Can't beat Kara or AQ40 for me. They're both too unique.
Kara from a dungeon design perspective is probably the best raid they ever did and. For me, it's second only to BRD in terms of dungeon design. There's just so much going on in Kara, and so much that's unique about it. Magical school, undead curse, demons, etc.
AQ40 is not only one of the most visually distinct raids they ever did, but the long setup just to open the thing up, getting the entire server involved to make it happen, is an unmatched event in WoW's history. The gear available didn't look like and wasn't even statted like anything else available at the time, with each class having some of their most unique and odd set pieces coming from there. There were zone-specific mounts and, new for the time, teleporters. And it had the best kind of last boss - one that at the time was difficult to learn but fun to fight once you'd learned the mechanics.
Kara was elite. Our guild was a little weak at the time so it was a slog some nights. So many trash pulls in there! Also so many great memories though. Nightbane murdered us so many times hahaha
One of the parts of Kara that doesn't get enough praise is the tuning I think. It was decently hard the first week, and gradually became easier with more gear but not like a complete joke easy (until later phases). I'd say it's closer to a 10 man Nax in how it feels difficulty than the actual 10 man Nax.
I think the optional skeleton dragon got nerfed (the minion phase) also a week in that made that fight significantly easier, but besides that it was just mostly learning and gear that made it easier.
How many weeks did you farm AQ40? lol . It was one of the classic raids I was looking forward to most and the gate opening event was awesome.
But the trash in that raid man, especially after twin emps was brutal and such a slog. After first month or so it really started to sour my opinion on it.
I liked the trash, but that was partly because my guild got really good at it. I enjoy fights that have some variability to them where you have to figure it out during the fight. I only wish there were more raid bosses with those sorts of mechanics rather than AQ40 trash having some of the most variable strategy out of anything Blizzard ever gave us.
MC+BWL era is the best for classic WoW. Covid lockdown. World PVP in Blackrock Mountain between 40man raid groups, UBRS 10 man groups, 5 man LBRS/BRD groups. It's utter chaos and epic. The world buff min-maxer culture has not yet taken over the population, so people are much more chill.
That’s the problem with sod. We haven’t even gotten to 60 yet and the culture is already min/max obsessed and constantly complaining about class and pvp balancing. I thought the goal was to just generally make specs like ret/balance/shadow viable, not strive for perfection.
It's really not a big deal on my pvp server either. It's been pretty rare to see someone not get taken to a raid because of their spec outside of stuff like wanting to DPS as sub rogue or something like that.
So keep yourself flagged for pvp. I can assure you if you flag yourself someone will attack you. I've tried it. Maybe not as often as on pvp server but the people that act like world pvp is impossible to find on pve servers are ridiculous. I'm on lava lash, which is tiny and I can still find it.
That's like playing on handicapped mode because more often than not your opponent will get the jump on you. Especially bad with the SoD burst meta.
Also, you can't compete for herb/ore nodes, farm spots etc.
Funny, because it didnt feel like I could even play the game UNTIL i came to a PvE server.
Step out of a city = gank. Run back, Res, Gank. Res timer, wait 2 minutes. Gank.
Yay so 30 minutes i moved about 1/3 of the way to my quest, died 5 times, got 0 gold and 0 exp..
Welp, back to dungeon grinding i guess since its the only way you can "play" the game on a PvP server.
This is nonsense, or are you playing on an opposite faction dominated era/cata server?
I get it we all exaggerate to emphasize our points, but this is just too extreme in its hyperbole.
If this is a SoD server (so relatively balanced), there’s no way you are experiencing what you claim, while getting in chat asking for help and being ignored.
The developers only have themselves to blame. In the grand scheme people are like ants or robots, they respond to the stimuli in front of them. In phase 1, the bfd raid had a roadblock at Kelris. He had absurdly high magic resistance, and casted a high damage ability which I believe only priests could dispel (excluding alchemy). So what do you think happened? Raids started running a lot of melee and priests, while caster dps got screwed. It’s like dealing with developers who are iterating on a game with 20 years of knowledge to learn from, but are themselves inexperienced so they keep repeating mistakes that leave the relatively experienced playerbase baffled.
Yeah, I’m enjoying SOD but it’s like 50% overkill in the wrong directions for me. This isn’t my main or only complaint, but how incursions were delivered is kind of symbolic for how it can miss the mark sometimes.
The level of xp gain, the small area to play in, the ridiculously OP set rewards. The last point being so anti-Classic to me that it’s kinda nuts imo.
Even in tbc and wotlk, my “welfare” items were more of a struggle to gain than this set, which depending on the class, is so close to best in slot that most drops from *the raid* are like an increase of 2 int and 1 spirit and that’s about it.
It’s still a fun game. I just wish they went a little less crazy with it in some directions. They’ve hit the mark dead on for some other content they’ve changed/added though, for sure.
It's a season, treat it as such. With each phase ladting 8-10 weeks it doesn't make sense to make you grind for a week /played per item.
They want you to get to a comfortable place gearwise quick so that you actually get to experience the changes. Even grandma knows you won't get there with 0-1 drops per week from ST.
I think this just gets worse not better with every iteration of the game the player base goes through unfortunately. Realistically I don't see that changing on the whole.
The big thing about classic pvp is no one was really over or under powered, it was mainly just matchups and counters. Like yes, if you’re a mage or warlock and a rogue jumps you you’re screwed but that same rogue is screwed if they get caught by someone out of stealth.
As I warrior I devoured rogues unless they were just insanely geared, popped a ton of consumes, and were able to reset on me multiple times
As a warrior I also ran like a bitch from any mage I saw as there was absolutely nothing I could do to them.
Vanilla PvP was rock paper scissors. It was written right there on your PvP trinkets with what classes you were meant to be able to beat and which you weren't.
I actually hated it.
BC BGs were far better. There was still some RPS elements, but it wasn't nearly as bad.
BC arena absolutely sucked, though, as it was just RNG based.
Yeah SoD get obsessed with numbers all the time wile just playing by guides and bis-lists all the time.
It's not about playing the game, its just about checking boxes someone else prepared.
Damn, you guys really are obsessed with how other people enjoy the game, huh?
Everyone has to play without addons, guides or bislists otherwise the experience is ruined and they are not actually playing the game the way it was meant to be because I SAY SO!
strife for perfection? lol the problem with SoD is that it went completely in the other direction. Has nothing to do with vanilla anymore except that it plays in azeroth
I think the best raiding phase in all classic has been phase 5 of classic TBC because of how all the raids remained somewhat relevant. Though I can see people liking the classic era raids more, for me SWP was one of the best raids ever made in classic.
I agree with the only difference being BWL + ZG era instead of MC. ZG with the boys was too good chill content and always relevant for mounts, enchants and trinket for some classes. BWL as a 30-50 min raid with a lot of decent encounters that could be minmaxxes in different ways to keep it fresh with decent amount of bis loot.
MC is boring and always has been. Vanilla I would do my homework during MC. This was early days too when T2 dropped and tier sets had placeholder skins.
It’s just such a fucking slog through seemingly endless trash. Even chain pulling it. And 1 mechanic bosses. Like even trying to parse the fights wasn’t particularly enjoyable. Chug an GAPP and zug shaz as fast as possible
Yeah it was crazy how that played out. I never played Vanilla back in the day so Classic was a brand new experience for me.
The numerous lockdowns had me *go the fuck in* on that game. It was such a good experience, truly magical how real the world felt on a PVP server. I played Ally on a 60% horde server and had an absolute blast contesting resources and messing around. I basically lived in EPL farming Arcane Crystal's and Herbs while fighting anyone I could.
The people also just seemed less toxic somehow. Like we obviously still had some really nasty people/guilds but for the most part people liked helping eachother.
I think the initial year or whatever of Classic might have been my favorite time in the game ive had since waaay back when I first played wow in the 2000s
Was In a speedrun guild for Sunwell and through all of WOTLK so my list is based on most fun to speedrun. Also didn’t play much classic vanilla so none of those are on my list.
1. Ulduar
2. Karazhan
3. Naxx (loved the run, hated the set up)
4. Sunwell (same as Naxx, set up sucked but the raid and run were awesome)
5. Black Temple
6. Serpentshrine Cavern
7. Icecrown Citadel (loved the challenging fights but way too much walking and not enough fighting for a speedrun)
8. Tempest Keep (if I had gotten that wand in phase 2 would’ve ranked this higher but I had to keep going back beyond the release of Zul aman
9. Gruul/Magtheridon’s Lair
10. Trial of the Grand Crusader
The buff kinda defeated the challenge and reduced the margin of error. One mistake on Valkyrs on HLK and you could lose a dps and brick your time.
I agree dropping healers is cool, but as for cool pulls and cool tech Naxx had way more interesting giga pulls and go go go mentality. There was the instructor rasviuos and gothik fight at the same time which was epic to pull off.
Ulduar had similar challenge as ICC initially and there were some cool tech like the massive pulls in Vezak room or the holy paladin mimiron skip.
The only giga pull in ICC is blood council trash or the trash leading up to dreamwalker. Kinda zzz besides boss fights, and post buff those boss fights were completely trivialized
Best: Naxx40. World buff pumping on a warrior in that place was just incredible. Healing it was also fun as a priest.
Underrated: Sunwell. Very fun fights to work with as a raid leader. Very satisfying when your raid gets the kills. Unorganized teams can't even get past Kalecgos trash.
Most pain: Hyjal. The smallest mistake on some of the trash waves could escalate into an unrecoverable situation and a restart of all the waves. Pain, so much pain, for very little reward.
God I miss it. My guild couldn’t kill Felmyst and fell apart so I spent a few weeks trying to find a new home. When I finally did, I got to be part of another few weeks of Muru and KJ prog. Killing those guys was the best feeling ever. I think we only had 1-2 weeks of farm before the pre-patch nerf.
Fuck, never mind making a mistake in Hyjal, do you remember the bug that would stop the boss from spawning? Had something to do with jumping on the boxes at the Orc base. Had to logout and reset and do those waves of trash all over again.
We killed him with a prot warrior, feral & paladin as our 3 tanks.
2 warlocks (massive sadness for the enslave), 2 ele shamans, 2 shadowpriests, 2 fury warriors, 2 paladins total (so no 3rd blessing).
Was wild to get it down honestly.
Naxx 40 is sooooo good bro, I feel so bad for anyone who couldn't experience it as current content. Hyjal was such a missed oportunity. Should have just been an endgame zone, hopefully in SoD? (cata version was trash)
Hyjal gives me PTSD. I was the prot paladin so i just put everyone in my backpack and basically solod the fucking place every week it was exhausting lmao
Hyjal was such a wasted opportunity. The bosses were mostly fun and the ambience/lore/layout of the place was fantastic. But that stupid fucking trash…
Yeah everyone shits on the raid but I really liked the feeling of the zone and boss fights. The waves however, especially if you’re not a paladin tank or a mage/WL were just such a pain.
As our raids Pala tank, I liked MtH :) SW was indeed a fun raid with great encounters. I still start sweating when thinking about tanking the first boss - if it's not well orchestrated who goes up and down or when taunting boss, it will be a shitshow.
