Personally I think wrathion from nyalotha (mythic) is by far the most tedious and annoying boss to fight as a first boss because say you.. stand too long in his fire swirls, you die. If you don't kill one pillar.. you die. If you get even 2 stacks of breath as tank you die. I tanked this as a blood dk in full heroic "bis" (mostly mastery) gear and I was seething after because I wanted to rip my hair out lol thought I'd mention this
I remember Halfus. Sure, he's the first boss of a raid in the first tier of an expansion, but I honestly believe Halfus was harder than more than half of the ICC bosses. He was a bit of a rude awakening. By the time we progressed to Cho'gall, you could really feel yourself becoming a better player, especially in the context of coming off of Wrath
Cataclysm was a big step up in raid and dungeon boss mechanics depth, complexity and quality, plus it was the first expansion where the raid difficulty didn't go up with each raid tier, they were tough from the get go, since the difficulties were supposed to compensate for that, but they forgot to make an equivalent to WotLK's 10 Man Normal difficulty.
Wasn’t Halfus also a lot harder based on raid size if I remember right? Where he was much harder in 10 man than 25. I remember my guild at the time was a ten man guild and we cleared Black wing decent, but couldn’t even come close to beating Halfus.
@@dalorasinum386 Yes Halfus was harder in 10 man, because everyone had a responsibility in the fight, whereas in 25 most people just avoided the cone attack if the tank didn't do the job well and dps-ed the drakes, and in the end Halfus himself.
Halfus was a beast of a fight, for sure. A real buzzkill if you don't manage to get any gear at all during a raid lockout because your raid simply can't beat it. Luckily mine managed it after a few hours, and we had a few bosses in Blackwing down too. But my goodness, those few hours were rough.
You should do a video on bosses that can still kill you no matter what level you are , two that come to mind are the first boss in BWL and spine of death wing
@@Deamia They don't mean "Bosses that you can't solo". They mean "Boss that, even if you are 6 expansions ahead from still have mechanics able to kill a max level player".
I remember Razorgore very well, we would all stack in the bottom left corner and people just kept getting DCed, it was pretty common to see 30 people start running and 10 people screaming that they got DCed :D good old times
My guild never got past Razorgore. We wiped on him for months and months and slowly the guild broke up as we lost tanks and healers who realized we were just never going to kill it.... self fulfilling prophecy.
@@TRFHoj Nope. It was too close to TBC, so it was kind of decided that we'd just take a break, and recruit for a comeback in TBC. I ended up switching to Horde and had much more success in TBC and beyond and stayed with that Horde guild for like a decade.
Rage Winterchill? We killed Kael'thas and it was close to the end time for the raid, but some people were excited to try out Hyjal (yeah, we were dumb). Raid leader let everyone decide what they wanted to do. 17 of us went to Hyjal. We figured we could at least check it out a bit, kill a few waves, maybe get a pattern drop, get the hunters practice for kiting the adds into the NPCs. We kill the waves and Rage shows up. Raid leader, who wasn't expecting this, just said: "stay out of shit on the ground. Let's see how this goes." And we killed him. With 2/3 of a raid. On our first try. Very hard.
Heroic Northrend Beasts was so much fun imo. Especially early on when your gear wasn’t that good. All the chaos when the next boss was about to join the fight… man, memories.
Man, Blacwing Lair... we were stuck on Razorgore for a while, for being confusing and complicated, and then Vaelastrasz who was very simple, but a gear check. And since gear was very limited, it took weeks for us to get to a level where we could kil it. After that the next couple of bosses were a cakewalk, and with all this BWL gear, Vaelastrasz became easy, too.
Yeah i got about the same experience. But we were one of the few guilds who killed razorgore on 5th try. But after that we wiped on vaelastrasz for 1 month XD. And yeah after that we killed all bosses up to chromaggus wich was a big road block again
@@badass6300 Hellfire Assault was incredibly tedious and a long fight there was no way you can rush because carts had a set timer, FL was a quick rush to the boss and dead within a minute depending if you went for towers.
