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.