What Was the Hardest Raid Boss in WoW History?

[Destinas]

While I never fought them when these were current, friends of mine who played during BC talked about two bosses: Shade of Aran and Teron Gorefiend.

There was a fairly popular song for the Shade of Aran's mechanics:

Lots of players played a minigame outside Teron's fight to get used to the constructs:
https://www.engadget.com/2008/01/14/...ron-gorefiend/

[Deleted]

So because you don't like the requirements or think it should not apply you don't count them. Nothing machanically was broken on C'thun he was just tuned really hard. So were the 4 horseman but the 4 horseman were doable you just had to know how without three tanks. Get over it.

from a dude who didnt raided in in vanilla clearly.

[dmerriam005]

While I never fought them when these were current, friends of mine who played during BC talked about two bosses: Shade of Aran and Teron Gorefiend.

There was a fairly popular song for the Shade of Aran's mechanics:

Lots of players played a minigame outside Teron's fight to get used to the constructs:
https://www.engadget.com/2008/01/14/...ron-gorefiend/

The funny part of that video is that people still screw up flame wreath.

[Terongor]

from a dude who didnt raided in in vanilla clearly.

I feel like alot of wrathbabies are here defending vanilla and TBC bosses.

[epLe]

I cleared naxx in vanilla. The 4 horsemen (lvl60) is the hardest boss Blizzard ever made, and ever will make by far.
(arguably KT, since he required you to kill 4H aswell.)

4H "required" 8 tanks for most raids - where all prot warrs needed the T3 4set.

*The micro management, having 40 players move correctly, and individually, rotating around the debuffs and/or safe zone, while having tanks,heals and sufficient dps (interrupts and soakers) at the right places for whole duration of the fight.

Not 1 fight later has ever been close the aspect of just organizing how to crack this fight, even if you know the mechanics.

Remember none who killed this in vanilla had any guide or similar, it was a logistical puzzle on "another level" compared to pretty much any other fight.
(KT, Gothik, Lethon, Ouro, Visc and Cthun - was like the only other bosses with such logistical puzzle elements, but all of them far easier than 4H)

[dmerriam005]

I'm surprised no one mentioned vael, the second boss in be or razorgore, you know the whole kiting the mobs and with vael how everyone had to watch there threat because he blow up the tanks

[Rootkitt]

I cleared naxx in vanilla. The 4 horsemen (lvl60) is the hardest boss Blizzard ever made, and ever will make by far.
(arguably KT, since he required you to kill 4H aswell.)

4H "required" 8 tanks for most raids - where all prot warrs needed the T3 4set.

*The micro management, having 40 players move correctly, and individually, rotating around the debuffs and/or safe zone, while having tanks,heals and sufficient dps (interrupts and soakers) at the right places for whole duration of the fight.

Not 1 fight later has ever been close the aspect of just organizing how to crack this fight, even if you know the mechanics.

Remember none who killed this in vanilla had any guide or similar, it was a logistical puzzle on "another level" compared to pretty much any other fight.
(KT, Gothik, Lethon, Ouro, Visc and Cthun - was like the only other bosses with such logistical puzzle elements, but all of them far easier than 4H)

I just don't see how any Vanilla boss can be considered the hardest. I cleared several bosses in vanilla naxx, including 4H.. I was like 14 or something, and had no idea what I was really doing (neither did the majority of us). The fact that 40 people were able to beat a boss with very little add-on support and min/maxing shows how simple it was compared to some of the bosses in the later expansions.

[Jack Ivanov]

I just don't see how any Vanilla boss can be considered the hardest. I cleared several bosses in vanilla naxx, including 4H.. I was like 14 or something, and had no idea what I was really doing (neither did the majority of us). The fact that 40 people were able to beat a boss with very little add-on support and min/maxing shows how simple it was compared to some of the bosses in the later expansions.

Excuse me but you bullshiting until you link your armory. It was only 900 guilds who killed atleast ONE boss in Vanilla Naxxramas.