No Kalecgos. God that fight was a complete nightmare, my guild wiped on it for like 3 months straight [and then killed brutallus who was considered the big block in swp in like 2 weeks]. Fight basically required no deaths and 5 groups of people to rotate around seemlessly.
I remember Kalecgos being a brick wall boss to many guilds due to its complexity. Brutallus was more of a hard DPS check with the short enrage timer he had
Those two don't count as first bosses because you don't have to do them first. Raids will only do those two bosses first if they have them on farm. Though to be fair Rage Winterchill is a joke compared to Vashj and Kael'thas who you need to kill to attune to Hyjal.
@@Sideshownicful there is an elevator somewhere in blacking descent or something that during progression it was the number one cause of wipes in the raid according to dbm which. Super funny.
Yeah High King Maulgar was a rough intro fight... The actual pull was harder than the rest of the encounter itself. So many attempts were spent on getting the pull right back in '07. Also making sure your key raid members were alive to handle their respective boss was important.
I'm surprised you didn't mention that the most common strategy on Rage Winterchill was to run a PvP trinket to completely negate the ice block mechanic.
High King was a fun cluster cluck. You better hope your mage and lock had enough spell hit or they spellsteal or control demon could fail and you all just immediately wipe.
First time we did Razorgore we cheesed the fight. Soul stone healers and have a pally DI Razorgore. The party would wipe, you could control Razorgore and no adds would spawn. One time loot didnt drop and we opened a ticket and the GM said "It was interesting use of game mechanics". The next week it didnt work so we had to do it the normal way. Actually a holy pally could use concertation to aggro the mobs and run them around the room. Hunter could also kite the dragons while other DPS killed the other adds.
My guild had a different strategy for razorgore. We all ran around the room where hunters would pick up the dragons and warriors would pick up the legionairs. I dont remember who picked up the warlocks but maybe we just burned them down. Warriors had to have the intercept talent to be able to pick up additional legionairs that spawn.
That's what we did as well. I was a Hunter, it was not uncommon for me to be kiting 2 or 3 dragonkin at once. It looked chaotic as hell but once you figured it out it worked well.
It's interesting that Magmaw made the list. Not because he wasn't worthy, but because I don't think I've ever been in a raid that did BWD that didn't do Omnitron first and Magmaw second. Yes, I know you could do them in either order. Everyone I knew just did him second. it's just sort of fun to encounter someone who did it the other way.
My guild at the time was awful so magmaw was our first boss because it was a bit easier to get through as more people could fail while the five of us that knew what we were doing carried it. I miss 10 man, although I get why it's gone.
Definitely. Such a nasty fight (on every difficulty, but exceptionally so on mythic) if you had raiders who didn't understand the mechanics or were simply slow to react.
10:13 “preventing them of popping defensive cds”, wrong information, pvp trinkets can be popped which will remove the ice block and allow you to negate the mechanic.
On High King Maulgar; there was also spell hit at the time. It was possible for the mage tank on Krosh Firehand to miss the spellsteal and wipe the raid. Best tactic was to have two mage tanks as a just in case.
I remember Magmaw well mainly because I played on a laptop at the time, and the fps would drop to single digits on that fight. Healing was an absolute nightmare and we wiped so many times because I couldn't keep people up.
The beautiful part is that there is a solid case to be made that Vael, the second boss of BWL, is also the hardest second boss ever made. This would probably make BWL the hardest Raid to get started in, if not for the fact that there was zero clearing between the two bosses.
I remember Rage Winterchill when I was first soloing this in Pandaria and never did this raid before and suddenly started taking 15% of HP, entirely oblivious what it was from and died to it 😅
You could do a list of just the TBC bosses that were bugged/glitchy or just didnt work like they were suppose to. Since TBC didnt have a PTR like we do now they weren't tested properly. Solarian had her mechanics completely rework multiple times after launch. It is annoying to be progressing on a boss one week only for blizzard to then change how the boss worked the next.