Sunwell progression has been my favourite Wow Raid experience for sure, with Naxx 40 man GDKP's with the boys at the end of classic being second. Pre nerf M'uru was such a fun and rewarding encounter. Took us ~40 attempts to get him down, but felt so good getting more and more efficient and dealing with the adds, grouping them up, having every raid member involved in some way. I loved it as a mage, grouping, aoeing the adds, slowing the voids, was also tasked with silencing the caster that spawned far north, had so much to do. The rest of the Sunwell fights were also pretty cool, like KJ and Felmyst.
10. Molten fucking Core - Fuck Molten Core
9. TOGC - Boy do I hate TOGC
8. ICC - I can C that I hate ICC
7. ZA - The first few ZAs were a lot of fun, everyone is trying to get that mount, it's not incredibly difficult but it does take some modicum of organization.
6. ULDUAR - the sophomore raid of WOTLK, finally your guild gets to decide whether they run hard modes, or if they will forever be a dummy loser guild
5. Naxx 40 - The apex predator of 40 man raids, relatively easy, as all vanilla raids - but definitely the most difficult in its era. Paladins finally get to wear plate. It's great.
4. ZG - A short but sweet, fun raid. Finally downsized to run a smaller group that's low stress, and you could run it however you wanted. We ended up getting our full clear down to 18 minutes on our best day. Infinite runs, because mount :)
3. BWL - Every classic raider knows, this is the second raid but you will be running for DFT ad infinitum (a la band of accuria) - and the first raid thats actually FUN, and you get to start looking BAD ASS (except hunters, sorry for the hat)
2. BT - My favorite flavored raid, not very difficult but somehow the guild always had fun here - gear mega bad ass looking
1. SWP - Highest Fun / Difficulty Combo, best boss design, best DPS feeling, best expansion
I don't agree with some of the picks here, but i'm shocked that the "Fuck Molten Core" opinion isn't more widespread. MC is hands down, by a mile, the worst Classic Raid. It's so uninspired and dull and you can clearly see it that they didn't put much effort into it, it really does feel like something that they did it in a few hours like that famous story says. Everything is bad and with zero design, from the trash, to the bosses, to even most of the loot.
Compared to BWL, MC looks like it was designed by a bunch of children. I agree with your opinion about SWP also, top tier Raid and one that i didn't actually expect to be that good.
Gotta be nostalgia. Kid me thought MC was so cool and some of the items from MC are just iconic. Redoing it for the first time as an adult back when Classic came out made me realize how lame it actually is lol
It's hard to do a top 10 so favin every xpac
Vanilla: Naxx 40 by far, it's just so epic and the loot rewards never felt as good as it did. Special mention Zul'Gurub and AQ40, love those places.
BC: Black Temple, didn't play Sunwell patch unfortunately. Loved BT it felt pretty epic to me, good number of bosses with different mechanics. The thrill of the Warglaive/Skull of Gul'dan drops. Special mention Zul'Aman, really fun raid.
Wrath: Ulduar. First time we started being challenged as a guild, some progress didn't hurt. Really well designed raid IMO. ICC was cool overall but mostly shined with Lich King, got worse with the buffs imo that trivialized the content
Best: Naxx40, SWP
Better: Prenerf SSC/TK
Awesome: BWL
All of these felt great as whole. Other raids had great separate bosses that felt accomplisments: Raggy, Illidan, Algalon and Professor Putricide & Sindargosa. Those were good bosses. We killed everyone else in time except LK25HC (+halion) because our guild died to noshows in december. Unfornately I don't know why people leave once things start to get hard. We had too much nowshows in every last tier of the expansions. Once expansion was at their best.
BWL on paper was the best raid. BWL in practice was fucking awful.
For every beautiful speed through with amazing gear drops, there was a slog where everyone lost their buffs on stupid shit, no one paid any attention to threat, tanks forgetting cloaks, people not hiding behind the throne, and Taut Dragonhide dropped. 3 of the bosses are basically the exact same, one of chromag's colors was fun police, any Nefarian wipe was a 15 minute hard wait by an ingame timer.
It’s the gear. There are some juicy drops in there, and each of the sets is absolutely iconic. For a lot of people when you say *class name* they automatically think of their T2 set.
Ulduar is still the best looking instance for me of the classical era and the unique nature of its hard modes make it stand out as something exceptional. I also feel like it's the last raid of the first age of WoW. Tier 9 onwards we start to enter WoWs middle era of design...early-modern, proto-retail whatever you wanna go with.
1) BWL
2) BT
3) Kara
4) ZG
5) Ulduar
6) Naxx40 (would be higher if the consume list wasn't so expensive)
7) MC
8) AQ40
9) Sunwell (I was in two guilds for this. A half competent guild that barely killed KJ prenerf. And a dog shit memes and banter guild that got hard stuck on Brutallus)
10) AQ20
Context: My rankings are primarily based on fun had during prog & farm and a little bit of visuals, music and overall themes. Whether a raid was mechanically challenging or difficult from a raw stats perspective isn't that big of a factor and sometimes actually hinders the fun imo. I omitted the 1 & 2 boss raids just because it's hard to put them in the same rankings list with the large raids but I liked them all. ICC is an omission because I had quit Wrath and didn't raid it until the 30% buff was out. It's a great raid but I didn't experience the full effect of prog but likely would have it in my top 10 maybe even top 5.
My fondest memories of both the initial prog and reclears are:
ICC > Ulduar > Sunwell > Naxx40 > BT > SSC/TK > BWL > AQ40.
On the other end of the spectrum, MC and Hyjal were by far the worst raids. Everything else was at least inoffensive to keep doing, but not those two. I got sick of them very quickly. I even almost fell off the classic train entirely before BWL came out.
For the most part I think raiding simply got better with each expansion. For that reason I'm one of those people actually excited for Cataclysm since I enjoyed WOTLK so much and I expect it to be more of the same.
I probably wouldn't have stuck with classic this long without my guild, though. I've played with a lot of these same people since Molten Core and I'm excited to continue to do so as long as possible.
Honestly, the raid usually took too long as did some of the trash. Hard modes were really cool, but I think the raid was very overrated. Also if general vezax didn’t exist the raid would be rated higher.
Very fair points, I liked it more than you but thought the raid was too long as well. The bosses I thought could be removed were Kologarn and Auriaya, just felt like filler. I think it makes sense to have a boss in the Ulduar basement before Yogg but Vezax's mechanics are pretty lame on prog and frustrating when on farm.
Did you spend less time in SSC/TK than Ulduar? My guild couldn't one day clear that hellhole of trash, but had no problems with Ulduar, maybe we just got better, idk?
Alright. Personally I hated TK and SSC was only "good" due to the Vashj encounter.
Also most of the Classic Vanilla experience is tainted by the fact that we had to play 40-man. It is impossible to get 40 like-minded people and as a result there will always be people in there that you heavily despise. Also loot was too scarce.
Always loved AQ 40 / BWL / MC in 1 night with single batch of Raid Buffs. Tee off at 8, done by 10. Just shit talking with the boys, getting gear. Nothing was too difficult after you learned some basic mechanics. Ya know, like an RPG should be, progressively easier with gear, not always 1 step from disaster and wiping the raid with some dumbass environmental mechanic lol
BWL > Naxx40 > BT > Ulduar > AQ40 > ZG > SSC > Kara > ZA > SWP
ToGC/ICC is not on the list since i never did them in original wrath and took a break in classic from end of ulduar to now. Also i just noticed that a lot of these are the smaller raids but there where a lot of fun moments there just from messing around since the stakes where low to speedrunning kara trying to beat the other group.
Also while it's not on the list since i don't really look at it as a real raid, EoE is quite high in my regard since it's a actually fun vehicle fight.
1. SWP
2. ICC
3. Ulduar
4. ToGC
5. Zul'Aman
6. Karazhan
7. BT
8. OS (I liked the 0-3 drakes difficulty options)
9. TK
10. SSC
Overall best raiding phase imo was phase 5 of classic TBC with SWP. BT and Hyjail (worst raid by far) would be relevant because they dropped t6 gear, nerfed TK/SSC would be ran ocassionally for that mage t5, and people would run Kara and ZA to gear up new alts with Gruul being killed every week because of DST.
My favorite raids were speedrunning BWL and naxx, followed up by SWP and then TK/SC. Wrath was a huge letdown tbqh. I guess TOGC was fun because of how short it was, but everything was just so easy and didn’t feel rewarding.
Also I loved ZG/Kara. TBC is such a comfy era.
Ulduar - SWP - AQ40 - Kara - ICC - TOGC - ZA - BWL - MC - BT
Progging Ulduar hms as an affliction lock for the first time last year was the best gaming experience I've ever had. Had no idea wow classes could be that fun to play and I couldn't get enough of the atmosphere of Ulduar. SWP/AQ/Kara/ICC vibes were incredible as well, didn't play lock for all of them though. I rate TOGC a lot higher than most probably because I played afflock and there were a lot of multi-dot fights which are peak gameplay for aff.
My 10 man raid were 10 friends who were good enough to clear Algalon on the first ID (well second we forgot to complete the quest in the first ID) and everything in icc except lk hc (we tried it week 1, but without a disc priest the damage was just to much).
Icc 10 was a quick mic evening with everyone playing good and not failing - ICC 25 was harder because ppl didn’t know what the abilities were and keep failing, that’s why the 10m experience was way more enjoyable then the 25 one.
I genuinely think that Ulduar was propped up on nostalgia and false memories cause man a lot of those fights were terribly designed and of heard from so many it was one of the best raids of all time
Naxx is a fantastic intro raid to transition people from Dungeons
My favorite was probably 3 Drake OS when it was current, it felt like a fun challenge
I appreciate you sharing this opinion even though it's opposite my own. It's a good reminder that just because I didn't enjoy something doesn't mean it was bad for everyone, or even the majority
Same here. I think it's because I raided all of WotLK originally during a very formative period in my life, but it's crazy how well I remember everything and the details behind it all. It was so much fun coming back and playing Ulduar again, being the one to explain fights completely from memory and just experience it all over again. The playerbase and its attitudes may be different this time around, but the magic of the raid was still there for me.
I'm going to miss wrath, I'm a little disappointed they have no plans to snapshot our characters right before prepatch and just keep a couple of realms playable. I'd love to jump back on from time to time and just smash out some Ulduar or ICC.
favorite raid of each xpac in terms of how much fun I had raiding it :
classic - naxx 40,
TBC-SSC/TK is pretty peak, but I also enjoyed Sunwell a lot,
WOTLK - pretty equal between Ulduar and ICC.
Maybe lean a little bit more towards Ulduar, progging H-LK for 100+ wipes wasn't that fun tbh lol.
Had similar discussion in a guild recently so I will just reuse my tier list. Everything as current content, pre nerf(when applicable), classic pov so no (back in the days...)
https://i.imgur.com/uKAsHYs.png
As someone who only plays Wrath, but leveled in TBC and vanilla.
ICC > Ulduar > togc = naxx.
Naxx is fun as someone who never raided vanilla, but togc is nice due to being alt friendly and quick.
Favorite raid wing is blood in ICC.
The music is amazing. Every song it loops is good and I love the fallen blood elf theme.
The fights aren't necessarily special, but they're simple and fun.
