Original Naxx 4 Horsemen hardest encounter ever?

[Dangerfield]

It's just another one of those classic Vanilla fights that needed something different, be it 8 tanks or everyone kitted out in resist gear. It was pretty difficult to learn but just like so many of those fights it was still a case of "no rng" (apart from the void zones) so once you knew what you were doing it was a one shot every time after.

Found my first kill on youtube (was a rogue at the time)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb7_5P_EAZE

also found our first kill of Sapphiron, woop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXYLptiGTw0

People saying that this is a hard fight.... (Sapph)

- Druid dies to icebomb because he is staring up looking at the boss and is late to the ONE mechanic that can insta gib you

- First use of innervate at 4 minutes (could of been used effectively at around 1 minute)

- Clicks most abilities/Cd's

- So much backpedaling

- Stands next to Ice rain then dies as it moves over him


The worst player in my guild is still 10 times better than this guy. So if this is the general level of skill which players in the few "good" guilds that manage to reach the end of naxx, then yes, I can imagine these fights would of been seriously difficult with that group of people. But don't kid yourselfs that any of these fights where actually difficult, players where just terrible as a whole compared to today's raiding scene.

[Dracodraco]

Errrr, you realise what kind of regen we had? Especially in full frost resist gear, we HAD to stand around for 5 second considering what was the right time to cast our heal and what heal, because that's all you had the mana for. It was actually the hardest fight healingwise I'd ever had to do. If "that was a current encounter with those kind of figures" meaning you remove all of your mana cds you have now and put your regen on zero, try solo healing that then.

"with those kind of figures" obviously meaning the health dropping at the same rate, but with me having the same amount of power in healing as I do now. We 2 man healed heroic 25 jin rokh and horridon this week in our alt run, it was far more intense than this seemed. Yes, regen was shit, that still doesn't mean that there's anything exciting about standing around staring at a bar that's at 70/100% for 5 seconds before deciding he needs a heal. It just looks dull.
As for "no mana regen", doing Vezax gave you that feeling again .

[Haywire5714]

How do you figure?

Ra-den has about as many abilities as a boss that you would see in vanilla, with none of them being overly complicated. The only part of the fight that vanilla guilds would find impossible is the last phase because of how limited healers were back then. I think Jin'rokh is a better example; the fight is fairly easy for most guilds today but i'm sure 40 man guilds would struggle with the transitions.

[cyqu]

while 4horseman was a very difficult fight for its time, yogg0, 0% lk, pre nerf rag, and lei shen, are all more difficult fights

[wariofan1]

People saying that this is a hard fight.... (Sapph)

- Druid dies to icebomb because he is staring up looking at the boss and is late to the ONE mechanic that can insta gib you

- First use of innervate at 4 minutes (could of been used effectively at around 1 minute)

- Clicks most abilities/Cd's

- So much backpedaling

- Stands next to Ice rain then dies as it moves over him


The worst player in my guild is still 10 times better than this guy. So if this is the general level of skill which players in the few "good" guilds that manage to reach the end of naxx, then yes, I can imagine these fights would of been seriously difficult with that group of people. But don't kid yourselfs that any of these fights where actually difficult, players where just terrible as a whole compared to today's raiding scene.

Yep, it's true, one of the reasons Vanilla was so hard wasn't because of the content, it was the players. An example I constantly use is that Vanilla Private Servers have needed to buff the HP of bosses by 100% and their damage by 50% I think. Not only because people have gotten so many better addons that have been made for Vanilla since (believe it or not,) but also because people have become much better in general. Before the buffs the raids were simply charged through on first go on the server. For the most part it wasn't the content which was hard, it was us who sucked.

[Lobstarrr]

Seems there was indeed more annoying stuff in Naxx 40

http://dev.manaflask.com/en/blog/Kungen/1028

Some quotes

Before I go on I just wanna thank Blizzard for one thing in the 25 man Naxxramas. THANK YOU for making the Heigan trash easy mode! If you didn't experience it yourself then let me tell you that the Heigan trash in 40 man Naxxramas was the most anoying and frustrating thing ever.

