Saturday, October 21, 2006

What’s the Hardest boss in each raid Instance?

My guild is trying to get as far as we can in the classic raid progression before the expansion comes out. Sure we know most of our items will be replaced by level 65 but at the moment its still a challenge. We just recently started killing Ossirian the Scarred in AQ20 and we’re working on the first boss of Blackwing Lair. In every dungeon we come across though we almost always seem to run into one boss who hands our ass to us. Most of the time this is the end boss but sometimes is just one who requires a really challenging strategy to defeat.


ZulGurub
Jindo the Hexxar

I’ve written about Jindo before and my undying hatred for the Totem Lord. This is a very involved fight where Jindo constantly lays down healing totems and mind control totems. He also teleports people into a skeleton pit that constantly respawns and summons shadow copies of himself. Because Jindo has so many different unique attacks it hard to focus on what needs to be done. We find that if the we have at least 3 rogues to kill totems and 2 warriors with mortal strike we can usually keep Jindo from regaining health and kill him. Still if we’re unlucky enough to get our main tank constantly sheeped and aggro wiped then we lose quite fast.

Onyxia’s Lair
Onyxia

Onyxia is a pretty easy fight we found if you can meet two conditions. One is having people who can constantly keep dots on her in phase two where she flies around her cave. The second condition is having some way to handle her fear in phase three. Alliance get it easy if they have a dwarf priest to fear ward but just having a couple warriors who know how to stance dance makes all the difference. Still sometimes this boss gets a bug up her butt and constantly uses deep breath during phase two. This usually makes things interesting since most of our newer members never get to the safe spots in time.

Molten Core
Ragnaros the Firelord

Ragnaros used to cause our guild a huge amount of trouble every time we fought him. It took awhile for most of our dps classes to get epic weapons which make all the difference with this fight. It’s a simple burn him down fight where he needs to be down to 30% by the time he submerges and releases his Sons of Flame. The Sons used to wipe us every time until we started coordinating low level warlock banish and mage frost nova. The main problem we have with this fight is his knock back attack which is chaotic and can cause the main tank to go flying way out of healing range. The best strategy for this is just to equip your main tank with as most fire resistance gear as possible.

AQ20
Ossirian the Scarred

The Big Bird was starting to get on our guild’s nerve since we’ve been clearing every boss in AQ20 but him for a while now. Finally we devoted a full day to just fighting him and we got good at finding the obelisks which weaken him. This fight reminds me a lot of the Jindo fight where you can’t just let loose on the main boss. You have to be aware of where the next obelisk is and how long before Ossirian goes into god mode. We’ve had luck having one hunter with aspect of the cheetah run around on the outside and click on obelisks that spawn. This forces them to spawn on the inside which makes it easier to move from one to another. Still its always a close race with this guy.

BWL

Razorgore (only the hardest cause that’s the only one we fought)

If my guild thought the coordination for Jindo and Ossirian was hard this fight takes the cake. For a game that put all world mobs on a leash to prevent kiting its seems kind of unfair to require it as a strategy in a fight. But still that’s what Razorgore requires, lots and lots of kiting. Usually we can get down to between 3-9 eggs before we lose control of the massive train of mobs and the wipe all our healers. The funny thing about this fight is where healers have to use low ranks of heal to keep aggro off themselves. Also the train of orcs gets big very quickly and its easy for it splinter apart if the main aggro holder dies. We still have some work on this fight but I could see us pulling a win in a few weeks.

AQ40

I don’t know much about AQ40 bosses except that some of them require massive amounts of nature resist gear and that Cthun is a laser beam using bastard.

Naxx
Way beyond my guild’s skill level though from what I hear once we got enough people attuned it might be worth while killing trash mobs for drops. I hear the four horse are a pain in the butt but I don’t think they are the hardest boss in there. Any Naxx guilds out there have one they really hate? Leave a comment.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Still if we’re unlucky enough to get our main tank constantly sheeped and aggro wiped then we lose quite fast."

Use a Druid bear to tank. Makes the fight a lot easier.

OwlBoy said...

Not all bosses in AQ40 require NR. Stop spreading lies!

-Owl

Relmstein said...

Well I hear the hardest bosses in AQ40 require massive NR gear. Its the same technique they used with Ragnaros which seems to be very hard without your tanks equipped in 250+ FR.

I don't have a problem with resistance themed dungeons as long as resist items drop inside them.

Anonymous said...

Dampen magic helps with the Sons. It's not as useful as before the dampen nerf, where the dampen buff made the Sons' aura hit for 1 pt. Now it halves the Sons's aura from 90ish to 45ish.

Anonymous said...

Hogger
Hogger
Don't forget this big guy.

Anonymous said...

Naxx:

4 Horsemen

Anonymous said...

BWL is all kinds of fun. It's hard to say which boss is actually the hardest... my guild is currently working on Nefarian, and while it's a very long endurance fight with some challenging aspects, it's rather straightforward and there's room for error.

Razorgore and Vaelastrasz, the first two bosses, are very very difficult, but for different reasons.

Razorgore Phase 1 is very chaotic, and there's virtually no room for error. If one or two kiters die, it's almost a guaranteed wipe. Phase 2 is just a standard tank and spank.

Vael is difficult because there's a lot left to luck. Even if your tanks have perfect transitions, your rogues keep aggro down, and your casters are on the ball, you could lose many healers early. It's possible that 4 of your first 6 BAs could land on healers, leaving you really short on healing.

After Razor and Vael, it's Easy Street until Chromie, and even she's not so bad unless your server lags or you get a bad combo of her abilities.

Yane (Yet another night elf) said...

Here are the bosses who I thought were hard. My criteria? These are ones we seemed to wipe on most. Ones that looked like chaos until you figure out the pattern. Also ones that give you a headache when you are simply undergeared - resistance or otherwise.

In no particular order (haven't done C'thun, Ouro, Viscidius and hardly any of the Naxx bosses) - Ragnaros (fire resist), Razorgore (chaotic), Vaelstrasz (fire resist), Ossirian (chaotic), Skeram (chaotic), EoM bosses (maybe not that hard but no one hardly ever does them), Firemaw (positioning), Chromaggus (positioning), Nefarian (chaotic), Anub'rekhan (positioning and chaotic).

Relmstein said...

Anyone know what causes the four horseman to be such a pain in Naxx?

Also it seems that a couple of hard boss fights are caused by the chaos of organizing 40 people into specific positions at certain phases. Will the smaller raid size in the expansion reduce this problem or just make the encounters bland?

Anonymous said...

well in AQ40 hardest boss untill twins(havent downed twins yet not rly focussing ont them anymore :P) is definitly huhurahn, this is because its not rly easy to get the fight under control.

in naxx well downed 2 bosses there both arent very hard if u know what to do.

btw anub chaotic?? how?

Anonymous said...

My guild runs BWL in under 4 hours now, and I can still say, without a doubt, that Vaelastrasz is the hardest boss in the instance. We can have a one-shot clear one week, then wipe five times on Vael the next.

As for Molten Core, I hear that though Rag is obviously the toughest, Magmadar is really tough for where he's placed in the instance, as you're still mostly in blues when you start attempting him. (I wouldn't know, my guild was already on Domo when I joined.)

Anonymous said...

AQ40
Viscidus
By quite a considerable amount he is the hardest in the instance. He is a challenge because everyone needs to wear quite a bit of NR and everyone needs to use NR potions, also the Toxin Clouds can be a pain.

Naxx
The Four Horsemen
These gruesome four are a nightmare simply because if a taunt gets resisted and all other snap aggro abilities are on CD, it is a whipe. And resists happen a lot.