Why the mid tier boss usually harder than the last?

[Velshin]

Hey everyone, why do you think the mid tier raid bosses are usually harder than the last bosses of the WoW expansions?

Of course I'm talking when the raid content was relevant and the latest. Here some examples:

TBC: Kael'thas was way harder and tougher than illidan and KJ which is why he was called the guilds breaker.


Wotlk: Yogg saron 25 zero light was way tougher than LK hc 25 (Although LK hc was not push over at all).


Cata: Ragnaros Firelands 25 heroic pre nerf geyser flame sure hell more diffcult than Madness and spine heroic.


MoP: I'm pretty sure a lot of people will agree that Lei Shen 25 heroic was harder than Garrosh heroic 25.

Thanks for reading folks and discuss please.


NOTE: I'm talking about mythic diffculty of some of these encounters known as heroic in the old days.

[Nilinor]

Last I checked, Spine was hardest, it had more attempts before the first kill than ragnaros did, by a large margin. I agree with the rest though.

[Velshin]

Last I checked, Spine was hardest, it had more attempts before the first kill than ragnaros did, by a large margin. I agree with the rest though.

I remember a lot of folks agreed that Ragnaros heroic 25 FL was considered even the hardest heroic boss in WoW history I remember it took Paragon guild something like 300 wipes before finally killing him I can't remember I might be wrong but yeah something like that.

[Soloz]

Technically Lick King was never killed first without the buff, not until people were over geared for it did they turn the buff off to kill it.

[Octa]

I remember a lot of folks agreed that Ragnaros heroic 25 FL was considered even the hardest heroic boss in WoW history I remember it took Paragon guild something like 300 wipes before finally killing him I can't remember I might be wrong but yeah something like that.

Think it was 550 before Paragon got Ragnaros.

[Mahourai]

What point of comparison are you making? Number of wipes? How long the boss stayed up? Reports from top guilds? The eye test? Hitting the bong and then thinking about it very hard?

Bosses can't reliably be compared in difficulty beyond very vague hand-wavy assessments even if they're in the same dungeon, much less if they're in different tiers or different expansions. There is no metric for encounter difficulty. I disagree with several of your assessments (Kael'thas being more difficult than Kil'jaeden being the most ridiculous) but it's just kind of approximating it in any case.

[Velshin]

What point of comparison are you making? Number of wipes? How long the boss stayed up? Reports from top guilds? The eye test? Hitting the bong and then thinking about it very hard?

Bosses can't reliably be compared in difficulty beyond very vague hand-wavy assessments even if they're in the same dungeon, much less if they're in different tiers or different expansions. There is no metric for encounter difficulty. I disagree with several of your assessments (Kael'thas being more difficult than Kil'jaeden being the most ridiculous) but it's just kind of approximating it in any case.

Tactics wise specially the more recent expansions bosses like Raggy FL hc and Lei Shen hc 25.

[seam]

Honestly, I think it's cause they base it more on a tier by tier basis, not expansion by expansion. At least since Wrath, where it wasn't so much "YOU HAVE TO DO T1/4, THEN T2/5, THEN T3/6!" due to a few reasons, including catchup mechanics.

And when it's not the last boss, it's likely an oversight(M'uru, Spine) where they're mostly focused on making sure the last boss is hard, but doable....and woops the guy before him was damn near impossible!

[Mahourai]

Tactics wise specially the more recent expansions bosses like Raggy FL hc and Lei Shen hc 25.

This doesn't make for any kind of valid comparison though.

[Deleted]

LK was by far the hardest in WotLK.

[NickCageFanatic]

WotLK data is skewed because only ~1% of all raiders even got to attempt Yogg 25 man. Ulduar was the biggest achievement and fail Blizzard has ever made. Spending so much time on a raid so few got to see the second half of.

Spine was definitely harder than Raggy as people needed to class stack legendary mages and rogues just to down it pre nerf. The rest of the guilds needed a 5%-15% nerf to get past it.

I'd say Lei Shen and Garry were equal as not a single raider could make a single mistake in those fights during progression and for the better part of farm until you really outgeared it.

[Tokru]

I don't think Kael'thas was harder than everything else in TBC as well as I don't think Yogg 0 lights was harder than LK.

On the rest I can't comment because I never did Deathwing or SoO.

[Deleted]

LK actually was the hardest bosss in form of tuning.

No one killed him in HC before buff. or without using exploit, grenades *wink*wink*

Mid tier is always hard reason is after first two raids, like BRF is that the first instance is hard then next becomes easy as hell due to tuning.

We will have same thing in BRF guilds will run over BRF like a party(most bosses)

while the raid after that might be a blocker.

This is due to ilvl things and tuning among other things.

HM was tuned well i think problem was the crafting and the abuse of alts and buying items.

if that would never been in the game, no guild would never killed Imperator during first mythic lock, not sure even if butcher would been able to be killed.

and i like crafting, but imo crafting should stick to recipie drops from instances that you craft for yourself that is BoP.

About rag and spine i cannot talk about didnt play cata nor MoP, just came back from wotlk.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't think Kael'thas was harder than everything else in TBC as well as I don't think Yogg 0 lights was harder than LK.