Next up was Loatheb. I'm not even gonna get started on Loatheb in the 40 man Naxxramas. Heigan was a pain in the butt. But not even close to Loatheb. I don't even have words to describe what a pain in the ass he was. The boss itself wasn't that hard but all the preparations you had to go through to beat him were just too much. He was one of the reasons why Nihilum never farmed Naxxramas and chilled until The Burning Crusade.

Everyone got their Whipper Root Tubers??? No, because there were at least 10 others camping them aswell!

[Deleted]

No. Wasn't even the hardest fight in vanilla.

[Deleted]

With how most players back then played their chars, most modern bosses would be completely impossible to beat.

Also, like so many people already said, the hardest part about the fight (or most of Vanilla Naxx in general) was to get enough people with enough dedication and gear to clear it.

[Deleted]

You could say we were probably a guild too unskilled and relied on gear to make up for it - but you have a point. The 40 people attuned to Naxx we had. But while we could reach the first boss in every wing, we just couldn't beat any. We were also still clearing BWL and only dipping our toes in AQ 40 when Naxx 40 arrived.

Most of us weren't incredibly skilled too, but we raided ~5 days a week, so we still managed to clear everything up to Sapphiron in a reasonable amount of time.
Unfortunately, a lot of people stopped caring about it at that point and left...and gearing up new members, especially tanks, just took too long. :/

[Jacob6875]

If by hard you mean hoping that none of your 8 tanks taunts resisted (yes that was possible) for the entire fight then sure it was super hard !!

Basically to overcome this you were forced to recruit / force your dps warriors to tank AND get them all the 4 set naxx set bonus that would prevent taunt from resisting. That was the hard part not the fight itself. Remember most fights in Naxx only needed 1 or 2 tanks so you basically had to recruit 4 or 5 geared tanks for 1 single fight. Also only warriors could get the set bonus so you had to recruit warrior tanks. (so the VERY few guild that used pally or feral druid tanks were even more screwed)


Fights like Heroic Lei Shen are a million times more complicated and harder than 4 horseman was. No one wiped 2-400 times on 4 horseman as it was a simple fight once you had the above mentioned 8 tanks with the 4 set to defeat it.

[Thatyrael]

People saying that this is a hard fight.... (Sapph)

- Druid dies to icebomb because he is staring up looking at the boss and is late to the ONE mechanic that can insta gib you

- First use of innervate at 4 minutes (could of been used effectively at around 1 minute)

- Clicks most abilities/Cd's

- So much backpedaling

- Stands next to Ice rain then dies as it moves over him


The worst player in my guild is still 10 times better than this guy. So if this is the general level of skill which players in the few "good" guilds that manage to reach the end of naxx, then yes, I can imagine these fights would of been seriously difficult with that group of people. But don't kid yourselfs that any of these fights where actually difficult, players where just terrible as a whole compared to today's raiding scene.

You do realize that back then, there wasn't 8 years of theorycrafting, almost no raid add-ons and a lot of people had never played a MMO before.

I remember toward the end of vanilla a post on the forums, someone had figured the "ilvl" system, the value was given to each stat and the budget for an item. This guy didn't have any inside infos from blizzard, he just compared a ton of items to figure it out. It was a major breakthrough in theorycrafting and it was the begining of people better gearing.

I remember when I joined a raiding guild (in Molten Core, before BWL came out) and people were making fun of me for wearing Mail items with intellect and mana regen, saying I was a wannabe shaman and real paladins used plate. That was the mentality back then, and as you can see, Lawbringer and Judgement set had extremely bad itemization (str / agi / int / sta). If I remember well, the first heal plate items appeared in AQ40, all our paladins were fighting to have them (Legplates of the blazing light and Mantle of the crusader mainly)

So yea, that's what we had to put up with in Vanilla, a lot has changed since then but people seem to forget that.

[Karreck]

You do realize that back then, there wasn't 8 years of theorycrafting, almost no raid add-ons and a lot of people had never played a MMO before.

I remember toward the end of vanilla a post on the forums, someone had figured the "ilvl" system, the value was given to each stat and the budget for an item. This guy didn't have any inside infos from blizzard, he just compared a ton of items to figure it out. It was a major breakthrough in theorycrafting and it was the begining of people better gearing.