PS Mechanic wise Vanilla raids weren't hard but they required a lot of resources and logistic from guild to beat them. So i would call it hard. If we put current raiding scene back in Vanilla most of the raiders will quite raiding. Today's players are too "gentle" to raid in Vanilla's environment.

[kary]

Excuse me but you bullshiting until you link your armory. It was only 900 guilds who killed atleast ONE boss in Vanilla Naxxramas.

PS Mechanic wise Vanilla raids weren't hard but they required a lot of resources and logistic from guild to beat them. So i would call it hard. If we put current raiding scene back in Vanilla most of the raiders will quite raiding. Today's players are too "gentle" to raid in Vanilla's environment.

Gonna call bs on that.
"Raiders" in this expansion are the kids who leveled several toons and grinded artifact weapons to 54. Logistics aren't hard, it's just time consuming. The whiny lazies would be the ones missing out (just like they are were then)

[Jack Ivanov]

I just don't see how any Vanilla boss can be considered the hardest. I cleared several bosses in vanilla naxx, including 4H.. I was like 14 or something, and had no idea what I was really doing (neither did the majority of us). The fact that 40 people were able to beat a boss with very little add-on support and min/maxing shows how simple it was compared to some of the bosses in the later expansions.

Excuse me but you bullshiting until you link your armory. It was only 900 guilds who killed atleast ONE boss in Vanilla Naxxramas.

PS Mechanic wise Vanilla raids weren't hard but they required a lot of resources and logistic from guild to beat them. So i would call it hard. If we put current raiding scene back in Vanilla most of the raiders will quite raiding. Today's players are too "gentle" to raid in Vanilla's environment.

It's not mine but I wanna to share it with people who think old Naxxramas was just tedious and boring.

