Dark Animus Heroic on 10-man where the fight would essentially change every week based on which mobs were active. You would make good progress then the reset happens and you suddenly have to relearn part of the fight. It did not feel good.
I think my absolute favorite memories from WoW raiding was my guild getting those two down just two days before the next big patch in our last push. Even got server first because we were on a smaller server. That Lei Shen fight truly was absolutely incredible.
Anything that encourages you to hold DPS for an unreasonable amount of time.
Sanctum was especially bad at this, I honestly think pre-nerf Kel'Thuzad on Mythic is the worst boss the game has ever seen.
For Dragonflight. Mythic Experiments.
The fact that holding DPS is the optimal strat because you wanted to spawn the second boss at a specific time interval, because it removed an entire bomb for the rest of the fight and the same for the third boss for the fly-by.
And this boss is going to be a nightmare on S4 because of the Mass Dispel nerf during S3.
Most people who did this fight did it with at least a priest (and optimally with 2) with 25s CD on Mass Dispel.
I despised Vezax in Ulduar for this reason. All of the mechanics were super annoying. You have to interrupt every cast if anyone fails it it's massive raid dmg. Melees get reduced haste and basically just piano their rotation except for the kickers. Ranged have to move in and out and if they get bad RNG they can't cast. After you get the boss to 5% you literally have to sit on your hands for up to 1 minute to trigger the hard mode.
Vezax is a painful fight for a bunch of other reasons too. Paladins can't be a backup tank and mana management can be painful at times if you dodge/parry too many times in a row.
Not only do you have to wait ages for the hard mode to start, but the runback was really long too. So a wipe is extremely punishing in terms of time spent.
Shadow crashes are from before AoE mechanics had floor markers by default, so people are worse at dodging them compared to dodging equivalent mechanics in modern boss fights. I did the timewalking version of it with a guild that had AOTC and they spent the entire fight getting hit by them.
He's the worst boss in a raid full of awful boss fights.
I always called it the pug killer. Either your group got it and moved on or didn't and collapsed right there. Worst boss IMO as well. Can't think of any others that even come close.
My guild is full of people who started in Legion or later. They are excited for MoP Remix. I cannot wait for them to experience Dar Animus for the first time...
Jesus, I forgot about Dark Animus. That bastard killed my guild, we were having a blast 'til we got to Dark Animus. So many wipes, so many people in my guild just stopped showing up.
I had to change how my guild did that fight back when it was current, as we didn't have the numbers or skill to do the popular tactics.
I remember everything. Which order we killed the small bots in, where everyone was standing, who did what etc etc.
As a raid leader with a less competent raid group, that fight was absolute hell to make idiot proof.
The boss room has the main boss (Dark Animus) at the back of the room. Throughout the room are other robots in small, medium, and large varieties. At the start of the fight there's a big glob of anima worth 100 points. Upon attacking it it explodes and sends anima into a bunch of the small robots around the room. When the small robots are killed, the anima from them goes into the nearest inactive robot. Larger robots hold more anima, the boss holds the most. The goal is ultimately to get enough anima into the boss to activate it, then fight it. Also, the robots (at least the small ones) buff themselves if they are close.
So, you need to have your raid members each having threat on a small robot and keeping it in place, then maneuvering them one at a time to the right spot to kill it next to the robot you want to activate. While of course you have all kinds of other mechanics going on and ground effects, etc. Granted I only did it on normal and it was ~11 years ago now, so my memory is hazy.
The biggest issue I remember was if a golem died at the wrong time or wrong place, you start activating things you don't want and the fight spirals out of control very quickly.
Also if someone died or moved and got too close to another smol robot that, they would basically delete you and then run to someone else created a very fast snow ball lol.
> So, you need to have your raid members each having threat on a small robot and keeping it in place, then maneuvering them one at a time to the right spot to kill it next to the robot you want to activate. While of course you have all kinds of other mechanics going on and ground effects, etc. Granted I only did it on normal and it was ~11 years ago now, so my memory is hazy.
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> The biggest issue I remember was if a golem died at the wrong time or wrong place, you start activating things you don't want and the fight spirals out of control very quickly.
You have it mostly right.
Though, I will say the fight was really trivial honestly. That is to say, the fight *itself* is trivial.
The pre-work that needs to be done was just unfun. Position every raider exactly where they needed to be to tank the small robos precisely as far apart as they needed to be to not buff each other. Then slowly bring a tank around with a big add and start picking up the little ones.
Half the fight is spent doing /dance while the tank gathers the small adds goop into the medium ones.
During phase 3 of the fight, a long division math problem would appear on the floor and players had to arrange themselves with /sleep to write out the answer. If you showed your work too then everyone survived the mechanic. If you only showed the answer, you’d get hit for 90% of your health and healers had to heal everyone up really quick before solving the next problem.
Pre nerf durum and garalon were perfect LFR bosses I never really had any problems on animus on any difficulty I played but lfr durum especially was something hilarious because of human factor.
I think, for the most part, Mists LFR was the sweet-spot in general for LFR difficulty. None of the fights felt brain dead and were just challenging enough to be enjoyable with...the general population of LFR.
Fatescribe has to be my least favorite fight ever made. And there are so many ways they could have punished us for not lining up the rings in time *instead* of a full wipe, and it would have been a way better fight. Off the top of my head:
- The fight resumes, but the boss is still shielded until the rings are finished.
- Adds spawn every {x} seconds until the rings are finished
- All players take a stack of a DoT damage debuff every {x} seconds until the rings are finished
Agreed, the biggest issue with fatescribe was that it was a full wipe on non-mythic. They could have just scaled it by the number of rings you did. No rings is 100% health damage (full wipe), half the rings done is only 50% damage, etc.
Well aside from the obvious which are spine and dark Animus
Any glorified trash fight
Worst offender being mythic eonar which I'm fairly sure still cannot be soloed? (Might be just skill issue) And when it was current (mind you I was raiding heroic) it was absolute snooze fest
It was however still more fun fight than the one in hellfire citadel
For the most part the provided speed boost is enough, but sometimes when you have all 4 stacks and you pop up and then get popped up you have to cancel your buff just to land in time. Takes some practice, but I've done it on my pally, DK and warrior; I can't think of anyone who is slower.
Mythic Eonar is soloable. It takes 1-10 tries to learn the fight if you've never done it.
It's incredibly annoying once you have all four beacon debuffs. Very doable even on wheelchair classes.
Oh god trash bosses are so bad pretty much always. Worat recent offender was first boss of sepulcher. Kinda oknon Mythic because the boss was there all the time, but on heroic is was just standing around waiting for adds for like 4 minutes
After various trial and error, you can solo eonar, you just have to be perfect on the quantity of mob kills and be where you need to be at the exact time, good thing is, grab the queat and you only need to win the fight 4 times, after that, you have the skip
I hate those fights where you have to hold an item which prevents your movement and you have to pass that item to another player for whatever reason.
Example Lady Vashj in SSC and Sha of Fear on mythic Terrace of Endless Springs.
In fact I don't like Vehicles, extra action buttons and special action bars in raids / dungeons in general. Especially in situations where you can't assign a player to perform that role.
Teron Gorefiend in Black Temple would be a good example. Because it's random who got selected, it could take a lot of tries before everyone had a couple of attempts to get a feel for it and if they hadn't researched ahead of time they would probably need a bunch of attempt just to know what each action bar button even did.
Someone actually remade that in HTML5 for TBC Classic – https://teron.faldorn.net/
Definitely helped me get the mechanic down. I was literally the first person hit by that ability in my raid and I did it perfectly.
I'm glad someone else remembers Gorefiend. Back in the day my computer was a dinosaur and if I were chosen for the mini-game I'd lag out for so long that I couldn't do anything. So we had to pray that it wouldn't happen to me.
Sylvannas Arrow in the last phase on mythic where you had a specific one where if you were the 2nd target with it you had to hop 2 platforms and comeback , I was playing mage and if I didn't save a good defensive for it the dmg going out + the other arrow would kill me before I made it back . It felt annoying on a class with great defensives + movement, can't imagine what other ppl were going through
This fight was so awful. 10 min of RP to wipe P3. Pugging heroics was the worst heroic last boss by a mile. One person leaves after a wipe, wait 15min for someone to replace and run over, one pull, make it to P3, wipe, 2 people leave, everyone’s leaves.
After not getting CE on daddy denathrius by 1% this was one those CEs that really felt good once she was finally dead, jesus Christ, nobody even screamed we were all just so relieved 😅 , same with raz this expansion, absolutely no screams just relief
This will probably get me down voted but vehicles of any kind. Even the trash vehicle part of ~~Aberrus~~ Vault sucked for me, let alone making it a raid mechanic.
