Back in the ancient era of TBC, anyone who was raiding at the time may remember a little raid instance called Karazhan. When you raided back then, you had to accept that some fights would be fun for you and some …. less well designed for your class/ spec/ style. Karazhan contained both heaven and hell fights for melee classes.
Shade of Aran was a melee dream fight. There was a bit of running in and out so that you didn’t get bored, you could interrupt to your heart’s content, and most of the rest of the time, you could just hit him. Even better, the fight didn’t need a tank so your tanks got to let off some steam too (unfortunately dual specs didn’t exist at this point, so letting off steam meant dual wielding in your tanking spec – but it was the thought that counted!)
And then to make up for it, Prince Malchezaar was the fight where melee always died. (Apologies to anyone who didn’t, you are either a mutant, sleeping with ALL the healers, or very lucky.) You had to run in and out … but you also had to dodge random infernals and if the tank was unlucky they could end up in a position where melee literally could not get out in time safely.
And there was a kind of expectation that there would be some balance. For each horrid fight, maybe you’d get a melee friendly one. And similar for ranged, and healers, and tanks … and maybe now you see the design issues here.
But what happens when one fight is SO hellish that it puts people off the entire raid? One of my ex-WoW guildies hates healing Chimaeron, for example, and checks the goals of a raid before he signs up. In LOTRO, I hated one of the fights where I had to stand pointlessly on a distant platform for about 80% of the time because it was so melee unfriendly and my class wasn’t that important anyway. (Nothing will make you hate a fight so much as feeling pointless … apart from guaranteed insta-death I guess.)
This is not so good for raid leaders, who really would like people to just sign regardless of which fights are on the menu. And back in the good old TBC days, that’s what we did. What else were you going to do? It was how things worked.
Now I suspect that players are more willing to just say “suck it” if they hate the fight that much, because there’s always another game, or waiting until the next tier to see if that’s more fun. I’ve wondered also if class/ soul design feeds into this, meaning that it’s easier to make fights that are just that darned unfun for some people. Or maybe the drive for devs to keep finding new and different mechanics to drop into a fight – maybe tank and spank with a few movement mechanics wasn’t so bad after all.
Do you have any hell (or heaven) fights? Have you ever considered only signing for a raid if they’re going somewhere you like? And as for me, I hate that LOTRO platform fight and never want to see it again, but it seemed rude to only sign up conditionally (eg. I can come but only if we don’t go to that wing) so I stopped signing up altogether. I wonder if that was better in the long run for everyone else.
Welcome to Spinksville! 
The answer is “Sindragosa” for everyone who went through ICC, right?
That was the fight where I’d respec resto in an attempt to tank the healing debuff for our real healers, because being Enhance on that fight was just terrible.
Actually that fight was quite fun to tank, but yeah I think everyone else hated it 🙂
Conversely, of course, I love the platform fight because I enjoy the timing of jumping on and off platforms, even if it means I can’t do any of the things I do in a normal fight (ok, I can do very very limited healing, because of range issues, and I never get to hit anything).
I don’t know why, I usually hate anything with a timing issue in games. But having just killed Durin’s Bane for the first time, I think I found standing and hitting something lamer than I wanted it to be.
I definitely have fights I’d rather not turn up to – most of Barad Guldur – especially the twins because it STILL seems like luck whether we do it or not, and I hate things that seem to rely on luck rather than knowing and being able to tackle the fight through practice.
Does AQ40 trash count?
YES!!!
Malygos.
I don’t especially like vehicle fights and a vehicle fight in three dimensions with a hefty movement component is my nemesis.
It wasn’t even that I couldn’t do it. After enough practice I got the hang of it. I just hated it. I rolled a healer not a sopwith camel, dammit.
Stabs: malygos phase 3 was easy as a healer. After everyone was mounted, you did /f , targeted yourself, then spammed (if I recall correctly) 3 3 3 3 3 4 until the boss was dead or the raid had wiped.
It was a lame design, but not a hard one.
