I actually like raiding in mop a lot better then in vanilla or BC, bosses are more complex now and there is generally more to do (and less skillless grinding needed to sustain raiding)

[Deleted]

People today do not know what difficult raiding is.

Stack the correct resistance.
One-shot the boss.
Difficult raiding.

Mind you, I didn't raid vanilla... But from what I have heard and understood, vanilla was just one very large and very slow gear curve. Four Horsemen being a great example, you needed what was it? 8 tanks? fully geared. You got exceptionally few loot drops from each boss kill, which was once or twice a week. The loot tables were rather large as well, so the chance of you getting the 16 pieces you needed to gear all those 8 tanks would be as near to 0% as anything has ever been.
Furthermore, it was a resistance check, which is just another word for gear check. You needed the right gear on your entire raid and almost everything would simply fall flat and spill the tiny tiny amount of loot that approx 7% of the raid would come to enjoy. Assuming you'd use every single item that was dropped and never disenchant.

Difficult raiding.

Having a raid going without any of the 40 people falling asleep, having a heartattack, going awol or being simply bad (or high as a kite).

Yes. Rose-tinted glasses people! Speaking of which, I gotta agree.. My rotation in Sunwell days was the most challenging ever. First I'd shadow bolt, then I'd shadow bolt... then I'd start over. .. Naaaat.

Difficult raiding.

[Delekii]

From a mechanical standpoint, you're absolutely right. But you didn't have to spend weeks farming Nature Resist gear for 40 raid members (or at least the 20 or so who stood closest to the boss) Lei'Shen and STILL risk dying in a few seconds when the poison spray starts. Huhuran required extreme preparation that is no longer in the game (thank god for that) and quite a bit of healer precision and raid positioning. It's not quite the tank and spank that the video makes it out to be.

This is a lot of the problem with the argument; a lot of people see difficult and laborious as synonymous - they aren't. "Extreme preparation" is not a factor that indicates difficulty; just time investment. It's like saying mining is hard because it takes time to level - no, it isn't.

[Belisaurio]

Just no, MC rag was a joke tbh along with every other boss in MC. People were extremely new to the game + long graveyard walks back to instance.

Yeah, and that made the boss more difficult than others with more hard mechanics. So, yes, I found harder to beat the old good Raggy than other Heroic Bosses.

The high end raiding became streamlined as much as anything else in the game:
Threat became a non issue
You don't need to spend weeks on farming specific sets of gear just to start attempting a boss
You don't need to have x number of class y because of z mechanic, pretty much everyone has access to everything and such mechanics are generally not introduced anymore
DPS doesn't have to worry about mana at all
Healers don't have to worry about mana to some extent
Dungeon journal displaying everything about boss fights

+1.
The hardest boss could be one with: low number of attempts to beat him, gear check with resist gear/farm mats,with a composition raid that guilds are not used to have (more tanks/healers or whatever) with hard mechanics to maintain mana (from dps/healers), high skills needed for all 40 players, and no journal to spoil (leaks can do that, but whatever...), and some reputations/faction items needed to advance his different phases.

The bosses from this days have only one point.

[vizzle]

Why exactly is it useless? The op asked for "proof" that other bosses were harder. This list clearly demonstrates other bosses took longer to kill and were thus more difficult to kill for whatever reason. How would you provide this proof?

And yes, different guilds found different things difficult, but a world first is a world first, it shows how fast whoever the best players at the time were to kill something, which equalises the 'different guilds find things easier/harder' issue.

That isn't proof at all. This shouldn't even have to be explained; the list is ridiculous. There's a reason why the list is filled with bosses from a time when WoW was a clusterfuck of imbalances and bugs.

[Angelicat]

I really feel like everyone is just saying hard fights are purely fights you beat based on your ability to manuever or execute a strategy. Let's face it, WoW isn't an FPS or MOBA where you need good apm/reflexes to do well in. It's an MMORPG, and like every other MMORPG before and after it, gear is a huge part of how hard a fight is. A lot of fights back in the day had a gear requirement to be beaten, and that has been slowly changing to not be true.

I don't feel that is a good change at all. Sure, beating a fight because you are good at not standing in fire is cool and all, but with the mechanics in place today that allow some of the top guilds to make gear a non-factor by either running multiple raids and/or stacking FOTM classes that do well on certain fights, they are able to bypass the single most important thing about playing an RPG - the gear. This is not something that was all that possible back in the day and made raiding more difficult as well. Gear progression is the lifeline of an RPG, and taking that out (or at least making it easier to acquire gear or being a bare minimum) removes a lot of the "difficulty", imo.

So sure, fights are harder now due to complex mechanics, but at the same time they are easier in the sense that you are "geared enough" for a new fight you first encounter as long as you follow the progression path, regardless of if it's the end boss of a heroic or not.

Think of it this way - every boss now can be beat if your gear is well above it (look how faceroll last expansion's content is now), regardless of how "complex" the fight is short of one shot mechanics. Can you say the same for bosses being beaten if you were doing heroic garrosh in say, 510 gear?