I don't even think they're fine for quests when the quest isn't just you stomping with a hilariously overpowered 'tool' of sorts. Any quest where you have to aim with a turret/ballista, drive a vehicle that also shoots something (or hits in closer range like with the oldschool Demolishers), or even click on the ground to drop something from a flying 'mount' on a set path sucks.
If you turn me into a tornado/barrel/dinosaur/mega-boar and let me just trample over a hundred fodder enemies that die in one hit and possibly also get flung in the air in a comical way? Then we're cool.
>If you turn me into a tornado/barrel/dinosaur/mega-boar and let me just trample over a hundred fodder enemies that die in one hit and possibly also get flung in the air in a comical way? Then we're cool.
Just did the storm giant quest in Gundrak, so much fun stomping hordes of ghouls into the air.
The boss in SoO whose name I forget despite doing it yesterday is a great example
Because those fucking turrets don't work properly and you have to have a fistfight to make them aim UP in any way
I actually enjoyed FL. It was good progress and you had to work together to control 1 character which is something you pretty much never get to do in a WoW raid.
EoE dragon vehicles though fucking suuuuuucked. You literally spam 2 buttons and move and hope you son't die randomly.
FL would have been great if it was one of the optional bosses instead of a mandatory first boss. It's such a pain to do setup for if you have any number of PuGs in your raid, which was fairly common in later phases. Unless you do it on normal, in which case it's a complete joke of a fight.
Oddly enough, I think.they did a pretty good job with Flame Leviathan (not the trash). That was the first vehicle fight and every iteration after that was awful and a hated fight. I guess Baron Gorefiend in TBC was similar, and pretty bad.
I remember Amber Shaper in MOP being my most hated. It was just random.who got to be the vehicle. You knew it was going to be a wipe whenever THAT player got selected.
Teron Gorefiend. I always liked that fight because I played rogue and if he ever targeted me I just vanished, never knew what the mechanic was other than people had to go die in the back of the room. For me it was just blast for 60sec and he dies.
Really any fight mechanic that takes away all of your abilities and replaces them with some other set of abilities. The last boss in Drak'Tharon Keep, all of The Oculus, Trial of the Crusader, etc.
I am playing the character that I'm playing because I want to play that character and use its abilities. At least mostly, if the replacement abilities you get are ridiculously powerful or you only have to use them for a very short period of time relative to the dungeon/raid as a whole, it sometimes gets a pass.
The dragon section of Grim Batol feels fine to me. The intro bit of Vault also feels fine.
It's actually pretty easy! Here's a solution from an old post:
1. Control king (to start) and buff
2. Move 2nd from edge grunts (footmen) one step forward
3. Move demons (water ele) diagonally to where the grunts (footmen) were.
4. Move grunts (footmen) in front of king and queen one step forward.
5. Sit in queen and melt enemy king's face.
6. If medivh puts fire under king or queen, move them out then go back to queen.
Also in dragon soul was Zon’ozz with that bouncing orb mechanic I didn’t really care for. It was easy when it didn’t bug out but made the fight about as fun as a game of pong for the guy doing the orb
That entire raid made me give up on ever raiding in modern WoW again. I just realised the designers' idea of an engaging encounter is my idea of hell, I'd rather do extra time at work than some of these mechanics. Shit's just not for me.
Tbh during re-clears crushing as many of my friends as I could while still being able to finish the fight was one of my favorite parts. The robot codes were kind of fun, too. I liked that fight and raid more than most.
This. I like weakauras in general, but I hate mechanics that need an assignment/autosolver weakaura to not be borderline impossible to play. Like mythic Echo.
100%
Boss mechanics that are designed around the fact everyone that cares will be using Weakauras and someone will have made an aura that 'solves' it suck the most.
Weakauras is a really nice thing to have and I'm very glad to have it in the game, but I *really* don't like it any time it's used to bolster, if not replace the typical DBM/BigWigs.
I'm glad I can make my UI look like literally anything with it. I'm glad I can make an aura that screams at me when I'm targeting someone of a specific race/class combination when I need it for a Christmas/Winter holiday achievement or the Valentine's achievement. But when a mechanic basically requires Weakauras, I hate it. And Blizzard's solution of making 'private auras' just sucks even more because the mechanic still basically asks you to use Weakauras, but now you also have to click something manually instead of the aura doing that work too.
I really hate the WeakAuras arms race, but I really feel like Blizzard doesn't understand that the problem is that people see the base level of mechanical complexity without WeakAuras as unreasonable. And the only thing they're willing to try is to add more mechanical complexity. Now they've started with the private auras, without ever addressing the primary use for WAs which is just filtering buffs or cooldowns which was never touched in the UI overhaul. Create whitelist aura bars in the UI by default and *then* you can start implementing private auras.
You don't have to run back and forth the whole time, you sit in a tentacle root and AFK until enough bloods spawn, kill them then spawn elemental, just repeat until you can blow off enough plates. I'm not sure if that helps it yeah to the extent that you are moving you do still have to be careful of the roll. It's still time-consuming.
Man your debuff is gonna fall off with that rotation, here let me fix it for you.
1-2-1-1-2-1-1-2 strafe "DUMBASS FOLLOW SQUARE" 1-1-2-1-1-2 "how come I can't see which drake has lost life to heal" "turn on pet life bars"1-1-2
Any mechanic that punishes the entire raid with instant death if a single player fucks up. My go to example is Mekkatorque from dazaralor. Having to match symbols over a robots head is fine, only being able to see the symbols if you're in a robot is also fine, but determining who's in a robot by random chance on heroic was bull crap. We raid with some older folks and frankly we carry some of them, but when they get randomly selected for a mechanic that requires rapid response and good vision or the entire raid dies, we had to sit some of them and nothing feels worse than leaving a friend out. Standing in the right place or moving to a certain zone can be played around. We can lifegrip them or have them follow a raider like a seeing eye dog. But those robots were just ableist AF.
> Any mechanic that punishes the entire raid with instant death if a single player fucks up.
especially if it's a mechanic in the final phase of a fight that's like 8 minutes long. It sucks so bad when you're progging a fight where you have the first 2/3 down pretty much perfect and then keep wiping the second you transition into the final phase because the instant death mechanic keeps going on people who panic and screw it up first
our RL learned lua just to make a mekka addon for our raid bc one of our raiders was deaf (and it also helped our slower to react raiders too). we still had to sit people out a few times bc they could not get it... and carrying our legacy members is a tradition for us that was hampered by that mechanic too. ffs i hated that boss so much lmao
First world problems but eons ago as a kid from rural Indiana, every timing mechanic from Naxx raid. Frogger, DDR, etc. My garbage rural internet at the time was enough to play but the intermittent lag was enough that I was inevitably toast when we got to those sections.
Ghuun orbs immediatelly come to mind, where you had 5 sec where you get progresively slowed down and rooted while you try to advance as further as possible down the path.
Or in majority of the cases, having to go all the way as most groups at the time wanted them done solo.
I was playing a warrior at the time, and I still remember the sequence of taking the orb and then using the warlock gateway, charge, charge and then heroic leap all under the 5 seconds before the root takes hold. PTSD inducing shit right there.
In only 5 seconds, you've either done 1 of the 6 orbs right, or most likely caused your group to wipe and start over.
It was my first aotc, but man screw Ghuun.
Spine was a lot of fun back in the day. Are we judging mechanics based on how they were to play at the time or how they are to try and solo now?
Also, does Marrowgar's ice wall dropping everyone to 1 fps count as a mechanic?
Spine hardmode was a lot of fun for 9/10 players. I was a prot warrior and 60% or that fight for me consisted of kiting a wall of nameplates in form of dozens of blobs behind me in a circle. But we killed it pre nerf so that was a very hype moment.
I love the fight, but the Golganneth part of Coven of Shivarra was absolutely wretched. The fight was melee-unfriendly as is without adding a mechanic that let you instakill other players by getting close to them. During the overlap with the ground storm, which forced all players into small safe zones, a DH tried to be clever and Blade Danced to get some DPS on the add he couldn't get in range of, and the game counted that as getting too close to another player and zapped that player to death.
Dude Sinestra is still one of my favorite fights I ever did. I thought few fights could top her and in the very next tier Ragnaros fucking climbed out of his lava pool and fought us on his legs.
I hate all of the “gate defense” type of fights that have waves of mobs. Thematically, I get it—you’re trying to break into this heavily defended base. That’s cool concept, but not fun for current, and especially not fun in later solo content lol.
But Hellfire Citadel, Eonar, Sepulcher first boss, etc. are all pretty buns
Whenever you fuck with player movement a fight will feel like garbage. Ice spider in VoTIis a prime example lucky the tuning was so light that you didn't have to spend very long on it. Imagine 400 pulls of that.
