Recap on WOTLK raids - what was good?

[Gron]

I just want to start a thread and see replies.

While its very easy to hate WOTLK for the constant changing of the raiding system, undertuning the fights, giving out free loot (VOA or FL anyone), but it had its creative bossess too - some new mechanics and ideas we didnt see (or didn't see much) in the past.

I want to give my perspective on what I liked:

Naxxramas 2.0
- Not having seen original Naxxramas, even though we blasted through it, Instructor Razovious was a good fight with MC-ing adds that "instructor" trains to be able to take down boss. That was a cool idea.
- Heigan dance was fun to do. Nothing new, but laughing a lot if someone failed.

Ulduar
This instance really showed that Blizzard can do good stuff if they have to. And they had to, given the large outcry from raiding community on delivering too little, too undertuned for WOTLK. Ulduar was fun - nearly all hardmodes were really-really excellent - straight up to the fight of Algalon, which deserves a special mention due to how great it looks. As you might be tired of ICC, go back - its worth getting to him.
- Auriaya - this boss demanded a very different tactic for defeating her, than usual bossess - her panthers were deadly, and kept the adrenalin flowing for tanks and healers alike. Very well done fight.
- Thorim - Splitting your groups into two, fighting off baddies one way, while another stands its ground in the middle waiting for all to arrive, is a great experience. Phase 2 was a complete different fight. Complex to do by Blizzard, but gets my hat off.
- Mimiron - Four phases, even the normal mode needed some tries to get down - and firefighter was a real hard, bad bad encounter that you will no doubt remember if you done it. Even without hardmode, this was a fun fight - one robot, yet so many ways to fail!
- Vezax - The mana management of this fight was a great concept. If undergeared seemed incredibly hard at first.

ToC
Received the most hate from raiders - mostly due to people becoming sick of looking a circular gray, bland room for so many hours, day after day. However it wasn't too bad from raid boss design:
- Northrend Beasts - Fun in this fight was to get through the 3 beasts. Good finally we didn't have to fight just one boss for loot.
- Faction Champions - Really great idea to fight faction champs of other side. Loads of tough cookies if you didn't have the right strategy or some minor PVP skills.

ICC
Final raid, 13 bosses. What I will likely remember is
- Valitharia - Healing up an NPC to win the fight is great idea. More variations like this, please!
- Blood-Queen - Turning your raiders into vampires is a great concept, also nicely done as DPS race on heroic.

As said, this is not measuring the fights from an "epicness" perspective, but new ideas in the raids (out of the over 50+ bossess we have seen - many have had features used from the past). These bossess I liked due to bringing something new. What about you?

[PrettyBiased]

Sorry OP but you don't get to praise WOTLK for anything you found in naxx, it's all recycled.


As far as everything else Ulduar had it semi good, not every boss had a hard mode but those who did were generally rather fun, Algalon as a hard mode only boss was a superb idea I wish they carried it through ToC and ICC.

[Lynalis]

Ulduar was plain awesome as a raid, atmosphere, fight designs, hard modes being really mechanics changing. ToGC is retarded. LK is epic. Naxx is, naxx.

[piggyahoyhoy]

Ulduar was cool, after wiping on razorscale when i first went in, i said 'this is way better than Naxx.
Haven't done a huge amount of icc, but Dreamwalker and gunship are both fun.

[Deleted]

God save Ulduar. Awesome instance. You will be missed.

[Sovietcake]

naxx was fun, yes was recycled but nice to see old content back again, ulduar was great, and toc was just to easy i think

[Traejun]

Naxx: A little undertuned - and that led to it being farmable inside the first month of the expansion. The Naxx era was one of boredom for most true raiding guilds b/c they'd mastered the place too quickly, and without hard modes, didn't have anything else to keep them busy. I enjoyed the place personally, even though it was recycled. I liked the classic versions, so I liked this one too.

OS was fun to do for a while, and the +1/2/3 versions were very challenging during 3.0. EoE was srs bznss and the bane of PuGs...even today. VoA doesn't even count as a raid.