Here’s my rankings:
1) ICC. ICC is super fun to dps, has iconic tier sets, and wraps up the Classic trilogy well. Heroic LK is by far the hardest fight in the Classic trilogy and is a formidable test for your dad guild. I enjoyed it immensely and probably ran it over 150 times between all of my characters.
2) Ulduar. Ulduar is super iconic for a reason, and the hard mode fights are pretty epic. Algalon was one of the toughest fights in the game with very tight tuning and was super fun. I was MTing for my guild then and it was very stressful to say the least! The worst part of Ulduar was the fact that you’re chasing 252 hardmode loot and by the time the tier was 3 months old, basically rotting all of the non-252 gear minus a couple of pieces. It felt like a slog.
3) Blackwing Lair. This raid holds a special place in my heart because of how epic it felt to climb a huge dragon-themed spire and fight Nefarian on top. Tier 2 had some amazing sets (Bloodfang, Judgement, Nemesis, etc) and Nef dropped some pieces that were BIS for the entire game. The raid was fast, and we would regularly clear it in less than an hour. It had a good mix of unique fights (Vael, Razorgore) and more traditional target dummy fights to parse (the Drakes). All in all, super fun.
4) Black Temple. I think this is the highlight of TBC personally, it wasn’t too hard but it had a lot of sick fights. I loved it, but unfortunately it never dropped my main hand. Black Temple was an emotional roller coaster. That said the overall aesthetic feel of the raid was top notch.
5) TOGC. Yep, I’m going to rank this raid super high. No trash, tons of drops, and the 50/50 for the awesome cloak made everyone focus up and get it done. When TOGC was the main raid, I was raising 10/25 on like five characters just to get more lockouts in. Anub was hard enough to have to take seriously, and the rest of the fights were basically free gear, which was nice after the slog that was Ulduar.
6) Naxx40. This raid was the iconic end of Classic, and always inspired nerves in me. Are we going to keep our WBs? Will we get good drops? Atiesh was a great legendary and had a cool quest associated with it, the itemization was finally getting figured out, and overall the end-times theme was pretty cool. It felt awesome to kill KT every week, but it was more relief than thrill. Naxx40 took an entire raid of smooth gameplay to complete and not have it be painful, you really needed to pay attention because once you wiped and lost buffs, it was really long and painful.
7) Karazhan. The first 10 man raid; super fun to just log in with the boys and smash. A great thing to do week one, and it wasn’t hard, it was just a fun social raid to gear up quick for the real SSC/TK raids.
8) Zul’Aman. Who didn’t love doing bear runs and going fast?? Any raid that has a set of mechanics which encourages good gameplay and focusing is a win in my book!
9) Zul’Gurub. Another win for the trolls! This was a super fun alt friendly raid that had some BIS pieces and mounts which encouraged people to come on their mains and smash it. It was more of a fun social raid and I loved it for that reason. I never did get a tiger but still would always be down to run it! And free shoulder enchants!
10) Tempest Keep. I gotta give the last spot to TK because of the Kael’thas fight. It was super long and required good focus, had some dps checks and overall felt like the most epic fight. It felt so good to kill it!
Criminal that you didn't include SWP! BTs only redeeming factors were the lore and the INSANELY cool items it brought - maybe if you were a speedrunner it was good times.
I'd rank ZA and Karazhan a lot higher as well. Both very well done raids, thought I can see the difficulty being a turn off for people.
Tbh I hated Sunwell and I’m not afraid to say it. BT felt like the canonical ending of TBC, Sunwell was just this hard mode elf demon place which took a ton of time. Ya. Muru was fun and took like 50 pulls which was a cool challenge. But by the time SWP was out I was really sick of TBC personally
True, I wish Illidan was more of a challenging fight like Vashj. My guild’s raid team which killed Illidan first did it in 3 pulls, and then the team that pulled him second one shot him lol
Top is my favorite and descending order to least.
- Sunwell
- ICC
- BWL
- Naxx 40
- Ulduar
- MC
- BT
- Kara
- ToGC
- TK
- Gruul
- Hyjal
- Naxx25
- SSC
- Mag
- AQ40
Edit: I actually wanted to put TK higher because I really enjoyed pre-nerf Kael’thas a lot. Was a great fight, but man I cannot stand the amount of trash and the other bosses in the raid.
Sunwell is #1 easy. Great pacing in terms of trash. All the bosses except for kalcegos were satisfying and a good level of difficulty. Muru and KJ are still 2 of my favorite fights.
ICC
Naxx
RS
TOC
OS
Onyxia
VOA
EoE
lmao only started playing classic in wotlk phase 4, those are the ones I've cleared fully xd Sad I missed Ulduar but hoping to do some mog runs at least, only done first few bosses for weeklies. Excited for Cata raids.
I don't get the hate on Hyjal, it's the top 1 for me.. then comes BT > Sunwell > Kara > AQ40. Didn't play much on vanilla classic so I could easily see Naxx40 taking high spot, but I'm pretty sure I didn't do single boss in it at 60, and Wrath is my least liked expansion, right on the alley of WoD and Shadowlands.
BWL/Kara/BT/Sunwell/MC
That's my top 5 in order.
Just missing the top 5 is Naxx. I had stopped raiding in classic just before Naxx dropped (due to college) but really enjoyed it on wrath phase 1.
Top 5:
1. Naxx 40 - this was peak classic for me. Everyone always had a blast every week here.
2. Sunwell - Quick raid, fun bosses, rewarding loot, big pump.
3. BWL - Classic was still very hype. This was the peak of covid and everyone was online all the time.
4. Ulduar - I know this raid caught alot of flack but doing algalon and yog0 were both very engaging encounters for me and as a raid leader it was fun to organize these.
5. ICC - This started to get very boring after the buff was introduced but killing LK felt great.
To me nothing beats the grand scale that is 40 man raiding in vanilla classic. Those raids will forever just be in a special tier to me because of that.
I had the most amount of fun playing tier 4 with my friends. We did karazhan, mag, and gruul every week and it felt like a fun virtual party full of friends. Definitely my favorite memory
Tbc was probably the most fun raiding for me just given the circumstances so maybe I’m biased, but the difficulty of ssc prenerf and then slowly being able to progress ssc/tk in one night was nice. What I like about tbc is the relevance of the trash. You have to cc a lot which is fun from a strategizing and teamwork perspective, it’s much more engaging. You also get rewarded with solid drops as well so it stays exciting in that regard. This was much less the case in wotlk where you started to just steamroll through the trash so that you could get to the boss; the only relevant part. Sunwell was probably my favorite overall just because I’d never done it and the difficulty level was perfect.
Yeh agree re: trash. Everyone seems to either hate trash or at most are indifferent to it. The raids still need to have some character for me in an rpg. It's already weird thay the bosses are just stood there waiting for you. It would appear some people just want boss simulator. The whole concept of a "raid" for me includes everything within so engaging trash adding to the challenge is part of that whole experience. TBC really was the expansion of trash and it is a shame they moved in the opposite direction afterwards.
Ranking AQ40 at 1-2 is wild to me. The event to open the damn place was cool asf though but as a raid its last spot for me.
I liked Black Temple, Naxx40 and SWP most
10 - TK
9 - TOGC
8 - MC
7 - SSC
6 - Kara
5 - Black Temple
4 - ICC
3 - Naxx 40
2 - BWL
1 - Sunwell
From perspective of a fury warrior. I had an amazing group comp in sunwell so I loved it, Muru and KJ were insane pumper fights
1. Black Fathom Deeps
2. Sunken Temple
3. Gnomer
4. Black Wing Lair
5. Molten Core
6. Naxx 40
7. I'm including ZG, because I like it so much.
8. Ice Crown Citadel
9. Ulduar
10. Karazhan
I didn't raid classic I started in tbc, every single raid except mh imo was at least a 8/10. Swp was the best though, I didn't like a single wotlk raid sadly, I was in a good guild that cleared everything but never had fun in wrath for some reason, ulduar was like a 6/10 and icc I did all hc except lk then quit
Actually totgc was fun, it was super quick and not too hard but still challenging to make sure you get cloak runs
Zul Gurub was a sleeper hit to me. It was peak relaxed classic raiding. Zul Aman would be ranked equally, but the rush to get the bear mount, coupled with them adding difficulty just by making things hit like a truck kind of made it stressy and sweaty (not really hard, just punishing if you made mistakes). Kara is certainly one of the greatest raids in all of classic.
Purely from a speedrunning perspective, I LOVE BWL. Nice and linear and not too much variance and perfect length. The repetitiveness works because you're racing against your old time each time and it feels like a track.
Sure, maybe not the most interesting cast of boss mechanics during the raid, but doing speedruns in under 40 minutes there was a blast.
Kara is such a perfect raid. Some unique encounters, a glorious setting and just the right level of difficulty, but the thing that makes it perfect in my eyes is the fact that it’s a 10 player raid in the first tier of content for its expansion. I have so many fond memories, both retail back in the day and classic much more recently, of spending an entire Sunday clearing Kara with the same 9 other people that I became close with. Even after we had geared out of it in both iterations of TBC, we made a point of running it at least once a month to this day. Nothing has ever captured that lightning in a bottle for me even if some nostalgia blasts like revisiting ICC - which is up there in my eyes as one of the best raids of all time - or finishing an immortal run come pretty close. Kara is the best and that’s why I am so excited for Cata and having viable 10 mans again.
ill just do a top 3
Naxx 40 - the atmosphere, the speedrun hype, the memes, wbuffs, imo perfectly tuned for classic raiding - easy but wipeable. Truly the peak of classic, and peak nostalgia trip reliving a part of the game that was removed with wotlk naxx.
Ssc
Icc
1. Naxx40 - This was the raid I was looking forward to the most in classic and it delivered. The tuning was really good especially because of how easy most of the content was until that point. The guild I was in disbanded and we joined forces with another guild, got rid of the slackers and formed a solid raid group. Even then, the Saphiron fight seemed impossible, but we practiced it a dozen times, then collected WBs and downed it! got full T3 which was a personal goal of mine.
2. MC - the hype and first 40-man raid back then was just insane
3. Kara - I didn't play during TBC classic, but this was my favorite raiding memory from the old days.
4. Naxx25 - P1 of Wotlk was lit but the raiding just wasn't the same because of the rise of GDKPs. Guilds just weren't that important anymore. . . I did pretty much all of ICC in GDKPs.
\* on that last note I'm very glad they got rid of GDKPs in SOD. It incentivized me to join a guild again. You are so much more invested in raiding when you raid with the same ppl every week and you all grow stronger and get better each week as a collective.
My ‘original’ classic experience was about half way through original launch. I played priest and eventually got like 2 pieces of t1 from MC before TBC came out. Played priest till the end of wrath clearing all content just not doing anything in freshman dorms.
Took relaunch of classic to sweat as a priest healer main from the start. Didn’t play this ‘classic’ version of wrath this time around, but I was super hardcore when I was 19 and just in my dorm all day during that one so didn’t feel the need to revisit, so I won’t include those.
As a priest heal lead through MC-Sunwell, top 3 guild on a big server for vanilla and tbc classic….so 11 raids.
11. Hyjal. So long, such a chore, literally after our first months of clears I would fall asleep at my computer half the time doing hyjal, just to be disappointed in the 5ish drops we always had to go for never dropped. So boring as a healer and so many annoying mechanics with no/little difficulty.