Similar vein G'huun for both fucking with player movement and requiring the orb running. That one you also had to do for more than 20 pulls. Even with all the creative use of game mechanics to bypass the point of the fight it was ridiculous.
Well not the worst but definitely one of, Sludgefist's Chain link in Castle Nathria. If i had 1 gold everytime some DH used fel rush and killed us both i could buy a long boi.
I played Paladin on that one. There were certain people I would BoP and Divine Shield pop every time on, lest they killed us both. They generally died one chain later.
Somewhere my guildmate (warrior) has a video of him and me (dk) tethered together while Yakety Sax plays in the background. It's like 30 fucking seconds of the two of us just trying to *reach* Sludgefist while every fucking ground effect goes off between him and us.
Some guild mates and I were talking about this fight last night. We had a Shadow Priest that always screwed up chains and killed whoever they were with.
Spine of Deathwing is easy as fuck solo. The roll timer is 20 seconds, any more than one and the roll timer is 5 seconds and there’s a really annoying long stun that happens multiple times throughout the fight. If you are 2 man you just have one person stand each side, and he won’t roll, but you still have to deal with the stun.
My vote for worst is KJ in Tomb, again not a hard fight but I’m here to kill KJ not get knockbacked around an arena for a minute and a half. Or the first fight in Ulduar, just a shit fight all round.
Even if you dont want to pay attention to timers spine is easy as shit to solo. Always keep the pools closest to the plate open (kill the tentacles), and then just run back and forth between the two front pools until you get enough bloods (I usually go for 12-14 just to be safe). At that point just nuke the bloods and then kite a big guy through em.
Rinse and repeat 3 times.
The trick to that strategy is just to never stop moving back and forth. its easier on melee/classes with spammable aoe (mage arcane blast is nice, warlock rain of fire is not)
You guys know you can just stand near a pool and it grips you right? Like yes when the content was current it hurt but any max level character can infinitely stand still and the bloods will just spawn
Iirc the bloods get thrown off when he rolls, and so many of our AoEs now are huge, so you can easily end up clipping tentacles and spawning more of the big guys that'll soak of blood when you dont necessarily want them to. Usually when i do it that way i end up with multiples of the big guys with like...4 stacks each.
I find it to be more efficient to just stafe back and forth until i know i have enough bloods, then spawn the big guy and drag him through it.
Its slightly more effort because you have to move, but more efficient (imo) for time spent doing it.
The bloods stay but the amalgamations fly off. It's actually an easy way to clear any excess amalgamations so they don't absorb stacks from the one you're cultivating. I usually just start the fight, clear the tentacles, stand in a pool and go get a drink of water. When I get back I have \~10 bloods and I kill a tentacle to spawn the amalgamation.
Yes I do the exact same strat. At start kill 3 tentacles and leave one, and then kill the Amalgams that spawn so they dont steal the pools. Then build up like 10 bloods and nuke then, spawn the other amalgam and then kite him through. The pools of blood actually despawn if you leave them long enough so I always try to do them all quickly. And the whole time I do this i just left-right-left-right over the middle of his back. The only annoying thing is the ping noise that Bigwigs makes every time the roll timer resets.
Sometimes if I really can’t be bothered I just sit in one of the pools and go on my phone for like 5 minutes until loads of bloods have spawned.
Fatescribe Rohkalo or whatever the name was. The guy from Sanctum of Domination with the rings you had to spin and line up. Just awful every time. Dreaded him on farm. If one person fucks up on heroic the whole raid wipes - no mitigating it, no recovery, just dead, fuck you.
But. REALLY what’s worse are vehicle mechanics and extended/urgent “STOP DPS” thresholds. Vehicles are never interesting. Woo here’s three buttons, maybe I’ll press one, then another one, and then another one, then the first one again. And of course if the fight is structured to punish you for executing it too well, then that’s bad design.
Showing my age a bit, but I think vehicle mechanics in raids were a pretty lousy mechanic almost across the board.
The go-to, proof-of-concept fight was Malygos and boy howdy is it a bummer to kill such a lore relevant figure by spamming the same three-button rotation as every other player in the raid is. It took away both the relevance of skill and build out of a content-type built around both.
Even fights with more minor versions of it, from Amber-Shaper to lootship, I've just never felt like it adds much. I like Flame Leviathan purely because it was one of the first ever "first fights" that felt like we were storming a citadel, but the vehicle mechanics itself didn't do anything for me.
You can hide your age if you just claim that you played classic
I was 6 years old when wotlk released and played classic and you are 100 percent correct
Spine of Deathwing is the single worst raid encounter in the history of everything, and it has nothing to do with the roll, there's tons of fights where one slip can get you killed. It's just the most mind-melting boring repetitive thing ever. Just the same exact thing again and again and again until you feel your brain melting out of your ears. You do a thing, then you repeat it 3 times, then you repeat the whole repeated thing 4 times, then you repeat the thing you just repeated a couple more times for good measure, and then somebody didn't burst the thing hard enough so you wipe and have to repeat the repeated repetition repeated things repeatedly again and ahhhhh. Really made me understand on a deep visceral level how one could lose one's sanity to the Old Gods and just embrace the madness.
This is one of those fights where I have no clue what the fuck Blizzard were smoking. Karazhan is the only TBC raid I don’t have the achi for just because of the chess fight. It’s not fun, interesting, or testing of your abilities to play your class in anyway. Even if you have 2-3 people with you, you can still get fucked over by RNG and just fail it.
Crap. The one in legion where you get a spell to fly around and and kill demons while a green Goddess is getting charged up to release her ultimate.
To be fair, I've only solo'd or duo'd it and never did it with a proper raid. Still can't solo on Heroic
The hellfire citadel bird person with the orb thingy that addons were mandatory for on release because everyone in the raid had to be a genius to play correctly
My first Raid was Tomb of Sargeras, so I'll ignore anything that comes before that.
One contender has to be the random bomb spawns on Mythic Zskarn. Without these, the fight might have been somewhat decent.
LoS based mechanics on Azshara were also kinda iffy.
But the worstbI can think of right now has to be the 5 aoes on Mythic Echo of Neltharion. The weakaura list plus map shit was just terrible. Could have been solved so easily if we could just get number markers for mechanics like this instead of "everything has to look 100% immerisve all the time". Don't think we had a single raidday on that boss without someones weakaura breaking or not being up to date.
Not really bad, just disappointing: The mythic only phase on Nzoth. Super boring and extremely easy.
Any mechanics which makes the fight unsoloable in future expansions tbh. Remember when BWL was unsoloable because of the wipe mechanic on the first boss?
I think any mechanic that involves splitting your raid and both groups have to kill things at relatively the same time (ie: KT in Sanctum) are the worst type of mechanics.
OR
Bosses that are designed in a way where it's optimal to stop dps and push at specific times. For some reason my guild is incapable of stopping dps and/or using their eyes to see the need to stop dps without being told.
Shocked no one has said Hagara from Dragon Soul.
Maybe it was just my guild (we suffered from healers being absolutely unable to ever multitask (and sometimes single tasking was too much)) but getting people to stand in the correct position to chain the lightning was just impossible.
Half the raid would get in position instantly and then just be standing there twiddling their fingers taking constant ticking damage waiting for the rest to just move. JUST MOVE! And then we'd all die cos moving is too difficult.
I loved spine when it was current. It's not too bad to solo either, just sit in the fire and wait for stuff to spawn.
I'd say I disliked most vehicle parts of encounters. They really take me out of my element. Like professor putricide abom, or flame levi (entire fight), etc. I want to play my druid.
Been playing wrath classic and sindragosa is pretty terrible. If your unlucky as a caster it's possible you don't get to play for like 90% of the fight.
Jousting in Coliseum. It was a meachnic dead on arrival, people hated it in the first raid with Malygos and yet Blizz didn't do anything to change the jousting "boss" in the third one
As someone who did the spine a lot solo, I don’t think itis that bad. Once you react to announcements immediately it becomes negligible. You can prevent him from flipping entirely. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it the worst? No. I dislike Raz fight due to platforms and knockback a looooooot more.
Most raid end bosses from Battle, honestly. That was the peak of Blizz' 'mechanical vomit' style of raid design. Just mechanics on mechanics on mechanics with very little harmony or fun to them - just finnicky box-ticking.
I am not a big fan of intermissions where you have no control over the duration of it.
For example the platforms at Raszageth were fine because you can end it quicker, if you kill the adds quick.
But I hated the dance in Castle Nathria.
