Cataclysm

[Sjofn]

Ingmar loved Aran because he got to be all RAAR DUAL WIELDING PROTECTION WARRIOR WATCH OUT on that fight.

Not sure what my favorite fight in Kara was, but WotLK taught me just how awesome Karazhan was. I got bored of Karazhan eventually, but I got sick of the various WotLK raids (except Ulduar, because we never did get that goddamn place on farm before the next tier came out) a lot faster.

[Khaldun]

Kara has been about my favorite experience of raiding in the game. Paced well, a guild could do a little or a lot, the fights had variety, none of them were just ball-breaking gonna fuck with you mechanics (I did not care for and still don't like "block the beam" mechanics, though) but all of them had some challenge or something to learn to do.

We took a stab at Baradin Hold last night but it was one of those "whoever in the guild was in Tol Barad at the end of the battle, come on along" things so we just didn't have the dps needed to beat the timer. Mechanically not complicated, though the dispels eat through healer mana pretty intensely.

[koro]

The only thing I didn't care for in (pre-nerf, never ran it post) Karazhan was the Prince Malchezzar fight and its random Infernal drop mechanics that could make an attempt practically impossible if you got unlucky with placement.

It's still easily the best raid in the game though.

[Paelos]

I disliked Karazhan's pacing in the middle, and that was the major detractor for me. The feel of the place was probably the best, though.

My favorite raid is still probably Blackwing Lair. There were so many good fights using mechanics that were completely different from anything we had faced in MC. It was the first time I was impressed with the designers ingenuity in creating things that involved the entire raid.

Controlling Razergore
The DPS rush on Vael
The suppression room to the Broodlord
Nefarian with the color adds and the class specific debuffs

[Merusk]

Yeah the trash just before and just after Aran was a little tiresome even after the nerfs. Still, it was one of the best instances ever.

Supression room did and still does suck.  In PUG raids that tried to crush BWL it was still the one area causing wipes at 80.

[Paelos]

Yeah the trash just before and just after Aran was a little tiresome even after the nerfs. Still, it was one of the best instances ever.

Supression room did and still does suck.  In PUG raids that tried to crush BWL it was still the one area causing wipes at 80.

The suppression room was important in that it was the first raiding "gauntlet" which was been repeated in various forms since. I hate certain forms of it now, but I liked the suppression room because it injected some tense moments into an otherwise methodical pace. BWL also brought us the widespread use of the threatmeter (due to Vael) and decursive (Chromaggus). The only thing I didn't like about the place was that they gear-gated the drakes through cloaks and shadowflame.

[Azuredream]

BC raids would've been more fun except my main was a warlock whose rotation consisted of one button.

Classic: BWL, BC: Karazhan, WotLK: ICC. Just my 2c.

[Soulflame]

BC:  Zul'Aman.  Wrath:  Ulduar.

[Paelos]

Classic: BWL
BC: Tempest Keep
WotLK: Naxx redux

[Minvaren]

Kara has been about my favorite experience of raiding in the game. Paced well, a guild could do a little or a lot, the fights had variety, none of them were just ball-breaking gonna fuck with you mechanics (I did not care for and still don't like "block the beam" mechanics, though) but all of them had some challenge or something to learn to do.

I tried to PUG Kara a couple times in LK, and the "block the beam" fight made me want to stab myself in the face.  It's the same issue with AQ40 and the twins, herding cats when everyone thinks they know what to do "the right way."   

Kara and BWL were quite amazing, though.  Haven't seen any of the LK raid content yet, but as I just hit 85 with my tank...   

[K9]

Ulduar is worth doing, even at level 85.

[Shrike]

Classic: it was all about AQ20. That place was a blast. Spend a lot of time in there, too.

TBC: expansion sucked, but aside from that I had a really good time in Karazhan. Honorable mention to ZA. Had a lot of fun in there, and not many really saw it.

Wrath: Naxx, of course. I loved that place. I only got to poke my nose in once in vanilla and then very briefly, but loved it here. Ulduar was the coolest by far, but I liked Naxx a lot. Place was just fun.

[kildorn]

On a cata note: JP -> trade good vendors are in 4.0.6 now.

The exchange rates are hilarious, though. 200JP -> 1 Hypnotic dust. 1200 -> 1 heavenly shard.

