Toughest "non-final" boss of an instance?

[xiic]

This is how hard heroic ascendant council was back in the T11: http://i.imgur.com/HBDoCIj.jpg

[Seezer]

H Ascendent council. Even on normal. It was a derp check and had a decent level of personal responsibility.

[Skarssen]

Heroic Mimiron was a bitch, but not as difficult as Yogg+0, so I don't think that would qualify here.

Heroic Spine was pretty simple mechanics wise. It was a retarded gear/burst DPS check, but there have been many more fights that presented more complex mechanics to deal with.

Heroic Zor'lok was MUCH more difficult than Empress. By a long shot.

However I have never wiped so much as I did on heroic 10man Blackfuse. Not h LK, nor h Rag, nor h Madness, nor Yogg+0, nor Lei Shen.

[Dracodraco]

Realistically the number of people who have an actual experience in beating these encounters is really, really low.

The answer is definitely between mimiron and spine of deathwing, both encounters had INSANE dps requirements where death of even one out of 25 players lead to wipe due to lack of dps.
I was in one of the ~30 guilds who managed to down spine of deathwing before it was nerfed to the ground, and it was definitely the hardest encounter I ever experienced. But I have not manged to down Mimiron before 20% hp nerf.
So even my opinion is biased and unreliable.
Opinion of players who did the encounters with 30% buf and half of the mechanics removed is pretty much useless.

Out of interest, how can you believe this to be true about Spine? The encounter difficulty was based on being able to stack mages/rogues/retri paladins and resto shamans - if you had the setup to meet the DPS requirement, it was fairly simple and nothing you could really fuck up on. Mimiron was actually a difficult fight mechanics wise, and the whole "one person dead ment a wipe" is true for the vast majority of the above bosses if done in the correct item level / progress level, as you did spine. Do you really think you met the DPS requirement for Dark Animus heroic in the top 30 without min-maxing the use of DOT classes to take down anima golems, while trying to meet the singletarget check on the boss at the same time? Heck, on Spine or Mimiron, most DPS or healers dying wouldn't even cause an immediate wipe - it just ment shit got harder and you probably wouldn't meet checks, could ress em back up and keep going. The first third of the Animus fight, a single dead person ment a lose anima golem, wiping the raid due to the proximity mechanic. By the logic you apply to spine being insanely hard due to a DPS check that you had to stack specific classes to meet, then Animus would be even worse.

[Deleted]

Im going to say muru

[Cairhiin]

M'uru and Vaelastrasz

[Puri]

Of course heroic where applicable and when the tier was current:
Classic: Four horsemen
BC: M'uru
Wotlk: Sindragosa
Cata: Ascendent council

[Deleted]

Heroic Siegecrafter Blackfuse 10man back when only 4 guilds had killed it, and there were no strategies publicly availible. So. Fucking. Hard.

Did it really take that much figuring out for the different strategies? Figuring out the strats was the easy part. Which strat works the best and actually executing it was the hard part.

Siegecrafter havent got shit on bosses like Mimiron.

[Uoyredrum]

TBC: gonna say maybe pre nerf High Astromancer Solarian

Solarian wasn't even hard pre-nerf you just needed 2 feral tanks w/ a ton of arcane resist gear. There was a lot of non-final bosses in BC that were much harder than solarian pre or post nerf. Leotheras, Eredar Twins and M'uru were all MUCH more difficult.

[Mibzo]

As some people have posted, Spine got to be the hardest, and it didn't make it any better when you hit it on heroic. It was like running head first into a freaking wall!

[Perudo]

From personal experience I'd say Four Horseman in original Naxx. Never did get through them before TBC launched. Would it have made a difference if we had all the strat pages, videos and such we do now? Possibly. Yes, there were some videos back then, but only a small fraction of what exists now.

This. Sadly I did not have the chance to try them at lvl 60 but had friends that tried to kill them for months but did not manage before the TBC patch. I did kill them at lvl 70 (still required strategy then).