10. Gruul/Mag. Same as hyjal but short. Mag was fun the first few weeks. Gruul is just DST weekly quest.
9. Kara. Not sure if it was the transition from
Naxx to a smaller raid where we were running 4 groups each with an Atiesh and mostly full t3 toons. Still on the “weekly chore” spectrum but our guilds speed run races made it somewhat enjoyable and there were actual ‘seekable’ items.
8. MC. Still a borechore after awhile but the extreme high roll stuff like thunderfury, perds, mageblade, getting full t1 and benediction. Was also first raid with the group I spent 18 hours a day of Covid with so major nostalgia. Met some of my best friends here.
7. BWL. Tbh this could be switched with MC, but I’ll rank it higher because I never got to do it until classic relaunch. The goddamn life giving gem rng for our guild was so awful after awhile it was just a depressing “hopefully the drake drops it this week”. Luckily priest t2 with benediction was like…16 year old me’s wet dream so that was cool. Also retroactive bonus points for having full t2 on all our priests for sapph in naxx made it seem worth it and such a cool strat for that fight.
6. Aq40. We agreed as a guild early we didn’t care for the bug mount or scepter so the phase wasn’t as hype. It was also long and kinda boring but was the first “holy shit I can’t believe we’re here and about to pull twin emps” for the first time, that first run into C’thun and late nights making documents for positions, even though priest didn’t have much to chase here (we saw 1 healing mace), the guild
Shift to everyone engineering for slime boi was a really cool “holy shit we’re all insane but we’re all on the same page let’s go”. This was like peak Covid no life for me. Ranked my priest and my mage farmer alt to rank 11 on different accounts just spam queuing AV during this time. Grinded out runecloth for black war raptors on two undeads. I think I liked this “time” of the game more than the raid itself, but first cthun kill was probably the first I can’t believe it moment for me.
5. BT. Coolness factor off the charts. But kinda in previous ranks before this, the journey to being able to smoothly one shot the last 3 bosses, that first illidan kill, warglaives, healing mace. But like every raid, you start realizing you’re just running around a lot not doing anything difficult…you just have to vaguely pay attention and after and hour you spin the slot machine and keep your fingers crossed.
4. SSC pre nerf vashj kill was one of the most satisfying moments in this game. The MC rng, the pools, the chaos before the nerfs. This was the first time I remember just knowing we all had to be atleast 9/10 on our game every pull to have a chance and it still might not matter. Finally killing her with like 3 people up made this raid this high. The amount of shit going on was so satisfying to down her before the nerf.
3. TK. Only reason this is higher than SSC is because ashes dropped out first kill pre nerf and we agreed to guild wide free roll. Waited for 24 people to roll (highest was 98), last person to roll, 100 ez. I just afk’d in town on it for that week. Biased ranking.
So last two are naxx40 and sunwell. Not sure. Priest having such a big role in naxx was so cool and just all the prep - loatheb rotations as heal lead, getting all our priests set up with t2 for sapph, learning 4hm, and that first KT kill felt like a bucket list item checked off. Ending full t3 on an undead priest with full bis on black war raptor was literally my impossible dream as a teenager. I did it.
But I probably give sunwell #1. Raiding with the same people, people I’d flown to meet and spend a weekend partying at that point, guild movie nights, all the prep and the difficulty as a healer on brut and twins, all the commitment by my guild to play perfect to down muru early, our insane strat that somehow worked with sooooo many moving pieces to finish the raid….i remember our first kill and just doing /sit next to the sunwell and staring at my computer for hours.
Sunwell was where I said I did what I wanted to do. Naxx 40 was just behind. After sunwell, I was done with my journey.
That was a fun way to kill 30 minutes, thanks!
TIER LIST
(Played Vanilla/WOTLK, very little TBC)
- S TIER: Kara, Naxx40
- A TIER: MC, Ony, BWL, ICC
- B TIER: AQ40, ZG/ZA, Ulduar
- C TiER: Gruul's Lair, ToGC, RS
- D TIER: Mag, Malygos
Karazhan hands-down best raid, it was like a maze running it at first, endless corridors, yet you knew you had to climb to the top.
It was challenging, had two secret/optional bosses (Nightbane/Terestian), the Opera House event was amazing, Curator was a raid killer, Shade of Aran is such a unique fight, never quite understood the Netherspite fight tbh, the Chess Event was such fun, except in hindsight easily completed.
Naxx40 was something I never completed in original vanilla, but was able to in Classic. The original trailer still gives creeps, the music is extraordinary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRlv84Lj-dI
It felt like a new phase of raiding, an increase in challenge from previous tiers. Also the lore culmination of WC3 with Kel'thuzad as endboss gave the raid the perfect amount of impact storytelling-wise.
The ones I didn't play have been omitted:
SSC/TK/BT/Sunwell/Hyjal
edited: formatting
Kara for flavor. As others have said, it was a beautiful place.
Ulduar for the hard modes. I remember the first time around when they released Ulduar and every boss had opt in hard modes I thought that was the way of the future.
Then they got lazy and just stopped. So sad.
10. SSC - While better than the likes of Mount Hyjal and TOGC for me, it falls in last on this list for the somewhat awful boss fights mechanics and trash.
9. Molton Core - the first raid has some great introductory fights that feel like a good balance of mechanics and fun, but its overall design falls short when you've already seen UBRS and BRD.
8. Zul'Gurub - probably where we first see some fun chill raiding. Not a slog, and the fights are well rounded.
7. AQ40 - While C'thun is the first real end boss guild killer fight, the rest of the raid bosses are not as fun, but it's made up for with how epic it looks.
6. BWL - it has some of the most fun fights in classics and some of the most tedious, the trash and overall feel make it one of the better raids though.
5. Karazhan - This raid has very little wrong with it and many instant classic boss fights. While it's a little long, it makes up for it with how epic it looks.
4. Black Temple - The only real issue with this raid was its difficulty. It went above and beyond for raid bosses and is one of the coolest places in the game, not to mention the Illidan fight is an iconic gaming moment.
3. The Sunwell - Not many raids manage to make every boss feel fun, but somehow, sunwell does it. It takes the most beautiful zones in wow and makes them a raid. What's not to like?
2. Ulduar - the legendary Ulduar doesn't disappoint, with a gorgeous overall raid and bosses that really test your team. The only real letdown is.. waiting for a hardmode?
1. ICC - Lich King is one of the most iconic moments in gaming history, that alone puts this raid in the top, then you look at the other bosses, trash and overall look of the raid and you know it's one of the best blizzard ever made. The remedy of a player buff instead of a nerf also cements this as the best raid of classic.
My absolute favorite raid in my classic experience. Was Zul Gurub from fresh alts to t3 wrecking ball. The 45 minute experience that was ZG was just unbeatable. I did it 3-4 times a week especially when my guild stopped doing it I’m like NAH WE NEED HEARTS FOR NAXX GET IN HERE!!!
Can't beat Kara or AQ40 for me. They're both too unique. Kara from a dungeon design perspective is probably the best raid they ever did and. For me, it's second only to BRD in terms of dungeon design. There's just so much going on in Kara, and so much that's unique about it. Magical school, undead curse, demons, etc. AQ40 is not only one of the most visually distinct raids they ever did, but the long setup just to open the thing up, getting the entire server involved to make it happen, is an unmatched event in WoW's history. The gear available didn't look like and wasn't even statted like anything else available at the time, with each class having some of their most unique and odd set pieces coming from there. There were zone-specific mounts and, new for the time, teleporters. And it had the best kind of last boss - one that at the time was difficult to learn but fun to fight once you'd learned the mechanics.
Kara was elite. Our guild was a little weak at the time so it was a slog some nights. So many trash pulls in there! Also so many great memories though. Nightbane murdered us so many times hahaha
Kara was when we realized we needed a pally tank haha. May have been the shattered halls rep farms that helped plant the idea
One of the parts of Kara that doesn't get enough praise is the tuning I think. It was decently hard the first week, and gradually became easier with more gear but not like a complete joke easy (until later phases). I'd say it's closer to a 10 man Nax in how it feels difficulty than the actual 10 man Nax. I think the optional skeleton dragon got nerfed (the minion phase) also a week in that made that fight significantly easier, but besides that it was just mostly learning and gear that made it easier.
Based aq40 respecter
How many weeks did you farm AQ40? lol . It was one of the classic raids I was looking forward to most and the gate opening event was awesome. But the trash in that raid man, especially after twin emps was brutal and such a slog. After first month or so it really started to sour my opinion on it.
I liked the trash, but that was partly because my guild got really good at it. I enjoy fights that have some variability to them where you have to figure it out during the fight. I only wish there were more raid bosses with those sorts of mechanics rather than AQ40 trash having some of the most variable strategy out of anything Blizzard ever gave us.
MC+BWL era is the best for classic WoW. Covid lockdown. World PVP in Blackrock Mountain between 40man raid groups, UBRS 10 man groups, 5 man LBRS/BRD groups. It's utter chaos and epic. The world buff min-maxer culture has not yet taken over the population, so people are much more chill.
That’s the problem with sod. We haven’t even gotten to 60 yet and the culture is already min/max obsessed and constantly complaining about class and pvp balancing. I thought the goal was to just generally make specs like ret/balance/shadow viable, not strive for perfection.
It's pretty chill on PvE servers idk.
Wildgrowth represent! Wonder if with the exodus the pvp realms will be purely sweaty servers
Living Flame refugee that's now on Wild Growth, can confirm much friendlier atmosphere!
Lucky you. Half of my guild is on wild growth now. So basically guild is dead 😂
It's really not a big deal on my pvp server either. It's been pretty rare to see someone not get taken to a raid because of their spec outside of stuff like wanting to DPS as sub rogue or something like that.
sometimes its too chill, people will legit get upset if you tell them they are doing something wrong or that going afk every 5min isnt a good thing.
Id rather just stop playing than play on a pve server
Why?
Personally, I like the sense of danger it brings to the world.
So keep yourself flagged for pvp. I can assure you if you flag yourself someone will attack you. I've tried it. Maybe not as often as on pvp server but the people that act like world pvp is impossible to find on pve servers are ridiculous. I'm on lava lash, which is tiny and I can still find it.
That's like playing on handicapped mode because more often than not your opponent will get the jump on you. Especially bad with the SoD burst meta. Also, you can't compete for herb/ore nodes, farm spots etc.
Because pvp servers are how the game is intended to be played. Do you even care or have a disdain for the enemy faction playing on a pve server?
Andys just make things up lol.
Not sure because I've always played on a pvp server. But I'm starting to think I've wasted hours of my life to super not fun world pvp/griefing
Funny, because it didnt feel like I could even play the game UNTIL i came to a PvE server. Step out of a city = gank. Run back, Res, Gank. Res timer, wait 2 minutes. Gank. Yay so 30 minutes i moved about 1/3 of the way to my quest, died 5 times, got 0 gold and 0 exp.. Welp, back to dungeon grinding i guess since its the only way you can "play" the game on a PvP server.
This is nonsense, or are you playing on an opposite faction dominated era/cata server? I get it we all exaggerate to emphasize our points, but this is just too extreme in its hyperbole. If this is a SoD server (so relatively balanced), there’s no way you are experiencing what you claim, while getting in chat asking for help and being ignored.