[Deleted]

Hardest boss was the last boss in Uldum in Vanilla WoW

[Deleted]

That isn't proof at all. This shouldn't even have to be explained; the list is ridiculous. There's a reason why the list is filled with bosses from a time when WoW was a clusterfuck of imbalances and bugs.

Agreed
The list is largely bull.
Just because you gather alot of numbers and dates doesn't make it even remotely accurate. I'm sure if you really really wanted to you could find that it took more effort and time to build a 1 story house with 3 rooms, than it did the great wall of china.

It's just a poorly listed and thus missinterpreted list of dates.

In all seriousness though, Pre-fix (aka Nerf) Lady Vashj was the hardest boss without anything coming close (except maybe broken C'thun.. but I guess that's disqualified).

[Lethora]

playing alliance mean't you had no bloodlust/heroism.

I can see you never played Vanilla. Because TBC introduced BL/Hero alongside with alliance shaman.
Go tell your fairy tales somewhere else.

[Alvito]

I think yes. Nobody kill him before 5% nerf hit so yes.

That is only due to the limited amount of attempts on him per week.

- - - Updated - - -

What i mean't was that there was no heroism to use. I had mean't to write no shamans in allaince and no heroism.

Good luck digging out of that hole. You jumped the gun on things you don't really know about. Why mention BL at all? Why not mention no group feasts, better flasks and things like that if you really just meant to bring up things the game didn't have then.

[JudgePayne]

I can see you never played Vanilla. Because TBC introduced BL/Hero alongside with alliance shaman.
Go tell your fairy tales somewhere else.

It is funny because if you managed to read on, you would see that I explained my post in more detail. I am in work atm and had to type fast.

- - - Updated - - -

Good luck digging out of that hole. You jumped the gun on things you don't really know about.

Dig Dig Dig, one bad post due to boss walking into the office. Guess I'll keep digging

[ebah]

Took longer to kill =! Harder

Nearly all Classic Bosses in this list took so long to kill because they were UNKILLABLE until Blizzard made some Bugfixes and then they fell after a few days or even hours.
There were no things like PTR or Feedback-Tools for Players at this time. Only the fights Naxx40 were killable from Day 1 though so this was the first properly tuned instance. Of course Sapphiron was kind of a contentblocker because you had to farm all the Frost Resistance Gear first. Still fights took a long time to kill because even Hardcore Guilds at that time werent THAT hardcore as they are today... even the best 40man Raids had lots of bad people in it, raiding schedules even for hardcore guilds were quite "normal" with raids only in the evening for 5-6 hours and people in general weren't that great at raiding at this time.

Same goes for a lot of the early TBC Bosses in TK and SSC... the Fights were buggy and overtuned like hell (and overtuned isnt hard, its just abilities that for example onehit someone and you cant do anything). The Bosses were either killed with exploits or shortly after being hotfixed. You have to know that in theory you could enter Black Temple and Mount Hyjal from Day 1 of TBC if you managed to kill Kaelthas and Vashj... of course the Instances weren't even finished at that time so Blizzard had to make the Bosses pretty much unkillable to later make them killable with a hotfix after finishing the Instances.

So the "real" Top 10 list would rather look like this: (again not the hardest but what fight took the longest to beat "legit")

#1 Yogg-Saron, Alone in the Darkness - 70 days from Stars' first pull. 7th July 2009
#2 The Four Horsemen - 56 days from Gothik's death to D&T's kill. August 25th 2006
#3 The Lich King (Heroic 25) - 42 Days from Heroic Putricide's death (first pull). March 26th 2010
#4 Heroic Al'Akir 25 - 36 days from Heroic Conclave of Wind's death. January 22nd 2011.
#5 Magtheridon - 29 days from the first level 70 25-man raid. 24th February 2007
#6 Loatheb - 14 days from Heigan's death. 17th July 2006
#6 tied Heigan the Unclean - 13 days from Noth the Plaguebringer's death. 3rd July 2006
#8 tied Hydross the Unstable <Duke of Currents> - 13 days from Gruul's death (Unlocking Serpentshrine). 16th February 2007
#9 tied Heroic Cho'gall - 13 days from Heroic Ascendant Council's death. 15th January 2011.
#9 tied Heroic Nefarian - 13 days from Heroic Atramedes' death. January 9th 2011.
(#11 Archimonde <The Defiler> - 10 days from Azgalor's death. 9th June 2007)