My takeback from this video is that the first tier of Cata was brutal. All of BoT was crazy hard and normal guilds would rather progress Heroic mode than go for normal Nefarian. 👌
Cataclysm was full of design where there was a deliberate information gap; once you knew what mattered and what didn't, all the material was reasonably easy, BUT it was a real rude shock after two years of WOTLK for a lot of players. I was new to the top tier in Cata and I thought it was a blast, but it absolutely was an expansion of 'does everyone know this mechanic? No, okay, then we need to explain it.'
It had a lot of genuine difficulty. Also had a few factors that made it 'artificially hard' Healers went from being nigh unable to oom in Wrath to suddenly being quite limited on mana. A lot hadn't adjusted yet. There were some major bugs in the tier that persisted for a while. And the balance between 10 and 25 was terrible. It seems Blizz thought designing a fight for 25, then reducing the boss HP, would scale it down to 10. It did not.
@@jji7447 true, healing was super difficult during Cata’s onset, and the 25-vs.-10 man issue never really got better. Fights in Dragon Soul were totally tuned for 25m so 10m groups had a much harder time progressing. But all in all, tier 11 was super fun.
Although I have played WoW for almost all of my life (ran my parents' early vanilla characters around in my pre-kindergarten year and Azeroth slowly began to dominate my childhood and teenage gaming from there), I began raiding regularly only in the middle of BfA, when my retail guild at the time came back from a long raiding hiatus partway through 8.1. I disliked the first boss of Battle of Dazar'alor (I forgot the name) more than Sivara in Eternal Palace, but that is only because my guild, being freshly back into casual raiding, spent far longer on that first boss than the next one. I ended up going full Classic mode when it came out not even a week after my old retail guild downed Normal Azshara, and I will definitely agree with High King Maulgar and Winterchill being annoying. Well, in Winterchill's case, it's more so that I dislike all the bosses in there. Other than Razorgore, I have never progressed on or really seen any of the others. Razorgore was barely any progression at all for me to be honest, but I can imagine my father and those he knew had a lot of trouble. If he wasn't dead, I'd ask him. I do know that he was one of the lucky ones that saw at least up to Four Horsemen in old timey vanilla, however, I am doubtful that his guild downed Kel'Thuzad. I don't truly know how far they got other than Four Horsemen, though.
High King was so weird, it went from what seemed impossible to completely trivial once your group started clicking. I remember really enjoying it back in the day.
It's all a combination of learning the skills needed to deal with each boss and gaining better gear along the way where its easier to maintain hit caps and deal more damage in a short amount of time
I actually have fond memories of Halfus, I never found his mechanics annoying in any way, just required getting used to which drakes you had to help you out that week. The Northrend Beasts encounter, I agree was annoying because if you wiped on the last one, you had to do ALL of them over again. Magmaw I found wasn't difficult OR annoying to deal with, I found it kind of fun. It was a pretty straightforward encounter, a good introduction boss for BWD, at least in my opinion.
Zor'lok at Number 3 is a ridiculous placement - he´s definately the hardest First Boss in the entire History of WoW atleast on the highest Difficulty. He took almost the same time to kill as the Final Boss in the Instance and wasn´t killed a single time before being nerfed several times (plattform fix, Adds in the final phase don´t all cast force and werve, only 1 Add spawns in the last phase, delays on the cast from the adds in the final phase) and even afterwards was extremly difficult. Odyn was a rather difficult fight aswell but not even comparable as the 2nd Boss in the instance was the hard one (tight damage race) and regarding Razorgore.... I guess that fight was 15 years ago, we know how the fight turned out during Classic 2.0 :3
But to my understanding wasn't it skipped because 1. People didn't want to do the 2nd phase since it had the chance to be the hard platform and 2. It was skippable so why do it. As far as the odyn statment, this is first bosses not 2nd. And as far as razorgore, he was hard back in the day due to lack of info
@@duelistkind846 how do you mean they didnt want to do 2nd phase? First plattform was random (left with attenuation or right with force and werve), the other one was always the remaining one of the two and the last the MC plattform. 2nd Phase (from 45-0%) had nothing to do with it, phase 1 was just unplayable if he started with attenuation bc you had to kill the add that spawns with every transition fast and the raid wouldnt have survived a Force and Werve without the bubble. Yeah you could skip Zorlok, but you couldn´t progress on the final boss if u skipped him on heroic and did him on normal instead and that argument (possibility to skip) doesn´t count imo if you´re already reminding me that we´re talking about first boss difficulty right? :P
Razorgore was brutal. We were raiding twice a week and failed to kill him for 6 weeks which was not only infuriating but also caused a lot of people to quit the guild. Finally when we got him, we managed to beat every boss until Chromaggus where we also struggled a bit, but not as much as with Razorgore.
