Top 3 raid bosses in Cataclysm

I was thinking about this after reading Clara's post on Ragnaros, though a lot of people seem to be reviewing Cataclysm raids lately (Dragon Soul in particular) and it made me think about my top 3 favorite fights in Cataclysm. The thought led me to a weird place.

My favorite fight in this whole expansion is the one that gave me fits of anxiety. It was the fight that kept me awake at night, shaking with dread, the fight where I made mistakes over and over and over again wiping the raid until I learned out how to do it over a brutal, brutal 3 straight nights of raiding the same boss. A rather masochistic exercise, I think.

So, anyway. I thought it would be kind of a fun exercise to see what other people thought, so here is a call-out:


What are your top 3 raid bosses from Cataclysm?

The Rules:

1. You may only pick 3 bosses
2. They must be from a Cataclysm raid
3. It must be a boss you encountered pre-nerf
4. Add a Most Memorable Moment from the encounter, whether a mechanic or from your own personal experience with the boss

You don't need to have killed them - just tried them a good number of times to get a good gauge of the encounter.

Okay - so to start it off, here is my list of top 3 favorite raid bosses in Cataclysm. I wound up sticking to normal-mode bosses to try and keep it universal, though no hard-modes really stand out as being all that exceptional anyway.

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NEFARIAN

This has been the hardest boss to tank pre-nerf in my career as a raid-tank. Kiting adds in Phase 3 was the do-or-die part of this fight and the responsibility of the fight's success was purely on the ability of the tank to get those resets, not to mention the positioning of the drakes and his breath, CD rotation between the healer and tank.

Did I mention the hardest part come in phase 3 after an intense 2 phases where everyone had to execute everything perfectly? DPS and interrupts on the adds in phase 2, surviving the 100k AoE every time you shaved 10% of his health, having a healer or DPS tank the adds in Phase 1 and position them correctly without getting killed...

Pre nerf - this was the most difficult thing I've done in this expansion. This was the hardest fight in all of Cataclysm, specifically for me at least, in Phase 3 and when it was nerfed, I felt really sad that no other raid would ever face up to him at that level. I suppose you could do Heroic Nefarian, but it lacks the simplicity of what made the original encounter so great that it just bit into you and didn't let go. Overall, this would be my favorite raid boss in all of WoW but for Heroic Mimmiron. Firefighter is still the most exhilarating kill I've ever had in a raid, hands down. But Nefarian is a very, very close second.

Most Memorable Moment: I don't know, the moment when Nefarian floods the arena with lava or realizing with head-smacking horror that stunning the adds in phase 3 with Holy Wrath was the biggest mistake I could have made? Either way - brilliant!

RAGNAROS

This fight was more about coordinating your own movement and cool-downs for all the individuals involved, rather than any single particular mechanic that any one person has to handle, but how each individual person helps the raid with damage both incoming and going, with adds in transition phases, and with meteors made or broke this fight. It's an elaborate, choreographed dance that everyone had to execute perfectly.

Not nearly as hard as Nefarian, it was still a worthy and memorable end-raid fight, and it took us a few nights of work to get this. Figuring out how to handle Sons and Scions, two-healing it on our first kill, figuring out positioning for the Smash with Seeds while dodging the fire on the ground, juggling Trap detonations on top of all the AoE going out... nobody was ever bored during Ragnaros (the tanking was relatively boring but I'll give it as pass on that).

Meteor juggling in phase 3, now that I can look back at it in hind-sight, was a hilarious mechanic and I've seen it deliberately knocked into people lately. Bad raiders! No biscuit! Regardless, this fight pushed healing to the limit, and required heavy DPS and demanded precise execution from every single person in the raid, and that's what I loved about it. If they had added some really hard tanking component to this fight, it might have been my favorite fight over Nefarian.

Most Memorable Moment: On our very first pull we coasted through Phase 1 and then at transition I saw the Sons land and zoom to Sulfuras wiping the confident smirk off my face in 3 seconds flat. It was an awesome, "how the hell are we going to do this?!" moment.

CHO'GALL

Deal with interrupting Worship, with fire on the ground, with debuffs on tanks, with the adds, avoiding the Shadow Crash, killing the Corrupter and then the Bloods in time, making sure everyone had very low stacks of Corruption going into Phase 2 and the massive DPS burn needed to kill it at the end - another fight where you just can't fall asleep.

If you're slow on that interrupt, the boss builds stacks and the tank get gibbed. You fail to dodge the Shadow Crash, you wind up with a ton of Corruption and get yourself killed. You fail to swap and kill tentacles in phase 2, you wind up hitting like a limp noodle. You fail to turn away to puke at high stacks of Corruption, you kill people. This fight was great, and the heroic version tuned it even better, adding the elemental mechanic to really keep DPS on the razor edge of swap/killing and pushing the meters.