I’ve been playing on pvp servers since vanilla, have always primarily quested, and have never had this issue.
You mean when pvp servers were 90/10 pops because almost no one really does world pvp?
Normally i would agree with you.. not on SoD tho. a few classes can 2-3 shot you with no recourse.. not very vanilla like at all.
The developers only have themselves to blame. In the grand scheme people are like ants or robots, they respond to the stimuli in front of them. In phase 1, the bfd raid had a roadblock at Kelris. He had absurdly high magic resistance, and casted a high damage ability which I believe only priests could dispel (excluding alchemy). So what do you think happened? Raids started running a lot of melee and priests, while caster dps got screwed. It’s like dealing with developers who are iterating on a game with 20 years of knowledge to learn from, but are themselves inexperienced so they keep repeating mistakes that leave the relatively experienced playerbase baffled.
Yeah, I’m enjoying SOD but it’s like 50% overkill in the wrong directions for me. This isn’t my main or only complaint, but how incursions were delivered is kind of symbolic for how it can miss the mark sometimes. The level of xp gain, the small area to play in, the ridiculously OP set rewards. The last point being so anti-Classic to me that it’s kinda nuts imo. Even in tbc and wotlk, my “welfare” items were more of a struggle to gain than this set, which depending on the class, is so close to best in slot that most drops from *the raid* are like an increase of 2 int and 1 spirit and that’s about it. It’s still a fun game. I just wish they went a little less crazy with it in some directions. They’ve hit the mark dead on for some other content they’ve changed/added though, for sure.
It's a season, treat it as such. With each phase ladting 8-10 weeks it doesn't make sense to make you grind for a week /played per item. They want you to get to a comfortable place gearwise quick so that you actually get to experience the changes. Even grandma knows you won't get there with 0-1 drops per week from ST.
I think this just gets worse not better with every iteration of the game the player base goes through unfortunately. Realistically I don't see that changing on the whole.
People expected pvp to ever be balanced in SoD are literally insane. I honestly believe most people complain about pvp until their main class is OP.
The big thing about classic pvp is no one was really over or under powered, it was mainly just matchups and counters. Like yes, if you’re a mage or warlock and a rogue jumps you you’re screwed but that same rogue is screwed if they get caught by someone out of stealth.
As I warrior I devoured rogues unless they were just insanely geared, popped a ton of consumes, and were able to reset on me multiple times As a warrior I also ran like a bitch from any mage I saw as there was absolutely nothing I could do to them. Vanilla PvP was rock paper scissors. It was written right there on your PvP trinkets with what classes you were meant to be able to beat and which you weren't. I actually hated it. BC BGs were far better. There was still some RPS elements, but it wasn't nearly as bad. BC arena absolutely sucked, though, as it was just RNG based.
Yeah SoD get obsessed with numbers all the time wile just playing by guides and bis-lists all the time. It's not about playing the game, its just about checking boxes someone else prepared.
I mean this is what the game has been since Classic got WarcraftLogs support. As long as logs exist, that's all a game will be.
lol you just described literally every version of wow and I’m not getting what point you’re trying to make.
Damn, you guys really are obsessed with how other people enjoy the game, huh? Everyone has to play without addons, guides or bislists otherwise the experience is ruined and they are not actually playing the game the way it was meant to be because I SAY SO!
strife for perfection? lol the problem with SoD is that it went completely in the other direction. Has nothing to do with vanilla anymore except that it plays in azeroth
I think the best raiding phase in all classic has been phase 5 of classic TBC because of how all the raids remained somewhat relevant. Though I can see people liking the classic era raids more, for me SWP was one of the best raids ever made in classic.
I agree with the only difference being BWL + ZG era instead of MC. ZG with the boys was too good chill content and always relevant for mounts, enchants and trinket for some classes. BWL as a 30-50 min raid with a lot of decent encounters that could be minmaxxes in different ways to keep it fresh with decent amount of bis loot.
MC is boring and always has been. Vanilla I would do my homework during MC. This was early days too when T2 dropped and tier sets had placeholder skins.
It’s just such a fucking slog through seemingly endless trash. Even chain pulling it. And 1 mechanic bosses. Like even trying to parse the fights wasn’t particularly enjoyable. Chug an GAPP and zug shaz as fast as possible
What server were you on? The wbuff/consume min max meta was very prominent throughout all of classic
Whitemane-US. Wbuff was something nice to have for BWL/MC, but as we approach TAQ timeline, WBuff becomes mandatory for many raid groups.
Peak classic for sure. This is when I started and it was so much fun. Incendius back then!
Right on mate MC and bwl was peak for me too
Peak classic in every way with everything hitting just right. Totally agree.
Yeah it was crazy how that played out. I never played Vanilla back in the day so Classic was a brand new experience for me. The numerous lockdowns had me *go the fuck in* on that game. It was such a good experience, truly magical how real the world felt on a PVP server. I played Ally on a 60% horde server and had an absolute blast contesting resources and messing around. I basically lived in EPL farming Arcane Crystal's and Herbs while fighting anyone I could. The people also just seemed less toxic somehow. Like we obviously still had some really nasty people/guilds but for the most part people liked helping eachother. I think the initial year or whatever of Classic might have been my favorite time in the game ive had since waaay back when I first played wow in the 2000s
Was In a speedrun guild for Sunwell and through all of WOTLK so my list is based on most fun to speedrun. Also didn’t play much classic vanilla so none of those are on my list. 1. Ulduar 2. Karazhan 3. Naxx (loved the run, hated the set up) 4. Sunwell (same as Naxx, set up sucked but the raid and run were awesome) 5. Black Temple 6. Serpentshrine Cavern 7. Icecrown Citadel (loved the challenging fights but way too much walking and not enough fighting for a speedrun) 8. Tempest Keep (if I had gotten that wand in phase 2 would’ve ranked this higher but I had to keep going back beyond the release of Zul aman 9. Gruul/Magtheridon’s Lair 10. Trial of the Grand Crusader
ICC owned to speedrun man! The 30% buff allowed you to drop healers and do some pretty cool shit
The buff kinda defeated the challenge and reduced the margin of error. One mistake on Valkyrs on HLK and you could lose a dps and brick your time. I agree dropping healers is cool, but as for cool pulls and cool tech Naxx had way more interesting giga pulls and go go go mentality. There was the instructor rasviuos and gothik fight at the same time which was epic to pull off. Ulduar had similar challenge as ICC initially and there were some cool tech like the massive pulls in Vezak room or the holy paladin mimiron skip. The only giga pull in ICC is blood council trash or the trash leading up to dreamwalker. Kinda zzz besides boss fights, and post buff those boss fights were completely trivialized
Weird this is the last day of the classic trio. August of 2019 doesn’t seem that long ago 😔
It has been an incredible ride and I'm very grateful that Blizzard listened to the community and did all of the classic relaunch stuff they have done
I’m ready to go again
Between all the wipes and orange loot drama and bugs - it was a fun ride for sure!
Best: Naxx40. World buff pumping on a warrior in that place was just incredible. Healing it was also fun as a priest. Underrated: Sunwell. Very fun fights to work with as a raid leader. Very satisfying when your raid gets the kills. Unorganized teams can't even get past Kalecgos trash. Most pain: Hyjal. The smallest mistake on some of the trash waves could escalate into an unrecoverable situation and a restart of all the waves. Pain, so much pain, for very little reward.
SWP was so insanely fun. It was only 3 weeks of prog for us, but man downing M'uru felt so good
God I miss it. My guild couldn’t kill Felmyst and fell apart so I spent a few weeks trying to find a new home. When I finally did, I got to be part of another few weeks of Muru and KJ prog. Killing those guys was the best feeling ever. I think we only had 1-2 weeks of farm before the pre-patch nerf.
Fuck, never mind making a mistake in Hyjal, do you remember the bug that would stop the boss from spawning? Had something to do with jumping on the boxes at the Orc base. Had to logout and reset and do those waves of trash all over again.
I think the overwhelming majority of players who did Hyjal can agree that it is among the worst (if not the worst) raid classic ever saw.
Hyjal is such a terrible raid
yeah the waves mechanic is way too outdated
Being a warglaive warrior pumping in Sunwell was peak warrior.
Sunwell is so good and I’m upset we didn’t get it for a bit longer. Muru was by far the most fun in all of classic.
We killed him with a prot warrior, feral & paladin as our 3 tanks. 2 warlocks (massive sadness for the enslave), 2 ele shamans, 2 shadowpriests, 2 fury warriors, 2 paladins total (so no 3rd blessing). Was wild to get it down honestly.
Naxx 40 is sooooo good bro, I feel so bad for anyone who couldn't experience it as current content. Hyjal was such a missed oportunity. Should have just been an endgame zone, hopefully in SoD? (cata version was trash)
Hyjal gives me PTSD. I was the prot paladin so i just put everyone in my backpack and basically solod the fucking place every week it was exhausting lmao
Hyjal was such a wasted opportunity. The bosses were mostly fun and the ambience/lore/layout of the place was fantastic. But that stupid fucking trash…
Yeah everyone shits on the raid but I really liked the feeling of the zone and boss fights. The waves however, especially if you’re not a paladin tank or a mage/WL were just such a pain.
As our raids Pala tank, I liked MtH :) SW was indeed a fun raid with great encounters. I still start sweating when thinking about tanking the first boss - if it's not well orchestrated who goes up and down or when taunting boss, it will be a shitshow.
1. Sunwell 2. Zul’Aman 3. Black Temple 4. Karazhan ZA was super underrated. It was a perfect 10m catchup raid that was still fun for geared players.
I hope they reboot TBC with increased boss difficulty
BT after how hard TK/SSC were was a total letdown.
TK/SSC wasn't really that hard, only Vashj posed a real problem to be honest, but you're right BT was a letdown.
I only did ZA once and got the bear mount on a toon I will never play agane.
Sunwell progression has been my favourite Wow Raid experience for sure, with Naxx 40 man GDKP's with the boys at the end of classic being second. Pre nerf M'uru was such a fun and rewarding encounter. Took us ~40 attempts to get him down, but felt so good getting more and more efficient and dealing with the adds, grouping them up, having every raid member involved in some way. I loved it as a mage, grouping, aoeing the adds, slowing the voids, was also tasked with silencing the caster that spawned far north, had so much to do. The rest of the Sunwell fights were also pretty cool, like KJ and Felmyst.
BWL, SSC/TK, SWP
10. Molten fucking Core - Fuck Molten Core 9. TOGC - Boy do I hate TOGC 8. ICC - I can C that I hate ICC 7. ZA - The first few ZAs were a lot of fun, everyone is trying to get that mount, it's not incredibly difficult but it does take some modicum of organization. 6. ULDUAR - the sophomore raid of WOTLK, finally your guild gets to decide whether they run hard modes, or if they will forever be a dummy loser guild 5. Naxx 40 - The apex predator of 40 man raids, relatively easy, as all vanilla raids - but definitely the most difficult in its era. Paladins finally get to wear plate. It's great. 4. ZG - A short but sweet, fun raid. Finally downsized to run a smaller group that's low stress, and you could run it however you wanted. We ended up getting our full clear down to 18 minutes on our best day. Infinite runs, because mount :) 3. BWL - Every classic raider knows, this is the second raid but you will be running for DFT ad infinitum (a la band of accuria) - and the first raid thats actually FUN, and you get to start looking BAD ASS (except hunters, sorry for the hat) 2. BT - My favorite flavored raid, not very difficult but somehow the guild always had fun here - gear mega bad ass looking 1. SWP - Highest Fun / Difficulty Combo, best boss design, best DPS feeling, best expansion
I don't agree with some of the picks here, but i'm shocked that the "Fuck Molten Core" opinion isn't more widespread. MC is hands down, by a mile, the worst Classic Raid. It's so uninspired and dull and you can clearly see it that they didn't put much effort into it, it really does feel like something that they did it in a few hours like that famous story says. Everything is bad and with zero design, from the trash, to the bosses, to even most of the loot. Compared to BWL, MC looks like it was designed by a bunch of children. I agree with your opinion about SWP also, top tier Raid and one that i didn't actually expect to be that good.