Ulduar: Masterfully created raid that brought both unique fights and interesting lore. On the subject of lore, Ulduar didn't really fit into the mythos of this expansion, so I kind of felt like it was out of place. Either way, it was a ton of fun and was VERY challenging even after the nerf. The fact that it didn't really fit didn't mean much to me b/c the raid itself was so good.

ToC: I'm not sure any raid ever got more hate than this one did. The regular version was WOEFULLY undertuned, and the heroic version was probably a little overtuned in spots - especially 25 man Anub, which is still difficult in ICC gear. I think this was Blizzard's way of testing out the "no trash" concept in a full raid rather than a single-boss encounter.

Ony...well...it was nice to go back and off the old girl again. BUT, she didn't really have any place in this expansion, now did she? I get that this was for the 5 year anniversary...but I don't care.

ICC: True end-expansion raid that mostly met expectations. I'd say Sindragosa, professor, and LK lived up to the hype as fun and challenging encounters. the rest of the fights were challenging when we did them without 6000 gearscores for the 17th time. Now, of course, they just don't seem as hard as they did 3 months ago. Either way, I rather enjoyed this raid - and I'm still working hard modes. Anything that can keep me busy for 5 months+ is a good raid as far as I'm concerned. IMO, this is the high point of the expansion.

[Saltypoison]

T7 - I think the highlight for me was probably Malygos. I know many people hated this fight, but I liked the fact that it required more coordination than anything else (with the exception of OS+3).

T8 - I love Ulduar. Piles of achievements, hard modes (mostly) based on gear checks rather than beating the final boss and flipping a switch. Firefighter made my guild learn to work together more than any other fight in the xpac and was great preparation future raids.

T9 - ToC.... Limited attempts suck. Though I will say Faction Champs was a fun fight, if for no other reason than you really had to dig deep in your spell book and dust off some abilities that are normally useless in PvE.

T10 - I've personally enjoyed ICC. The only fight that really annoys me is Sindragosa, due to the RNG on iceblocks in P3. LK is an awesome fight. Tightly tuned, no room for errors, and that first kill got some awesome nerd screams on vent. That'll always be a good memory.

[Deleted]

i like icc, but im kinda casual too

[Powerogue]

naxxramas - rehash, BUT they were smart to do a rehash a lot of people hadn't seen. it was one of the uppermost raids in vanilla, so to most people it was completely new to them! smart, unlike onyxia. (please just give up on the concept of rezzing her again for cata. it's a bad idea.)

ulduar- WHOAAAA!!!! epic, lengthy, every boss varied and interesting. lore, scenery, battle! my only complaint is i was never able to find a group that could get to yogg-saron, and i'm told that part is really epic. :-\

TOC- the raid was pretty lame. the end would've been cool if this was the initial debut of anub'arak. we fought him twice in the same expansion, which was just pitiful. like Kael'thas setback pitiful. :

ICC- very, very nice. i like the slow scaling up in damage instead of all at once nerfing like what happened just before wrath of the lich king to the BC instances. feeling of epicness from all the bosses. this + ulduar + the leveling up experience were my favorite parts of the expansion.

[phys]

Best time I had in WOTLK was during Ulduar. Me and my guild did it twice a week for ??? hours. We only progressed to Mimiron but personally it was the thing I looked foward to every week.

What you would hear on vent an average Ulduar night
Levi: you are being pursued : A sustained for the duration of the pursue "AAAAAHH!!!"
Razorscale: o fucking...who started it this time?
XT: FUCKIGN STOP IT!! -The hunter we just gravity pulled into the deadzone of XT.
Kologarn: el oh el guise im getting a han job
Iron council: FAALCCON PUNNCCHH
Hodir trash: LEEEERRROYYYYY
Freya trash: errghh.... Release, run back.
Freya: "micelanious screaming"
Mimiron: Doing laps around the bomb bot frogger, pressing the button. Etc.

ICC I'm currently doing 9/12 HM 25, not enjoying it at all...

hahahah you just described my EXACT experiences in Ulduar also. hahaha

[Rëtribution]

RIP Ulduar, I will miss you

[Gron]

I hope Blizzard reverses its statements, like "Ulduar was too hard, we will not do such like that in Cataclysm".

