Worst Designed Dungeon/Raid Boss Encounter *In your Opinion*

[kaelleria]

Heroic Sha of Fear was obnoxiously long for no reason and the only part of the fight that was challenging was dps check at the end.

This came around 20 minutes into the fight.

[shise]

Faction Champions. TOTGC.

Man, fuck that encounter with a broom.

Never understood why people hated it. It was one of the easiest fights to clear, but people failed at basic skills like kitting.

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I´d say most of SoO was super annoying, it felt like it was all trash, bosses included. Also DS, but I think that is mainly because we were clearing it for a year lol

[vian]

Mythic Iron Maidens, it was the reason I quit raiding altogether.

[rogoth]

Heroic Sha of Fear comes to mind

i would argue that fight was fine while you progressing it, but when you got to farm status that's when it just went to shit and became a clusterfuck.


for me personally my top 3 worst fights in terms of annoying mechanics:

heroic lich king 25: while i loved the storyline of the encounter and the overall aesthetic, the sheer amount of mechanics and some of the 'hidden' mechanics that weren't made apparent until later on such as the '3 people in defile = wipe' mechanic which made this fight such a battle of attrition and it took so much out of the team i killed it with at the time, also didn't help you couldn't skip the RP so every single pull was a chore, good fight but some very specific nitpicks that bring it down in my book.


heroic amber shaper un'sok: the amber construct vehicle mechanic was a nightmare to have everybody learn it because it was a random thing that could affect anyone at any time so if it targeted somebody who had never done it before it was a huge amount of stuff to learn on the fly, especially if it was a healer that was put in it making it harder on the remaining healers of which there wasn't that many cos you needed as much dps as possible it was just a messy encounter overall really.

joust encounter in TOC 5 man AFTER icc came out: because while it was the current 'end game' content everyone knew what to do for the most part and it wasn't that much of a hassle, but post icc especially late into the tier if you wanted to go back there for badges/specific loot items that were BiS for some specs at the time, you were likely to get matched with people in the LFG tool that had no clue what the fuck they were doing and it took significantly longer to get through than 'normal' otherwise.

[Nosnogard]

It's a tough call. Does the reclearing of trash leading up to most of the bosses in Battle for Mount Hyjal count? Other than that it's a call between Spine of Deathwing and Madness the Deathwing. The latter for being the most disappointing end expansion encounter I've ever tried.

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Both Deathwing fights, but specifically Spine of Deathwing.

A glorified add fight as part 1/2 of the final boss? What a joke.
Tanks had to kite nonstop. DPS had to wait with DPS at times and then use everything for burst even though some classes had horrible burst which made them essentially useless. Healers had to spam dispell. Not to mention that half the fight was slow as fuck and then the last plate became absolute uncontrollable chaos.

There are worse fights in the game but Deathwing was an expansion endboss. I will never miss progressing on Deathwing.

Seems I'm not alone in my thought. I'd say those two fights alone killed my boner for Cataclysm that I had had prior to that

[Shaqthefat]

This is exactly best possible raid boss design. Quite literally.

That is unbelievably boring

[Pakheth]

Any boss that is just standing around waiting for trash waves. So goddamn boring and takes forever. And almost every expansion has their fair share of them.

[Shaqthefat]

You have no idea how the fight went on mythic, do you?

I agree with OP. Bosses, that introduce significant amount of downtime as you get gear due to hardcoded timers are up there. And the other end of spectrum, bosses, that do not get significantly easier as you gear up or that have random 1shot mechanic in them. Archimonde in Mount hyjal and Brutallus (roflstomp) respectively come to mind.

Yeah, it was boring for anyone not doing orbs

[Soon-TM]

How to do fun raid bosses --> Ulduar or Firelands.

How to do awful bosses --> Tomb of Soaks, EP or 80% of CN.

Special mention to Spine of DW, crappiest boss fight ever made. I was OP at the time (lolarcane mage) and even so, it blew donkey d1ck.

[Pakheth]

You forgot Faction Champs' predecessor, Priestess Delrissa in Magister's Terrace.

I did that boss so bloody much in TBC for the mount and goddamn that boss was a pain in the ass if people didn't learn to CC.