Er, that’s /f [leader] (website took out angle brackets).
Al’Akir is worse… even without the vehicles. hehe
I know a lot of people did hate that fight (with reasojn) but for me the sheer epicness of the ground crumbling and everyone falling into the void and … being picked up on dragonback was just so awesome …
One word: Vaelastrasz.
A Unique fight in that he WILL kill half your raid, through no fault of theirs and if he decided to kill your healers first then it was game over. This was before they learned to make balanced raid encounters.
I’ll have to second Sindragosa, although for slightly different reasons. That fight was just our bugaboo in the raid guild I was a part of at the time. We could be crushing ICC, cruising through every fight, one-shots all the way…. then we hit that dragon and everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. Some guy lags out and iceblocks the whole raid. People kill ice tombs too fast and get themselves killed. Tanks forget to rotate. You name it. It just became a comedy of errors some nights.
No fights I really hated from WoW raiding, however, Prince Malchezzar was probably the worst, we had no real problems with any of the others but those random infernals could just wipe you out even if you were over-geared for it, a couple of bad placements and you’ve lost the melee or the tank is forced to move out of range of the healers… very frustrating when you can’t do anything about it.
Some good suggestions for crappy fights in there (Vaelstrasz and the AQ40 trash were absolutely HORRIBLE). The one I hated most in my playing days, though, was Teron Gorefiend in BT.
I liked Malchezzar, because it was one of the few fights I actually felt like I was having an effect, as the tank. I mean, when he pulled out those axes and went to his 1second attack speed, it felt like I was being properly hammered as a target.
The worst for me was Hydross. partly, getting 50% nature, 50% frost resist gear (in early BC, so basically camping the AH for random “of frost resistance” green items) was where I drew the line as to how much effort I put into raiding. Also the fight was just icky, really. I’d had enough.
There were a bunch of fights where I could rage terribly though…I’d still be there, and we’d eventually kill the boss, but woe betide anyone who argued over loot afterwards. I wasn’t a terribly nice person if that happened.
I hated Sindragosa with a passion. such an example of an over-tuned, hectic and overly tactical fight – I didn’t like where they started going with raid encounters at all. and the Lurker in SSC, we just had a special “relationship”, hehe…he definitely didn’t like me very much… -.-
Honestly? Nefarian this time around. The reason why I hate this fight is due to P2.(Big Wall o’ Text incoming!)
Now let me explain. It’s not that I think P2 is difficult. We’ve done the fight, and more than once.
But P2 to me, is the biggest example of a Big Lipped Alligator Moment in a raid boss. For those unaware of a BLAM, here is the TVtropes description. Also, apologies for linking people to this site. :p http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BigLippedAlligatorMoment
For those afraid to click the link, a BLAM is something that just comes out of nowhere that makes no sense in the context in the situation that is at hand.
The reason why P2 is a BLAM, is basically-look at the fight. P1: Neffy and Ony tag team. Makes sense! He brings back Undead Ony and then you have to deal with both. Sure! P3 has Neffy getting personal. The adds summoned are…Well that’s I guess thrown in to give another tank something to do, but sure, it works. Now look at P2. Lava fills the room, and you need to split off to kill and interrupt 3 completely arbitrary adds for 3 minutes/until they die. Wha? Why? Why is this even here? What is the point? There is none. I’m also wondering with Blizz’s emphasis on ”fun” and ”cool” who there thought this phase was actually fun.
I think I have another beef with this fight, and it’s actually a technical one. Not a fight technical, but a computer technical. This fight causes more DCs in our raid than any other fight put together for some reason that I don’t know about. People who have perfect connections through any other fight drop off left and right here. I’m not sure if it’s an internal bug with the fight, if it’s the lava, or what, but something causes it. We get DC’s on P1 with the pull(stuck up top so they can’t be ressed.) We get people DCing when the room fills with lava, and we also get people who get the ”Lava Bug” where they don’t see the lava on screen, they don’t float up to the platform, but they still take the damage from the lava, which means they die. 8 out of 10 times this happens to interrupters, of course. P3 sees people DCing when Bloodlust is cast, slowing down DPS. (Even my own MS tends to go up a little more than normal in this fight. It’s not as bad as some of the others, but I have kept track; and it honestly does.) it sucks because we have a lot of good players who end up suffering from what we now call ”Neffy’s DC Hardmode” get frustrated as well. I honestly swear I cannot remember the last time we did Neffy without any DCs. At this point it’s a matter of ”If a non-healing, non tanking non interrupter gets DC’d, then it’s our lucky night.”