I agree with Ulduar being the height of raids in WOTLK - but also that Lich King is a great encounter to experience.

[Daemonis]

Naxx was my first ever raid, I loved it.

Just a shame that you out-gear it by miles nowadays so people rarely run it :-[

Though this will change when my Druid hits 80 ;D

Ulduar was awesome despite only getting to the Cat Lady.

TotC was meh, haven't tried ICC yet.

[Irony]

Sorry OP but you don't get to praise WOTLK for anything you found in naxx, it's all recycled.

I highly doubt you ever did Naxx 40. Because being stuck on saph for 3 months sucked back in Vanilla, I liked naxx basically because I finally got to finish it.

[knopp]

though i didnt get to try it much the ulduar hard modes were awesome ;P

[Gilian]

I highly doubt you ever did Naxx 40. Because being stuck on saph for 3 months sucked back in Vanilla, I liked naxx basically because I finally got to finish it.

It's still a copied raid from Vanilla.

[kumduh]

Naxx: Fun for about 3 weeks, after that the place was a boring nightmare.

OS: Great instance, quick, easy, and had great hard modes for its time.

Malygos: Yeah....... I liked Magtheradon better, but at least EoE had no trash packs.

Ulduar: Excellent instance for its time. Yogg 0 and Algalon were great fights.

ToC: Good only because you could do it once with your guild on hard mode and once with random pugs in a GDKP run on normal for fat cash. H Anub 25 was actually a challenging fight.

ICC: Great instance with plenty of unique fights. LK hard provides a worthy encounter to be the pinnacle of the expansion. If there was one thing I could change about ICC, it'd be the spider room before Sindragosa, was that seriously needed?

Ruby Sanctum: I'm including this because after having raided it on the PTR, I am quite pleased with the both the difficulty and the fun involved in the fights. Halion is a great encounter and I look forward to seeing the hard mode version of him. I felt like the fire and shadow zones on the ground didn't really do enough damage on normal to be very scary. I remember running through fire without much care. I think the shadow zones were there only to eat my fps to try and get me killed by the spinning beam. Really, they were quite harmless.

So I guess you could say that with the exception of Naxx, I'm pretty pleased with how the expansion turned out.

[FedUp.]

Naxx: The biggest disappointment in WOW-raiding so far. Can't believe they turned a fun instance into a mindless boring piece of turd. Ruined all my good memories of that place

TOC: This place has to be designed by the same guy who did Ring of Valor for arenas. A 10 year old could have done better. Some of the bosses were mildly entertaining I guess. But when you invest so much money and time into something you should atleast make it show somewhere. Thank god they made ICC or I would have been seriously worried.

ICC: Fun instance although some of the boss fights aren't tuned too well. Gunship battle is disappointingly easy.

Got to hate Blizzard nerfing stuff so damn fast as well when hardly any fights require a lot of skill or coordination. They should make the hard modes properly hard and not just the last bosses.

Overall I'd say wotlk hasn't been as anywhere near as good or as fun as vanilla/tbc were.

[Annalife]

Just my opinion of the raids in WOTLK

Naxx: 5/10 (Thought Blizzard did a lame job with this)
Sarth: 7.5/10 (Thought the instance was short but sweet. Liked how you could slowly increase the difficulty using more drakes in the main fight)
Malygos: 7.5/10 (personally i don't like 'vehicle' fights. However this instance required a good amount of skill to complete when it was first released.)
Ulduar: 10/10 (One of my favourite ever raids. Just behind AQ, BWL, BT and Sunwell. Thought it was very well designed, hard modes were awesome and it did feel very 'epic'.)
ToC: 4/10 (One of the games worst raids ever. Only think decent about it was faction champions on hard mode.)
ICC: 8/10 (Personally thought this instance was a bit lame being released in stages. Seemed a way to waste time Blizzard needed for Cata. However some fights are very good and Lich King was pretty epic.

Not a bad expansion overall. However i would have prefered a decent 10/25 man raid in Caverns of Time instead of ToC.