On the rest I can't comment because I never did Deathwing or SoO.

Kaelthas pre nerf was hard as hell, hell imo along all bosses i think he is the hardest boss blizz released with tuning. and such of all bosses.
there is a reason guilds where stuck on him for so long

[Deleted]

I don't think they base stuff on difficulty just because it's the big bad guy of an expansion, they base it on end of tier, which is fine imo. As long as the fight isn't a massive joke (lol 25h Madness) it doesn't particularly bother me.

Out of everything I've done, 25hc Lei Shen & Ragnaros (before he was gutted by a slew of nerfs) are probably the hardest bosses ever released, atleast imo. 25h Garrosh was easier than Paragons before they were nerfed. I don't think Spine was particularly hard, just incredibly overtuned. If you had the Classes to dps the Tendon in 2 lift phases it wasn't that hard. I still stick to my opinion on 25h LK that it was only considered difficult because of limited attempts, iirc it only took most of the top guilds like 100-150 pulls.

As for Kael'thas, he was incredibly broken until the BT patch released, no guilds managed to kill him before that because of incredibly stupid it was, tuning wise and bug wise. Same goes for Vashj, she was absolutely ridiculous and I believe most guilds that managed to kill her before she was fixed used a lot of sketchy stuff (hi 500k revenge crit) to kill her, I know Method is one of the few guilds that had a legitimate kill, but they had every single world buff (onyxia, ZG, crit buff from Ferelas etc) stacked just for attempts.

Can't comment on yogg+0, never tried it whilst it was relevant for the few months Ulduar was current content.

[Malefic]

WotLK data is skewed because only ~1% of all raiders even got to attempt Yogg 25 man. Ulduar was the biggest achievement and fail Blizzard has ever made. Spending so much time on a raid so few got to see the second half of.

Spine was definitely harder than Raggy as people needed to class stack legendary mages and rogues just to down it pre nerf. The rest of the guilds needed a 5%-15% nerf to get past it.

I'd say Lei Shen and Garry were equal as not a single raider could make a single mistake in those fights during progression and for the better part of farm until you really outgeared it.

Spine wasn't as hard as Ragnaros at all. If it wasn't for the class requirements for tendons it would have been the easiest fight in the instance.

[Nitros14]

Lich King wasn't mechanically overwhelmingly difficult, one hard phase with the Val'kyr+Defile combo. It was just tuned exceedingly ridiculously and demanded perfect disc priests for infest. (Not like Alone in the Darkness 25 which needed five hunters to simultaneously distracting shot 5 different adds in a pile of 40 of them to different places around the room all 20 yards from eachother and 20 yards from Yogg-Saron with down to the second timing).

It's the combination of numbers and mechanics that make an encounter challenging. If we're just going by numbers Lich King is pretty high up there, but so is Loatheb 40 which was basically undoable without world buffs when guilds got to him.

Kael'thas was bugged before 2.1 and built aggro on healers in phases 1-3 then ran around one shotting them all (taunt immune) when phase 4 started. He was tough but when you break down what you need to do not too bad, again only VERY hard because of it being tuned tightly and being a very long fight.

- Run from Thaladred, get the advisors tanked in the right part of the room, make sure the conflagrate soaker gets healed, keep the legendary weapon buffs up, burst down his shield and interrupt his pyroblast, have melee break mind controls and kill a slow phoenix add without getting near it then kill its egg. Spread out during gravity lapse.

Nothing here is overwhelmingly hard, but it all needed to be done perfectly over a long period because of numbers tuning.

Ragnaros 25 heroic on the other hand I feel was a truly challenging encounter similar to Yogg-Saron. No matter how you handled the molten elementals in phase 2 you really had to be on the ball. The intermissions demanded quick decisions and perfect stuns and knockbacks. Phase 4 required no one causing a geyser by keeping perfectly spaced, plus three people doing dreadflame perfectly which was not simple.

Garrosh 25 had long periods of not much going on and people kind of hoping the few people with hard jobs got it right. I felt it was a poorly designed encounter, much like Spine of Deathwing.

[Deleted]

I think its very hard to compare just from a tactics pow.

From a tactics pow Tectus is harder then Butcher.

The reaility however is vastly different

[Raiju]

Spine wasn't as hard as Ragnaros at all. If it wasn't for the class requirements for tendons it would have been the easiest fight in the instance.

Except KIN proved you didn't need to get them down in 2 tendons, with the first kill.

What did they do... 3/3/4?

Ragnaros was certainly harder, but spines difficulty was that the west was being stubborn about how to do it. Just like they were with yogg 0.

[Hoofshock]

I felt Kael was only hard because of the fact for a while he was actually unkillable. The fight in itself wasn't that tough, it just took a lot of planning and setting up, followed by everyone's favorite P1.

Mu'ru was harder than Kael IMO.

Heroic Spine is also harder than H Rag by a long shot (though that just be me talking, I healed in Cata.)

[Deleted]

Alone in the darkness doesnt count since its pretty much just an achievement


one light was the hard mode of yogg saron and was NOT harder than LK 25 HC