Most Memorable Moment: The night we had multiple - multiple - sub1-million wipes and at least 2 sub 100k wipes. Heartbreaking. Came back the next night to one-shot it, naturally.

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I'm sad that none of the Dragon Soul bosses are memorable enough to stand out in my list, and though I do like some of the Heroic mode fights (particularly Heroic Yor'Sahj and Heroic Ultraxion), I'll remember doing Dragon Soul, but I won't sigh wistfully over fights it, like I sigh over the fights listed above, or other fights from Wrath like Firefighter, or Yog or Lich King or Heroic Putricide or  3-drake Sarth or Malygos...

And while Tier-11 was a lot of hard work and fun, it was really draining on raids to attack the number of bosses at the level of difficulty they came in with. I'm hoping Pandaria finds a middle-ground. I felt Firelands had a just-about perfect level of difficulty for us to tackle but with too few bosses - and the current tier of Normal modes feels vastly under-tuned, and Heroics feels like it is tuned just about right as well, and maybe a hair over-tuned for 10s but that's okay.

Dragon Soul Nerfs

This feels familiar, doesn't it?

I'm glad we've killed Deathwing a couple of times by now, and have the fight down pat and dry at this point or I'd be really pissed as I was over Ragnaros. As it is, I'm just shrugging it off, as I don't really see the point in further tuning this content as it is, if you'll excuse the elitism for a moment, relatively easy compared to pre-nerf Firelands, but difficulty is a relative thing.

That said, Madness of Deathwing is no Ragnaros. And Madness of Deathwing is certainly no pre-nerf Nefarian. It's more on par with, I don't know, Cho'gall maybe, or Ascendant Council in terms of difficulty. Once you know what to do, the fight is entirely a breeze and the right setup lets you breeze through so much of the fight it's not even funny.

To be fair, we had a number of wipes on Madness. Spine took us a night. But ever since we killed these bosses, it hasn't been a problem and we more or less 2-healed the whole place except for Zon'ozz and Spine. If we do all normal modes next week, I imagine we can clear out the place in less than three hours. Though I think our Raid Lead might want to do Heroic Morchok and Heroic Yor'sahj.

I don't know. I don't know that we're particularly great and our gear was more or less at normal-Firelands level when we started this tier. We even missed about two weeks of progression when we didn't have people over the holidays. So are the nerfs necessary? Not for us, they aren't.

But I think they probably are necessary for the guilds that were stuck on Ultraxion or Lootship or Spine. Those fights do have relatively steep DPS requirements.

Are you having trouble 2-healing in the 5th minute when you're getting hit with 300k every second? Can you get one of the adds down before the Sapper spawns? Can you take the hits of fire throughout the fight without loosing people? Can your tanks taunt swap and chain CDs to survive phase 2? Is everyone able to dodge fire and cones at the same time? Do Bloods overwhelm you in the third plate phase over and over? Do you just need a bit of DPS to get over the hump on that 4th limb of Deathwing or to clear the last 2% in phae 2?

If yes, then this will help you get over that little bump and that's not a bad thing.

Maybe another two weeks of gear will help, maybe you need a different strategy or composition, or whatever, but I've been there going in on the same fight, night after night after night and not being able to kill something and feeling the frustration with making absolutely no progress. I remember two years ago (holy crap) that the 5% nerf helped us down Sindragosa when she was wiping us with sub 5% enrages or something crazy for two or three weeks in a row, and then the week the buff hit, we killed her. It stung a bit, but I was just glad to finally be on Lich King.

As it is, my expectation and my performance is based on completing at least all of normal content pre-nerf and as long as I can manage that, I'm happy. And we've more than managed that this time around. To everyone else who's waiting to get over that hump - I hope you're able to make the magic happen before the nerfs hit, but if not, I'm sure you'll have those shiny titles after January 31.

Hyjal is backwards

Ever since I did Hyjal back in December, I've been thinking about why I don't like that quest line. And I think with 4.2 and the invasion quests, it finally makes sense to me. Hyjal is written backwards. It starts where it should end and then tries to back out of that, and winds up feeling trivial instead of challenging and threatening.

I think one of the big problems with Blizzard is that they are writing on such an epic scale they can't see what makes stories good - they do not let us as characters experience struggle. And yet, it is exactly struggle that makes heroes what they are. It's in the wake of loss that victory has meaning. That is why Wrathgate was so widely accepted as a genius move - it was about the heroes making a massive mistake and being absolutely ruined because of it. It was about the loss of names we thought were immortal.

Cataclysm - and Warcraft in general - could use some more of that.


Think about what happened in 3.1 through 3.3 - nothing. Did we as heroes ever loose ground? Did we have even one setback? Was there ever a point where we saw Dalaran under threat even though it was a 30 second flight from the Citadel? Did the Lich-King more or less tolerate a Renaissance Faire on his doorstep for months? By the time we killed Arthas, it was a foregone conclusion. We were on a relentless march forward with barely a false step along the way.