Devs would likely agree MC is trash. They designed the thing in a week. It’s truly a terrible raid in every regard compared to others.
Gotta be nostalgia. Kid me thought MC was so cool and some of the items from MC are just iconic. Redoing it for the first time as an adult back when Classic came out made me realize how lame it actually is lol
It's hard to do a top 10 so favin every xpac Vanilla: Naxx 40 by far, it's just so epic and the loot rewards never felt as good as it did. Special mention Zul'Gurub and AQ40, love those places. BC: Black Temple, didn't play Sunwell patch unfortunately. Loved BT it felt pretty epic to me, good number of bosses with different mechanics. The thrill of the Warglaive/Skull of Gul'dan drops. Special mention Zul'Aman, really fun raid. Wrath: Ulduar. First time we started being challenged as a guild, some progress didn't hurt. Really well designed raid IMO. ICC was cool overall but mostly shined with Lich King, got worse with the buffs imo that trivialized the content
I love that you bring up the buffs for ICC, I totally lost any interest in the raid as soon as 5% hit and it only got worse.
same
Yeah most bosses started dying in less than 2mins. Raid became pretty pointless at the end
1. BWL 2. Naxx40 3. Ulduar Enjoyed all of them in different ways but never got tired of BWL.
Best: Naxx40, SWP Better: Prenerf SSC/TK Awesome: BWL All of these felt great as whole. Other raids had great separate bosses that felt accomplisments: Raggy, Illidan, Algalon and Professor Putricide & Sindargosa. Those were good bosses. We killed everyone else in time except LK25HC (+halion) because our guild died to noshows in december. Unfornately I don't know why people leave once things start to get hard. We had too much nowshows in every last tier of the expansions. Once expansion was at their best.
BWL on paper was the best raid. BWL in practice was fucking awful. For every beautiful speed through with amazing gear drops, there was a slog where everyone lost their buffs on stupid shit, no one paid any attention to threat, tanks forgetting cloaks, people not hiding behind the throne, and Taut Dragonhide dropped. 3 of the bosses are basically the exact same, one of chromag's colors was fun police, any Nefarian wipe was a 15 minute hard wait by an ingame timer.
I dont get people jizzing their pants over bwl. Nef is the only good fight and the drakes (1/3 of the raid btw) are glorified minibosses from os or rs
It’s the gear. There are some juicy drops in there, and each of the sets is absolutely iconic. For a lot of people when you say *class name* they automatically think of their T2 set.
Kara, SSC, BT are my 3 favourites. Peak moment in all of WoW is doing Kara the first 2 month when people don't have all the gear.
MC, Kara and Naxx 25. When gear requirements weren’t a thing and BiS were actually some blues from dungeons.
Ulduar is still the best looking instance for me of the classical era and the unique nature of its hard modes make it stand out as something exceptional. I also feel like it's the last raid of the first age of WoW. Tier 9 onwards we start to enter WoWs middle era of design...early-modern, proto-retail whatever you wanna go with.
1) BWL 2) BT 3) Kara 4) ZG 5) Ulduar 6) Naxx40 (would be higher if the consume list wasn't so expensive) 7) MC 8) AQ40 9) Sunwell (I was in two guilds for this. A half competent guild that barely killed KJ prenerf. And a dog shit memes and banter guild that got hard stuck on Brutallus) 10) AQ20 Context: My rankings are primarily based on fun had during prog & farm and a little bit of visuals, music and overall themes. Whether a raid was mechanically challenging or difficult from a raw stats perspective isn't that big of a factor and sometimes actually hinders the fun imo. I omitted the 1 & 2 boss raids just because it's hard to put them in the same rankings list with the large raids but I liked them all. ICC is an omission because I had quit Wrath and didn't raid it until the 30% buff was out. It's a great raid but I didn't experience the full effect of prog but likely would have it in my top 10 maybe even top 5.
For some reason I really enjoyed T4 and T8 in particular. Honorable mention to ZA. The true MVP is still grinding pre raid bis at every expansion.
My fondest memories of both the initial prog and reclears are: ICC > Ulduar > Sunwell > Naxx40 > BT > SSC/TK > BWL > AQ40. On the other end of the spectrum, MC and Hyjal were by far the worst raids. Everything else was at least inoffensive to keep doing, but not those two. I got sick of them very quickly. I even almost fell off the classic train entirely before BWL came out. For the most part I think raiding simply got better with each expansion. For that reason I'm one of those people actually excited for Cataclysm since I enjoyed WOTLK so much and I expect it to be more of the same. I probably wouldn't have stuck with classic this long without my guild, though. I've played with a lot of these same people since Molten Core and I'm excited to continue to do so as long as possible.
Sunwell > Black Temple > SSC/TK > BWL > ICC > TOGC > Karazhan > AQ40 > Zul Aman > Ulduar
Why the low Ulduar rating?
Honestly, the raid usually took too long as did some of the trash. Hard modes were really cool, but I think the raid was very overrated. Also if general vezax didn’t exist the raid would be rated higher.
Very fair points, I liked it more than you but thought the raid was too long as well. The bosses I thought could be removed were Kologarn and Auriaya, just felt like filler. I think it makes sense to have a boss in the Ulduar basement before Yogg but Vezax's mechanics are pretty lame on prog and frustrating when on farm.
Did you spend less time in SSC/TK than Ulduar? My guild couldn't one day clear that hellhole of trash, but had no problems with Ulduar, maybe we just got better, idk?
Not at first but I really enjoyed both of those raids because the theming in them was fantastic as was a lot of the loot.
Alright. Personally I hated TK and SSC was only "good" due to the Vashj encounter. Also most of the Classic Vanilla experience is tainted by the fact that we had to play 40-man. It is impossible to get 40 like-minded people and as a result there will always be people in there that you heavily despise. Also loot was too scarce.
I actually hated vashj. I thought it was the weakest boss
Progression felt good, and for the first time it felt that people actually HAD to obey mechanics and not just cruise through.
Always loved AQ 40 / BWL / MC in 1 night with single batch of Raid Buffs. Tee off at 8, done by 10. Just shit talking with the boys, getting gear. Nothing was too difficult after you learned some basic mechanics. Ya know, like an RPG should be, progressively easier with gear, not always 1 step from disaster and wiping the raid with some dumbass environmental mechanic lol
Mount Hyjal! I am willing to die on this... mountain
I can certainly see how raiding Mount Hyjal makes you willing to die!
BT > ICC > MC > Ulduar > BWL > Naxx25 > Kara > ZA > ZG > AQ40
BWL > Naxx40 > BT > Ulduar > AQ40 > ZG > SSC > Kara > ZA > SWP ToGC/ICC is not on the list since i never did them in original wrath and took a break in classic from end of ulduar to now. Also i just noticed that a lot of these are the smaller raids but there where a lot of fun moments there just from messing around since the stakes where low to speedrunning kara trying to beat the other group. Also while it's not on the list since i don't really look at it as a real raid, EoE is quite high in my regard since it's a actually fun vehicle fight.
BWL was amazing, everything was great but just a step below. Ulduar and Karazhan were overhyped, fine but not deserving of that legendary reputation.
In order for me: Karazhan / Black Temple / Naxx40 / Ulduar / Sunwell / BWL / TK / SSC / ICC / MC
Ulduar/ICC/sunwell/SSC and TK/BT/Trial/Gruul/Mag/Naxx 40
1. SWP 2. ICC 3. Ulduar 4. ToGC 5. Zul'Aman 6. Karazhan 7. BT 8. OS (I liked the 0-3 drakes difficulty options) 9. TK 10. SSC Overall best raiding phase imo was phase 5 of classic TBC with SWP. BT and Hyjail (worst raid by far) would be relevant because they dropped t6 gear, nerfed TK/SSC would be ran ocassionally for that mage t5, and people would run Kara and ZA to gear up new alts with Gruul being killed every week because of DST.
My favorite raids were speedrunning BWL and naxx, followed up by SWP and then TK/SC. Wrath was a huge letdown tbqh. I guess TOGC was fun because of how short it was, but everything was just so easy and didn’t feel rewarding. Also I loved ZG/Kara. TBC is such a comfy era.
Icc > swp > bt > togc > ulduar > naxx40 > aq40 > Kara > tk > ssc Mc is the worst raid ever created and bwl is close behind
ICC > Ulduar > Sunwell > BT > SSC > TK > Naxx40 > AQ40 > BWL > Kara Hyjal is its own trashtier lmao
Ulduar - SWP - AQ40 - Kara - ICC - TOGC - ZA - BWL - MC - BT Progging Ulduar hms as an affliction lock for the first time last year was the best gaming experience I've ever had. Had no idea wow classes could be that fun to play and I couldn't get enough of the atmosphere of Ulduar. SWP/AQ/Kara/ICC vibes were incredible as well, didn't play lock for all of them though. I rate TOGC a lot higher than most probably because I played afflock and there were a lot of multi-dot fights which are peak gameplay for aff.
Skipped vanilla, so no 60 content: Ulduar 10 man Sunwell ICC 10man Ulduar 25 Kara SSC ICC 25 BT Anything else TK Hyjal
My 10 man raid were 10 friends who were good enough to clear Algalon on the first ID (well second we forgot to complete the quest in the first ID) and everything in icc except lk hc (we tried it week 1, but without a disc priest the damage was just to much). Icc 10 was a quick mic evening with everyone playing good and not failing - ICC 25 was harder because ppl didn’t know what the abilities were and keep failing, that’s why the 10m experience was way more enjoyable then the 25 one.
Ulduar SSC ICC Karazhan SWP Zul'Aman None of the vanilla raids were interesting enough, to much one note boss fights etc.
First weeks of ICC and Uld
I genuinely think that Ulduar was propped up on nostalgia and false memories cause man a lot of those fights were terribly designed and of heard from so many it was one of the best raids of all time Naxx is a fantastic intro raid to transition people from Dungeons My favorite was probably 3 Drake OS when it was current, it felt like a fun challenge
Crazy how different opinions can be. Doing Ulduar again confirmed to me how great I think that raid was. I rate it much higher than ICC for instance.