1.Yogg+0 surely was hard but lots of guilds didnt even bother to try him at first because everybody thought it was unkillable. Moreover you should rather count the time from Algalons death to Yogg+0 Death which would "only" be 1 month.
2. 4 Horsemen was kind of contentblocker because you had to bring 8 Warriors and most of them had to have T3 5pc (or was it 3pc?) to realistically kill him. Moreover Naxx40 didnt have a linear progressionpath, iirc pretty much all guilds went to kill Loatheb after killing Gothik. So you rather have to count the time from Loatheb to 4h which again would be much shorter.
3. LK HC definately is one of the hardest fights ever, but it only took so long because of the "Limited Trys" Mechanic. Otherwise he would have been killed much earlier.
4. Alakir same problem as a lot of other fights in contents without linear progression... people simply went on to clear BWD/BoT first after killing Conclave which was kinda freeloot. Alakir itself wasnt that hard.
5. I'm not sure about this boss anymore... maybe he was unkillable at first too, i dont remember.
6. Loatheb is legit, but Heigan only took so long because Noth was one of the first bosses you killed in Naxx40 and most guilds went to Kill Meaxxna and Thaddius first before returning to Plaguewing.
8. First Gruul kill was an exploit iirc so most guilds actually reached SSC much later. Boss wasnt hard as such.
9. Non-Linear progression!
11. Legit.

So in the end the bosses that took the longest actually would actually be: 4H, Yogg+0, LK HC, Loatheb, Archimonde.

On Topic: Hardest Fights:
1. Ragnaros HC
2. 4H (Classic)
3. LK HC
4. Yogg+0
5. Muru

This, the some old bosses just were bugged or required insane gear to kill.

Ragnaros hc were hardest boss what i killed before nerfs. Started raiding hardcore in wotlk, so dont have much to say about earlier raids since i raided them in normal 1k~ world rank guilds.

[Deleted]

LK 25s difficulty is overrated due to the pacing mechanism of only allowing 50 attempts per week on the boss. It took 6 weeks to kill, but that was in actuality only ~325 wipes. Had there been no limitation on attempts a serious raiding guild would go through that in a couple of days learning a boss. So the real difficulty of LK was the limited attempts mechanic, which was total bullshit.

So wrong and no reroll ... U SURE ?

I remember the first kill of LK and one of their Warlock was a reroll. LK have been killed ONCE without the debuff, only by Paragon.

[Vaelorian]

For me personally it was The Lich King heroic 25. Ultimately I gave up and unsubbed. This was like 5 months before Cata or something.

It wasn't the difficulty that made me quit though. I was just fed up with doing the same routine over and over just to get to The Lich King. Sure it was one raidnight to get there and perhaps do a few tries, but it was horridly boring to get there. We had done it so many times already and also on normal ofcourse.

I seriously got burned out. So I quit. And since The Lich King was my ultimate goal to down and the downing on normal (cinematic) was already terribly anticlimatic imo (he gets to say 2 lines? There is no trace of Arthas there at all? No remorse? Sure we destroyed his heart but... anyway it was just not what I had expected at all).

I was done and did not return until Cata.

[Angelicat]

So wrong and no reroll ... U SURE ?

I remember the first kill of LK and one of their Warlock was a reroll. LK have been killed ONCE without the debuff, only by Paragon.

No one killed it without the buff, Paragon was the only guild to kill it with the 5% buff.

All the gated mechanic meant was that guilds could gear up and come back. It's not like learning the fight itself was tough besides defile. Having the DPS for valks and beating the enrage was tough as well, all stuff the buff (and gearing up due to gating) helped with.

300 attempts is also nothing to scoff at and that was one guild. The top guilds in the world took a 100-150 attempts more or so, and those who killed it at 15% a lot more.

[Breccia]

Of the bosses I was actually around for, I remember H Ragnaros being quite the stumbling block at level.

EDIT: Reading the other posts, maybe it was good I wasn't around for Vanilla. Raiding against literally unkillable bosses...

[Ichifails]

No one killed it without the buff, Paragon was the only guild to kill it with the 5% buff.

All the gated mechanic meant was that guilds could gear up and come back. It's not like learning the fight itself was tough besides defile. Having the DPS for valks and beating the enrage was tough as well, all stuff the buff (and gearing up due to gating) helped with.

300 attempts is also nothing to scoff at and that was one guild. The top guilds in the world took a 100-150 attempts more or so, and those who killed it at 15% a lot more.

You could disable the buff. They went in after the first kill and killed it without any buff.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ll-by-Paragon/
With the 5% buff on March 26-ish.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPd0A6iGBSg
Part 1 of the 0% kill uploaded on July 31.

[Hyve]

#1 Ouro - 87 days from the Twin Emperors' death. 26th April 2006.
#2 C'thun - 86 days from the Twin Emperors' death. 25th April 2006.

Ouro was optional, and so of course was going to take a lot longer to kill because there was no real reason to go and try him. Along with that, C'thun was also mathematically impossible to defeat. There is a difference between being unable to kill the boss due to skill, and the fact that your gear simply won't allow it because of a severe lack of tuning.

Even Chromaggus had some tuning problems and difficulties. I'd honestly say the only major boss in your top 5 list that could be there is Ragnaros.

Besides all of this, remember that the community has grown, and while tools to help us defeat encounters and prepare for them have improved immensely, so has the overall role, and requirements of each individual raider.