I cleared naxx 40 on my priest back than. Outside of all the main points people mentioned like controlling a guild of 50+ raiders , having the right classes , being undergeared , not understanding the game , not having any info sources outside of you wiping , disconnects and ques being a problem.
I can do a quick breakdown of why bosses were hard , if you combine all those factors , you would get the instance 0.01% cleared.
Spider wing 3/10 - Having a guild cappable of getting to naxx 40 with some gear and spending some time would gurantee this wing being cleared.
Anub
Required hunters who could play and kite , pretty killable for guilds who downed bosses in AQ up to twins.
Grand Widow Faerlina.
Trash to her took 30mins. She did pretty heavy aoe damage. Tricky part here was she enraged one shotting the tank , a priest had to mind control and a suicide an add into her to dispel it. Mind control had many break checks back than , like range , shadow resistance , taking damage , spell hit ( part of resistances ).
Maexxena
Easy fight , people had to learn to free people from X disable mechanic here. Also she stunned the whole raid for 6sec, basically since your MT couldnt dodge or parry in the stun , you had to pray he survived.
Abomination Wing - 10/10
Patchwerk 11/10 - Nobody knew what was going on for weeks. People avoided him like the plague. At some point people figured it out , wiped 1312312 times and killed him. First kills actually involved people kiting him for hours in a certain spot at the start of the spider wing. Later on blizzard added a poison spit that 2 shotted if there wasn't anyone in melee range.
Grobbolous - 3/10
This boss introduced the boss drops cancer on the ground , tank has to move it , so do the melee , + adds spawning.
Gluth - 4/10
Introduced the aoe adds before they reach boss mechanic. Much easier if you had dwarf priests as alliance.
Thaddius 14/10
Introduced the +/- mechanic. If anyone died and didn't give the bonus damage you wiped to enrage. If anyone went into the wrong camp it was a wipe. No easymod mods back than , remember that!
Death Knight Wing 10/10
Instructor Razuvious Impossible/10 if u didn't have good priests. Thats it. 1/10 otherwise.
Gothik the Harvester. 15/10
Personally i consider this to be the hardest boss in vanilla. It required insane cordination CC wise , DPS wise , on both sides. And by insane cordination , i mean insane cordination for that time. It had to be perfect for every single wave or it was a wipe. Much fucking harder than the 4HM.
The four horse-man: 8x 4/8 tier 3 tanks / 10. If your guild was cappable of killing gothik , you surely had the skill to kill 4hm, except the fact that it required 8 fucking tanks with 4/8 t3 , because a resisted taunt was a wipe. From here you can imagine the realm transfers ( just introduced ) and guilds poaching , guilds breaking up because of losing their main tanks etc. On top of that the encounter required some brains.
Plague wing Cancer / 10
Noth the plaguebringer 4/10
A very generic fight for modern standards , adds dispels , small dps check.
Heigan the Unclean 6/10
It came down to the point that if 25 or more people in the raid could do the "dance" ( was much harder and faster than naxx 25 ). You could kill him.
Gauntlet before Heigan 10/10.
It took 30 fucking minutes , it was hard , you could wipe , made heigan 15 times harder since you had 3-4 tries max per night. And most people required tries to learn the dancing part of the encounter.
Loatheb 6 hours a day farming ghost mushrooms in scarlet monastery graveyard / 10
Pretty much that , it required a strict rotation of shadowpots/bandages/healthstones. Farming Shadowpots took literally 6hours. Also healers had 1 heal per minute, had to use it on the maintank , so rotations were introduced ( there was an addon later on that showed who already used his heal , but it wwasnt very relevant when it showed up ). So 40 people had not to screw up their consumables rotation for 6mins , also healers couldnt screw up , also tank had to get good rng on avoidance and ON TOP OF THAT , it was a very tight DPS race. Which meant world buffs helped alot. So you really had 1 good try per night or 3 days depending on zul'gurub/onyxia buffs. The stars had to align to kill him.
Sapphirion 6/10
Introduced alot of new mechanics like the moving blizzard , the hide behind LOS to avoid one shot etc. The main problem with him was the fact that even if u were top in the world guild progress wise you needed to borrow frost runes ( you looted them from naxx from the walls around bosses ) to craft the epic frost resistance gear. So you needed good diplomacy with lesser ranked guilds , which probably already hated you since being the top guild on realms mattered back than( also you probably stole their best geared and most reliable players). Also you needed 1 priest in each group because of prayer of healing.
KT - 11/10
You needed dps , guardians under 40% had the most retarded snow ball mechanic , annoying dps race check phase 1 which lasted 5 mins every try. A lot of "one shot" mechanics , melee's had to interrupt every cast he did , alot of raid damage , burnt people's mana by 50%. Main tank could get oneshot if melee's failed. Required fully flasked of the titans raid. World buffs were almost a must.
Combine all those retarded factors with the fact that people didn't have any information or knew how to play and had to manage twice as big guilds and you can get the picture i hope.
edit:Oh yeah i completely forgot about thaddius being unplayable , so we had to do the raids at 2 am. It didn't help that our realm was the number 1 on the progress ranking ( meaining most guilds with best progress or crap like that )

- - - Updated - - -

I just don't see how any Vanilla boss can be considered the hardest. I cleared several bosses in vanilla naxx, including 4H.. I was like 14 or something, and had no idea what I was really doing (neither did the majority of us). The fact that 40 people were able to beat a boss with very little add-on support and min/maxing shows how simple it was compared to some of the bosses in the later expansions.

Excuse me but you bullshiting until you link your armory. It was only 900 guilds who killed atleast ONE boss in Vanilla Naxxramas.

PS Mechanic wise Vanilla raids weren't hard but they required a lot of resources and logistic from guild to beat them. So i would call it hard. If we put current raiding scene back in Vanilla most of the raiders will quite raiding. Today's players are too "gentle" to raid in Vanilla's environment.

It's not mine but I wanna to share it with people who think old Naxxramas was just tedious and boring.