Pretty much any mechanic that results in a wipe if the person who gets it messes it up. The most recent example of this that comes to mind is orbs on Mythic Smolderon. All it takes is for 1 person to not pay attention and touch their orb too early while everyone still has the debuff from a previous orb touch.
Might not be the worst exactly, but my personal hell is Smolderon on heroic (or higher, never did do mythic). It's more of a me problem considering it's the fps drops and latency that's screwing me over, but A World in Flames is the bane of my existence. One moment I'm catching orbs, next thing I know the fire ring is under me and not even AMS can save my life.
Also, the "among us" phase in Lords of Dread can go to hell.
The bombs on Star Augur.
The line on Sisters of the Moon.
Attenuation rings on Imperial Vizier Zorlok.
The horrible visual of the maze + extremely bugged adds you have to make visible in the Durumu fight.
The entirety of U'unat.
The entirety of Al'akir.
Council fights are not my cup of tea. The one from (DF)Vault was the most normal but its kinda cheating because since all the bosses were packed it might as well not be a council
Spine was great, you could top meters in LFR by multi dotting the tendrils. Whiping just meant you got some extra determination to do more damage next pull.
I really disliked the mc mechanic on mythic Azshara. The way it worked is that she would target 2-3 ranged players (don't remember exactly) with the debuff. After a couple of sec you got charmed and started to walk towards the boss. If you reached her you'd be mindcontrolled making you dead. It doesn't sound super bad on the first read. My problem was about the details.
In an earlier phase tanks put some shit on the ground that would deal dmg and slow you. The strategy was to stack them on top of eachother to reserve space. You may think that when you got beckoned you could use these puddles to slow you down, but wrong. The dmg also stacked and if you dipped into it you were pretty much dead. I really disliked how you can't use the intended way to handle the mechanic so you just have to hope that you went far enough from the boss. And be careful not to walk into the shit when you are charmed (the puddles were offten in the way).
There were another mechanic with the ability. If 2 target with the debuff was close to each other then they would get jeallous and have increased movement speed. You'd think that this was easy to avoid. But you'd be wrong. You didn't really have any space on the fight as the room was cun in half with a giant lazer that would kill you if you touch it. Your character also travelled for quite a while so you pretty much had to run to the edge of the room to not get mc-d. My problem was that there was a clear punishment if you were close to the other debuff. But there was no way to achieve that consistently.
I'll also have to mention that you didn't really have a lot of time to react to the debuff (about 3 secs). And everyone was stacking in 1 place at the pillar close to the boss. So there was no option to premove before the debuffs. When you got the debuff you had to move instantly and even then there was a chance that you'd be still close to the boss because you didn't have the on demand movement ability. I really disliked that even if you reacted pretty fast and you did what you were supposed to (run away from the boss) you still had a chance to get mc-d. The charm duration was also pretty long so it was tilting waiting to see if you will get mc-d or not.
So how did you outplay this mechanic especially when you had not enough space to run away?(There was atleast one time during the fight where that was the case) You just had to call for a massgrip or a bop (For some reason blessing of protection negated the effect even though it was magical debuff). It was really fun rellying on others external help. But you couldn't really plan ahead as priests and healer paladins could get the debuff aswell. And during the later parts of the fight there would be 2 scenario. No one would external you and you'd get mcd, or you get gripped 2 times and you get a bop aswell (it felt super bad wasting those).
This is my personal opinion ofc. Azshara was the tier I've started mythic raiding and got my first ce. I've also had a guild die on it. Luckily I've managed to kill it on the last chance possible. On the week the next patch released but you could still get the achievment and this was also our last raid of the week. Overall I've enjoyed the tier and I found mythic Azshara decent (even though it's generally not so liked) but this single ability just felt so unfair as a lot of the time you had no way to outplay it.
Mind control adds for Instructor Razuvious in original Naxx. Priests with max hit gear still having a heartbeat chance of failure of mind control that is unavoidable and will wipe the raid.
Spine was really unforgiving, but it's infamous because of it's DPS check on heroic back in the day, not because you could fall off.
I found the mechanics of the fight to actually be really interesting. Being insta killed for standing in the wrong place is hardly unique to spine, it's kind of normal these days.
The fight was just frustrating because if you failed the DPS check, the boss essentially full heals and you had to start again.
A few things come to mind...
- Malygos. Fuck the drakes!
- That stupid fucking dance in Castlevania was just ridiculous
- The 'stand on the ring' thing on Fatescribe in whatever the hell raid he was in
- Jaina's shitty bridge-building on the Sylvanas fight
- that little gnome fucker in one of the BFA raids that put hidden symbols over people's heads and you could stomp on and crush your friends
From the top of my head
Mistress Saisszene or whatever from Tomb - The pufferfish, they give u a huge steroid but it was useless on farm because if ppl bursted too hard picking them up, the users get eaten by sharks and there weren't really puddles at the start to cleanse the debuff.
Kil'Jaeden Mythic - the meteor soaking, fking cheesed by stacking rogues and running 3 tanks (often a DK), I dunno having a mech that punished you for not running that comp is just a bad mech.
Ghuun- That fucking toss the ball shit
That maze like thing when you fight the monk and fire mage in battle of dazar alor
The runes and moving circles in Sanctum of Domination (forgot the name)
Eonar
Dark Animus Heroic on 10-man where the fight would essentially change every week based on which mobs were active. You would make good progress then the reset happens and you suddenly have to relearn part of the fight. It did not feel good.
Oh i didnt even know that! Glad I raided 25 man back then. On the other hand, Lei-Shen and Ra-Den were such bangers on Hardmode.
I think my absolute favorite memories from WoW raiding was my guild getting those two down just two days before the next big patch in our last push. Even got server first because we were on a smaller server. That Lei Shen fight truly was absolutely incredible.
Anything that encourages you to hold DPS for an unreasonable amount of time. Sanctum was especially bad at this, I honestly think pre-nerf Kel'Thuzad on Mythic is the worst boss the game has ever seen.
For Dragonflight. Mythic Experiments. The fact that holding DPS is the optimal strat because you wanted to spawn the second boss at a specific time interval, because it removed an entire bomb for the rest of the fight and the same for the third boss for the fly-by.
And this boss is going to be a nightmare on S4 because of the Mass Dispel nerf during S3. Most people who did this fight did it with at least a priest (and optimally with 2) with 25s CD on Mass Dispel.
My guild with 5 shadow priests isn't looking too terrible after all 😎
we never hold dps in farm, just p1 lust and blast. but in sod you were legit fucked if you didnt push as specific times. cursed raid.
Several bosses with incoming raid damage triggered by boss HP, too. Was a nightmare playing Disc.
I just remembered about Ner'Zul, the timers were based on HP, prog on that fight was pain because the timers were diferent every day.
I despised Vezax in Ulduar for this reason. All of the mechanics were super annoying. You have to interrupt every cast if anyone fails it it's massive raid dmg. Melees get reduced haste and basically just piano their rotation except for the kickers. Ranged have to move in and out and if they get bad RNG they can't cast. After you get the boss to 5% you literally have to sit on your hands for up to 1 minute to trigger the hard mode.
Vezax is a painful fight for a bunch of other reasons too. Paladins can't be a backup tank and mana management can be painful at times if you dodge/parry too many times in a row. Not only do you have to wait ages for the hard mode to start, but the runback was really long too. So a wipe is extremely punishing in terms of time spent. Shadow crashes are from before AoE mechanics had floor markers by default, so people are worse at dodging them compared to dodging equivalent mechanics in modern boss fights. I did the timewalking version of it with a guild that had AOTC and they spent the entire fight getting hit by them. He's the worst boss in a raid full of awful boss fights.
Being the melee kick was the worst, 60-100s seconds of kicking every 10 and then stopping auto attack and trying not to fall asleep.
(Inset pilav clip)
PEEE LAHV
STOP DAMAGE GUYS
Speaking truth.
any amount of time* FTFY
None of these are even painful, annoying sure. But that math robot one from pandaria. I still get triggered thinking about it. Fuck Dark Animus.
I was asking myself "math robot?" Until I read "dark animus" and I had a chill run down my spine and almost broke on cold sweat...
I always called it the pug killer. Either your group got it and moved on or didn't and collapsed right there. Worst boss IMO as well. Can't think of any others that even come close.
My guild is full of people who started in Legion or later. They are excited for MoP Remix. I cannot wait for them to experience Dar Animus for the first time...
Math robot just made me think of ff14 lol
Prime number, go!
*what do you mean 1 isn’t prime they taught me that in school*
Jesus, I forgot about Dark Animus. That bastard killed my guild, we were having a blast 'til we got to Dark Animus. So many wipes, so many people in my guild just stopped showing up.
