Most challenging boss in Warcraft so far

[Freelapdance]

Seems a big debate about LKHM vs some of the new content. What do you guys feel?

[Jubeto]

The content we've seen is harder on average than ever before, even the easiest hc boss is somewhat equal with professor putricide hc in icc. However there wasn't any boss which could be compared to HC LK, which remains as the hardest boss with its outright brutal dps requirements and unforgivingness. Obviously I am talking about the version we faced it at, not some 30% buff ;FACEROLL.

[zYN]

I'm going to wholeheartedly agree with mr. sir lord Jubeto.

[Freelapdance]

Problem with the question is that the game has changed so much over the years. I wonder though if the game had the knowledge level and itemisation as well as having the guilds they do now if bosses would have died faster. Things like vashj etc.

Granted there are so many factors that comparing say cata with vanilla is almost impossible. I guess overall the game was harder back then, not because of the bosses but because the grind to get to the point of doing them just took so long. Interesting discussion nevertheless.

[zYN]

Hell yes, things would die significantly faster. Not only are people way, way, way better at the game, but something that's often ignored are the tools that players use. Those have gotten _massively_ upgraded over the years. Anything from addons to analyzing what's happening to .. well, anything. Those things help a ton when players just play _a lot_ better than even at the start of Wrath.

I still remember raiding the original Naxxramas. I'm not blinded by the shiny goggles of nostalgy. I remember the countless wipes on Sapphiron and whatnot. You remember what a joke that encounter was at the start of Wrath? You had one thing to dispel, then you had to dodge the PAINFULLY SLOWLY DROPPING BOMB. Anyone who died to it in Wrath more than once or twice was a total scrub, tricked by that Brewfest drink or by a mage, right?

Back then, however, we had easily one hundred wipes to that same stupid shit. To that damn bomb alone. Not to mention people forgetting to dispel the curse? Like, literally forgetting that it just existed in the whole fight and we wiped. The addons pretty much had no restrictions even back then, so you could make a macro that dispelled anyone in range with the same damn key that you shot Fireball from without having to do anything else. We had a priest who refused to use PoH; he was Greater Healing people in a fight where everyone takes AoE damage and GHeal heals for less with lower efficiency. We had people who put out less than half the damage of what some people playing the same class did with the same gear. We had people who were dirty clickers. We had a feral druid doing DPS back when there were no goddamn real talents for it.

Worst of all, we were a top guild. Just let that sink in for a moment. What I described was something like the 4th or 5th kill of Sapphiron _total_ in the whole world.

I do not miss those times. I'm not going to even start ranting about the world buffs, 50 elixirs and flasks stacking etc.. pretty much everything was just horrible.


The game and the players were both just significantly worse. Raids were a shit ton easier. They just consumed more time because you had to farm, farm, farm and farm and get world buffs which doubled your hitpoints and gave +50% damage.

Sometimes there's people who haven't even been there, or people who were absolute scrubs claiming it was the hardest shit ever. It most definitely wasn't. It was just painful to anyone with the slightest clue. I suppose I was quite masochistic back then.

[dethkrik]

Well, while HLK had extremely high DPS and coordination requirements, if I remember correctly it took you guys 170 or so attempts in total to get the kill, which with limited attempts spread it over several weeks/months. How does that compare to a fight like Lady Sinestra that you spent 5 days on for X amount of hours before getting down. For instance, had Lady Sinestra had a limit of 25 attempts per week, I would assume it would have taken much longer to get down, somewhere in the order of 4-5 weeks? Or if HLK had not had limited attempts and you could have ground out 200 attempts in the first week you had 11/12 down, do you think you could have gotten a kill?

As mentioned players are just so extremely good, well informed, and highly coordinated today, I tend to wonder if it is possible, assuming that the fight is actually beatable, to have a fight without limited attempts or gating of some kind that takes longer than a week or 2 to kill?

[zYN]

HLK wouldn't have died even then, not even with perfect play. We were simply lacking gear. It would have allowed us to grind out the mistakes faster though and get the kill maybe a week earlier.

The +5% buff was pretty significant. What was more significant was the patch that came out just then, increasing the DPS of quite a few classes by a significant amount and giving the priest shields more absorb.

Sinestra I'm pretty sure would have died in two weeks, if it were 25 weekly attempts. I'd have to assume here then though that the fight was in its current state. The DPS requirements are surprisingly lenient on it, but that could be simply because of the buff you get at the end - some classes just scale off of it way better than others. I just feel it could have had a bit tighter tuning. On the other hand I'm quite glad I didn't have to grind it for two more weeks straight.


I'd say it's still possible to create a very, very challenging fight that's still beatable without gating or limited attempts. But designing such a boss would take significantly more time than a "normal" boss. Sinestra already used a few tricks that I'm sure we'll be seeing more in the future, I think they were a success.

[dethkrik]

So with HLK, since you obviously did go back and kill him without the buff, he was very much beatable, it just took gearing out some more and of course really tuning your execution. Were there any fights here in T11 that you had to go back for a week or 2 and gather more gear to beat the fight or was it simply a matter of going down your list of the fights in order of difficulty, tweaking your strategy, and getting them down? For instance, had you beaten Cho'gall 2 weeks earlier do you think Sinestra would have been killable or would your DPS and survivability have been lower than it needed to be until you had the 60 or so new pieces of gear that 2 weeks of farming would bring? Also, do you think that with getting 5-6 drops per boss being new here in Cata it skewed the rate at which you geared up to the point that the content might have gone down faster than Blizzard anticipated, making some of these fights not as much of a DPS check as they might have originally been intended to be?