[Merusk]

That is truly  .  200 per heavenly shard seems more appropriate, given that's what you get for killing a boss in heroic.  Hell, 100 considering that each boss can give multiple blues to be sharded.

Also, why the fuck is a selection of 20 random, possibly useless to your alchemist, herbs 1k more than 20 of a known element for ore?  Sure, 20 of anything is good for inscription, but not worth it for the alchemist.   Also, cloth being more than ore is equally 

No volatiles either, but at those prices who gives a flying fuck. The catasses truly have taken control of the helm again.

[K9]

Also, no orbs.

It's a pretty bizarre move, since it really does little to help people who need the mats to level tradeskills, and as a points dump it feels astonishingly inefficient.

[Paelos]

They are going to be stingy with orbs. I just wish they would make them tradable. For some reason they don't like the market to actually dictate what their bullshit is worth.

[Rendakor]

It's better than nothing, which is what I currently have to spend JP on.

[Sjofn]

I disliked Karazhan's pacing in the middle, and that was the major detractor for me. The feel of the place was probably the best, though.

Yeah, the trash in that section was really obnoxious. Waaaay too much.

Part of why I loved Kara so much is it has the bestest music in the game. 

For WotLK, I dunno which raid overall was my favorite, but feel-wise I liked Ulduar best. My favorite fight was in ICC, though. I loved blood princes. Deeply. To the point where I didn't care if we wiped towards the end of it, because it meant we got to try it again.    I think it's because we always did it "wrong" when I was there and I got to be the orb gathering tank.

[Ashamanchill]

My favorite raid ever in WoW? trial of the Crusader. Yeah that's right. No trash, I liked the bosses, and to me faction champs was always a blast. I got to do things other than threat tank, which was really cool.

[Ingmar]

My favorite raid ever in WoW? trial of the Crusader. Yeah that's right. No trash, I liked the bosses, and to me faction champs was always a blast. I got to do things other than threat tank, which was really cool.

Yeah that was a pretty fun instance, underrated in general I think.

[Paelos]

I enjoyed parts of it. Faction champions was not one of those parts, but it had it's moments.

The main issue I had with ToC was that the first boss caused more wipes than the second boss, and the third boss caused more than the 4th. I would have liked an increasing difficulty in the order.

Oh and fighting all the bosses again after the stupid yeti wipes us because some dumbass went linkdead during a charge? 

[Ashamanchill]

Okay that's true. I hated the first boss, although it was the worms that I loathed. What a tanking nightmare.

[Ingmar]

The worms weren't hard to tank, they were hard to get fail DPS and healers to grasp where to run when they got the different debuffs. 

[Soulflame]

TOC:

First boss(es) sucked.
Second boss was a joke.
Third bosses ranged from sucked to "reshuffle your group comp or you'll never down them".
Fourth bosses ranged from sucked when you first saw the place to "let's have our MT tank both" trivial after you geared.
Fifth boss was a joke.

God I hated that place.

[Xanthippe]

I am feeling like the old "EQ raiding was the greatest thing ever" faction inside Blizzard that I thought long since lost out has made a resurgence.  

That's how it seems to me as well.

In the ruckus surrounding Ghostcrawler's post on how dungeons are supposed to be hard, it seems to me from what reading I've done in the forums (I make brief forays over there, I don't usually stay long), the complaints are coming from people who are using the LFD tool, and those in Ghostcrawler's camp run with regular guild groups - so both groups seem to be talking past each other.

[kildorn]

Part of the issue is that since it's not just "incoming damage is high/short enrage timers" where an LFD and guild group have a small gap, it's "X Y and Z must do things at specific times", where you get wildly varied results in LFD and pretty uniformly good results in a guild group.

A good example of the gap is someone like Baron Ashbury with his interrupt mechanics. In a guild group, it's just a casual fight with a kinda crazy enrage at the end. However pugging it, I frequently assign interrupt duties.. only to have the interrupter either not do it, or to quote one last night who was assigned Mend Rotting Flesh "I just interrupt whatever he's casting when I can" which is NOT how you do that fight. I had another where the DK assigned to interrupt apparently did not feel he could do this, and instead of telling me before the pull, he silently just decided to not interrupt anything.

Since the mechanics are harder than wrath, the gap between LFD pug and preformed group is getting huge. In a preform, I can pretty much wrath up the instances again and ignore CC without impacting the healer's mana much at all.

