Most of the raid encounters in World of Warcraft has the same basic concept. You got a boss, and you tank it until dead. Tank ‘n’ spank. Then you add a “gimmick” feature on top of the tank ‘n’ spank fight and get a standard raid encounter. Onyxia fears, Prince Malchezaar summons infernals, Flame Leviathan are done in vehicles, etc.

I have done pretty much all of WoW’s raid content, from Classic up to now, and below is a list of what I consider the most original encounters in the game. Not fun, challenging, or awesome (although some are all of these), just original. An encounter where you can imagine that the designers just went crazy in the brainstorm sessions where they came up with them. In no specific order:

Gunship Battle – Icecrown Citadel, Wrath of the Lich King

The Gunship Battle is an aerial fight between the Horde gunship Orgrim’s Hammer and the Alliance Skybreaker. As if fighting on an airborne gunships wasn’t cool enough, you also have to fire cannons on the other ship and use Jet Packs to fly over to the other ship and times to take out a mage that freezes your guns.

Razorgore the Untamed – Blackwing Lair, Classic

You ultimately have to kill him in a tank and spank fight, but to get to that point you have to take control of the boss and break all the eggs in the room. It’s up to the rest of the raid to protect Razorgore and the controller from the hordes of adds that are summoned from all four corners of the room. It is a frenzy that borders oh so close on full chaos.

Hakkar the Soulflayer – Zul’Gurub, Classic

A relatively easy fight is made impossible since Hakkar siphons life from every raid member at specific times. How do you kill a self-healing boss? I would love to know just how the first raiders thought about this, since the solution is not the most obvious. You have to kite a mob that spawns on the way to Hakkar, kill it at precise timing, and then have every raid member stand in the poison cloud that appears. Hakkar then siphons your life – but it’s poison! Problem solved.

Majordomo - Molten Core, Classic

Original in the sense that you actually don’t kill the boss, you just kill his adds. Majordomo comes with 8 adds, 4 of which must be tanked, and 4 which must be crowd controlled. When all adds are killed Majordomo surrenders (“Impossible! Stay your attack, mortal… I submit! I submit!”) and goes to summon Ragnaros.

Ossirian the Unscarred – Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj, Classic

Ossirian starts the fight in Supreme Mode, which is well worthy of capitalization, since in this mode he hits like a truck. Instead tanks have to quickly grab some aggro on him, and then start running. You kite him to huge pillars that appear in the ground to dispel the Supreme Mode and make Ossirian vulnerable to a school of magic. Repeat until dead.

Opera Event – Karazhan, The Burning Crusade

The Opera Event in Karazhan breaks the mould in more than one aspect. First of all you don’t know which of three random encounters you will get before the start, and secondly the encounters is based on real life tales and movies. You have:

• Big Bad Wolf (“What phat lewts you have grandmother”; “All the better to own you with!”) based on the Little Red Riding Hood tale. Turns one of the raid members into a gnome with a red hood, and the Big Bad Wolf will start chasing you. Then it’s another raid members turn.
• Wizard of Oz (“Oh dear, we simply must find a way home! The old wizard could be our only hope! Strawman, Roar, Tinhead, will you… wait! Oh golly, look! We have visitors!”), based on the tale with the same name. You have to fight five bosses (Dorothee, Roar, Strawman, Tinhead, and Tito the dog), each who has to be handled in a specific way.
• Romulo and Julianna (“What devil art thou, that dost torment me thus?”), based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. First you have to kill Julianna, then Romulo, and then both at once.

Chess Event – Karazhan, The Burning Crusade

You are not fighting a boss at all, you are fighting chess! Each player take control of a piece on a chess board, and then you must kill all the opposite pieces controlled by Medivh (who cheats). Chess has never been so exciting.

Heigan the Unclean – Naxxramas, Classic/Wrath of the Lick King

“A Necromancer specialized in diseases and dancing.” A simple tank and spank fight, except that at intervals you all have to avoid the floor erupting in flames by standing in specific places and then move to another location after each eruption. Also known as “The Heigan Dance”. Holy crap! The floor’s trying to kill us!