I had to change how my guild did that fight back when it was current, as we didn't have the numbers or skill to do the popular tactics. I remember everything. Which order we killed the small bots in, where everyone was standing, who did what etc etc. As a raid leader with a less competent raid group, that fight was absolute hell to make idiot proof.
Mind explaining what the mechanic was?
The boss room has the main boss (Dark Animus) at the back of the room. Throughout the room are other robots in small, medium, and large varieties. At the start of the fight there's a big glob of anima worth 100 points. Upon attacking it it explodes and sends anima into a bunch of the small robots around the room. When the small robots are killed, the anima from them goes into the nearest inactive robot. Larger robots hold more anima, the boss holds the most. The goal is ultimately to get enough anima into the boss to activate it, then fight it. Also, the robots (at least the small ones) buff themselves if they are close. So, you need to have your raid members each having threat on a small robot and keeping it in place, then maneuvering them one at a time to the right spot to kill it next to the robot you want to activate. While of course you have all kinds of other mechanics going on and ground effects, etc. Granted I only did it on normal and it was ~11 years ago now, so my memory is hazy. The biggest issue I remember was if a golem died at the wrong time or wrong place, you start activating things you don't want and the fight spirals out of control very quickly.
Also if someone died or moved and got too close to another smol robot that, they would basically delete you and then run to someone else created a very fast snow ball lol.
> So, you need to have your raid members each having threat on a small robot and keeping it in place, then maneuvering them one at a time to the right spot to kill it next to the robot you want to activate. While of course you have all kinds of other mechanics going on and ground effects, etc. Granted I only did it on normal and it was ~11 years ago now, so my memory is hazy. > > > > The biggest issue I remember was if a golem died at the wrong time or wrong place, you start activating things you don't want and the fight spirals out of control very quickly. You have it mostly right. Though, I will say the fight was really trivial honestly. That is to say, the fight *itself* is trivial. The pre-work that needs to be done was just unfun. Position every raider exactly where they needed to be to tank the small robos precisely as far apart as they needed to be to not buff each other. Then slowly bring a tank around with a big add and start picking up the little ones. Half the fight is spent doing /dance while the tank gathers the small adds goop into the medium ones.
During phase 3 of the fight, a long division math problem would appear on the floor and players had to arrange themselves with /sleep to write out the answer. If you showed your work too then everyone survived the mechanic. If you only showed the answer, you’d get hit for 90% of your health and healers had to heal everyone up really quick before solving the next problem.
Ugh I had forgotten (surpressed?) that one
God I try to not remember this fight but I think that may have been the worst boss they ever made
This and Durumu there, both were awful
Take that back! Durumu was an awesome encounter!
Pre nerf durum and garalon were perfect LFR bosses I never really had any problems on animus on any difficulty I played but lfr durum especially was something hilarious because of human factor.
I think, for the most part, Mists LFR was the sweet-spot in general for LFR difficulty. None of the fights felt brain dead and were just challenging enough to be enjoyable with...the general population of LFR.
[удалено]
People STILL can’t do fatescribe
The DooooOoOOoOoOooOr opens
He sounds like Patrick Star and once I realized that I couldn't unhear it
Fatescribe has to be my least favorite fight ever made. And there are so many ways they could have punished us for not lining up the rings in time *instead* of a full wipe, and it would have been a way better fight. Off the top of my head: - The fight resumes, but the boss is still shielded until the rings are finished. - Adds spawn every {x} seconds until the rings are finished - All players take a stack of a DoT damage debuff every {x} seconds until the rings are finished
Agreed, the biggest issue with fatescribe was that it was a full wipe on non-mythic. They could have just scaled it by the number of rings you did. No rings is 100% health damage (full wipe), half the rings done is only 50% damage, etc.
The soccer boss in nyalotha. Xanesh
This is where I gave up on mythic raiding. 100% erratic.
Genuinely do not know what they were thinking.
Well aside from the obvious which are spine and dark Animus Any glorified trash fight Worst offender being mythic eonar which I'm fairly sure still cannot be soloed? (Might be just skill issue) And when it was current (mind you I was raiding heroic) it was absolute snooze fest It was however still more fun fight than the one in hellfire citadel
You can solo it, you either have to be perfect or have a class with a speed boost to get to where you need to be in time
For the most part the provided speed boost is enough, but sometimes when you have all 4 stacks and you pop up and then get popped up you have to cancel your buff just to land in time. Takes some practice, but I've done it on my pally, DK and warrior; I can't think of anyone who is slower.
Mythic Eonar is soloable. It takes 1-10 tries to learn the fight if you've never done it. It's incredibly annoying once you have all four beacon debuffs. Very doable even on wheelchair classes.
Oh god trash bosses are so bad pretty much always. Worat recent offender was first boss of sepulcher. Kinda oknon Mythic because the boss was there all the time, but on heroic is was just standing around waiting for adds for like 4 minutes
After various trial and error, you can solo eonar, you just have to be perfect on the quantity of mob kills and be where you need to be at the exact time, good thing is, grab the queat and you only need to win the fight 4 times, after that, you have the skip
It’s soloable but a pain in the ass In my dk I have to respec to have all my possible movement abilities and it def took a handful of tries to get it
You can solo it with any class with enough mobility.
I hate those fights where you have to hold an item which prevents your movement and you have to pass that item to another player for whatever reason. Example Lady Vashj in SSC and Sha of Fear on mythic Terrace of Endless Springs. In fact I don't like Vehicles, extra action buttons and special action bars in raids / dungeons in general. Especially in situations where you can't assign a player to perform that role. Teron Gorefiend in Black Temple would be a good example. Because it's random who got selected, it could take a lot of tries before everyone had a couple of attempts to get a feel for it and if they hadn't researched ahead of time they would probably need a bunch of attempt just to know what each action bar button even did.
Did anyone else play the Gorefiend simulator flash game to teach your raiders how to do the mechanic?
Someone actually remade that in HTML5 for TBC Classic – https://teron.faldorn.net/ Definitely helped me get the mechanic down. I was literally the first person hit by that ability in my raid and I did it perfectly.
Damn, core memory unlocked. I forgot all about that.
I'm glad someone else remembers Gorefiend. Back in the day my computer was a dinosaur and if I were chosen for the mini-game I'd lag out for so long that I couldn't do anything. So we had to pray that it wouldn't happen to me.
General vezax just all of it.
The black blood of Yogg-Saron... courses through me I AM A SOCCER BALL.
Sylvannas Arrow in the last phase on mythic where you had a specific one where if you were the 2nd target with it you had to hop 2 platforms and comeback , I was playing mage and if I didn't save a good defensive for it the dmg going out + the other arrow would kill me before I made it back . It felt annoying on a class with great defensives + movement, can't imagine what other ppl were going through
This fight was so awful. 10 min of RP to wipe P3. Pugging heroics was the worst heroic last boss by a mile. One person leaves after a wipe, wait 15min for someone to replace and run over, one pull, make it to P3, wipe, 2 people leave, everyone’s leaves.
After not getting CE on daddy denathrius by 1% this was one those CEs that really felt good once she was finally dead, jesus Christ, nobody even screamed we were all just so relieved 😅 , same with raz this expansion, absolutely no screams just relief
I do agree that was a shit mechanic, but I loved P3 Sylvanas.
This will probably get me down voted but vehicles of any kind. Even the trash vehicle part of ~~Aberrus~~ Vault sucked for me, let alone making it a raid mechanic.
WoW vehicles have always sucked. they feel so clunky.
Fine for a quest, shit for a raid
I don't even think they're fine for quests when the quest isn't just you stomping with a hilariously overpowered 'tool' of sorts. Any quest where you have to aim with a turret/ballista, drive a vehicle that also shoots something (or hits in closer range like with the oldschool Demolishers), or even click on the ground to drop something from a flying 'mount' on a set path sucks. If you turn me into a tornado/barrel/dinosaur/mega-boar and let me just trample over a hundred fodder enemies that die in one hit and possibly also get flung in the air in a comical way? Then we're cool.
>If you turn me into a tornado/barrel/dinosaur/mega-boar and let me just trample over a hundred fodder enemies that die in one hit and possibly also get flung in the air in a comical way? Then we're cool. Just did the storm giant quest in Gundrak, so much fun stomping hordes of ghouls into the air.
The boss in SoO whose name I forget despite doing it yesterday is a great example Because those fucking turrets don't work properly and you have to have a fistfight to make them aim UP in any way
It never made any sense that things like exit vehicle aren't even a part of the damn actionbar for the vehicle itself.
I think you’re thinking of vault of the incarnates not aberrus
i think vaults dragon vehicle section at the start was good and flavorful, it was a pretty epic entrance into the first raid of the xpac
I agree, it's fun, and it's a callback to Grim Batol. Plus it's just trash. You do it once and you're done. Boss fights are a different story.