I cleared naxx 40 on my priest back than. Outside of all the main points people mentioned like controlling a guild of 50+ raiders , having the right classes , being undergeared , not understanding the game , not having any info sources outside of you wiping , disconnects and ques being a problem.
I can do a quick breakdown of why bosses were hard , if you combine all those factors , you would get the instance 0.01% cleared.
Spider wing 3/10 - Having a guild cappable of getting to naxx 40 with some gear and spending some time would gurantee this wing being cleared.
Anub
Required hunters who could play and kite , pretty killable for guilds who downed bosses in AQ up to twins.
Grand Widow Faerlina.
Trash to her took 30mins. She did pretty heavy aoe damage. Tricky part here was she enraged one shotting the tank , a priest had to mind control and a suicide an add into her to dispel it. Mind control had many break checks back than , like range , shadow resistance , taking damage , spell hit ( part of resistances ).
Maexxena
Easy fight , people had to learn to free people from X disable mechanic here. Also she stunned the whole raid for 6sec, basically since your MT couldnt dodge or parry in the stun , you had to pray he survived.
Abomination Wing - 10/10
Patchwerk 11/10 - Nobody knew what was going on for weeks. People avoided him like the plague. At some point people figured it out , wiped 1312312 times and killed him. First kills actually involved people kiting him for hours in a certain spot at the start of the spider wing. Later on blizzard added a poison spit that 2 shotted if there wasn't anyone in melee range.
Grobbolous - 3/10
This boss introduced the boss drops cancer on the ground , tank has to move it , so do the melee , + adds spawning.
Gluth - 4/10
Introduced the aoe adds before they reach boss mechanic. Much easier if you had dwarf priests as alliance.
Thaddius 14/10
Introduced the +/- mechanic. If anyone died and didn't give the bonus damage you wiped to enrage. If anyone went into the wrong camp it was a wipe. No easymod mods back than , remember that!
Death Knight Wing 10/10
Instructor Razuvious Impossible/10 if u didn't have good priests. Thats it. 1/10 otherwise.
Gothik the Harvester. 15/10
Personally i consider this to be the hardest boss in vanilla. It required insane cordination CC wise , DPS wise , on both sides. And by insane cordination , i mean insane cordination for that time. It had to be perfect for every single wave or it was a wipe. Much fucking harder than the 4HM.
The four horse-man: 8x 4/8 tier 3 tanks / 10. If your guild was cappable of killing gothik , you surely had the skill to kill 4hm, except the fact that it required 8 fucking tanks with 4/8 t3 , because a resisted taunt was a wipe. From here you can imagine the realm transfers ( just introduced ) and guilds poaching , guilds breaking up because of losing their main tanks etc. On top of that the encounter required some brains.
Plague wing Cancer / 10
Noth the plaguebringer 4/10
A very generic fight for modern standards , adds dispels , small dps check.
Heigan the Unclean 6/10
It came down to the point that if 25 or more people in the raid could do the "dance" ( was much harder and faster than naxx 25 ). You could kill him.
Gauntlet before Heigan 10/10.
It took 30 fucking minutes , it was hard , you could wipe , made heigan 15 times harder since you had 3-4 tries max per night. And most people required tries to learn the dancing part of the encounter.
Loatheb 6 hours a day farming ghost mushrooms in scarlet monastery graveyard / 10
Pretty much that , it required a strict rotation of shadowpots/bandages/healthstones. Farming Shadowpots took literally 6hours. Also healers had 1 heal per minute, had to use it on the maintank , so rotations were introduced ( there was an addon later on that showed who already used his heal , but it wwasnt very relevant when it showed up ). So 40 people had not to screw up their consumables rotation for 6mins , also healers couldnt screw up , also tank had to get good rng on avoidance and ON TOP OF THAT , it was a very tight DPS race. Which meant world buffs helped alot. So you really had 1 good try per night or 3 days depending on zul'gurub/onyxia buffs. The stars had to align to kill him.
Sapphirion 6/10
Introduced alot of new mechanics like the moving blizzard , the hide behind LOS to avoid one shot etc. The main problem with him was the fact that even if u were top in the world guild progress wise you needed to borrow frost runes ( you looted them from naxx from the walls around bosses ) to craft the epic frost resistance gear. So you needed good diplomacy with lesser ranked guilds , which probably already hated you since being the top guild on realms mattered back than( also you probably stole their best geared and most reliable players). Also you needed 1 priest in each group because of prayer of healing.
KT - 11/10
You needed dps , guardians under 40% had the most retarded snow ball mechanic , annoying dps race check phase 1 which lasted 5 mins every try. A lot of "one shot" mechanics , melee's had to interrupt every cast he did , alot of raid damage , burnt people's mana by 50%. Main tank could get oneshot if melee's failed. Required fully flasked of the titans raid. World buffs were almost a must.
Combine all those retarded factors with the fact that people didn't have any information or knew how to play and had to manage twice as big guilds and you can get the picture i hope.
edit:Oh yeah i completely forgot about thaddius being unplayable , so we had to do the raids at 2 am. It didn't help that our realm was the number 1 on the progress ranking ( meaining most guilds with best progress or crap like that )