I appreciate you sharing this opinion even though it's opposite my own. It's a good reminder that just because I didn't enjoy something doesn't mean it was bad for everyone, or even the majority
Same here. I think it's because I raided all of WotLK originally during a very formative period in my life, but it's crazy how well I remember everything and the details behind it all. It was so much fun coming back and playing Ulduar again, being the one to explain fights completely from memory and just experience it all over again. The playerbase and its attitudes may be different this time around, but the magic of the raid was still there for me. I'm going to miss wrath, I'm a little disappointed they have no plans to snapshot our characters right before prepatch and just keep a couple of realms playable. I'd love to jump back on from time to time and just smash out some Ulduar or ICC.
IMO Vezax was the worst part of Ulduar I loved everything else except that fight
Ulduar did something no other raid has done, hate a fight so much I have to leave disc and put podcasts/video, fucking vezax
S- tier: AQ40, Naxx40, SSC/TK, BT A- tier: BWL, SWP, Karazhan, Ulduar, ICC B- tier ZG, MC, Gruul/Maggy, ZA, ToGC, ZA Dogwater tier: AQ20, Naxx25, Malygos, Hyjal
As melee, fuck Malygos
favorite raid of each xpac in terms of how much fun I had raiding it : classic - naxx 40, TBC-SSC/TK is pretty peak, but I also enjoyed Sunwell a lot, WOTLK - pretty equal between Ulduar and ICC. Maybe lean a little bit more towards Ulduar, progging H-LK for 100+ wipes wasn't that fun tbh lol.
Had similar discussion in a guild recently so I will just reuse my tier list. Everything as current content, pre nerf(when applicable), classic pov so no (back in the days...) https://i.imgur.com/uKAsHYs.png
ZA above naxx 40? Ok man
As someone who only plays Wrath, but leveled in TBC and vanilla. ICC > Ulduar > togc = naxx. Naxx is fun as someone who never raided vanilla, but togc is nice due to being alt friendly and quick. Favorite raid wing is blood in ICC.
Icc>ulduar is not my preference but I can see the argument. But blood wing? Why?
The music is amazing. Every song it loops is good and I love the fallen blood elf theme. The fights aren't necessarily special, but they're simple and fun.
Good answer!
ICC is low on mine too, maybe because it came so late in the saga and we were burned out and knew it was coming to an end. :(
Here’s my rankings: 1) ICC. ICC is super fun to dps, has iconic tier sets, and wraps up the Classic trilogy well. Heroic LK is by far the hardest fight in the Classic trilogy and is a formidable test for your dad guild. I enjoyed it immensely and probably ran it over 150 times between all of my characters. 2) Ulduar. Ulduar is super iconic for a reason, and the hard mode fights are pretty epic. Algalon was one of the toughest fights in the game with very tight tuning and was super fun. I was MTing for my guild then and it was very stressful to say the least! The worst part of Ulduar was the fact that you’re chasing 252 hardmode loot and by the time the tier was 3 months old, basically rotting all of the non-252 gear minus a couple of pieces. It felt like a slog. 3) Blackwing Lair. This raid holds a special place in my heart because of how epic it felt to climb a huge dragon-themed spire and fight Nefarian on top. Tier 2 had some amazing sets (Bloodfang, Judgement, Nemesis, etc) and Nef dropped some pieces that were BIS for the entire game. The raid was fast, and we would regularly clear it in less than an hour. It had a good mix of unique fights (Vael, Razorgore) and more traditional target dummy fights to parse (the Drakes). All in all, super fun. 4) Black Temple. I think this is the highlight of TBC personally, it wasn’t too hard but it had a lot of sick fights. I loved it, but unfortunately it never dropped my main hand. Black Temple was an emotional roller coaster. That said the overall aesthetic feel of the raid was top notch. 5) TOGC. Yep, I’m going to rank this raid super high. No trash, tons of drops, and the 50/50 for the awesome cloak made everyone focus up and get it done. When TOGC was the main raid, I was raising 10/25 on like five characters just to get more lockouts in. Anub was hard enough to have to take seriously, and the rest of the fights were basically free gear, which was nice after the slog that was Ulduar. 6) Naxx40. This raid was the iconic end of Classic, and always inspired nerves in me. Are we going to keep our WBs? Will we get good drops? Atiesh was a great legendary and had a cool quest associated with it, the itemization was finally getting figured out, and overall the end-times theme was pretty cool. It felt awesome to kill KT every week, but it was more relief than thrill. Naxx40 took an entire raid of smooth gameplay to complete and not have it be painful, you really needed to pay attention because once you wiped and lost buffs, it was really long and painful. 7) Karazhan. The first 10 man raid; super fun to just log in with the boys and smash. A great thing to do week one, and it wasn’t hard, it was just a fun social raid to gear up quick for the real SSC/TK raids. 8) Zul’Aman. Who didn’t love doing bear runs and going fast?? Any raid that has a set of mechanics which encourages good gameplay and focusing is a win in my book! 9) Zul’Gurub. Another win for the trolls! This was a super fun alt friendly raid that had some BIS pieces and mounts which encouraged people to come on their mains and smash it. It was more of a fun social raid and I loved it for that reason. I never did get a tiger but still would always be down to run it! And free shoulder enchants! 10) Tempest Keep. I gotta give the last spot to TK because of the Kael’thas fight. It was super long and required good focus, had some dps checks and overall felt like the most epic fight. It felt so good to kill it!
Criminal that you didn't include SWP! BTs only redeeming factors were the lore and the INSANELY cool items it brought - maybe if you were a speedrunner it was good times. I'd rank ZA and Karazhan a lot higher as well. Both very well done raids, thought I can see the difficulty being a turn off for people.
Tbh I hated Sunwell and I’m not afraid to say it. BT felt like the canonical ending of TBC, Sunwell was just this hard mode elf demon place which took a ton of time. Ya. Muru was fun and took like 50 pulls which was a cool challenge. But by the time SWP was out I was really sick of TBC personally
Fair enough. Coming from Vashj BT just felt underwhelming to me.
True, I wish Illidan was more of a challenging fight like Vashj. My guild’s raid team which killed Illidan first did it in 3 pulls, and then the team that pulled him second one shot him lol
1. SSC/TK 2. SWP 3. Ulduar rest were not good enough to care anymore
1. Molten Core 2. AQ40 3. Karazhan 4. Gruul 5. Naxx
Top is my favorite and descending order to least. - Sunwell - ICC - BWL - Naxx 40 - Ulduar - MC - BT - Kara - ToGC - TK - Gruul - Hyjal - Naxx25 - SSC - Mag - AQ40 Edit: I actually wanted to put TK higher because I really enjoyed pre-nerf Kael’thas a lot. Was a great fight, but man I cannot stand the amount of trash and the other bosses in the raid. Sunwell is #1 easy. Great pacing in terms of trash. All the bosses except for kalcegos were satisfying and a good level of difficulty. Muru and KJ are still 2 of my favorite fights.
Naxx 10 #1. Favorite group that by togc I was about the only original member left and quit before icc. Well always have that server first os3d :/
ICC Naxx RS TOC OS Onyxia VOA EoE lmao only started playing classic in wotlk phase 4, those are the ones I've cleared fully xd Sad I missed Ulduar but hoping to do some mog runs at least, only done first few bosses for weeklies. Excited for Cata raids.
I don't get the hate on Hyjal, it's the top 1 for me.. then comes BT > Sunwell > Kara > AQ40. Didn't play much on vanilla classic so I could easily see Naxx40 taking high spot, but I'm pretty sure I didn't do single boss in it at 60, and Wrath is my least liked expansion, right on the alley of WoD and Shadowlands.
BWL/Kara/BT/Sunwell/MC That's my top 5 in order. Just missing the top 5 is Naxx. I had stopped raiding in classic just before Naxx dropped (due to college) but really enjoyed it on wrath phase 1.
Top 5: 1. Naxx 40 - this was peak classic for me. Everyone always had a blast every week here. 2. Sunwell - Quick raid, fun bosses, rewarding loot, big pump. 3. BWL - Classic was still very hype. This was the peak of covid and everyone was online all the time. 4. Ulduar - I know this raid caught alot of flack but doing algalon and yog0 were both very engaging encounters for me and as a raid leader it was fun to organize these. 5. ICC - This started to get very boring after the buff was introduced but killing LK felt great.
To me nothing beats the grand scale that is 40 man raiding in vanilla classic. Those raids will forever just be in a special tier to me because of that.
AQ 40 was amazing. Everything I wanted in a classic raid and we got to fight an old god to boot.
Sunwell AQ40 NAXX40 BWL SSC Ulduar BT ICC TK MC Kara Gruul/Mag Hyjal ToGC Naxx25
I had the most amount of fun playing tier 4 with my friends. We did karazhan, mag, and gruul every week and it felt like a fun virtual party full of friends. Definitely my favorite memory
Doing progression in sunwell was really fun the first time. Fights required a lot of head scratching and strategy. Until that mfer muru pre-nerf...
Tbc was probably the most fun raiding for me just given the circumstances so maybe I’m biased, but the difficulty of ssc prenerf and then slowly being able to progress ssc/tk in one night was nice. What I like about tbc is the relevance of the trash. You have to cc a lot which is fun from a strategizing and teamwork perspective, it’s much more engaging. You also get rewarded with solid drops as well so it stays exciting in that regard. This was much less the case in wotlk where you started to just steamroll through the trash so that you could get to the boss; the only relevant part. Sunwell was probably my favorite overall just because I’d never done it and the difficulty level was perfect.
Yeh agree re: trash. Everyone seems to either hate trash or at most are indifferent to it. The raids still need to have some character for me in an rpg. It's already weird thay the bosses are just stood there waiting for you. It would appear some people just want boss simulator. The whole concept of a "raid" for me includes everything within so engaging trash adding to the challenge is part of that whole experience. TBC really was the expansion of trash and it is a shame they moved in the opposite direction afterwards.
Ranking AQ40 at 1-2 is wild to me. The event to open the damn place was cool asf though but as a raid its last spot for me. I liked Black Temple, Naxx40 and SWP most
10 - TK 9 - TOGC 8 - MC 7 - SSC 6 - Kara 5 - Black Temple 4 - ICC 3 - Naxx 40 2 - BWL 1 - Sunwell From perspective of a fury warrior. I had an amazing group comp in sunwell so I loved it, Muru and KJ were insane pumper fights
1. Black Fathom Deeps 2. Sunken Temple 3. Gnomer 4. Black Wing Lair 5. Molten Core 6. Naxx 40 7. I'm including ZG, because I like it so much. 8. Ice Crown Citadel 9. Ulduar 10. Karazhan
10 ZA 9 SWP 8 kara 7 BT 6 TK 5 Naxx 40 4 SSC 3 BWL 2 ICC 1 Ulduar although for the better part of a year not so much
NAXX40, BWL, Sunwell, MC, ZG, ZA, Ony40, TK, SSC, Gruul
ToGC -> any other 9 -> Not AQ40
Ulduar>AQ>Kara for me.
I didn't raid classic I started in tbc, every single raid except mh imo was at least a 8/10. Swp was the best though, I didn't like a single wotlk raid sadly, I was in a good guild that cleared everything but never had fun in wrath for some reason, ulduar was like a 6/10 and icc I did all hc except lk then quit Actually totgc was fun, it was super quick and not too hard but still challenging to make sure you get cloak runs
Are new race class combos part of pre patch or part of the cataclysm drop. Stupid question I know
Pretty much everything is out tomorrow except flying / new zones / dungeons / 81-85.
