The Dread Citadel

Naxxramas. Originally released as the final raid instance of Vanilla World of Warcraft, it was the hardest thing players could hope to tackle at level 60. With fourteen bosses in five massive wings, it would go on to be remembered by veteran players as an excellent and highly rewarding experience.

An interesting note about this dungeon, most of the items acquired here were actually enough to wander into Karazhan with, surpassing even most of the rare items from dungeons. Also, the Tier 3 sets were nine pieces instead of the usual eight- a ring was added to the mix!

Unfortunately, many players had not been able to experience the full wrath of Naxxramas, and many guilds had not even completed it, as there were six months to do so before the release of Burning Crusade. Six months wasn't enough time for raiding guilds back in the day, as raid bosses took much longer than a few weeks to develop and perfect strategies on. This also led to a retcon of the raid, as it would later reappear in Wrath of the Lich King as the introductory raid with a new story.

In Wow's third expansion, the entirety of Naxxraamas was re-tuned for both 10-man and 25-man groups, a lot of trash mobs were removed, replaced, or rearranged for smoother traversing. Bosses still retained MOST of their original abilities with relatively minor tweaks, such as damage outputs and mechanic changes to account for a smaller raid group. The original Naxxramas was tuned for 40 people.

Over The Years [Part Two]

So yeah, by Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard gave players the choice of going for 10-man or 25-man versions of every raid introduced in that expansion. In a nutshell, it worked, as the 25-man raid versions gave higher item level loot than the 10-man, but it also caused some problems. For instance, epic level gear began at item level 200, but by the time the expansion was at its end, the highest item level was pushing 277-284. That was a BIG jump at the time, but it did not have to be that way.

Another issue was the introduction of hard modes, harder versions of raid bosses that could be triggered by a raid for even better loot, a couple item levels higher than the usual. For 10-man raids, hard mode loot was equal in power to the stuff you'd find in a normal 25-man raid. Ulduar, for example, gave iL213 loot in 10 man, while hard mode bosses would give iL226. That was also the same level of gear you would receive in the normal 25-man version. Hard modes in 25-man would yield iL239 gear. Quite the jump. The next raid tier would go from 232 > 245 > 258.

It also didn't help that there were lots more players were running around in such gear too. It was pretty hard to distinguish the good players from the bad ones. Sadly enough, this was the new face of World of Warcraft.

As time went on, the player base would being to alienate itself from each other- The better players would still continue to interact with one another, totally avoiding things such as the new "Looking-For-Group" system for their daily badge rewards. The rest of the players relied on these random group runs to earn badges to buy their gear and hope to get in a pick-up raid for even extra rewards. The game quickly became boring. Not many guilds were able to do hard modes, since they'd become too cozy with the simplicity of normal raids, especially on the server where I played. This led to a few burnouts.

Nobody had to work anymore to get a few purples. All you had to do was run the easy heroics countless times to get the badges required. All you needed was a bit of time really. But oh well.

When Cataclysm rolled around Blizzard attempted to scale the difficulty back to where it once was at the start of the Burning Crusade but the damage was already done, people weren't too happy leaving their comfort zone and the ones who had greatly enjoyed their time in Wrath of the Lich King all started to break off from the game, as well as some veteran players who grew tired of everything else.

But oh well, life goes on.

Over The Years... [Part One]

World of Warcraft was a growing game up until after the release of its current expansion set, Cataclysm. Although the numbers began to slowly bleed off at the end of the Lich King expansion, Cataclysm was the final nail in the coffin for many.

At the very start, World of Warcraft was a very immerse experience. There were lands unexplored and dungeons to pillage. Players had to work together to conquer most of this content, as solo play was mainly discouraged. As a result, server communities were quite close. It meant your reputation.