So yeah, I think all of these put together makes this my ”ffffffuuuuu” fight currently.
I know I’ll probably get some hate for this, but I absolutely loved the Lootship battle, especially “heroic”. It was always a wonderful time of the raid. We’d gotten through the first couple bosses of the evening, we were comfortable with each other and in the groove, and there was so little chance of failure that you could play games or just chat.
And on heroic you could stand in the little target reticles and bounce around the ship. And nothing will ever top the awesomeness of rocket bear.
I loved lootship too, it was just /fun/. I don’t care if it was fairly easy, it’s OK to have a fun and easy fight in a raid instance IMO as a change of pace. I wish Blizzard would remember the fun sometimes.
Rocket Bear was epic
There hasn’t been a particular fight that I dreaded. I have dreaded not having a break or having to grind through the early bosses over and over because we lost people, replaced them, had to teach them fights and never seemed to progress.
Once we had our people (which was recent)… zoom.
Yeah. The scariest boss in Vanilla and BC was probably the Guild Progress boss, where we spent a good sized chunk of early AQ40 wiping in BWL because our geared guys kept getting snatched up progression guilds.
By that argument, the 10 man boss was the hardest one in Cataclysm because it kept eating 25 man raiders.
Sindragosa. I hated that fight. Until the final phase of a fight we had a well-executed fight to the point of utter boredom, and then in the last phase it broke out into hectic chaos. So unfun. We only killed her 2 or 3 times, extending the ID for work on LK instead of facing having to kill her again. Blargh.
Any fight that A, is purposely stretched out and unable to be sped up, and B, has the endphase be incredibly unforgiving. I imagine this is why Sindragosa gets so much hate, but the real offender in Cata has to be heroic Maloriak. I lost count of the number of 10+ minute attempts where we’d leave him just shy of phase 2 just so we could carefully handle the adds, only to push and have everyone go full retard as 3 of our 10 people got blown up by the first magma jet. Spending entire nights on that made me rage.
Sindragosa for me as well. One for having to stand around and do nothing most of the fight and two because the mechanics were somewhat buggy depending on your race.
I was a priest healer and had switched to the Draeni class in Wrath to enhance my raid-worth based on the hit buff. Seems like the tallest race in the game had to be PERFECTLY (and I mean within a micron of error) to not get ganked by Frost Bombs during the Ice Tomb phase. Conversely, if I relentlessly farmed Pygmy Oil so I could be changed into a gnome (and made sure to chug one extra mid-fight so i didn’t lose form before the encounter was over) I practically could stand anywhere and not get hit. Didn’t seem fair, but since the gank/race ratio was a consistent phenomenon, I went with it.
Malchezzar and the legions he commanded. It was a long run up there. And then his legions would go out of their way to land in inconvenient spots. As a tank, any fight that requires me to back into a wall inevitably means I either cannot see or I can see too much… demon crotch.
I’m fairly sure that the people who haven’t mentioned Teron Gorefiend yet are either the people who didn’t do him pre patch 3.0, or those who forgot about him.
what a terrible fight. You always had that one guy who insisted he had practised his constructs and NEVER got it right.
Yeah Sindragosa Heroic. Having to heal up the MT during frostbreath while hiding behind a fucking iceblock at the same time? Who thought up that shit?
I do remember Teron Gorefiend – please don’t let it be me…please!, I don’t wanna wipe the raid, take someone else, don’t turn me into a ghost, I’m begging you!!