I remember when I joined a raiding guild (in Molten Core, before BWL came out) and people were making fun of me for wearing Mail items with intellect and mana regen, saying I was a wannabe shaman and real paladins used plate. That was the mentality back then, and as you can see, Lawbringer and Judgement set had extremely bad itemization (str / agi / int / sta). If I remember well, the first heal plate items appeared in AQ40, all our paladins were fighting to have them (Legplates of the blazing light and Mantle of the crusader mainly)

So yea, that's what we had to put up with in Vanilla, a lot has changed since then but people seem to forget that.

This. Vanilla wow was the dark ages when it came to gear, strats, mods, and theorycrafting. Everybody seems to forget that. So while a fight like 4 Horsemen seems so simple when compared to modern boss fights, we forget that modern boss fights factor the advancements this game (and the player base) has made in the past seven years since the release of Naxx.

[Demeia]

This. Vanilla wow was the dark ages when it came to gear, strats, mods, and theorycrafting. Everybody seems to forget that. So while a fight like 4 Horsemen seems so simple when compared to modern boss fights, we forget that modern boss fights factor the advancements this game (and the player base) has made in the past seven years since the release of Naxx.

Bad itemization? I don't know what you mean. I liked +Strength on my tier one...Mage.

I actually like these threads. There's usually some old timer who still does hard cores who comes on and generally puts things into perspective.

[Deleted]

This. Vanilla wow was the dark ages when it came to gear, strats, mods, and theorycrafting. Everybody seems to forget that.

No. In fact, it was mentioned quite a few times in this thread.
What actually made the fights hard was, among other things, the bad understanding of WoW's mechanics - this is why I said that fights like Heroic Lei'Shen etc. would have been completely impossible back then; while fights like C'Thun etc. wouldn't be too much of a problem for most (top) guilds nowadays (if tuned correctly, of course).

[Outofmana]

Seems there was indeed more annoying stuff in Naxx 40

http://dev.manaflask.com/en/blog/Kungen/1028
He was one of the reasons why Nihilum never farmed Naxxramas and chilled until The Burning Crusade.[/I]

Yeah same here quit right after KT I guess like any other guild, we even bought ~200 black lotusses from an alliance guild thru neutral AH in a deal with all of our remaining gbank money (we were on Sapphiron and needed moar flasksss) since they killed it before us and stopped raiding immediatly as well. Not even for a second did the thought cross our mind to do it again with so much work and cost put into it.

Everyone got their Whipper Root Tubers??? No, because there were at least 10 others camping them aswell!

hahaah oh man I still have nightmares about Felwood and those cenarion plant salve items sometimes

4 Horseman basicly killed the possibility by the need to steal geared tanks but, IF let's say 10 guilds (which is not a lot compared to let's say the realm Kazzak now) would've raided Naxx and especially the end of naxx, there simply would not have been enough materials (black lotusses / Felwood plants) around to supply all of them. Can you imagine having to herb fellwood for the regular herbs and cenarion plants together with 100 people lol.

[Preach07]

Heroic Rag personally. 500+ attempts, and that was from the TOP guilds in the world? Ya that's got to be the hardest encounter in the game that was feasible to beat.

One thing to keep in mind about that though, is that top world guilds race for world first. If they had waited 3 weeks, or the encounter had been gated and not open until 3 weeks later, with the amount of extra gear they'd get in those weeks they might have landed on only 50+ attempts. The fact that it took the top guilds more than 500 attempts says something about the encounter's difficulty relative to the current ilvl of the guild's gear. I don't remember ilvl politics from back then, but here's another example: If thunderforged items had existed in Firelands, 3-5 thunderforged weapons in a 25-man raid could have made the little DPS difference that would have saved the last 200 attempts out of the 500, just due to that little edge.

So my point is, when trying to determine the hardest encounter, taking into account the ilvl of gear from the previous raid and the ilvl of gear that drops in the raid we're talking about is another factor to look at. Maybe BWL gear had a higher ilvl compared to Naxx gear, than Cata tier 1 gear had compared to Cata tier 2 gear. Which would mean, guilds attempting Naxx would be at an advantage in their BWL gear.