[hulkgor]

snip

Gunship Battle
Hellfire Assault
Immerseus
Spine

Couldn't single out one out of a few crappy ones. Probably missing some at the same level though, it's been a long ride.

[Argorwal]

Drestagath was the only one in recent memory I just felt was absolutely terrible.

Edit - forgot that Battle for Mount Hyjal existed, that whole entire place was awful except archimond.

[cparle87]

But Sun King is a meme of a fight.

Well, when you talked about random timers, having to stop dps because of said timers, and literally the worst fight my mind immediately jumped to Sun King. Only fight in there I don't like.

[Frozenbro]

Well, when you talked about random timers, having to stop dps because of said timers, and literally the worst fight my mind immediately jumped to Sun King. Only fight in there I don't like.

But Sun King doesnt have random timers xd SLG does so i dont get the similarity, difficulty aside.

[Tziva]

I don't think "boss you hate the most" and "boss that is worst designed" are synonymous. A lot of people just seem to be naming fights they really loathed even if there's nothing really that offensive or crazy about their design.

In my opinion, the worst design is the last boss in Oculus. Vehicle fights are terrible in general and I think all of them are a bad choice. The only reason Flame Leviathan isn't last is that at least it had a cool concept for throwing raid members on top of the tank to kill the turrets, but I also fucking hated that fight and it's trash at the time. Enormous slog, annoying as fuck. Oculus basically had no redeeming qualities and there's no depth to the design at all. It's just all vehicles all the time; you had to fight on the dragons, everyone had to know what they were doing. I didn't hate the dungeon and I knew how to do the fight but I 100% understand why so many people did and why to this day you still get people that peace out when they zone into that one from queuing randoms. Second worst would probably be the jousting fight from the TOC dungeon. The rest of the vehicle fights are somewhere above that but again, all of them are dumb.

HFA was an okay concept that was just bad in execution. If you'd had more control over the pacing, it would have been fine. I personally don't like any kind of boss fight that feels like you're just fighting a shitton of trash endlessly (whether it's Dreamwalker or Sun King as DPS or Gunship or Eonar or Galakras or Spoils or HFA, etc), but there's usually one of those in every tier and they usually aren't poorly designed. Some of them, like Galakras, probably even sound pretty cool on paper in their uniqueness. I just don't ever enjoy doing them and I'd pick between a number of those as my most hated fights if I had to.

[Ave07]

I only raided up to the end of Cataclysm and did LFR maybe once every expansion starting MoP but from my experience the two Deathwing encounters were awful.

[Simple Rick]

Spine stands out... though most add fights are rather awful. They lead to boredom and tedium once people have gear unless they have a way to influence spawn rates. Sun king is the best of a worst theme.

[ydraw]

Still High Tinker Mekkatorque.

Requiring every raid member to have a working microphone was unnecessary and divisive.

[ONCHEhap]

Especially as a tank on heroic. Hello, my job is to run in circles for however long it takes this boss to die. Oh, someone else fucked up mechanics and we wiped? Cooooool, I'll just run in circles more.

Yuup
As a tank you pretty much didn't even take part in the fight really. Just kinda let a mob beat on you until they have all the charges they need and hope your DPS can kill it before it kills you. Repeat three times

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Still High Tinker Mekkatorque.

Requiring every raid member to have a working microphone was unnecessary and divisive.

You could just use macros for this. Was good enough even for Mythic,we beat it with half of our raid team with mics at most

[Gasparde]

In recent memory? Stone Legion Generals. Spell Queueing and some RNG are fine and all that. But holy fucking molly, there's a way to overdo it and Blizzard have fucking found it with this horribly stupid encounter - especially when you combine it with its fucking 12 minute fight length and absolutely nothing interesting going on for like 11 of those 12 minutes. What a horrible, horrible fight.

Before that... think I'll have to give it to Sasszine. Like... just nothing about this fight was good. Not a single good word for that fight. Having to relearn that fight with every new ID was the dumbest thing ever.

By far my most hated fights over the recent years. And then there's the odd fight like Maiden in ToS where a single person can wipe your raid for hours on end and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Ugh, the worst kind of fight.