[kary]

Eh, my guild cleared naxx in vanilla (before I joined)
Most people who raided then think current raiding is better and more difficult.

I mean if we're going by 2nd hand anecdotes.

[Deleted]

Pointless thread, pointless debate. Everyone has a subjective opinion, and you're not comparing like for like. A lot of people are also clueless as to the difference between a nerf and a fix. Hint: if the boss was impossible to kill prior to being patched, it was fixed, not nerfed.

Also many mistaking tedious design for difficulty (Four Horsemen and, pretty much anything from Vanilla since 40 man logistics, terrible loot to player ratio, bullshit resistance requirements and horrible gear itemisation represent artificial difficulty independent of the actual boss mechanics)

[Queen of Hamsters]

Mythic Archimonde or Mythic KJ. Basing this on how the best guilds struggled, not what was the most difficult for me. If I had to choose one, I'd say... Mythic Gorefiend.

And I don't know a single person having raided throughout this game, still thinking that bosses from pre-WOTLK hold a candle to what came after. There's a reason for why current day raiders, can go to Classic private servers to raid for relaxation on an off-night.

Today's players are too "gentle" to raid in Vanilla's

Regular players would go through the logistics and down the bosses at a slower rate, sure, but take the Mythic world first mentality and apply that to the equation... Ain't nothing "too gentle" about how players have evolved and attack content these days.

People back then were akin to stumbling around in a dark, unknown room and getting things right by trial and error and a few people having enough know-how to carry the rest.
Players today (many of them having played since then) attack encounters with EVERYTHING, perfected class performance, communication, addons, meters to read what's happening... And yet they can end up seeing hundreds upon HUNDREDS of wipes against a single boss... And that's their entire raid teams made up of players of a similar mindset. You won't find them carrying 5 people still at the "stumbling"-stage...

[kary]

Pointless thread, pointless debate. Everyone has a subjective opinion, and you're not comparing like for like. A lot of people are also clueless as to the difference between a nerf and a fix. Hint: if the boss was impossible to kill prior to being patched, it was fixed, not nerfed.

Also many mistaking tedious design for difficulty (Four Horsemen and, pretty much anything from Vanilla since 40 man logistics, terrible loot to player ratio, bullshit resistance requirements and horrible gear itemisation represent artificial difficulty independent of the actual boss mechanics)

Every time you try to come up with an objective metric, the kids here wanna give concessions to vanilla encounters too. Fun stuff.

[Fayenoor]

I am going to vote for Muru. Purely because it is a 6 min fight. For a fight that short, it was remarkably complex. As a mage, I had to sheep one add, counter spell another and spell steal from a 3rd mob all in the span of 3 GCDs. We had two mages, one on each side of adds spawning. And any mistake with the Sheep-CS-Spellsteal combo usually meant instant death for a healer, cascading to a wipe.

All the new fights (end bosses) are incredibly long; so their complexities are rather bloated.

[kary]

Mythic Archimonde or Mythic KJ. Basing this on how the best guilds struggled, not what was the most difficult for me. If I had to choose one, I'd say... Mythic Gorefiend.