For all of the original World of Warcraft and much of the Burning Crusade expansion this was how the game went. As a player who started in late Vanilla ("vanilla" is another term for the original iteration of WoW), I enjoyed the end game of Burning Crusade, which wasn't too different from Vanilla's raid style, raids were cut down to 25 players, warriors were still the de-facto main tanks but druids and paladins now had a decent chance, raiding Retribution paladins weren't too common yet, priests were still the best healers but shadow was becoming increasingly prevalent, Horde and Alliance now both had Shamans and Paladins as these two classes were faction-specific in Vanilla, so and so.

Getting into the raids required going through some quests called "attunements", which were required for a spell to be cast on your character or an item he or she needed to possess to get past the green raid portals. In this case, in Vanilla, players had to trek through the Blackrock Depths and find the entrance to Molten Core in order to retrieve a rock sample. Blackwing Lair required a full run of the Upper Blackrock Spire in order to use the teleportation orb. In Burning Crusade players had to complete a lengthy quest chain including four dungeon runs to re-assemble the key to Karazhan, its entry-level raid. Moving on to Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep required slightly more demanding tasks, such as defeating the end bosses of the raid tier before it.

Sadly, Blizzard decided to remove the attunement quests altogether for all raid dungeons in order to let more guilds access this content. While I consider this a bad move, it allowed for more players to flood the raid content, both eager yet unprepared. Although players were now able to enter the hardest raid dungeons without stepping foot in the easier ones, their lack of experience and gear would quickly come to bite them back. This explains why not many guilds ventured past the first few bosses of Black Temple/Mount Hyjal or Sunwell Plateau, which was exceedingly difficult at the time...

Constructs In The Raid

Ah Teron Gorefiend.

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.

Reigning Triumphant

The joys of downing a raid boss for the first time.
The cheers that blew up the vent servers.
The many chat messages that flooded everything from Guild Chat to General Chat.

It may sound funny, but downing a new raid boss for the first time was a wave of excitement for many guilds. To some, it meant they were progressing as a whole. Raid-level bosses were not designed to be easy. They were designed to require tight guild coordination and teamwork. Without those, you were doomed to fail. Now, getting it right was the main obstacle to getting down that raid boss. That meant wiping for hours on end. Until everyone got it down right and pulled through for the last attempt.

Wiping wasn't a bad thing. It shouldn't be one either. Sure, it's frustrating, but the repair bills don't matter. Gold is plentiful in the World of Warcraft, even more than ever. Instead of giving it up or calling it quits next time, focus on what the raid is doing wrong, and do things to improve it. Check your positioning/raid balance. Check if you're properly itemized for the encounter. Make sure your tanks are properly equipped and are using their abilities accordingly. Make sure your healers are being efficient with their mana. If damage dealers constantly die to avoidable battle elements you may want to consider going one-on-one with  them to rectify the situation.

Please don't call an encounter hard or un-doable. If anything, consider your playstyle and improve on what needs improving.

Raid Bosses

Raid bosses are just what their name implies- they are meant to be taken down by a raid. They are also a level of ??, meaning that they lack an actual level. This does not mean that they do not have an actual level. In fact, bosses are dynamically-leveled, meaning that they are always at least three levels higher than the player fighting them. At level 60, a raid boss would have been level 63, 70 would have been 73, and so on as the caps progress, with the current cap being 85, and raid bosses 88.

Now, raid bosses are categorized into three types- tank-and-spanks, DPS race, and Battle For Survival. A tank-and-spank boss is one that really doesn't have much movement involved in terms of raid positioning, the mechanics are extremely simple and/or mostly harmless unless they're not kept in check. These encounters are usually gear-check bosses. A good example of this type of boss is Attumen the Huntsman in Karazhan- two tanks were all the raid needed, and whoever was capable of removing curses was responsible for the raid's survival. DPS race bosses are pretty much that. The raid's survival is actually placed on the damage dealers' ability to kill the boss before it wipes out the entire raid. These bosses are usually tank-and-spank with a few hurdles thrown in, can hit pretty hard, and usually have a high amount of health. They are also on shorter enrage timers, such as 6-7 minutes. Excellent examples are Patchwerk from Naxxramas and Brutallus from Sunwell Plateau.