The victory was not earned in blood and we felt cheated.

In general, Cataclysm feels half-done. We know why we're in Throne or Bastion - there are clear indications even if a few quests leading directly to raids would have helped, but what about Nefarian? There is absolutely no questline devoted to his threat in the end-game. Even something local to Orgrimmar and Stormwind where the old Lady Prestor and Lord Nefarius stories could easily have been done as they tried to re-gather their resources and suddenly we were aware of their threat and moved in before they could get too far down that line - which would explain the limited resources Nefarian seems to bring to bear.

Anyway. Back to Hyjal - I'm going to take a stab at it by looking at Hyjal and seeing how it might have been done so as to follow this back-and-forth swing of loss, regroup and victory.

So imagine, if you will, a different Hyjal storyline. One in which Hyjal is whole, or as whole as it was before the invasion - nascent forests, lush and green, blue streams of water, rich with animal life when an urgent call goes out for help to put out forest-fires. You arrive to see a small volcano and elementals - nothing too much to worry about but as you fight and quest, you find that on returning to your quest hubs, they are overrun, and you have to move back, further up the mountain to regroup - echoes of what happened when the Scourge came.

Over and over, you try to contain the fire but are pushed back, more and more powerful Fire Lords appear, and take over the lower levels of Hyjal and you continue backwards, imploring the Ancients for help but even their intervention isn't enough - only after all four are summoned are they able to put up a defense, but it's too late - by then, much of the forest is already gone, the forces of Ragnaros are on the doorstep of Teldrassil and the world-tree is truly threatened on all side, as Ragnaros' lieutenants wander openly, transforming Hyjal into a part of the Firelands itself.

We are left with dailies to combat the skirmishes against wandering fire elementals and rescuing druids from behind enemy lines and such - we are under siege. You are sent as an emissary to call for help, but the world is too fractured, too busy dealing with their own local problems to care much about a tree on some distant land.

Desperate for something to happen, we become a part of Malfurion's gambit - while the bulk of Ragnaros' forces are on the offensive, he suggests a daring attack against the enemy. He calls for resources to be gathered from the enemy, that he will collect and use to open a gateway into the Firelands itself - dangerous dailies with rich rewards, perhaps.

Imagine, further, a small instance within the barrow-dens. With all this disruption, the various prisoners held by the Wardens are breaking free as the Wardens are called out to battle. Staghelm is making a move, aided by unknown forces that have infiltrated the Dens, perhaps even druids who lead us in and then mislead us while they rescue Staghelm, we see the betrayal and corruption of Druids first hand - a sign of things to come later.

4.2 finally arrives and Malfurion, along with the Aspects and the Elders having gathered enough resources finally opens that gate - straight into the Firelands itself, bypassing all the defenses Ragnaros has put in place. The Avengers of Hyjal take a skeletal crew into the Firelands along with the adventurers and begin their own invasion - one of foliage. The quests can continue as they do now - we plant our own trees in the Firelands and solidify our foothold even as Ragnaros recalls some of his forces, aware now of his exposed flank.

The fight is two-fronted - the invasion and the repel - do dailies in Firelands to grow the trees, and do a new (shorter) questline in Hyjal to retake the land. As quests are completed in Hyjal, the Guardians move forward, take new land, open new dailies and quest hubs, regrow their lands bit by bit.

Meanwhile, the fight continues in the Firelands - adventurers raid against Ragnaros refusing him the opportunity to advance against the tree himself, and tangle up his strongest lieutenants. 4.2 ends with the fires of Hyjal finally extinguished, and Ragnaros finally defeated.

This keeps things very close to the way they are but it just changes the tone of things and adds a palpable sense of desperation to things - it brings a sense of danger. Something sorely lacking in the game right now. With phasing technology being so evocative in its ability to change the world, I think the storytellers can afford to be a little more risky and let us loose things at the end-game a little bit.

It'll make the victories all the more meaningful.

HOW TO: Nefarian

This is part 9 of a series where I'll cover the way my guild does all the normal-mode encounters on the 10 person difficulty in the current raiding tier. I'll cover the fights in general but also talk specifically about tanking from a paladin perspective and give any hints I can about how we assign DPS and healing.

This is a very Paladin-tank specific view, and you'll excuse me for that, I hope.

Finishing Tier 11

Last night was a culmination of something I started at the end of January. It took us four months to get from pulling Magmaw to killing Nefarian and now we're done with all the normal mode raid bosses in this tier. Nefarian was the ideal place to end it - I think Al'akir would've felt a bit underwhelming if we had saved him till the end.

Killing Nefarian felt like it was the crowning glory of this tier. It literally felt like we had finally toppled this beast. As I've mentioned before, 12 bosses at the scale of difficulty that Tier 11 came in with, for a 6-hours a weeks raid, was just overwhelming and we really had to stretch our wings to get this far.