Well? What boss do you think had the most unusual or convoluted mechanics?
Turning a boss into a duck is pretty unusual
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i think there was some boss where specific ranged players get to turn into a bird and play a star fox minigame in firelands
I did this on my shadow priest. It was a blast!
playing simon says with ashara was pretty dumb
Getting to your dance square in Castle Nathria was certainly unusual
In terms of convoluted, maybe the Dark Animus from Throne of Thunder?
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mythic varimathras had 3 players tiptoe out from the group then spread out in a line because two of them had to explode in small circles but if no friends were in a medium-sized radius from you then you died
I feel like Shadow Lord Iskaar in HFC making us play football with the Eye of Anzu during the fight or it’s a wipe to the point where a specific addon for it was made and required by any group not skipping him has got to be up there lol
unusual? As in like not the norm?
Spine of Deathwing was pretty neat. Fighting on the back of a dragon while he tried to spin us off was interesting.
Wait, which one is this?
Alysrazor.
Council of Dreams in the new raid
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Convoluted?
Mythic Queen Azshara
Spine of Deathwing, for sure.
Dipping into some oldschool examples people may never have experienced/forgotten about:
Teron Gorefiend had players turn into ghosts and literally basically play a flash game to keep ghosts out of the raid.
There’s even a version of it still up online: https://teron.faldorn.net/
Reliquary of Souls spawned in with the Essence of Suffering, who was untankable, and reduced all healing for everyone by 100%, armour by 100%. He would fixate the closest player every few seconds, so you spend a while rotating players in and out and hoping you made the right call and the person survived the 3 or so melee hits that they were going to take. Later on Essence of Desire did reflect damage, so if you happened to hit really hard, or get some lucky crits, you could basically gib yourself.
Mother Shahraz was not only a Shadow Resist armour stack fight, but also had a Prismatic Shield that rotated every 15 seconds. Based on which buff was up, she would take 25% less damage from one school of magic, while taking 25% more from an opposite school (e.g. less Fire damage, but more Frost damage).
Gruul would Hurtful Strike at the second-highest person in threat, meaning the off-tank was someone who was trying to maintain aggro while not being hit meaning far fewer resources. This essentially meant a lovely game of everyone watching threat meters to stay below the second tank. Patchwerk had Hateful Strike which worked similarly, but not only was it targetting the people 2nd/3rd in threat, but also people who had high health. At least Hateful Strike also added threat to the eligible targets, so that part became easier to handle and it was more of a “Can you top the tanks up before the next one?”.
Nefarian of course had his class calls which ranged in hilarious effects. Druids would be stuck in Cat Form, which did nothing if you were Feral. Hunters would just have their ranged weapons instantly broken, meaning you did things like swap bows to a grey, have it broken, then re-equip your normal weapon. Something similar was also there with Hex Lord Malacross. He’d gain buffs based on the members of the party, so having him do something like pop AW/Consecrate on your face, or become a Priest and Fear + heal, or MC people, was lots of fun. Coupled with the RNG of the adds themselves, the fight could be super-easy, or super-annoying.
Prince Malchezzar had Enfeeble, which reduced health to 1 for 5 players in the 10-man group. Since he also did Shadow Nova, and put Shadow Word: Pain on people, you just tried to not get oneshot. That wasn’t particularly convoluted. What came later was the concept ramped up on Chimaeron. There, the Bile-O-Tron would bring your health to 1 instead of death, as long as you were above 10k health for the hit that would have killed you. Since he did Massacre which was an insta-death (converted to bringing everyone’s health to 1), as well as Double Attack, which was designed to bring the tank’s health to 1 (with a 5 second swing speed), you spent a lot of the fight yo-yo’ing people health. The icing on the cake was that at 20% health, he reduced all healing by 99% and Nefarian would do a 2k/second dot on everyone, meaning from there it was just a zerg-fest to kill him before everyone died.
Will of the Emperor had the Devastating Combo → Opportunistic Strike. That wasn’t super complex, but it was a bit unique and interesting. We did come across this bug though, which is THE most hilarious bug I’ve ever seen on any boss fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkElHMQSQRk
Trial of the Crusader had Faction Champions. This was meant to simulate PvP rules, with untankable mobs who would try to focus down people, CC, etc. It also added PvP rules to all abilities, e.g. PvP-based durations on CC, diminishing returns, and so on. There were some ways to try and game the threat, e.g. having your tank take gear off/equip it back on so they were low on health going into the fight so that mobs would try to focus them first, etc.
Halion had Corporeality. Based on his Corporeality, he would take less damage and deal less damage in one realm, while taking and dealing more damage in the other. If you had the split right and balanced DPS, it was mostly negligible, but the way it worked essentially translated to a % of Corporeality, where 50% meant it was equal, then at every 10% threshold, he would have % damage increase/decrease in the appropriate realm. So if you had 60/40, I believe it was 15% less in the realm with 40, but 20% more in the realm with 60. But it was also different numbers for damage taken vs damage dealt, so really to understand what the effects were, you had to tabulate/matrix it out. Or just ignore what the mechanic ACTUALLY did, and make sure you had equal damage in both realms, and adjusted to any player deaths.
Dark Animus probably counts as well, consider it was set up as a puzzle where you had to allocate which golem received Anima when, so that you’d end up activating only the golems you wanted to, and ensuring you had the maximum amount of time for the burn window while the boss cast Siphon Anima.
Lei Shen’s Conduits was a pretty cool way to let players control the fight, as well as activate mechanics and difficulty in various ways. Siegecrafter Blackfuse also did a similar thing with the weapon assembly line, and the overcharged weapons. These were probably examples of convoluted that were pulled off really well.
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Juggling the electrical charge on Dealer Xy’exa in De Other Side.
I think the intended strat was to pass the charge to the tank during the traps so that dps/healers didn’t get flattened by the damage, but it just ended up being a clown fiesta most of the time.
Traps spread everywhere, players taking back to back stacks and healers crying in a corner.
Edit: Toss in Hakkar too. Ideally you killed the adds at the right time, but it was so hectic and unintuitive that players would either kill them too fast, or not at all, or both, or I don’t really know what they heck they expected us to do in the end.
haha and on mythic that fight got bonus points for having points where the best move was to stop dps entirely for a bit. i know that’s more common now, but at the time it was bizarre!
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Oooh, dungeon not raid boss, but I’ll add my least favorite fight of all time: Knight Captain Valyri in Tol Dagor. In my experience it was either smooth sailing or utterly unplayable chaos with very little in between.
this fight is especially great because the non-ghost players can’t interact with these guys at all!
our guild had the first side group in sha of fear just stand there until p2 and not engage the add. I kept failing at this somehow D:
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