Respectfully, Rage Winterchill is not a "very hard first boss" . His death n decay can be fully ignored by melee/tanks as you can just heal through it, and his frostbolt is easily countered with a single trinket.
I'll 2nd this, Rage shouldn't even be on the list. Think of Lucifron in the context of never having raided a 40 man, and you definitely have an "annoying" boss
I think he’s placed here for being annoying and requiring you to clear 8 waves of trash every time you want to kill him. Not because he’s difficult tbh.
One more thing about Rage Winterchill: There was a time where his Death and Decay was invisible if you had your graphics settings low enough so it was even harder to get out of.
Rage Winterchill, The only raid boss that made me fall asleep! We were progressing through MH and the next morning i woke up to -DKP for falling asleep.
razorgore was nuts during the original launch. Almost every guild made it to chromagus the same week they first took down razorgore, but razorgore took weeks to even months to down him for some guilds. Also, once you beat him the first time, it almost was like a levelup for your raid group because of all the coordination it required. It wasn't just a couple healers a couple tanks and a couple DPS carrying a 40 man raid, it literally took all 40. He would have been a perfect boss if he was 3rd to last instead of 1st.
Wowowow, even when fighting halfus in 10m in pug groups and not being able to 3 tank, pulling all the dragons at once was THE way to do the boss unless it was first week of heroic where you had almost no gear
Ohh i was expecting Lord Marrowgar to be on the list ... He was really annoying with chance to cast spike and flame on the same player! We never had a problem with ToC beast i was surprised with that pick ^^
For Kiggler on the Maulgar fight we just had a Boomy pop cds and do as much dmg as possible since they can't be polymorphed, and dedicated 1 healer to keeping that Boomy alive. If not that, then 2 hunters would sit on him with a healer keeping them up, since pets usually got the polymorph and could be dispelled with Mend Pet.
HFC and ToV are still hard to this day just because of classes with horrible mobility (I hated running HFC on my DK, but loved doing it on my druid or DH) or not being able to summon a tanking minion (ended up forcing my friend who mained monk to raid with me for that sole purpose)
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure Halfus had some weird bugs on him too. The first tier of Cata was great because it had 3 raids but they did have quite a few bugs, especially BWD.
Bro our guild used to have all of the off tanks and hunters kite the Razorgore adds by spamming demo shout in a figure 8 while 4 groups of DPS and healers would DPS down the adds and kill the magesas they passed. It was so fucking scuffed.
So we had a TOV boss, but did you not consider Restless Cabal from crucible of storms something different enough? I think it’s valid either way, just curious what your thoughts were. It was a crazy boss if you classify it as a “first boss”
I made sure any 1 boss raids were not allowed as that's cheating I felt 2 would also be too easy, but ehhh and 3 i was not for either but close enough that odyn being insane pulled it through.
4 million was nothing. IIRC, back in late stages of Cata or MoP, before the first stat squish, I saw a druid tank will nearly 1 billion HP. I want to say it was Cata since I specifically remember seeing a druid tank (I was healing) with an obscene amount of health in H Vortex Pinnacle.
@@Dimumouto The first stat squish was the prepatch to WoD at the end of MoP. Also, your memory isn't correct. Nobody had anywhere near that much hp ever.
@@claytonreeves150 doing some searching and you're right. It may have been a druid tank in Cata with 1 million health instead, that expansion DID release 12 years ago. goddamn.
@@Dimumouto I think it was those instances of bears having over 1 million hp that started the ball rolling for the stat squish in the first place. What surprised me was how fast everything re-inflated over just two expansions, leading to the second squish.