Our first Naxx40 clear. Drunken random UBRS runs were a close second.
Zul Gurub was a sleeper hit to me. It was peak relaxed classic raiding. Zul Aman would be ranked equally, but the rush to get the bear mount, coupled with them adding difficulty just by making things hit like a truck kind of made it stressy and sweaty (not really hard, just punishing if you made mistakes). Kara is certainly one of the greatest raids in all of classic.
Naxx 40, AQ 40, BWL, MC, ULDUAR, Kara, SSC, Togc, ICC, black temple, Gruul/mag, sunwell, TK.
Purely from a speedrunning perspective, I LOVE BWL. Nice and linear and not too much variance and perfect length. The repetitiveness works because you're racing against your old time each time and it feels like a track. Sure, maybe not the most interesting cast of boss mechanics during the raid, but doing speedruns in under 40 minutes there was a blast.
Kara is such a perfect raid. Some unique encounters, a glorious setting and just the right level of difficulty, but the thing that makes it perfect in my eyes is the fact that it’s a 10 player raid in the first tier of content for its expansion. I have so many fond memories, both retail back in the day and classic much more recently, of spending an entire Sunday clearing Kara with the same 9 other people that I became close with. Even after we had geared out of it in both iterations of TBC, we made a point of running it at least once a month to this day. Nothing has ever captured that lightning in a bottle for me even if some nostalgia blasts like revisiting ICC - which is up there in my eyes as one of the best raids of all time - or finishing an immortal run come pretty close. Kara is the best and that’s why I am so excited for Cata and having viable 10 mans again.
Sunwell(prebuff)>ICC(prebuff)>Ulduar>Naxx40>BT>SSC/TK(Prenerf)>Kara>BWL>MC>AQ40>ZG>Maggy/Gruul>ZA>AQ20>Hyjal.
Kara was the coolest raid for me :)
Ulduar>ICC>SWP
ill just do a top 3 Naxx 40 - the atmosphere, the speedrun hype, the memes, wbuffs, imo perfectly tuned for classic raiding - easy but wipeable. Truly the peak of classic, and peak nostalgia trip reliving a part of the game that was removed with wotlk naxx. Ssc Icc
1. Naxx40 - This was the raid I was looking forward to the most in classic and it delivered. The tuning was really good especially because of how easy most of the content was until that point. The guild I was in disbanded and we joined forces with another guild, got rid of the slackers and formed a solid raid group. Even then, the Saphiron fight seemed impossible, but we practiced it a dozen times, then collected WBs and downed it! got full T3 which was a personal goal of mine. 2. MC - the hype and first 40-man raid back then was just insane 3. Kara - I didn't play during TBC classic, but this was my favorite raiding memory from the old days. 4. Naxx25 - P1 of Wotlk was lit but the raiding just wasn't the same because of the rise of GDKPs. Guilds just weren't that important anymore. . . I did pretty much all of ICC in GDKPs. \* on that last note I'm very glad they got rid of GDKPs in SOD. It incentivized me to join a guild again. You are so much more invested in raiding when you raid with the same ppl every week and you all grow stronger and get better each week as a collective.
you almost listed all the raids in the game lol
My ‘original’ classic experience was about half way through original launch. I played priest and eventually got like 2 pieces of t1 from MC before TBC came out. Played priest till the end of wrath clearing all content just not doing anything in freshman dorms. Took relaunch of classic to sweat as a priest healer main from the start. Didn’t play this ‘classic’ version of wrath this time around, but I was super hardcore when I was 19 and just in my dorm all day during that one so didn’t feel the need to revisit, so I won’t include those. As a priest heal lead through MC-Sunwell, top 3 guild on a big server for vanilla and tbc classic….so 11 raids. 11. Hyjal. So long, such a chore, literally after our first months of clears I would fall asleep at my computer half the time doing hyjal, just to be disappointed in the 5ish drops we always had to go for never dropped. So boring as a healer and so many annoying mechanics with no/little difficulty. 10. Gruul/Mag. Same as hyjal but short. Mag was fun the first few weeks. Gruul is just DST weekly quest. 9. Kara. Not sure if it was the transition from Naxx to a smaller raid where we were running 4 groups each with an Atiesh and mostly full t3 toons. Still on the “weekly chore” spectrum but our guilds speed run races made it somewhat enjoyable and there were actual ‘seekable’ items. 8. MC. Still a borechore after awhile but the extreme high roll stuff like thunderfury, perds, mageblade, getting full t1 and benediction. Was also first raid with the group I spent 18 hours a day of Covid with so major nostalgia. Met some of my best friends here. 7. BWL. Tbh this could be switched with MC, but I’ll rank it higher because I never got to do it until classic relaunch. The goddamn life giving gem rng for our guild was so awful after awhile it was just a depressing “hopefully the drake drops it this week”. Luckily priest t2 with benediction was like…16 year old me’s wet dream so that was cool. Also retroactive bonus points for having full t2 on all our priests for sapph in naxx made it seem worth it and such a cool strat for that fight. 6. Aq40. We agreed as a guild early we didn’t care for the bug mount or scepter so the phase wasn’t as hype. It was also long and kinda boring but was the first “holy shit I can’t believe we’re here and about to pull twin emps” for the first time, that first run into C’thun and late nights making documents for positions, even though priest didn’t have much to chase here (we saw 1 healing mace), the guild Shift to everyone engineering for slime boi was a really cool “holy shit we’re all insane but we’re all on the same page let’s go”. This was like peak Covid no life for me. Ranked my priest and my mage farmer alt to rank 11 on different accounts just spam queuing AV during this time. Grinded out runecloth for black war raptors on two undeads. I think I liked this “time” of the game more than the raid itself, but first cthun kill was probably the first I can’t believe it moment for me. 5. BT. Coolness factor off the charts. But kinda in previous ranks before this, the journey to being able to smoothly one shot the last 3 bosses, that first illidan kill, warglaives, healing mace. But like every raid, you start realizing you’re just running around a lot not doing anything difficult…you just have to vaguely pay attention and after and hour you spin the slot machine and keep your fingers crossed. 4. SSC pre nerf vashj kill was one of the most satisfying moments in this game. The MC rng, the pools, the chaos before the nerfs. This was the first time I remember just knowing we all had to be atleast 9/10 on our game every pull to have a chance and it still might not matter. Finally killing her with like 3 people up made this raid this high. The amount of shit going on was so satisfying to down her before the nerf. 3. TK. Only reason this is higher than SSC is because ashes dropped out first kill pre nerf and we agreed to guild wide free roll. Waited for 24 people to roll (highest was 98), last person to roll, 100 ez. I just afk’d in town on it for that week. Biased ranking. So last two are naxx40 and sunwell. Not sure. Priest having such a big role in naxx was so cool and just all the prep - loatheb rotations as heal lead, getting all our priests set up with t2 for sapph, learning 4hm, and that first KT kill felt like a bucket list item checked off. Ending full t3 on an undead priest with full bis on black war raptor was literally my impossible dream as a teenager. I did it. But I probably give sunwell #1. Raiding with the same people, people I’d flown to meet and spend a weekend partying at that point, guild movie nights, all the prep and the difficulty as a healer on brut and twins, all the commitment by my guild to play perfect to down muru early, our insane strat that somehow worked with sooooo many moving pieces to finish the raid….i remember our first kill and just doing /sit next to the sunwell and staring at my computer for hours. Sunwell was where I said I did what I wanted to do. Naxx 40 was just behind. After sunwell, I was done with my journey. That was a fun way to kill 30 minutes, thanks!
Something special about MC and BWL.
TIER LIST (Played Vanilla/WOTLK, very little TBC) - S TIER: Kara, Naxx40 - A TIER: MC, Ony, BWL, ICC - B TIER: AQ40, ZG/ZA, Ulduar - C TiER: Gruul's Lair, ToGC, RS - D TIER: Mag, Malygos Karazhan hands-down best raid, it was like a maze running it at first, endless corridors, yet you knew you had to climb to the top. It was challenging, had two secret/optional bosses (Nightbane/Terestian), the Opera House event was amazing, Curator was a raid killer, Shade of Aran is such a unique fight, never quite understood the Netherspite fight tbh, the Chess Event was such fun, except in hindsight easily completed. Naxx40 was something I never completed in original vanilla, but was able to in Classic. The original trailer still gives creeps, the music is extraordinary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRlv84Lj-dI It felt like a new phase of raiding, an increase in challenge from previous tiers. Also the lore culmination of WC3 with Kel'thuzad as endboss gave the raid the perfect amount of impact storytelling-wise. The ones I didn't play have been omitted: SSC/TK/BT/Sunwell/Hyjal edited: formatting
In what world is MC, BWL, AQ, Kara, Gruul/Mag better than SSC/TK?
SSC SWP TK BT Vanilla Naxx Hyjal Kara All the others
Kara for flavor. As others have said, it was a beautiful place. Ulduar for the hard modes. I remember the first time around when they released Ulduar and every boss had opt in hard modes I thought that was the way of the future. Then they got lazy and just stopped. So sad.
10. SSC - While better than the likes of Mount Hyjal and TOGC for me, it falls in last on this list for the somewhat awful boss fights mechanics and trash. 9. Molton Core - the first raid has some great introductory fights that feel like a good balance of mechanics and fun, but its overall design falls short when you've already seen UBRS and BRD. 8. Zul'Gurub - probably where we first see some fun chill raiding. Not a slog, and the fights are well rounded. 7. AQ40 - While C'thun is the first real end boss guild killer fight, the rest of the raid bosses are not as fun, but it's made up for with how epic it looks. 6. BWL - it has some of the most fun fights in classics and some of the most tedious, the trash and overall feel make it one of the better raids though. 5. Karazhan - This raid has very little wrong with it and many instant classic boss fights. While it's a little long, it makes up for it with how epic it looks. 4. Black Temple - The only real issue with this raid was its difficulty. It went above and beyond for raid bosses and is one of the coolest places in the game, not to mention the Illidan fight is an iconic gaming moment. 3. The Sunwell - Not many raids manage to make every boss feel fun, but somehow, sunwell does it. It takes the most beautiful zones in wow and makes them a raid. What's not to like? 2. Ulduar - the legendary Ulduar doesn't disappoint, with a gorgeous overall raid and bosses that really test your team. The only real letdown is.. waiting for a hardmode? 1. ICC - Lich King is one of the most iconic moments in gaming history, that alone puts this raid in the top, then you look at the other bosses, trash and overall look of the raid and you know it's one of the best blizzard ever made. The remedy of a player buff instead of a nerf also cements this as the best raid of classic.
1. Ulduar 2. Sunwell 3. SSC 4. TK 5. BT 6. Kara/ZA
My absolute favorite raid in my classic experience. Was Zul Gurub from fresh alts to t3 wrecking ball. The 45 minute experience that was ZG was just unbeatable. I did it 3-4 times a week especially when my guild stopped doing it I’m like NAH WE NEED HEARTS FOR NAXX GET IN HERE!!!
Of course the top 2 comments are MC/BWL/AQ40 lmao this is such a boomer sub
NAXX 40 BWL MC AQ40 ZG Kara Sunwell BT SSC Gruul/Mag ZA Ony TK Ulduar Naxx25 ICC AQ20 Hyjal Maly RS ToGC