Which version of WoW had the best raids?

[Velerios]

MoP by far, then WoD.

WotLK had only one good raid, Ulduar, still my personal favorite; Blackrock Foundry and Throne of Thunder are totally both on second place. Still: WotLK was beside of Ulduar horrible: ICC was a bit of MEH, it was not so bad, but also not so good. ToC was GRUESOME, Malygos was an vehicle-fight, and i knew exactly that half of my raid would die on it, always the same one, and Obsidian Sanctuary was also... it was simply a 1 boss fight: not that this is something bad, but it was to late to have any kind of impact.

WoD had Blackrock Foundry, one of the best raids ever, but also Highmaul; and this was a really bad dungeon, except the last boss, that i actually liked (even and because it also took very long).

MoP Mogushan Vault was also enjoyable; especially when you also did LFR, since lfr was not a joke-mode in MoP. In fact, there was not a single failure in raids in MoP, so i went with MoP.

Naturally MoP was also good because classes back then were enjoyable. If your class is bad, then no matter what you do, the game stays bad, no matter how good the raids are. This also made WoD loose to MoP.

[Nokami]

MoP by far

[Dch48]

Overall, I would have to say MoP with WotLK being second. I say overall because BC had maybe the best in Karazhan but also the worst in The Sunwell.

[Moor Shadows]

Good to see Cata getting dunked on. Firelands was decent, but DS was just a serious letdown.

BC, Wrath and Mists were the peak of everything good about this game in terms of raiding.

[Marvy]

Loads of people here have voted for WOTLK and I really cannot understand what twisted logic has encouraged them to do so.

Yes Ulduar was the best raid the game has ever seen, by far, I will be the first person to put my hands up and say that, but when you look at the expansion as a whole, it was terrible for the raid scene.

Tier 7: The 10 and 25 man split was a disaster and a complete balls up right from the get go, if the boss has 10mil on 25 man, he has 4mil on 10 man, makes sense right? Wrong, there are usually 16-17 dps in a 25 man, and 5-6 in a 10 man, which means a 10 mil boss should have had about 2.5 mil HP. As a result of this simple logic that no raid developers could notice at the time, 10 man was artificially harder than 25 man (at least on the hard modes). Also about a year earlier Blizz had issued a statement that "we will not make raids that intend to be puggable" and a year later here we are in trade chat recruiting for our naxx25 pug. The difficulty was a complete joke and an insult to anyone that had come out of grinding through M'uru for the past months, all content cleared in 3 days sums it up. The only challenge was the Immortal, which most weeks was lost due to someone DCing or the server going to shit when a Wintergrasp battle started. Add to the fact that class balance at this stage was all over the place. Terrible tier and introduction to the expansion.

Tier 8: Deserves it own thread, but was fantastic. Not just the raid but a lot of the class imbalance from the previous tier was fixed in this patch as well along with the introduction of dual specs, a much welcome change. The previous tier got a nice 6 months to last after it was cleared in 3 days. This tier, the arguably best raid ever released ceased to be relevant a mere 4 months later, when less than 100 guilds had killed Algalon25, absolutely shocking poor decision, yet again.

Tier 9: Again, another tier that deserves it's own thread on just how bad it was. A single (or fine, two) room raid with no trash or real imagination behind it. I remember being mid pull Vezax hard mode when someone read the "you face not one, but two jormungars" quote and wondered if it was an April Fools joke. The introduction of the absolutely retarded limited attempts system, the incredibly poor tier system (where a freshly dinged character could now look the same as one that farmed ToC heroic week in week out) and the terrible raid made this tier possibly the worst raid tier in the history of the game. Some of the fights like the faction champions were stupid and Lord Jaraxxus was far too easy. I think the most aggravating part about this entire tier was how it made Ulduar obsolete, and no, saying "people still went back to farm the mace", is not a justified answer, yes they did, but only because they had no sodding remaining attempts for ToC.