@@claytonreeves150 right it's crazy that we literally just did a squish and we are already back up to where we are. Dps are already doing 100k in some pulls.
Magmaw sounds like a nightmare. Imagine being a healer on that fight. Fuck me, imagine being the Hunter on that fight! You fuck up one time and the entire raid wipes and EVERYONE _KNOWS_ it was you.
Rage Winterchill wasn't difficult at all for groups that had managed to kill Kael'thas - in fact, Winterchill was one of the easiest "reward bosses" for reaching a new raid tier.
Man I loved battle for mount hyjal although most of that came from the Warcraft3 mission nostalgia thinking about how I was playing the rts but I was just one of the units and not the guy who was in fact building aproximly 40 balistas to kill archy when ho hit janias base
definitely agree on these i think u could do a part 2 even… the first boss of dragon soul is weird because of the bosss room and trash could run up… also the first boss of firelands same reason… and definitely wrathion from nyalotha
I feel like it was the true start on hunters being the mechanic class. Doing that fight with or without a hunter that knew what they were doing was such a big difference.
halfus and omnotron defense system just don't get enough respect considering the absurd amount of interrupts and crazy cast times of them. oh yeah and blizz just kinda forgot to account for the fact that a 10 man raid only had a third of the interrupters. Most 10 man guilds were just stuck on 1/13 for that tier for WEEKS. The wind council was also kinda crazy. blizz really didn't know how to balance 10 and 25 with each other...
You did fight Hallfus by releasing all drakes at once since at start he got the dmg% taken instant when drakes got free not killed. few times where more fun to be a firemage
Flame Levi in Ulduar? Hmm have to disagree a bít. The boss itself was a bit annoying yes, but the clearing of ALL that trash, that was pretty cool! We had our guildmembers constantly team up with the same drivers and vehicles and gotten pretty good at shooting évery damn thing that moved. It was time-consuming yes, and after many months, it did became a bit boring, but thats the case with every raidboss after a while. I dó miss those times. Clearing Flame Levi-trash, or the Battle for Wintergraps. Good times :)
Razorgore destroyed many many guilds. We were able to do the fight relatively fast, but more than half of the guilds that completed MC on my server disbanded on him and Vael. BWL was brutal.
I did progressed later on the bug, and that boss was one of the best designed one ever exsisted. It was an easy boss, once you knew what does what, and how to deal with them, it was a really forgiving boss too, because if someone died, you could still down the boss, the enrage timer wasnt hard. Most of his mechanics could be cheesed like getting from 1 platform to another via warlock portal, 1 tank going earlier, steampeding roar etc. And outside of song of empress, nothing oneshots, on heroic the echo can be solo tanked, with a meele swapping or even 2 dps tanking it like warrior rotating defensive cds, which you had like 3, dk in the same position etc. Tho it was a pain farming it, because you could easly wipe on it, any time and puging it was a pain jn the ass, because yes, you could fail something once, and not die, or 1 or 2 ppl die, but even after doing it dozens of time, of you misstep, got confused or blink at the wrong moment and panices afterwards, you could die, and ppl were failing stuff like no tomorrow, and died like they get paid for it..overall, it was the most fun boss in the raid for me (maybe because the second and 4th were gimmick bosses), the 3rd one was a gear check, the 5th was one of if not the most hated boss of all time y and the last one was a snoze fest and a cake walk after downing the 5th.)
sometimes you do changes of specs over time - i would like to hear about shadow - it is weird, i was sorta bad at shadow in legion and bfa, but the change how he works now helped me a lot - also i remember that in cata they had alternative dmg dealing other than dots - mind spike mind blast combo
Razorgore was difficult because in 2005, people had very bad computers and internet connections as well as the fact that no one really knew properly how the fight even worked or what to do and just had to trial and error to figure it all out. Definitely why he was so challenging.
we were a VERY casual guild (from late TBC to early cata for me) but i think magmaw was the beggining of the end for us (miss you guys EU! also me being the MT and a clicker prob didn't help hehe!
