Sunwell Plateau - The best WoW raid to date. Heres why:

[TheyCallMeTarzan]

He stated that very clearly: the DPS race.

To the post:
The Burning Crusade was my favourite too. I loved all the slow gearing up, the attunements through all the raids (untill the removal of those) and the fights. I will say that the Burning Crusade was the best expansion I have played. Yes, the difficulty with some raid bosses and attunements sometimes caused problems, but this difficulty also made success and progress so much more meaningful. At least to me.
I don't like how you almost farm your way through the first couple of bosses today. Taking 2-3 bosses a week and getting the tier end bosses down so fast. I loved when you were either good enough or not good enough. Today the solution is heroic modes. Go kill the same boss, we gave it some steroids. I know this makes raiding possible for everyone, but it kills my experience so badly. It really, really, really kills the excitement for me. It becomes more of a MMO rather than an MMORPG.

Bottom line: Loved BC. And the way things are going now, the game wont reach that epic level again. But that's life. I can like it or find another game. I'm still playing though. Little, but still.

[tashur]

1) It was super difficult. - There was a reason why this raid instance was so difficult. Black temple and Hyjal were supposed to be the end raids of BC, and most consider them to be that, however blizzard knew they needed to give something more to all the guilds who had been in BT and Hyjal for as long as they were. It was getting stale, kinda like how ICC was near the end of WoTLK (except not to the extent that ICC was stale, imo ICC was way over rated and frankly a boring atmosphere compared to BT) The guilds who mastered the content of BT and Hyjal now had something super difficult to finalize the BC raiding experience, and most guilds who were high end raiding guilds, managed to finish the instance just right before wotlk came out. (which is perfect timing imo)

The difficulty of Sunwell is highly overrated. Every boss died to quite a few high end guilds the first week, with the exception of M'uru, where SK had the only first week kill, iirc. Go a few weeks out past the final gate and you've got 30+ world guilds and 11+ US guilds with KJ down.

Compare that to Ulduar or ICC, where the hardest bosses were dramatically harder when progression began on them. Pre-nerf Firefighter probably bears comparing to pre-nerf M'uru, and Yogg0 was a step up from any SWP boss. Likewise, HLK was dramatically harder than any SWP boss. You fast forward to November, and a bunch of people running around with Bane titles talking about how "easy" icc and HLK are, when they beat it with 25m HM gear and a 30% buff... they should go back in time to May and try beating 25hm when the buff was 5%.

That having been said, ICC wasn't a great instance, and HLK wasn't a great fight; there wasn't unavoidable rng but there was a lot of WEIRD rng that amplified the difficultly without adding fun to the fight. (To name two examples, the 2nd defile would sometimes happen before valks, maybe 10% of pulls, and when Valk dps was a big deal at 5% in 25m, that was usually a wipe; also, sometimes when LK was due to Soul Harvest, the tank would blow a CD, and LK would decide to cast something out of order, so the cooldown would end early and you had to have a spare or your tank would probably die. It was totally unpredictable, fairly rare, and just generally dumb. I won't even go into how infuriating having an enraged shambler resist a tranq shot was.)

I think Cata raids are fabulous. There are tons of new mechanics. Few of the heroic modes were trivial. (Note: some of them are pretty easy now, when you're in full raid gear. But progression guilds that were downing hard modes during week #3 will have a different perspective. Halfus heroic is a bit tougher when your average ilvl in raid is like 350.) Even a bunch of the normal modes were amazingly fun if you were doing them early. (Before my old guild broke up, we had the US #4 normal mode Chimaeron, which we got late Friday night the week Cata was out. 3 of 5 people in my party, according to the DF window, were not geared enough to queue for a heroic.)

But here we are, 5 months into Cata, and only ~40 guilds (24 guilds in 25-man) have downed all the content, despite no gating. The progression curve is really smooth.

In terms of flavor, I can concede the Cata raids aren't that great. The mechanics and tuning is really top notch, though. And I hate trash, so the less the better. Thematically, I'd pick Ulduar over SWP. Algalon wasn't much of a fight in terms of mechanics or tuning, but it still stands out as one of the most visually fantastic fights ever. The way the whole instance tied into all the other lore in WotLK was brilliant.

Edit: with respect to the "last week before wrath", there was an entire month post-3.0 after SWP had been nerfed to hell. A guild downing KJ in late October was not a competitive raiding guild.

[shadowlich]

Agree, it was also the last raid before every raid was made into 4 modes(10man,25,10h,25h) which i think is the worst idea Blizzard has had to date.

[Myrlae]

OP is totally right, Sunwell was one of the best, maybe even the best instance ever. The only thing I disliked was the rerolling to LW to grab the drums and i was on the group changing duty for Bruttalus aswell, so that consumed some time aswell (for the people that don't know what i mean you just took shamans because of BL and changed them into your top dps group they bloodlusted->changed with the next shaman and so on)

[Fudge]

People continue to compare apples and oranges here. There were NO heroic fights in BC, NO 10 man versions, etc. Trying to compare M'uru to Fightfighter is probably the most off-base argument I've ever read. In order to clear Uld, you did not HAVE to kill Mimi doing this HM achieve. To clear SW, you HAD to kill M'uru. To get geared for Uld you simply needed to gear through heroic epic and BoE epics. To gear for SW, you HAD to go through it all... Heroics for blues -> Kara for epics -> T5 ->6, etc.. There was no, ding 70 go to Hyjal and gear out.. The learning and gearing curve for fights since BC has been scaled way down. SW was the premier raid of its time, and IMO, the best we have seen yet.