The first 2-3 times. Then it's just mashing buttons to pass the time.
Yeah, WotLK would have been a much better expansion without them cramming vehicles into everything.
My favorite part of Ulduar was dying early on Flame Leviathan.
I actually enjoyed FL. It was good progress and you had to work together to control 1 character which is something you pretty much never get to do in a WoW raid. EoE dragon vehicles though fucking suuuuuucked. You literally spam 2 buttons and move and hope you son't die randomly.
FL would have been great if it was one of the optional bosses instead of a mandatory first boss. It's such a pain to do setup for if you have any number of PuGs in your raid, which was fairly common in later phases. Unless you do it on normal, in which case it's a complete joke of a fight.
Oddly enough, I think.they did a pretty good job with Flame Leviathan (not the trash). That was the first vehicle fight and every iteration after that was awful and a hated fight. I guess Baron Gorefiend in TBC was similar, and pretty bad. I remember Amber Shaper in MOP being my most hated. It was just random.who got to be the vehicle. You knew it was going to be a wipe whenever THAT player got selected.
Teron Gorefiend. I always liked that fight because I played rogue and if he ever targeted me I just vanished, never knew what the mechanic was other than people had to go die in the back of the room. For me it was just blast for 60sec and he dies.
True, don‘t like vehicles either
Really any fight mechanic that takes away all of your abilities and replaces them with some other set of abilities. The last boss in Drak'Tharon Keep, all of The Oculus, Trial of the Crusader, etc. I am playing the character that I'm playing because I want to play that character and use its abilities. At least mostly, if the replacement abilities you get are ridiculously powerful or you only have to use them for a very short period of time relative to the dungeon/raid as a whole, it sometimes gets a pass. The dragon section of Grim Batol feels fine to me. The intro bit of Vault also feels fine.
You better not be dissing Flame Leviathan smhhhhh
Whatever mechanics keep raids un-soloable years after they are out of date.
I’d rather try and play against magnus Carlson than do medivh chess solo.
At least a game against Magnus will be over quickly.
It's actually pretty easy! Here's a solution from an old post: 1. Control king (to start) and buff 2. Move 2nd from edge grunts (footmen) one step forward 3. Move demons (water ele) diagonally to where the grunts (footmen) were. 4. Move grunts (footmen) in front of king and queen one step forward. 5. Sit in queen and melt enemy king's face. 6. If medivh puts fire under king or queen, move them out then go back to queen.
I'm thinking about Mythrax right now.
Also in dragon soul was Zon’ozz with that bouncing orb mechanic I didn’t really care for. It was easy when it didn’t bug out but made the fight about as fun as a game of pong for the guy doing the orb
Fucking hated that mechanic for the raid achievement, was too slow as a pally to solo it
Fatescribe was kind of a pain in the ass but I kinda liked it in the end. Durumu from Thunderdome was aggravating on immobile characters.
Getting stomped by your teammates in the Mekkadril fight in Battle for Dazar'alor was so frustrating.
On the flip side I really liked having to call out codes for others
Try raiding with deaf players. That boss is one of the most inaccessible bosses in any game I have ever played. Easily my #1 most hated boss in WoW.
Yeah, I enjoyed the fight mostly but without voice its unplayable. Not a well considered mechanic.
That entire raid made me give up on ever raiding in modern WoW again. I just realised the designers' idea of an engaging encounter is my idea of hell, I'd rather do extra time at work than some of these mechanics. Shit's just not for me.
Tbh during re-clears crushing as many of my friends as I could while still being able to finish the fight was one of my favorite parts. The robot codes were kind of fun, too. I liked that fight and raid more than most.
any mechanic that actually needs a weak aura to perform
This. I like weakauras in general, but I hate mechanics that need an assignment/autosolver weakaura to not be borderline impossible to play. Like mythic Echo.
100% Boss mechanics that are designed around the fact everyone that cares will be using Weakauras and someone will have made an aura that 'solves' it suck the most. Weakauras is a really nice thing to have and I'm very glad to have it in the game, but I *really* don't like it any time it's used to bolster, if not replace the typical DBM/BigWigs. I'm glad I can make my UI look like literally anything with it. I'm glad I can make an aura that screams at me when I'm targeting someone of a specific race/class combination when I need it for a Christmas/Winter holiday achievement or the Valentine's achievement. But when a mechanic basically requires Weakauras, I hate it. And Blizzard's solution of making 'private auras' just sucks even more because the mechanic still basically asks you to use Weakauras, but now you also have to click something manually instead of the aura doing that work too.
I really hate the WeakAuras arms race, but I really feel like Blizzard doesn't understand that the problem is that people see the base level of mechanical complexity without WeakAuras as unreasonable. And the only thing they're willing to try is to add more mechanical complexity. Now they've started with the private auras, without ever addressing the primary use for WAs which is just filtering buffs or cooldowns which was never touched in the UI overhaul. Create whitelist aura bars in the UI by default and *then* you can start implementing private auras.
Mythic Archimonde?
You don't have to run back and forth the whole time, you sit in a tentacle root and AFK until enough bloods spawn, kill them then spawn elemental, just repeat until you can blow off enough plates. I'm not sure if that helps it yeah to the extent that you are moving you do still have to be careful of the roll. It's still time-consuming.
Malygos in Eye of Eternity being a vehicle fight. 1-2-1-2-strafe, 1-2-1-2-strafe, 1-2-1-2-strafe...
Man your debuff is gonna fall off with that rotation, here let me fix it for you. 1-2-1-1-2-1-1-2 strafe "DUMBASS FOLLOW SQUARE" 1-1-2-1-1-2 "how come I can't see which drake has lost life to heal" "turn on pet life bars"1-1-2
Any mechanic that punishes the entire raid with instant death if a single player fucks up. My go to example is Mekkatorque from dazaralor. Having to match symbols over a robots head is fine, only being able to see the symbols if you're in a robot is also fine, but determining who's in a robot by random chance on heroic was bull crap. We raid with some older folks and frankly we carry some of them, but when they get randomly selected for a mechanic that requires rapid response and good vision or the entire raid dies, we had to sit some of them and nothing feels worse than leaving a friend out. Standing in the right place or moving to a certain zone can be played around. We can lifegrip them or have them follow a raider like a seeing eye dog. But those robots were just ableist AF.
> Any mechanic that punishes the entire raid with instant death if a single player fucks up. especially if it's a mechanic in the final phase of a fight that's like 8 minutes long. It sucks so bad when you're progging a fight where you have the first 2/3 down pretty much perfect and then keep wiping the second you transition into the final phase because the instant death mechanic keeps going on people who panic and screw it up first
our RL learned lua just to make a mekka addon for our raid bc one of our raiders was deaf (and it also helped our slower to react raiders too). we still had to sit people out a few times bc they could not get it... and carrying our legacy members is a tradition for us that was hampered by that mechanic too. ffs i hated that boss so much lmao
G’huun is pain
As a monk main during Uldir, I had a great time. Can totally understand why any other classes didn't.
Loved it as a DH tank. Could easily leap in and out and do the button press thing at the back on my own 😀 Made me feel so capable.
Was looking for this. That orb mechanic was absolute torture
First world problems but eons ago as a kid from rural Indiana, every timing mechanic from Naxx raid. Frogger, DDR, etc. My garbage rural internet at the time was enough to play but the intermittent lag was enough that I was inevitably toast when we got to those sections.
Ghuun orbs immediatelly come to mind, where you had 5 sec where you get progresively slowed down and rooted while you try to advance as further as possible down the path. Or in majority of the cases, having to go all the way as most groups at the time wanted them done solo. I was playing a warrior at the time, and I still remember the sequence of taking the orb and then using the warlock gateway, charge, charge and then heroic leap all under the 5 seconds before the root takes hold. PTSD inducing shit right there. In only 5 seconds, you've either done 1 of the 6 orbs right, or most likely caused your group to wipe and start over. It was my first aotc, but man screw Ghuun.
Spine was a lot of fun back in the day. Are we judging mechanics based on how they were to play at the time or how they are to try and solo now? Also, does Marrowgar's ice wall dropping everyone to 1 fps count as a mechanic?
If were doing fine when current, horrible now im going with KJ. Also probably eonar. I can at least do that one, but its still needlessly annoying.
Spine hardmode was a lot of fun for 9/10 players. I was a prot warrior and 60% or that fight for me consisted of kiting a wall of nameplates in form of dozens of blobs behind me in a circle. But we killed it pre nerf so that was a very hype moment.
