The fourth boss in Black Temple (or fifth/sixth) depending on what order you kill the bosses in this area. Teron Gorefiend was among one of the first Death Knights according to Warcraft lore. There's an interesting quest chain where you inadvertently bring him back into the physical world at Shadowmoon Valley.
Anyway, Gorefiend is a DPS race boss with a very nasty twist. This boss wiped many raids back when it was new, mainly because players failed hard at the Shadow of Death "minigame".
Basically, what raids wanted to do was kill Gorefiend before his Doom Blossoms became too much for the healers to handle. The Doom Blossoms were strange purple clouds that floated in mid-air spamming Shadow Bolt Volleys at random raid members for absurd amounts of HP. 1500 Shadow damage might not sound like a lot, because at 70 it wasn't, BUT if you had a good number of them up, more players are taking damage and that's more stress on your healers. That's a Very Bad Thing. That and Gorefiend hit pretty hard, about 5-6,000 HP on an average geared main tank. Tanks at this level of the raid tier would roughly have about 19-22k HP raid buffed.
Now, the catch to this fight! While your raid's busy dispelling the various magic effects and pummeling Gorefiend, every 30 seconds he marks a random player for death! This ability was called Shadow of Death! Players had 55 seconds to quickly finish whatever they were doing, run to the other side of the room from the raid, where they would drop dead, spawning four shadowy constructs that would slowly run towards the raid. Along with that, the now-dead player would also become a ghost. This was very important. As a ghost, you'd have 60 seconds to kill the four constructs you just spawned because they cannot be harmed by anything else but the abilities you now possessed. These abilities were Spirit Strike, Spirit Lance, Spirit Chains, Spirit Volley and Spirit Shield. These abilities were bound to the 1,3,4,5,7 keys respectively. To kill the constructs before they reached the raid, players had to use the four damaging abilities to their advantage. Spirit Volley would hit all the constructs for massive damage, Spirit Chains would damage and root them temporarily, Spirit Lance would slow the constructs and do a fair bit of damage. Balancing these abilities required fast fingers and fast target switching. Spirit Shield could be used to help out random raid members.
After 60 seconds, players would remain dead for the rest of the battle. So much for that. This fight is very similar to one of the Hyjal encounters in terms of this mechanic.
If you could kill Gorefiend before he finished your whole raid off, you'd walk away triumphant.
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