A Battle For Survival boss is for the more complex-styled encounters, and these kinds of bosses are usually found at the end of a raid dungeon. Such bosses may have anywhere between 2-5 phases where the mechanics will switch up significantly. A Battle for Survival can throw in DPS race-like elements or tank-and-spank elements at certain phases, but the key to winning such fights relies on the raid's ability to stay alive. Usually there will be an item or nearby environmental object that players must activate to weaken a boss, expose a weakness, or temporarily boost defenses to survive an attack that would otherwise be impossible to avoid or not die from.

It's hard to give a good example since the end bosses of all the WoW raids are battles for survival, but a unique example would be Archimonde from The Battle for Mount Hyjal. In this blast from the past event, players had to help weaken Archimonde so the wisps can blow him to shreds as they did in the actual timeline of events. However, doing so was no easy task. A player death on this fight could easily result in a raid wipe. Whenever a player died, Archimonde would gain a Soul Charge. The effect of his next attack using the Soul Charge depended on what class the dead player was. Archimonde had three different abilities for the nine different classes. Either way, they were all pretty devastating, but some were survivable depending on your healers's abilities. Archimonde also had an additional number of abilities at his disposal, a Fear-effect, which made all players run about in a daze, a Doomfire move which unleashed a stream of flames that followed a random player until it stopped, otherwise it would leave a ticking damage-over-time that progressively grew stronger, a Curse that needed to be dispelled, and an air burst ability that would blast three random raid members into the sky. The air burst was deadly, as it sent you high enough to fall to your death; an item given to you before the start of the encounter was to be used to slow your descent. Although players had nine minutes to bring Archimonde down to 10% of his total health, it was more than enough time to actually get him there because of the mechanics.That extra time was to focus on survivability.

Gear check bosses, by the way, require a certain amount of gearing before a raid can even attempt to take them down. This means getting your tanks the best possible armor from previous encounters, your damage dealers the best weapons/armor/gems and enchants, and your healers the best possible spell boosting gear. With that being said, if your raid can meet all of the above, a gear check boss shouldn't be much trouble on your first few attempts.

Mounts!

If you're relatively new to the game, or haven't played before Wrath of the Lich King, players couldn't originally mount until they were level 40. Yes, this meant you had to continue to run around for another 20 levels and using the flight masters to get around. Of course this is what slowed down leveling times significantly. That and you needed about 90-100 gold to buy the training, and 8-10 gold for a mount. All for a 60% movement speed increase. At level 60 you could upgrade to a full-on 100% speed increase but that required about 900-1000 gold and another 80-100 for the mounts.

But, Warlocks and Paladins did not have to bother with any of the above steps to get their mounts. To get their level 40 mounts, all they had to do was complete a simple quest and learn the spells to summon their mount. At level 60, they had to gather a whole bunch of obscure materials and a bit of gold (much less compared to 900-1000 though) for a very lengthy but epic quest chain that ended in interesting final battles. As Paladin, I completed these quests with a bit of difficulty, as I hit 60 a week after the Burning Crusade dropped, and suddenly found myself unable to find groups easily to complete the dungeon portions of my Charger mount quest. Eventually I'd pull through and with the help of some friends I was finally able to complete the quests. That was quite the accomplishment for me.

I'll never forget that day.

At level 70, players were now allowed to use flying mounts, which originally boosted movement by 60% both on land and air. Going from a 100% movement speed increase on land, this felt very slow. If you had the money, however, players were allowed to fly even faster, at 280% movement speed, and 100% on land. But this option was very costly, setting back players 5000g, which wasn't too hard to save up if you did your daily quests and made constant use of your professions and the auction house. There also existed flying mounts that solely flew at 310% movement speed but were very hard to obtain. Nowadays 310% riding speed is just another available riding skill for another 5000 gold, or less when you apply the faction discounts.

Happy riding!