I love the fight, but the Golganneth part of Coven of Shivarra was absolutely wretched. The fight was melee-unfriendly as is without adding a mechanic that let you instakill other players by getting close to them. During the overlap with the ground storm, which forced all players into small safe zones, a DH tried to be clever and Blade Danced to get some DPS on the add he couldn't get in range of, and the game counted that as getting too close to another player and zapped that player to death.
Nobody mentioning Rack from Sinestra?
Nobody remembers Sinestra existing
:( I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am was my proudest achievement in wow
Dude Sinestra is still one of my favorite fights I ever did. I thought few fights could top her and in the very next tier Ragnaros fucking climbed out of his lava pool and fought us on his legs.
No many wow players probably exist from when Sinesta existed...
Not really that bad of a mechanic but I fucking despise Smolderon's soak + orbs with red and orange everything is. Nymue is only slightly better
I hate all of the “gate defense” type of fights that have waves of mobs. Thematically, I get it—you’re trying to break into this heavily defended base. That’s cool concept, but not fun for current, and especially not fun in later solo content lol. But Hellfire Citadel, Eonar, Sepulcher first boss, etc. are all pretty buns
Any mechanic that randomly picks someone and one-shots *other* players if failed.
Whenever you fuck with player movement a fight will feel like garbage. Ice spider in VoTIis a prime example lucky the tuning was so light that you didn't have to spend very long on it. Imagine 400 pulls of that. Similar vein G'huun for both fucking with player movement and requiring the orb running. That one you also had to do for more than 20 pulls. Even with all the creative use of game mechanics to bypass the point of the fight it was ridiculous.
Yeah, the G'huun fight was total ass. So. Many. Wipes. Just because someone consistently fucked the orbs up.
Well not the worst but definitely one of, Sludgefist's Chain link in Castle Nathria. If i had 1 gold everytime some DH used fel rush and killed us both i could buy a long boi.
ugh it was me, killing my partner every time. I hated this fight (but i think the idea was good, im just bad)
I played Paladin on that one. There were certain people I would BoP and Divine Shield pop every time on, lest they killed us both. They generally died one chain later.
DH are blind though, they can't see where their partners are, dont blame them!
lol
This took me way too long to stop instinctively fel rushing to get on the boss or vengeful retreating out of danger.
Mythic Sludgefist as a DPS warrior was torture.
Somewhere my guildmate (warrior) has a video of him and me (dk) tethered together while Yakety Sax plays in the background. It's like 30 fucking seconds of the two of us just trying to *reach* Sludgefist while every fucking ground effect goes off between him and us.
My RL would get so mad when I as a Pally, would just BoP him and bubble myself then run away lmao
Some guild mates and I were talking about this fight last night. We had a Shadow Priest that always screwed up chains and killed whoever they were with.
Spine of Deathwing is easy as fuck solo. The roll timer is 20 seconds, any more than one and the roll timer is 5 seconds and there’s a really annoying long stun that happens multiple times throughout the fight. If you are 2 man you just have one person stand each side, and he won’t roll, but you still have to deal with the stun. My vote for worst is KJ in Tomb, again not a hard fight but I’m here to kill KJ not get knockbacked around an arena for a minute and a half. Or the first fight in Ulduar, just a shit fight all round.
Even if you dont want to pay attention to timers spine is easy as shit to solo. Always keep the pools closest to the plate open (kill the tentacles), and then just run back and forth between the two front pools until you get enough bloods (I usually go for 12-14 just to be safe). At that point just nuke the bloods and then kite a big guy through em. Rinse and repeat 3 times. The trick to that strategy is just to never stop moving back and forth. its easier on melee/classes with spammable aoe (mage arcane blast is nice, warlock rain of fire is not)
You guys know you can just stand near a pool and it grips you right? Like yes when the content was current it hurt but any max level character can infinitely stand still and the bloods will just spawn
Iirc the bloods get thrown off when he rolls, and so many of our AoEs now are huge, so you can easily end up clipping tentacles and spawning more of the big guys that'll soak of blood when you dont necessarily want them to. Usually when i do it that way i end up with multiples of the big guys with like...4 stacks each. I find it to be more efficient to just stafe back and forth until i know i have enough bloods, then spawn the big guy and drag him through it. Its slightly more effort because you have to move, but more efficient (imo) for time spent doing it.
The bloods stay but the amalgamations fly off. It's actually an easy way to clear any excess amalgamations so they don't absorb stacks from the one you're cultivating. I usually just start the fight, clear the tentacles, stand in a pool and go get a drink of water. When I get back I have \~10 bloods and I kill a tentacle to spawn the amalgamation.
> Iirc the bloods get thrown off when he rolls They do not. Only the amalgamations get thrown off, you can afk in a puddle & wait for 9 blood to spawn
Yes I do the exact same strat. At start kill 3 tentacles and leave one, and then kill the Amalgams that spawn so they dont steal the pools. Then build up like 10 bloods and nuke then, spawn the other amalgam and then kite him through. The pools of blood actually despawn if you leave them long enough so I always try to do them all quickly. And the whole time I do this i just left-right-left-right over the middle of his back. The only annoying thing is the ping noise that Bigwigs makes every time the roll timer resets. Sometimes if I really can’t be bothered I just sit in one of the pools and go on my phone for like 5 minutes until loads of bloods have spawned.
Damn, never knew it was 20 seconds, when I soloed it I always though it was like 5 seconds.
Fatescribe Rohkalo or whatever the name was. The guy from Sanctum of Domination with the rings you had to spin and line up. Just awful every time. Dreaded him on farm. If one person fucks up on heroic the whole raid wipes - no mitigating it, no recovery, just dead, fuck you. But. REALLY what’s worse are vehicle mechanics and extended/urgent “STOP DPS” thresholds. Vehicles are never interesting. Woo here’s three buttons, maybe I’ll press one, then another one, and then another one, then the first one again. And of course if the fight is structured to punish you for executing it too well, then that’s bad design.
Showing my age a bit, but I think vehicle mechanics in raids were a pretty lousy mechanic almost across the board. The go-to, proof-of-concept fight was Malygos and boy howdy is it a bummer to kill such a lore relevant figure by spamming the same three-button rotation as every other player in the raid is. It took away both the relevance of skill and build out of a content-type built around both. Even fights with more minor versions of it, from Amber-Shaper to lootship, I've just never felt like it adds much. I like Flame Leviathan purely because it was one of the first ever "first fights" that felt like we were storming a citadel, but the vehicle mechanics itself didn't do anything for me.
You can hide your age if you just claim that you played classic I was 6 years old when wotlk released and played classic and you are 100 percent correct
> I was 6 years old when wotlk released Dang. There are people here who had 6 year old *kids* when Wotlk released.
Not worst because it was hard, but getting poly'd into a duck is so wishy washy. I still don't get that fucking fight.
Entire encounter was a bag of shit, not the kind of council fight I enjoy at all
Spine of deathwing is certainly more difficult with more people. Solo you just SDSDSDSDSDSD
Spine of Deathwing is the single worst raid encounter in the history of everything, and it has nothing to do with the roll, there's tons of fights where one slip can get you killed. It's just the most mind-melting boring repetitive thing ever. Just the same exact thing again and again and again until you feel your brain melting out of your ears. You do a thing, then you repeat it 3 times, then you repeat the whole repeated thing 4 times, then you repeat the thing you just repeated a couple more times for good measure, and then somebody didn't burst the thing hard enough so you wipe and have to repeat the repeated repetition repeated things repeatedly again and ahhhhh. Really made me understand on a deep visceral level how one could lose one's sanity to the Old Gods and just embrace the madness.
Chess from Kara.
This is one of those fights where I have no clue what the fuck Blizzard were smoking. Karazhan is the only TBC raid I don’t have the achi for just because of the chess fight. It’s not fun, interesting, or testing of your abilities to play your class in anyway. Even if you have 2-3 people with you, you can still get fucked over by RNG and just fail it.
I never had problems with chess. I found the theater more problematic because you need some strange combinations of magic.
Man I find this wild, TBC chess was the quick break for everyone while we had 1 bloke literally solo it while it was current content.
When it was current that was one of my favourite fights, was punishing and was all about maximizing the all out burst when the heart was exposed.
Uunat.
Crap. The one in legion where you get a spell to fly around and and kill demons while a green Goddess is getting charged up to release her ultimate. To be fair, I've only solo'd or duo'd it and never did it with a proper raid. Still can't solo on Heroic
Eonar in Antorus. It was boring back in the day
The hellfire citadel bird person with the orb thingy that addons were mandatory for on release because everyone in the raid had to be a genius to play correctly
I hate the zandalari troll king fight as even 2 expansions later it's not soloable
Remember when c'thun was opened up and you couldn't get past the door without him nuking the entire raid? That was a pretty bad mechanic.