[Firebert]

#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.
#3 tied Chromaggus - 74 days from Ebonroc's death. 25th September 2005.
#3 tied Ragnaros - 74 days from Majordomo Executus' death. 25th April 2005.
#5 Yogg-Saron, Alone in the Darkness - 70 days from Stars' first pull. 7th July 2009
#6 High Astromancer Solarian - 59 days from Magtheridon's death (unlocking the Eye). 24th April 2007
#7 The Four Horsemen - 56 days from Gothik's death to D&T's kill. August 25th 2006
#8 Al'ar <Phoenix God> - 48 days from Magtheridon's death. 13th April 2007
#9 The Lich King (Heroic 25) - 42 Days from Heroic Putricide's death (first pull). March 26th 2010
#10 Heroic Al'Akir 25 - 36 days from Heroic Conclave of Wind's death. January 22nd 2011.
#11 Kael'thas Sunstrider <Lord of the Blood Elves> - 31 days from Solarian's death (first pull). 25th May 2007
#12 Magtheridon - 29 days from the first level 70 25-man raid. 24th February 2007
#13 Lady Vashj <Coilfang Matron> - 17 days from being unlocked. 29th March 2007
#14 Leotheras the Blind - 16 days from Hydross' death. 4th March 2007
#15 Loatheb - 14 days from Heigan's death. 17th July 2006
#16 tied Heigan the Unclean - 13 days from Noth the Plaguebringer's death. 3rd July 2006
#16 tied Hydross the Unstable <Duke of Currents> - 13 days from Gruul's death (Unlocking Serpentshrine). 16th February 2007
#16 tied Heroic Cho'gall - 13 days from Heroic Ascendant Council's death. 15th January 2011.
#16 tied Heroic Nefarian - 13 days from Heroic Atramedes' death. January 9th 2011.
#20 tied Archimonde <The Defiler> - 10 days from Azgalor's death. 9th June 2007
#20 tied Gothik the Harvester - 10 days from Instructor Razuvious' death. 30th June 2006
#22 tied Mimiron Firefighter 25 - 8 days from Ensidia's first pull. May 1st 2009
#22 tied Sapphiron - 8 days from Four Horsemen dying. 2nd September 2006
#22 tied Gruul the Dragonkiller - 8 days from Maulgar's death. 3rd February 2007
#25 Reliquary of Lost Souls - 6 days from Gurtogg's death. 2nd June 2007
#26 tied Kel'Thuzad - 5 days from Sapphiron's death. 7th September 2006
#26 tied Kil'jaeden <The Deceiver> - 5 days from the opening of the third Sunwell gate. 25th May 2008
#26 tied Sinestra - 5 days from Heroic Cho'gall's death. January 20th 2011.
#29 tied Heroic Anub'arak 25 - 4 days from Heroic Twin Val'kyr's death. September 6th 2009.
#29 tied M'uru. 4 days from the opening of the second Sunwell gate. 4th May 2008

This guy knows his stuff.

I'm just going to throw my vote in for Firefighter, because Ensidia said it was impossible until it was bugfixed or they'd collected another week's worth of gear.

[Deleted]

KT was harder according to D&T.

[Deleted]

This guy knows his stuff.

It's not possible to compare them like that though. Gamebreaking bugs and impossible tuning makes this really screwed. Tuning and bugfixing has improved over the years (stupid/rng stuff like taunt-resist on 4 horsemen or healer aggro on kael thas has also been removed)while top guild dedication has gone up. Nowadays fights are designed to actually being killable.

[Boathouse]

A few of those fights on that list were just pretty much unkillable in their initial incantations. I remember the nightmare of pre-fix C'thun. Never again. All that aside even, raiding wasn't even as hardcore back then as it is now. If the guilds around now were together and in those instances, the fights wouldn't have lasted nearly as long. These new guys are pumping insane amount of hours into pulls. It just wasn't feasible to have 40 people and sub raiders available for these time periods. The amount of "days" between kills doesn't register the difficulty of a fight. It never will.