General Drakkisath, The Beast, Warchief Rend Blackhand, and Pyroguard Emberseer in Upper Blackrock Spire should be level ?? bosses in Classic. Instead, they are simply level 62 elites (while Emberseer is a level 60 elite). This seems to be due changes in WotLK and Cataclysm that retuned the dungeon. This should be fixed immediately because it makes the raid much easier than it should be. It should be an easy thing to fix as well.
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I think ?? levels are only for bosses in raids not dungeons.
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UBRS is a raid, albeit a 10-man raid. You can check through the histories of Wowpedia and WoWWiki to see that these four bosses were, in fact, skull-level ?? bosses. Videos of UBRS from Vanilla also clearly shows that Warchief Rend Blackhand was a ?? boss (you can search this yourself).
I think you’re right, It’s been a LONG time and I do not remember completely 
but I do think you’re right though sorry man
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Might be worth posting this to the Bug Report forum as well so the right people have eyes on it. If this is actually supposed to be the case, nice catch! I vaguely remember them being ?? as well.
Edit: Hey, look at that, this is the bug report forum. I’m ready for my morning coffee.
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This is the bug report forum 
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The ?? Just hid their level, it isn’t a higher level.
Hence the +hit requirement for raids hasn’t changed.
?? doesnt just hide the level, it effectively means level 63. So level 62 would be easier than ?? in this particular case.
?? is what they use(d) for bosses. It isn’t indicative itself of what level the boss actually is.
Here is the patch notes from wowpedia. It’s not really hard to look up, maybe do some research first:
Patch 1.3.0 (2005-03-07):
- Capped at fifteen players.
- Some Blackrock Spire bosses will now properly display their true level, instead of being considered world bosses (who do not display level).
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From wowwiki:
Skull type bosses are the hardest mobs to kill in WoW. Their level is not displayed as a number, but as a death’s head sign. When hovering your mouse over such a mob, the tooltip will read “Level ?? (Boss)”.
These bosses have a “dynamic” level - when a numeric level is required for some calculation, they are considered to be 3 levels above the player character involved in that calculation. That is, if both a level 60 warrior and a level 65 druid both tank the same skull type boss, the boss will make crushing blows on the warrior as if it was 63, and on the druid as if it was 68. Similarly, the boss will resist their respective powers as a 63- and 68-level creature would.
The first skull type boss that a player may fight with in PvE used to be Pyroguard Emberseer in Upper Blackrock Spire, but as of Patch 3.3.0 this mob is now an ordinary level 60 Elite; The Beast in the same dungeon is still a skull boss, however. There are also some skull type bosses that a usual player can not fight with, e. g. Nessy in the Deeprun Tram.
So it may be the case that UBRS bosses were changed from Skull mobs to level 62 mobs, or that they were incorrectly labeled as skull mobs but in reality were always level 62, but that doesn’t change what it actually means to be a Skull mob, which isn’t something that just hides their level, it makes them 3 levels above whoever is interacting with them.
The giant boss in Uldaman is also not correct, she was a ??? during vanilla.
You’re incorrect. You can easily verify this by looking at any video from 2006 way after patch 1.3. Or you could look at the page histories of Wowpedia or WoWWiki. Or the patch notes from Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. Patch 1.3 removed the skull-type boss designation from all Blackrock Spire bosses except General Drakkisath, The Beast, Rend Blackhand, and Pyroguard Emberseer.
Before this patch, bosses like Overseer Wyrmthalak were also designated as skull-type ?? bosses.
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Well, the patch notes say literally “true level”, so skull mobs apparently didnt all work that way.
This is also the patch when they added world dragons and such, so they could have changed how skulls interact. The game wasn’t static, after all.
Wowiki says the beast was a level 60 elite after cata. You’re saying it’s a level 62 ingame. That’s not the same thing.
I guess they just made them all 62. Their hp and armor would all be the same. Those were static. The only difference in difficulty would be 1 level of resist and miss/dodge/etc and a greater chance to crush (which isn’t that high in the first place).
No one actually cares about resist checks or any nerdy stuff like that, the fact of the matter is that this is a bug and is NOT how UBRS bosses were in vanilla.
#nochanges
Getting into UBRS for the first time and encountering your first ?? raid boss was a big part of the feeling of being level 60 and reaching the big leagues. There are many 10-12 years old videos on youtube post-TBC and even post-Wrath that show at least Rend and Drakkisath as ?? skulls still.
Drak for example has an elite portrait, but the text says “Level 62 Dragonkin”. No (elite) in the text.
That’s not right.
The bosses in UBRS could do crushing blows on players back when they were ?? bosses. To do crushing blows, a mob in classic and TBC needed to be 3 levels above the player - thus they are supposed to be level 63s as tons of other people have already pointed out. Being level 62s is a change that came in Cata and it is not vanilla-like to have them as anything but their proper level of ?? [ie level 63], especially since it makes the content easier than it should be.
No. It’s consistent with how these mobs were in TBC and 1.12 introduced a lot of dungeon “nerfs” including reducing boss levels; mechanics ( in some case) and eliminating or changing Elite trash into normal mobs.
Wrong.
UBRS bosses were turned into level 62 during WOTLK and not TBC or 1.12. They should be ?? skull level [ie- lvl 63] so their current level 62 is not vanilla-like.
This video is from pre-TBC and despite being blurry, you can see the skull icon for the bosses levels in UBRS and they are not level 62.
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Hmm I stand corrected.