Hiya,
I'm here to ask if you guys agree or disagree with the notion that Megaera was what I'd call a "wasted" concept or "missed opportunity" to put it more plainly; I feel like we waited quite a while for a "traditional" hydra boss (that is, not like WoW's usual bi-pedal multi-headed creatures) as they appear in a lot of action games (the best example I can think of in recent years is the first God of War - that is quite a respectable hydra) to appear in WoW and Megaera just didn't quite deliver.
For me personally, I had really hoped for it to be a bit more involved (kind of like Magmaw of BWD but on a larger, more numerous scale) with the combating of the heads and their natural threat as enormous, fanged serpent heads. I suppose the elemental bit is interesting but I just feel like there are plenty of elemental-based bosses in the game that throw stuff on the ground or put out conical areas of doom that most or all of your raid need avoid.
I'd kind of envisioned the fight being more like you're in a nearly identical area (still cavernous) but fully-surrounded by water so that the heads could pop up at more varied spots and part of the fight would be placing your raid accordingly and having to do a little bit of Magmaw-esque environmental work to actually bring the heads down and execute them - perhaps via first using one trigger to bring them down and then another trigger to drop a stalactite on them to kill them or some such - maybe you'd have these barrels of gunpowder someone would have to drop and then DPS players would need to activate them - that would weaken the head and drop it - then you'd have some area of the wall that would need X damage done to it in a limited window (this area is perhaps normally not able to be targeted) which then causes the rocks/whathaveyou to kill the head.
The idea that the main body is "hidden" and many kills of its heads would result in its death is cool - maybe an addition for heroic would be that on top of taming the growing number of heads, you'd have to have DPS players and tanks working together to also destroy a huge formation somewhere that would, by the end of the fight, bring down an enormous rockslide or huge spikey rock that would impale the main body and kill it.
I'm not sure - I may be off my rocker here because I'm very partial to huge boss encounters (the aforementioned hydra and almost any other God of War boss, bosses in Rift and FFXI, the Dragon God of Demon's Souls is one of my all-time favorites) and I realize SOME ideas that work in other MMOs and certainly in action games are not applicable here but I think WoW does something many other games do not do when it does have fights like Magmaw and the like where you use environmental triggers to actually kill a boss - I just feel like it's been almost 9 years and I've killed a LOT of powerful people/creatures/otherworldly things by just throwing ice and death at it and hitting it with some kind of steel - I really like when they add another factor to killing the bosses or give you something to control other than your standard rotation.
Thoughts on alternative hydra bosses? FWIW, I also really liked Northrend Beasts and how you had to get Icehowl to run into a wall - that was a lot of fun too.