[caladein]

I am feeling like the old "EQ raiding was the greatest thing ever" faction inside Blizzard that I thought long since lost out has made a resurgence.  

Normal and Heroic dungeons are more difficult yes, and that's by design.

Raids really aren't.  I guess the argument can be made that Normal 10s are more difficult now with the lack of better gear from 25s and having fewer fight mechanics that aren't made significantly easier by the smaller raid size, but that's more closing a loophole than an increase in difficulty.  (Heroic 10s are a different matter .)  If anything, going from a dungeon to a raid makes a lot of the healer changes and emphasis on CC less of an issue (read: Mana Tide Totem).

[Simond]

It's going to be vastly amusing come 4.1 when the standard progression route turns into "Run normals, get faction gear" -> "PUG Twilight Sanctum" and nobody bothers with heroics at all.

[Malakili]

I disliked Karazhan's pacing in the middle, and that was the major detractor for me. The feel of the place was probably the best, though.

My favorite raid is still probably Blackwing Lair. There were so many good fights using mechanics that were completely different from anything we had faced in MC. It was the first time I was impressed with the designers ingenuity in creating things that involved the entire raid.

Controlling Razergore
The DPS rush on Vael
The suppression room to the Broodlord
Nefarian with the color adds and the class specific debuffs

BWL was a great raid.   We continued running it all the way until the end of vanilia even though we needed barely any gear from there anymore, just because everyone was willing to do it every week (granted, the fact that we could run the whole place in less than 2 hours helped).  I think the positioning required in there was good and really helped push players to do more than just hit a few buttons when raiding).  Back then I felt like the raids really progressed in terms of mechanics though.  MC - tank and spank, BWL - positioning, AQ40 - situational awareness Naxx - Brought it all together.

I think my best memories are from AQ40 though, killing C'thun was probably my greatest WoW moment.  It felt epic just GETTING to him, and after about 2 months of chewing glass, we finally killed him. (The whole thing is bolstered by the fact that during that time the guild split, and the people who remained and rebuilt ended up killing him before the guys who split because the original group wasn't hardcore enough, so a bit of political victory involved)

EDIT: Yes, I was a hardcore raider in those days, spare me.

[Rendakor]

15v15 Rated BGs are being removed next patch. Not sure I like this change as I don't like the 10 man base holding BG as much as I like Arathi.

[Merusk]

Not enough people participating?

Ed:

Yeah, not enough people.  But they're not removing them, they're changing the player caps on the 15's to 10.

We’re in the process of developing a hotfix to push before next Tuesday that will change all 15vs15 rated battleground weeks into 10vs10 weeks.

Looking at participation, the 10vs10 rated battleground weeks have been far and away more popular than the 15vs15 weeks. The difference in organizational requirements as well as battleground map popularity have been a couple big factors that have led to the 10vs10 weeks seeing a great deal more action. By making this change and supporting the popular option we hope to encourage even more players and teams to participate, as they won’t have to wait out every other week, or struggle to beef up to 15 players to match the requirement.

We also have plans to adapt additional battleground maps in the future to work in the 10 player bracket to increase the variety of maps available.

Also:  Turns out the "Luck of the Draw" PUG buff hasn't worked for most of Cata's life so that extra 5% you thought you were getting? Not so much.   That was fixed in 4.0.6 and will be buffed to 15%, because "we think heroics are hard and need this."   

So they're holding to the 'we're not going to nerf dungeons' line by.. buffing players. 

[Rendakor]

Not enough people participating?

Ed:

Yeah, not enough people.  But they're not removing them, they're changing the player caps on the 15's to 10.

Semantics.

[Ingmar]

WTB that 15% when playing with my loser guildmates. 

[SurfD]

15% in many dungeons still wont help you get past those "group killer" bosses.

15% more HP is not going to save the people who keep standing outside of the grounding field on Asaad, or the tanks who simply can not get the Ozruk dance mechanic down.
15% more DPS is not going to save your group when it is full of people pushing 4k in a heroic on a single target tank n spank fight, or who simply can not manage to change targets to the adds on the Erudax fight.

Yes.  It will improve quality of life in a decent number of complete pugs, but it wont completely protect you from the vast amounts of epic fail that still lurk in the shadows of the LFD tool.

[Ironwood]

I'm not sure what your point is.