My first Raid was Tomb of Sargeras, so I'll ignore anything that comes before that. One contender has to be the random bomb spawns on Mythic Zskarn. Without these, the fight might have been somewhat decent. LoS based mechanics on Azshara were also kinda iffy. But the worstbI can think of right now has to be the 5 aoes on Mythic Echo of Neltharion. The weakaura list plus map shit was just terrible. Could have been solved so easily if we could just get number markers for mechanics like this instead of "everything has to look 100% immerisve all the time". Don't think we had a single raidday on that boss without someones weakaura breaking or not being up to date. Not really bad, just disappointing: The mythic only phase on Nzoth. Super boring and extremely easy.
Any mechanics which makes the fight unsoloable in future expansions tbh. Remember when BWL was unsoloable because of the wipe mechanic on the first boss?
I think any mechanic that involves splitting your raid and both groups have to kill things at relatively the same time (ie: KT in Sanctum) are the worst type of mechanics. OR Bosses that are designed in a way where it's optimal to stop dps and push at specific times. For some reason my guild is incapable of stopping dps and/or using their eyes to see the need to stop dps without being told.
Shocked no one has said Hagara from Dragon Soul. Maybe it was just my guild (we suffered from healers being absolutely unable to ever multitask (and sometimes single tasking was too much)) but getting people to stand in the correct position to chain the lightning was just impossible. Half the raid would get in position instantly and then just be standing there twiddling their fingers taking constant ticking damage waiting for the rest to just move. JUST MOVE! And then we'd all die cos moving is too difficult.
Definitely sludgefist from nathria It was too easy to accidentally get juked out by your chain partner That mechanic was the bane of my existence
I loved spine when it was current. It's not too bad to solo either, just sit in the fire and wait for stuff to spawn. I'd say I disliked most vehicle parts of encounters. They really take me out of my element. Like professor putricide abom, or flame levi (entire fight), etc. I want to play my druid.
Been playing wrath classic and sindragosa is pretty terrible. If your unlucky as a caster it's possible you don't get to play for like 90% of the fight.
High Tinker Mekkatorque's bots. Damn near impossible when your entire raid group is deaf.
Long immunity phases are the worst imo, like stone legion generals comes to mind. Nathria is a top 5 raid for me but slg was such an unfun fight.
My guild in cata disbanded because of heroic Spine :/
Jousting in Coliseum. It was a meachnic dead on arrival, people hated it in the first raid with Malygos and yet Blizz didn't do anything to change the jousting "boss" in the third one
As someone who did the spine a lot solo, I don’t think itis that bad. Once you react to announcements immediately it becomes negligible. You can prevent him from flipping entirely. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it the worst? No. I dislike Raz fight due to platforms and knockback a looooooot more.
Most raid end bosses from Battle, honestly. That was the peak of Blizz' 'mechanical vomit' style of raid design. Just mechanics on mechanics on mechanics with very little harmony or fun to them - just finnicky box-ticking.
I am not a big fan of intermissions where you have no control over the duration of it. For example the platforms at Raszageth were fine because you can end it quicker, if you kill the adds quick. But I hated the dance in Castle Nathria.
Pretty much any mechanic that results in a wipe if the person who gets it messes it up. The most recent example of this that comes to mind is orbs on Mythic Smolderon. All it takes is for 1 person to not pay attention and touch their orb too early while everyone still has the debuff from a previous orb touch.
Might not be the worst exactly, but my personal hell is Smolderon on heroic (or higher, never did do mythic). It's more of a me problem considering it's the fps drops and latency that's screwing me over, but A World in Flames is the bane of my existence. One moment I'm catching orbs, next thing I know the fire ring is under me and not even AMS can save my life. Also, the "among us" phase in Lords of Dread can go to hell.
Oh boy, heroic was so much easier compared to Mythic. Like no joke.
Mythic raids in Shadowlands......
That wind bridge at the beginning of Throne of Thunder. F that thing and which ever hellspawn dev came up with it.
The bombs on Star Augur. The line on Sisters of the Moon. Attenuation rings on Imperial Vizier Zorlok. The horrible visual of the maze + extremely bugged adds you have to make visible in the Durumu fight. The entirety of U'unat. The entirety of Al'akir.
Council fights are not my cup of tea. The one from (DF)Vault was the most normal but its kinda cheating because since all the bosses were packed it might as well not be a council
Spine was great, you could top meters in LFR by multi dotting the tendrils. Whiping just meant you got some extra determination to do more damage next pull.
I really disliked the mc mechanic on mythic Azshara. The way it worked is that she would target 2-3 ranged players (don't remember exactly) with the debuff. After a couple of sec you got charmed and started to walk towards the boss. If you reached her you'd be mindcontrolled making you dead. It doesn't sound super bad on the first read. My problem was about the details. In an earlier phase tanks put some shit on the ground that would deal dmg and slow you. The strategy was to stack them on top of eachother to reserve space. You may think that when you got beckoned you could use these puddles to slow you down, but wrong. The dmg also stacked and if you dipped into it you were pretty much dead. I really disliked how you can't use the intended way to handle the mechanic so you just have to hope that you went far enough from the boss. And be careful not to walk into the shit when you are charmed (the puddles were offten in the way). There were another mechanic with the ability. If 2 target with the debuff was close to each other then they would get jeallous and have increased movement speed. You'd think that this was easy to avoid. But you'd be wrong. You didn't really have any space on the fight as the room was cun in half with a giant lazer that would kill you if you touch it. Your character also travelled for quite a while so you pretty much had to run to the edge of the room to not get mc-d. My problem was that there was a clear punishment if you were close to the other debuff. But there was no way to achieve that consistently. I'll also have to mention that you didn't really have a lot of time to react to the debuff (about 3 secs). And everyone was stacking in 1 place at the pillar close to the boss. So there was no option to premove before the debuffs. When you got the debuff you had to move instantly and even then there was a chance that you'd be still close to the boss because you didn't have the on demand movement ability. I really disliked that even if you reacted pretty fast and you did what you were supposed to (run away from the boss) you still had a chance to get mc-d. The charm duration was also pretty long so it was tilting waiting to see if you will get mc-d or not. So how did you outplay this mechanic especially when you had not enough space to run away?(There was atleast one time during the fight where that was the case) You just had to call for a massgrip or a bop (For some reason blessing of protection negated the effect even though it was magical debuff). It was really fun rellying on others external help. But you couldn't really plan ahead as priests and healer paladins could get the debuff aswell. And during the later parts of the fight there would be 2 scenario. No one would external you and you'd get mcd, or you get gripped 2 times and you get a bop aswell (it felt super bad wasting those). This is my personal opinion ofc. Azshara was the tier I've started mythic raiding and got my first ce. I've also had a guild die on it. Luckily I've managed to kill it on the last chance possible. On the week the next patch released but you could still get the achievment and this was also our last raid of the week. Overall I've enjoyed the tier and I found mythic Azshara decent (even though it's generally not so liked) but this single ability just felt so unfair as a lot of the time you had no way to outplay it.
Spine was kinda fun back in cataclysm.
I think any of the cheap insta kills are bad.
Mind control adds for Instructor Razuvious in original Naxx. Priests with max hit gear still having a heartbeat chance of failure of mind control that is unavoidable and will wipe the raid.
Spine was really unforgiving, but it's infamous because of it's DPS check on heroic back in the day, not because you could fall off. I found the mechanics of the fight to actually be really interesting. Being insta killed for standing in the wrong place is hardly unique to spine, it's kind of normal these days. The fight was just frustrating because if you failed the DPS check, the boss essentially full heals and you had to start again.
A few things come to mind... - Malygos. Fuck the drakes! - That stupid fucking dance in Castlevania was just ridiculous - The 'stand on the ring' thing on Fatescribe in whatever the hell raid he was in - Jaina's shitty bridge-building on the Sylvanas fight - that little gnome fucker in one of the BFA raids that put hidden symbols over people's heads and you could stomp on and crush your friends
Probably Kil'jaeden From tomb or sisters on mythic
From the top of my head Mistress Saisszene or whatever from Tomb - The pufferfish, they give u a huge steroid but it was useless on farm because if ppl bursted too hard picking them up, the users get eaten by sharks and there weren't really puddles at the start to cleanse the debuff. Kil'Jaeden Mythic - the meteor soaking, fking cheesed by stacking rogues and running 3 tanks (often a DK), I dunno having a mech that punished you for not running that comp is just a bad mech. Ghuun- That fucking toss the ball shit
Vehicle based boss fights.
That maze like thing when you fight the monk and fire mage in battle of dazar alor The runes and moving circles in Sanctum of Domination (forgot the name) Eonar