[Serenais]

Hm. Hmm...
I didn't play Vanilla and I didn't raid in TBC, so I can't say there (though from what I read, Mu'ru wins the TBC contest hands down).
As for the other expansions:
WotLK: I am a bit unsure whether to put Putricide or Sindragosa here, but I'll go with Putricide.
Cataclysm: Spine.
MoP: Blackfuse.

The whole contest would likely be tied between Spine and Blackfuse, though Mu'ru might completely offset it, considering how many people made it past him pre-WotLK.

[Xaverus]

I loved vanilla raiding because at the time, I didn't play, I watched my little brother heal on his priest, The computer he had was barely powerful enough to play it, his FPS was so insane...1-5 on fights? and still managed to heal really well...while focusing the camera on the ground so he wouldn't drop too much FPS and die xD

I started playing in BC, but I didn't raid I pvp'd the hardest boss for me was in Kara on Maiden because apparently dispelling was 'hard' >.>

I chose Sindrigosa because I had a hard time on heroic with that fight, Back then we needed three tanks for the fight, and one of the tanks was a bear wearing pvp gear, about the only way to reach 100k hp, Her double swipe was killer as the bear tank could take two with just one of his defensive cooldowns, I had maybe 76k buffed, maybe 80k, so the ONLY way I could take a double was if I used shieldwall, so we rotated back and forth between three tanks, The rest of the mechanics were annoying but as a tank I didn't have to deal with most of it, I had an easier time than most anyways.

Heroic Halfus, first boss of BoT...Ugh,I wanted to three tank it but one of our 'heroic raiders' wanted it to be done with two, no bear qq, A warrior and a pally, Pally would take full stacks, tank as much damage as possible insta bubble and click it off, taunt back, By the time the adds were done with, He'd be almost dead so I had to taunt off him and just kill him, We had a bear tank come one week, He dodged a lot of his strikes, never really needed to taunt off him as quickly as I had to with the pally.

I have other moments I thought were difficult, 25 man pugging ToC...someone always had to get hit by icehowl, Jaraxxus...Yay for random melee dude standing with other melee dudes and people instadying to fire >.< We had a hard time with Omnitron on heroic but it was mostly because we never had the same effing people log in every week, so we had to switch with others that were on at the time, until eventually, everyone in the fucking guild knew the fight >.>

[PetersenIII]

I voted other. Nethermancer whatever-the-hell-her-name-was in Mechanar. That fight was a bitch and a half.

(Your OP says nothing about having to be a /raid/, just an instance. =P)

[AeneasBK]

I voted other. Nethermancer whatever-the-hell-her-name-was in Mechanar. That fight was a bitch and a half.

(Your OP says nothing about having to be a /raid/, just an instance. =P)

Agreed I posted it to but it went un-noticed. All these raid bosses ain't got shit on her

[Warlord Booty]

Mimi was hard for us, none of the others were near as challenging.

[Madruga]

M'uru.

From the ones in the topic... Heroic Spine, probably.

But if you consider it was already Deathwing, and the final boss of the expansion was a two-part fight...

Then Ascendent CounCil by a long shot. By far and large the toughest boss in Tier 11, specially in 25 man.

[Sunblaze]

i dont think ascendant council was that hard....but Its one of the most fun fights

[Fluttershy]

I voted other. Nethermancer whatever-the-hell-her-name-was in Mechanar. That fight was a bitch and a half.

(Your OP says nothing about having to be a /raid/, just an instance. =P)

that boss was easy as hell, just jump on the railing leading to pathaleon once you've cleared the instance, the fire will run all the way to the end of the instance to jump up the rails, then you just jump down again and the adds will run another 1 minute to reach you.

BC encounters seriously lacked bug testing and polish, literally everything was broken, especially ZA.

[xiic]

M'uru.

From the ones in the topic... Heroic Spine, probably.

But if you consider it was already Deathwing, and the final boss of the expansion was a two-part fight...

Then Ascendent CounCil by a long shot. By far and large the toughest boss in Tier 11, specially in 25 man.

Al'Akir would like a word with you.