Honestly, thinking to myself of all the end of raid fights recently (going to Warlords at least);
Imperator Margok: Decent fight
Blackhand: Very good fight, best in there
Archimonde: Very very good fight, raid not so great but he makes up for it.
Xavius: One of the best fights and great ending to a bad raid.
Helya: She was pretty cool, but its also a mini raid so I expect less.
Gul’dan: Incredibly awesome fight. Great raid.
Kil’jaeden: He cool. Not my favorite fight but he was good, just good.
Argus: Awesome fight, I loved it and the raid was fun too.
G’hunn: Might contest sylvanas tbh here but I don’t know, still think she’s worse.
Jaina: Absolutely amazing fight, almost makes up for Ghuun here.
Uu’nat: Fun fight, mini-raid but it was still satisfying end.
Azshara: Was interesting and fun, great raid too.
N’zoth: Not the best of fights, will still put him above Sylvanas though as personally I enjoyed the complexity of it especially in Mythic.
Sire Denathrius: One of the best fights of all time, up there with Jaina and Gul’dan to me.
Sylvanas: Awful. What part of this fight was fun for you? And why does she end at 50%? (Yes I know she doesn’t die , neither did Jaina and she still had an execute phase… execute phase is one of the best parts of a fight.)
8 Likes
As a healer. I hate the Sylvannas fight. All of phase 1 is so much random damage that has no mechanic to it. You just get arrows and stacks without any kind of ability to avoid it. And it’s not a raid wide thing is just random who gets it. I hate that as a healer. Raid damage is one thing and avoidable damage from mechanics is a thing, but just random damage is so stupid.
8 Likes
I thought mechanically and visually the boss fight was great, the problem was what happened after.
4 Likes
I like the first phase, it is cool. Phase two is incredibly boring to me though. I get it’s a whole transition, but unlike Jaina’s, of which took a few 10’s of seconds to pass, Sylvanas P2 just never seems to end and is not fun or challenging in the slightest to me.
P3 Is a revamped version of Deathwing fight, which no one really liked and i’m surprised they decided is was a cool idea to do again. But nothing crazy or cool there at all. To me her fight just got worse as it progressed instead of the boss-standard where it gets cooler thematically and harder as well.
1 Like
It’s an interesting encounter but way to long. 10+ minutes fight are tedious.
12 Likes
I disagree with this. The scenery and set up for Xavius was awesome, but the fight itself was actually pretty lame to me.
G’huun was an issue because it’s just a slog. It’s one of those fights that goes well at the difficulty it is designed around, and while it is relevant. It is cancerous outside of this. Heroic G’huun was a completely different fight than LFR/Normal and felt more engaging early on I feel. Though that said, the fight was boring and sluggish after you overgeared the fight which happened in barely a month of clearing.
Basically it’s like Spine of Deathwing, it’s a cool fight on paper. In practice it blows.
I like the fight on paper. A fight atop Torghast, which she then blows up the top of (at least that’s how it reads), then chasing after Zovaal trying to stop him from reaching Oribos as Sylvanas flies around trying to stop us from stopping Zovaal, then up on the Arbiters platform a final effort to try to stop Zovaal from killing the Arbiter, but Sylvanas is in the way and has to be dealt with… It sounds pretty cool and epic and fun on paper.
In execution, though? Wow it’s bad. Phase one is a joke of a phase and is pretty much the epitome of teleports behind you “HEH, NOTHING PERSONNEL KID”. Then it abruptly ends with Sylvanas throwing a bunch of rocks around randomly.
Phase 2 is… what? You get randomly teleported to a tiny section of a massive chain miles away from anywhere and just run along a couple of links dodging a few waves and killing boring trash mobs because, as usual, the npcs are bloosy useless and need your help. Then after you run up a couple of links, still miles away from anywhere, Jaina randomly teleports you on top of Oribos. This phase is INCREDIBLY disjointed and poorly done, it just feels awful.
Finally, the third phase is also a joke. You appear on the Arbiters platform, then get randomly teleported again to one of the side platforms. You then fight Sylvanas on a tiny platform in a mostly tank and spank encounter, as a dps race jumping across the 4 platforms. Meanwhile Zovaal stands there channeling doodads, Anduin runs around randomly and occasionally holy novas, Jaina randomly runs around and occasionally throws a few bolts at Anduin, and Thrall and Bolvar stand there watching, just as useless as they’ve been for the rest of this expansion.
Awful, simply awful.
4 Likes
Apparently outside of terrible server lag it’s MUCH better on Mythic than Normal/Heroic but it absolutely sucks on Normal/Heroic.
N’zoth was definitely worse, and Azshara was WAAAAAAAY worse.
I’m not sure about mechanics, but I hope she’s not a pathetic boss who just jumps and jumps for nothing.
As soon as I lore, we already know the reality.
If we wanted to lose, he should feel that feeling, not the jailer, that he is the only one he shows us, but that he has that feeling between defeat and the desire to have gone far.
-
in other series like the red wedding in GoT.
-
When Gundam Wing threatens the colonies to destroy with their own satellites, the Gundams surrender and one of them self-destructs so as not to give the Gundams.