Tier 10: People seem to look back at ICC as if it was some amazing raid, but in my opinion it really wasn't. The raid was so incredibly lack luster, anything with the Lich King in it was going to be good, so they seemed to not put much effort in at all. Fights like Sindragosa felt poorly thought out and designed, and were not at all engaging. The lore was not that special either, I at least expected to be able to climb the spiral ice pinnacle to the top of the throne to follow in Arthas path, so having a dumb teleport up to the top instead was a big downer. The fights apart from Putricide and Lich King were not that complicated nor demanding as they should have been at all. And I think what annoyed me most was the stupid 30% HP, healing and damage buff that you got from Varian/Garrosh. This made the first 11 bosses completely trivial, yet it seemed almost as if the Lich King heroic was designed around you having this buff. This dumb artificial difficulty did not go down well. Add to further insult they still persisted with the stupid limited attempts BS, I remember only having 5 attempts on Professor Putricide the week he released, which was hard enough for a complicated fight, and I remember unstable servers being the reason for wasting most attempts. On top of all this ICC lasted nearly a year, which considering it had essentially become a 1 boss raid once the 30% buff had kicked in, was not a particularly fond memory.

So in summary, no WOTLK was not the best expansion for raids at all, I'd even go as far to say that if it wasn't for Ulduar, it is probably the worst.

[Marxman]

MoP > Wrath = TBC >>> The Rest

Throne of Thunder and Siege of Orgrimmar are both top ~3-5 raids ever. MoP wins fairly easily.

Wrath would be a solid 2nd place if Tier 9 wasn't so god fucking awful.

[Celestraza]

I chose WotLK but really it had one splendid raid that defeats all raids: Ulduar. The encounters were so good and hardmode was something special instead of just changing a mode for more boss hp and more dmg. I mean Naxx, ICC were shit.

Pandaria and Legion would be a close second. Heart of Fear/ToT and Nighthold/Antorus were nice.

[Jeremypwnz]

Prefacing this by saying I didn't play Vanilla when it was current (Or 2019 Classic WoW), nor most of WoD/Legion/BFA (Only did a couple bosses in Highmaul and 3/8M Uldir). So my results will be skewed towards the earlier expansions. I actually went into a spreadsheet and scored all the raids I've done when it was current content (out of 10):

• Karazhan - 4
• Gruul's Lair - 6
• Magtheridon's Lair - 3
• Serpentshrine Cavern - 4
• The Eye - 6
• Naxxramas (Wotlk) - 1
• Obsidian Sanctum - 5
• The Eye of Eternity - 2
• Icecrown Citadel - 7
• Firelands - 9.5
• Dragon Soul - 7
• Mogushan Vaults - 6
• Heart of Fear - 8
• Terrace of the Endless Spring - 6
• Throne of Thunder - 10
• Siege of Orgrimmar - 9
• Highmaul - 3
• Uldir - 5

• TBC - 23/50 = 46%
• Wotlk - 15/40 = 37.5%
• Cata - 16.5/20 = 82.5%
• MoP - 39/50 = 78%
• WoD - 3/10 =30%
• BFA - 5/10 = 50%

Couple things I want to note.

Heart of Fear seems to get a bad rap here, but it is one of my favorite raids for 2 reasons. The fights were unique and weren't complete bullshit like a lot of the current content, and that it was one of the raids I felt where you can 100% tell the difference between a good raider and a bad one. I loved being able to min-max my movements on some of the fights and actually feel rewarded for doing so. Especially Blade Lord Ta'yak with the end phase and the tornadoes, being able to utilize movement speeds and gap-closers while dodging tornadoes to min-max DPS was very gratifying.

Highmaul felt very lazy despite 2 fights being very interesting despite all the issues with them (Brackenspore and Tectus).

Siege of Orgrimmar would have been a 10/10 if I wasn't placed on perma belt duty on Siegecrafter.

Karazhan is low because I just didn't like it very much, sue me. It's not bad, just barely below average.

Terrace of the Endless Spring, the first 2 fights were very fun. Especially Tsulong, alternating between healing and killing the boss was unique and fun. But Lei Shi was simply an annoying encounter and Sha of Fear was too long of an encounter.

[fakaroonie]

Close between TBC and WotlK. If it wasn't for ToC, WotlK easily.

WotlK was more polished though so I'll go with that.

[Geasa]

Close between TBC and WotlK. If it wasn't for ToC, WotlK easily.

WotlK was more polished though so I'll go with that.

Pretty much this exactly!

[Dellboi]

Overall I've gotta say Cataclysm, Dragon Soul was a huge let down, mainly from the last 2 bosses but generally under-tuned before that also. However the first 2 tiers were godlike and more than made up for it.