[Clouce]

SW was fun but I wish it had come out a few months sooner so I had more time with it before WOTLK

[sanderdanielsen]

I miss keys, but don't at the same time. Sure, it felt epic after you completed it.. But omg.. 2 tanks just gquit, a couple dps had IRL issues. Time to find new recruits.. wait.. we have to all go back to get you keyed to what we are doing? Awesome...


Requiring heroic keys was a bloody excellent idea, and should have been brought back. Getting to honored with the faction for dungeons wasn't hard, and it ensured that you got a basic sense of what was going on in the dungeon and that you would at least have some basic ( at the time 70 ) gear.

Could't been more agreed : D The keys was a brilliant idea, but the minimum item level should been 333 and it would been worked as the same

[Deleted]

Ugh, there's so much nostalgia and glossing over of flaws in this thread, but oh well. Rather than arguing about it I'll just state what I did like about the place.
The trash felt really dangerous and interesting at the same time. I think everyone bar the mages stuck on sheep duty enjoyed it.
Kalecgos' portal mechanic and the bouncing curse of agony were pretty clever. Brutallus burn healing was an interesting challenge, unlike the rest of the fight. Felmyst was kinda cool. Eredar Twins were...um...random. M'uru was an interesting example of a well-tuned "waves of adds" bossfight, like an early version of Freya. And Kil'Jaeden was absolutely awesome, both technically and as an audio/visual spectacle, even if we did only kill him in 3.0.
Oh and the gear looked pretty good. So yeah, not the worst raid Blizzard have put out by any means, to give it credit its mere 5 bosses kept us raiding for many months.

[babyback]

Gating system sucked. Except for BWL I think that Sunwell was the best instance. If I werent on my way to hell, I definately earned my spot from all the curses on M'uru.

[vesseblah]

As the name suggests, Sunwell Plateau was the best world of warcraft raid ever created by blizz imho. There are many reasons for this and ill try to give a little insight as to why I feel this way, and hopefully shed some light for those who never got to experience it in all its glory and majesty.

1) It was super difficult. - There was a reason why this raid instance was so difficult. Black temple and Hyjal were supposed to be the end raids of BC, and most consider them to be that,

4) Raid leaders had to actually LEAD the raid - What i mean by this, is raiding was very different back then. Classes had specific abilities that were required to have in a raid, and those classes had to perform or be replaced. Raid leaders had to switch people in and out of groups during encounters in order to maximize the effectiveness of the raid.

Sunwell was great example of everything that went wrong with TBC raiding.

Tuning was awful. Yes, it was super difficult for average raiders, but the sad fact is that the top guilds who had farmed Illidan for half year facerolled first three bosses until the gate in less than two hours simply with gear, there was nothing hard about the bosses. There were over hundred 3/6 clears worldwide first day.

Class stacking was fucking retarded, all the way up to having 4-6 shamans for Brutallus to chain bloodlusts to 10-11 healers in twins to having 4 paladins sitting outside to bless the raid...

Sorry, but claiming that Sunwell was masterpiece is pure nostalgia.

[HolgerDK]

100% agree!!!

My guild at the server uldum, we killed almost every boss at sunwell the very first day, of course we did them at beta so we knew the fights already, twins girls took us a couple days, and we found out that the hardest strategy to get extra epics was easier; ohh Muru he was a nightmare took us more than a month to kill, but killing him pre-nerf was very epic. Kil'jaeden was a let down cause he was easier than Muru, we were expecting a real end boss, but still an awesome fight took us 2 weeks to kill him.

Sunwell was no joke, hopefully we get more raids like that!

Too bad for your little story that the content was gated and that you're contradicting yourself.

[Deklol]

Agrees
It was epic

[mosher94]

Karazhan was the best raid ever. Your points are invalid.

[pleaserelax]

People not hitting their tears wore my patience extremely thin.

It was particularly irritating when Mages and Priests failed at air bursts.

[Deleted]

People continue to compare apples and oranges here. There were NO heroic fights in BC, NO 10 man versions, etc. Trying to compare M'uru to Fightfighter is probably the most off-base argument I've ever read. In order to clear Uld, you did not HAVE to kill Mimi doing this HM achieve. To clear SW, you HAD to kill M'uru. To get geared for Uld you simply needed to gear through heroic epic and BoE epics. To gear for SW, you HAD to go through it all... Heroics for blues -> Kara for epics -> T5 ->6, etc.. There was no, ding 70 go to Hyjal and gear out.. The learning and gearing curve for fights since BC has been scaled way down. SW was the premier raid of its time, and IMO, the best we have seen yet.

Pfft. Sure, Sunwell was basically on heroic mode by default, so obviously you want to compare it to other heroic modes. And also, you *did* have to kill heroic Mimiron to clear Ulduar, since he was a prereq for Algalon :P
And I gotta laugh at your gearing up process. The hardmodes with aoe damage like Freya or Thorim would absolutely destroy anyone not kitted out in 226 gear from Ulduar normal modes. And by the time Sunwell was out, Tier 5 was entirely bypassed as a source of gear. And almost no one used the shockingly bad blue items from heroic 5 mans, the only good stuff was the Badge of Justice items and the odd endboss epic. The proper gearing procedure for a newcomer to Sunwell was 5 man normals+crafted gear-->Karazhan for gear and Badges-->heroic 5 mans for more Badges-->BT and Hyjal runs where you pick up all the spare Tier tokens and random DE fodder epics to cover any gaps not provided for by the Isle of Quel'Danas Badge vendor.