I don’t know if its an unpopular opinion, but I think raid boss fights longer than 5 minutes are just boring and tedious. Having to wait 6-7 minutes into a fight just to prog another phase really kills progression raiding moral for me. Fights like Mythic Ra’den were perfect, you either killed it in 4-5 minutes or you wiped.
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As a progression raider on my main… I find having to repeat the same stages you already have nailed down for the first 5 or 10 minutes just to get back to the point you actually have issues with is morally deflating.
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I like fights like Illidan. 20-25 minutes. That was epic.
Queen is a good length. Sylvanas was…too much
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The problem when you gotta make bosses HP Sponges because you know your community wouldn’t be able to handle mechanics properly.
Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of long boss fights myself. 10 min max (ideally lower) would be my preference, and even then, it feels like an eternity if the boss in question is giving your raid trouble.
Sylvanas without the intermission might have been tolerable.
In any case it’s incredibly tiresome to have early phases be a cakewalk and you have to slog through 7 minutes of the fight to get to the only part that matters, learn what you can before wiping, and then try again.
I think the distinction here is % phase Vs timer. Doing 6-7 minutes of a fight doesn’t feel bad when what you’re doing still has consequences and honing it still has an impact. P1 Ansurek is great because the health you get her to is the amount you’ve gotta get through in P3. P2 is a drag because nothing there matters.
Anytime a boss is over 10 minutes it should be split into 2 fights.
Do more DPS then
Them being long in n of itself don’t make em epic, but some long fights are epic.
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eh…depends on the fight. If there’s a lot of one-shot stuff that’s new to the later phases and you don’t get the chance to practice it much, that can be pretty annoying. But if it’s just a matter of mostly bleeding out because not enough people made it to the end, I think it’s fine.
context matters, right? it’s nice to have a memorable fight for an expac’s ultimate villain, or for an important plot point in a raid or some such. i’d argue that while quality of course assures this more than anything else, a certain duration to the fight is also important. deathwing’s flight to the maelstrom? the flames of azzinoth? flailing against kil’jaeden in the dark and despising his mechanics with every fiber of your being? all essential.
The only way I can justify paying 15 a month and raging at pixels on a screen is to say “I raid for hours and hours” so I can feel some sort of superiority and accomplishment. Don’t take that away from me buddy. It’s all I have 
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Depends on the fight.
But I agree that if a fight is going to be long, it should do enough stuff to be worth the fight length.
This is part of why I think people don’t really like tyrannical in M+, none of the dungeon bosses do enough stuff to warrant lasting longer than 90 seconds to 2 min.
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There are exciting bosses that take 10 minutes and then there are exciting bosses that take like 2.
But if the boss isn’t exciting, I’d rather it take 2 minutes than 10.
I don’t know if there have ever been exciting bosses that only take 2 min on a prog kill.
On a late season deep farm kill: yeah, sure.
Sylvanas was a cut scene masquerading as a boss fight.
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Technically it took longer than 2 minutes, but Dark Animus (Heroic) was basically killed or wiped in the first 60 seconds.
Once you got past the very first phase, the boss was basically dead. But that first phase, hoo boy. Great boss. Very unique.
Yeah, Sylvanas would have been a better boss if P2 just didn’t exist.