Loatheb – Naxxramas, Classic/Wrath of the Lick King

Loatheb is an anagram for “Healbot”. Loatheb casts an aura that reduces healing by 100%, and you only have 3 seconds to actually heal before he recasts it. With normal tanking and AoE damage it makes the fight very interesting from a healing perspective.

Thaddius - Naxxramas, Classic/Wrath of the Lick King

Thaddius is a fight, not just against the boss, but also against electricity. Everyone in the raid will receive either a negative or a positive debuff, and if a player with negative stand close to one with positive the raid might wipe. If two players with the same debuff stands close they receive a damage buff. Then he will change the debuffs several times during the fight so people have to rearrange themselves.

The issue was that plenty of statistics showed that only the very tip of the iceberg that is the WoW playerbase got to beat the final boss–the main villain of the expansion–Illidan. I never got to. My guild cleared Mount Hyjal and got halfway through Black Temple before Wrath of the Lich King came out, and then we thought we did pretty well.

Blizzards solution to this was the badge/emblem system. It was brought in at the end of the Burning Crusade, and came to its full in Wrath of the Lich King. By running heroic 5 man dungeons you got badges (you also got them from raids, and in larger quantity), and with them you could buy epic gear. It was a nice feature that made heroic dungeons popular again, and even if you didn’t get any loot from encounters you still got badges. My guild even started running Karazhan again just for badges.

The real problem arose in WotLK, when Blizzard decided to upgrade badges after each new raiding tier. First you got Naxxramas-level gear from running heroics. Then you got Ulduar-level gear from running heroics. Now you get Trial of the Crusader-level gear from running heroics. For letting new players/alts come in and immediately be able to raid the latest content it was a good system. Except it also made all the earlier raiding tiers completely obsolete.

For what? So that as much as possible of the WoW population get to kill Arthas before the next expansion. So that Blizzard can boast with a much higher percentage number compared to The Burning Crusade.

Is it worth it?

Considering that there is new 5 man dungeons where players can finally meet Arthas (although not kill him), and by clicking on a memorial in Dalaran you can see the cut-scene where Arthas dies, without ever stepping into a raid, I’d say no, it’s not worth it.

In The Burning Crusade you had guilds all over the progression ladder. Some were in Karazhan, some were in Serpentshrine Cavern or Tempest Keep, and some were in Mount Hyjal or Black Temple. Is that really a bad thing? Do every single guild need to be in Black Temple, just like every single guild is in Icecrown Citadel now? If you came late to the party in TBC you had to start at the beginning like everyone else and work yourself upwards. In WotLK you start at the bottom, then jump immediately to the top.

Just so you can kill Arthas.

MMOs are just too time-consuming. It requires you to devote all your available time, and it doesn’t care how much all your time is, it will never be done with you. Switching from one MMO to another doesn’t give you more free time, you just change what you spend the time on. I realised that ever since WoW came out I have spent pretty much all free time from one MMO to the next, and that – in the lack of other words – sucks. I love games, but spending all the time playing just one game feels like such a stupid waste of time. It’s like being in a candy story with 500 types of candy, and only eating one. Only when I was between MMOs would I pick up single-player games, and when I was done with them I would have time to do other stuff, because those games had an end.

So a while ago when I was still playing WoW I started picking up non-MMO games. Torchlight came first. Then I installed Rome: Total War and had a blast, despite its age. After that came Dragon Age, and Modern Warfare 2. Suddenly there wasn’t enough hours on the day. With all those games to choose from why continue to play for just one?

When I started the Wrath of the Lich King expansion I was excited. It was new content, and classes had enough new and changed abilities that they felt like whole new classes. But I feel that this entire expansion has been a complete letdown aside from that. Grinds and repetitive content was everywhere. Blizzard seemed to have missed the point of why people liked daily quests when they was introduced in Burning Crusade. It wasn’t because they were fun, but because they beat grinding fire elementals any day to make gold… which you needed a lot of back then. Now Blizzard is creating more and more daily quests, and at the same time more things you have to spend gold on.