And I don't know a single person having raided throughout this game, still thinking that bosses from pre-WOTLK hold a candle to what came after. There's a reason for why current day raiders, can go to Classic private servers to raid for relaxation on an off-night.



Regular players would go through the logistics and down the bosses at a slower rate, sure, but take the Mythic world first mentality and apply that to the equation... Ain't nothing "too gentle" about how players have evolved and attack content these days.

People back then were akin to stumbling around in a dark, unknown room and getting things right by trial and error and a few people having enough know-how to carry the rest.
Players today (many of them having played since then) attack encounters with EVERYTHING, perfected class performance, communication, addons, meters to read what's happening... And yet they can end up seeing hundreds upon HUNDREDS of wipes against a single boss... And that's their entire raid teams made up of players of a similar mindset. You won't find them carrying 5 people still at the "stumbling"-stage...

Yeah, 100% this.
You have to be pretty delusional to think that todays raiders are nothing less but a seal team 10 to vanilla's bart simpson with a slingshot.

Top tier raiders today would clear likely to (a non bugged) c'thun in blues with the way they play.

[Deleted]

I cleared naxx in vanilla. The 4 horsemen (lvl60) is the hardest boss Blizzard ever made, and ever will make by far.
(arguably KT, since he required you to kill 4H aswell.)

4H "required" 8 tanks for most raids - where all prot warrs needed the T3 4set.

*The micro management, having 40 players move correctly, and individually, rotating around the debuffs and/or safe zone, while having tanks,heals and sufficient dps (interrupts and soakers) at the right places for whole duration of the fight.

Not 1 fight later has ever been close the aspect of just organizing how to crack this fight, even if you know the mechanics.

Remember none who killed this in vanilla had any guide or similar, it was a logistical puzzle on "another level" compared to pretty much any other fight.
(KT, Gothik, Lethon, Ouro, Visc and Cthun - was like the only other bosses with such logistical puzzle elements, but all of them far easier than 4H)

no ... no.. just NO. stop spreading this myth??? its so wrong.

[Jack Ivanov]

Mythic Archimonde or Mythic KJ. Basing this on how the best guilds struggled, not what was the most difficult for me. If I had to choose one, I'd say... Mythic Gorefiend.

And I don't know a single person having raided throughout this game, still thinking that bosses from pre-WOTLK hold a candle to what came after. There's a reason for why current day raiders, can go to Classic private servers to raid for relaxation on an off-night.



Regular players would go through the logistics and down the bosses at a slower rate, sure, but take the Mythic world first mentality and apply that to the equation... Ain't nothing "too gentle" about how players have evolved and attack content these days.

People back then were akin to stumbling around in a dark, unknown room and getting things right by trial and error and a few people having enough know-how to carry the rest.
Players today (many of them having played since then) attack encounters with EVERYTHING, perfected class performance, communication, addons, meters to read what's happening... And yet they can end up seeing hundreds upon HUNDREDS of wipes against a single boss... And that's their entire raid teams made up of players of a similar mindset. You won't find them carrying 5 people still at the "stumbling"-stage...

Don't cherry picking. I said in Vanilla's environment - its means old design of specs / combat / importance of consumables and its grind / rare purples / gear wasn't enough to beat bosses etc.

[Deleted]

C´Thun mechanics were broken as hell, but yeah that's actually the one I wipest the most.

But... I'll have to go with 4H or KT back in Vanilla.

[Jack Ivanov]

Top tier raiders today would clear likely to (a non bugged) c'thun in blues with the way they play.

Fun to read you statement considering even full T2 raids had struggling with putting enough DPS/HPS to kill him. How they gonna do it with full blue gear? Jeez mate you delusional...

- - - Updated - - -

C´Thun mechanics were broken as hell, but yeah that's actually the one I wipest the most.

But... I'll have to go with 4H or KT back in Vanilla.

Its wasn't broken as people says. The only problem were random spawns of big tentacles in second phase.