-
And the final Mission in Halo Reach and Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
They showed a way of seeing that if we must lose, have a good feeling.
Not like Sylvanas, who failed in all her expectations, nothing called the last boss will do. Which is the final boss like Jaina doesn’t prove anything, and believe me, do you think that’s the only boss we lose? don’t forget the horde in Dazar’lor.
Both characters did not help at all in that feeling of the raid, and for the next patch the only important thing would be their farm, either for a mount, or for a legendary bow.
Personally it’s up there with Deathwing for me. This giant, awesome dragon who sundered the very world we knew, and we get to fight his tentacle bits until his head falls on the platform and we beat it until he dies. A tragic ending to what otherwise was a very cool villain.
Sylvanas’ fight is cool conceptually but it does fall quite short, and a large part of that is, as I’ve often complained about, Sylvanas is supposed to be a master tactician but instead the fight is just brute force. There’s not a lot of cunning going on, and really at no point in Shadowlands have we seen her supposed intelligence or wit. It’s just all brute force and stupidity.
Edit:
Also it might just be me, but I personally hated that the end of the fight was getting her below 50% HP. Something about that just feels like an insult. Like it’s showing she didn’t break a sweat holding us back, but couple that with how honestly boring the fight is outside of the concept of moving from point A to B, I just didn’t like that.
3 Likes
The whole not dying thing?
Yeah that bothered me so much I didn’t even bother with this raid tier.
3 Likes
Does your raid not know how to remove stacks with arrows?
I didn’t hate the fight nearly as much until a guildie pointed out the background on the P3. The “fight” that is happening is so unbelievably bad that i’d rather watch WC3 character auto attack each other than whatever it is they are doing on the arbiter’s platform. It soured any potential “saves” this fight ever had for me. The laziness is astounding, despite WoW being a multi-dollar company.
This aspect of WoW raiding has always been a deterrent to me. I feel like most raid boss encounters are too long since BC. I spend all day at work highly focused - I don’t need it when I get home. Fights like Vael were great - intense but quick.
Agree here. Deathwing would be up there if I went back all the way to Cata final bosses, but I didn’t raid a whole lot and mythic wasn’t a thing so I didn’t bother.
Have to be honest, getting a huge raid together to fight Sylvanas as a World PvP bosses was leagues cooler and more memorable than her actual raid boss fight. And that really sucks.
sylasavasnas is not worst boss she is trong woman that don serve
1 Like
Yes, you can never actually DPS her. She moves too much and a extreme frustration to melee.
With most bosses unless they are literally carbon copies of pervious fights it is hard to say was is objectively good or objectively bad. To compound that different people will have different experiences based on where they were at (in life and in game) when taking on a boss as well as who they did it with or how they experienced it. On top of that your expectations will also color your opinions one way or another.
Outside of the middle phase with breaks the pace of the encounter and adds a level of tedium to it I think the Sylvanas fight has several interesting mechanics goin on with here barbed shot in phase one and the pools and other placement management in phase 3. I think the second phase was meant to add a sense of tension and progression to the fight while we changed setting but honestly it only serves to break up the pace of the fight. If they had a cut scene in the middle of the fight it should have been to simply take us to Oribos and the final phase should have been something to the effect of Anduin being on another platform and we need to say use Sylvanas’s arrows and pool to slow his attacks against our allies or prevent him from nuking the raid.
Honestly to talk about Sire that fight could have been far better designed in terms of how it phases. Proging that fight on heroic with a heavily under geared group was an absolute nightmare. Every week with more gear we had to change our phase one strat based on if we could skip a set of adds or if we had to deal with them before phasing, then we would have a good pull and haft to straight stop DPS or we would miss a cleanse. It was also frustrating when you were getting consistent clean phase 3 the previous week but now because your group has more gear there are 2 adds still up by the time the boss is getting in to P3 and now crap has hit the fan. If the fight was less janky in terms of progression I would give it a thumbs up but god damn it was not a great time after the first couple weeks.
I am not saying the fight was over all bad or anything but it had its problems and as you can see my elongated experience progressing and re progressing Sire causes me to highlight the bosses flaws. Objectively the fight is pretty good it is just an annoying prog if
As for good fight I don’t think anything I did from BFA came close to MoPs end bosses. Sha of Fear, Garrosh, Lei Shen… my god Lei Shen (chefs kiss). Those fights were the right about of tense, epic, frantic, chaotic and most importantly fun. It is hard to really pin down what makes a boss fun at times because different people like different things. Personally I hate the Sylvanas intermission, Why? because we are just running across a bunch of platforms dodging easily avoidable AOE.
Definitely agree for the P2 parts you said. I mean, you don’t even have to dodge the things that are meant to be dodged. The haunted wave sylvanas does is a small gust of wind and a DoT. Most of our guild cares less as long as you aren’t hit by more than one. Nothing is lethal. Nothing the adds do is particularly dangerous or challenging and they die insanely fast to just a moderate amount of AoE. I understand why the transition exists, but feel like it could have been so much better. Like I said, Jaina’s transitional area lasted like 10-20 seconds and (on heroic/mythic in particular) still felt dangerous. Then bam we’re in a whole new zone on a frozen platform in the middle of the ocean. Awesome.