I had always supported Blizzard in their strategic changes before, but what was happening in this expansion… Achievements (feel obliged to do things for the sake of doing them), free epics from heroics, trivialized raiding content, etc, etc. I can see their reasoning, but I can’t agree with it. I don’t want things for free, I want to earn them, to fight for them. I had in vanilla WoW, and Burning Crusade. It was neither a smooth nor easy ride, but I knew what I was getting into. Handing out free epics is like having a GM coming in and giving you a helping hand at the last percent of a boss fight. There is nothing I hate more than deus ex machina moments in movies, and what is happening in WoW is nothing less than just a deus ex machina moment.

But I’m not unreasonable. There are more people who play the game than me, and I understand that game is shifting focus to the wider audience. I’m not going to cry to everyone I see that the sky is falling. It’s not; it’s just changing. But I don’t like that change, so I leave.

I love what they are doing in Cataclysm, but I also don’t like what they are doing to the “plan” of the game, and in the end I doubt redesigned old zones is going to balance the issues I feel I have with the game.

Alliance on the other hand had a distinct lack of notable leaders. Tyrande Whisperwind is known from Warcraft III, but she doesn’t make much noise; the human leader was a kid counseled by Onyxia – go figure; Magni Bronzebeard stand in his room and don’t do much; the gnome king was a king in exile; and no one cares about the blue space goats.

Overall the Horde was considered noble and misunderstood, while the Alliance was just greedy and corrupt.

In the Burning Crusade the Horde and Alliance worked together to fight back the Burning Legion. They became pals, shared the city of Shattrath in peace, and all was flowers and ponies. Some people liked that, most people didn’t. After all, this was World of WARcraft.

Then came Wrath of the Lich King and all that did a 180.

In comes Varian Wrynn, long lost human king and badass warrior with an attitude. Blizzard wanted to “go back to its roots” with war and… stuff. What should be painfully obvious is that the lead designers at Blizzard called down to lore department and ordered a “Badass human king with an attitude, sporting really cool armor and has a natural hatred for the Horde so all this teamwork can never happen again. Someone the Alliance people can look up to like the Horde do to Thrall. Create some background lore for him. On my desk at lunch.” And thus Varian Wrynn was manufactured to exact specifications.

Not that Horde was saved such rampant changes with no regard to past history. Thrall was noble, just, awesome, and brought respect and honor to the Horde, but he didn’t fit the profile any longer. Now they needed someone reckless, savage, slightly mentally disturbed and so full of sh*t that no one could identify with him. In short, they needed Garrosh Hellscream.

In the Burning Crusade we found Garrosh sitting and sobbing beside a fire in Nagrand. After a long quest chain and a personal visit by Thrall he is convinced that his father was not a total douchebag after all, and gains some new strength and will. The next time we see him he wants to charge into the arms of Arthas, despite all common sense. After fighting Thrall openly (seems like a nice guy) he is then named general for the Horde forces in Northrend. Garrosh went from whimpering by a fire to “ZUG ZUG! I KEEL YOU!” against the entire Alliance faster than you can say “lore lol”. If there is one more suited for command I don’t know him.

Events such as Wrathgate, the following battle of Undercity, Horde ambushing the Alliance in Icecrown and the meeting in Violet Citadel are just topping of the cake. With these two stupid leaders in charge of armed forces there would be war no matter what. It is painfully obvious what Blizzard wants, and they didn’t hesitate in doing a complete turnaround from their previous ideas of teamwork.

I’m not against a war in WoW – far from it – but I really despise such shallow and quick changes to make it so. Varian got some substance in that he was captured by the Horde, but it’s not much. Garrosh is a shallow as a leaf of paper and seems to have tasted a bit too much of the demon blood to be good. As a player you can’t really identify with any of them, making all their decisions to further the conflict seem stupid. You can’t respect stupid leaders.