I have favorite boss fights for, if not every raid, at least every expansion. I'm partial to dragons, but not every raid has a dragon. Recently I was thinking about this - my love of dragon fights - and I realized I don't really care for either of the Deathwing fights. One has frustrating pacing, and the other is just too long. So here are a few fights that I do especially like:
Onyxia (original)
My guild did three and a half raids in Vanilla, with random shots at the first boss in Blackwing Lair to no avail. I ran Molten Core a lot, but never enough to get exalted, since I worked on two of our three raid nights. My first raid was actually Zul'Gurub, but none of the fights in there particularly excited me. We also did Ahn'Qiraj (20), but not all of it.
But Onyxia. There are a variety of reasons I liked the fight: It was multiphasic. It allowed for epic kills. You had to work to get into it, but other than finding a group for Upper Blackrock Spire and actually winning the blood, it wasn't a terribly odious attunement.
Multi-phasic boss fights weren't terribly common in the first tier of Vanilla raiding. The fights were generally, "boss does x, y, and z the whole fight, and may enrage at q%." Sometimes there were adds to initially kill, or something to be off-tanked and killed afterwards or ignored. There weren't a ton of fights were the boss changed tactics entirely at a%, b%, and c%, or on timers. Even the Vanilla Ragnaros fight was just two phases cycled. Onyxia starts out as a tank-and-spank, then flies up into the air for an add phase with random fire breathing, then comes back down but adds fears and lava bursts. Onyxia was a hint of things to come, of bosses that require mid-fight adaptation. Looking, for example, at Firelands: Beth'tilac has two phases with different tactics; Rhyolith is a similarly phased fight (complex phase + burn phase); Alysrazor has four phases that repeat until you kill her; Staghelm has two alternating phases, each with some extra bits built in depending how many of each phase you've done; and Ragnaros, who has three phases with different tactics for each. Shannox isn't really a phased fight different from the "kill the adds, kill the boss" tactics of a lot of other flamewalker bosses (every one but Shazzrah in Molten Core, really), although you have to be a little more careful about how you kill the adds, since dropping both dogs too early or too late is bad; Baleroc uses the same tactics for the whole fight, but is a bit of a DPS/gear check.
So I guess I'm saying I like complex fights, and Onyxia was the first taste we really got of it. And then of course there are the epic kills.
Vanilla Onyxia was a 40-man raid. One of the thing I liked about these big raids was that people could die and you wouldn't wipe. If you lose people in a 10-man raid, finishing the fight becomes iffy. The healers may not be able to keep up; the DPS may not be enough to finish it. The closest we've come to similarly epic kills in Cataclysm (in my guild, anyway) are 3-man standing Gunship fights. Well, dude, 3/10, that's pretty skin-of-the-teeth, sure. But 3-man standing Onyxia kills, when you started off with 40? That's an adrenaline rush, to be sure. (I say 3-man, but really, it was one man and two women - the tank (male), one of the priests (female), and me, a hunter (also female). I've gotten pretty good at not dying early most of the time.) This isn't to say that people were expendable; just that if you got a boss to 3% and people started dropping, you weren't necessarily going to lose.
Magtheridon
When the Burning Crusade rolled around, we didn't get terribly much further into overall raid progression than we did in Molten Core: that is, we didn't move very far beyond the first tier. We ran a lot of Karazhan. I liked both dragon fights in there (Nightbane and Netherspite) and the Shade of Aran, despite the frustrations of the Flame Wreath. (The advent of Flame Wreath is when I bound escape to the thumb key on my mouse, since I couldn't jump to interrupt casting during it.) We also killed Gruul, delved into Serpentshrine Cavern to kill Hydross and the Lurker Below, and we tackled Magtheridon.
Magtheridon was an interesting fight - you had to kill his adds one by one, kill the adds they summoned, and then click on cubes the five original adds were using simultaneously with four other people in your 25-man group in order to interrupt his blast nova. This was a fight where your raid team working together was important - if the timing on the cubes was off, you were going to get hurt. And then of course at 30%, he'd drop the ceiling on your raid for more spike damage, so you'd have to throttle your DPS to not hit yourselves with the ceiling and blast nova damage at the same time. Oh, and I think he threw fire puddles on the ground, so you had to stay near the cube you were going to click, but not right by it, or you'd have fire on the ground by the cube when you needed to be channeling it.
Thaddius
Wrath of the Lich King brought back Naxxramas, which we didn't really see prior to the expansion other than running around with about 15 people and dying horribly at some point towards the end of the Burning Crusade. The fights were mostly of the Vanilla style of complexity (tank & spank with some twists), but you got some like Heigen that were just off the wall different.
Thaddius was one of those fights where if someone died, you were probably screwed. Every person up was another added to the stacking damage buff, and the DPS threshhold meant that, in the fairly casual guild we are, you needed everybody alive. He was also a personal-responsibility fight, because you had to pay attention to your polarity and stand with the right people. Overall the fight wasn't terribly complex, but the pace of it, and the "am I + or -?!" switches gave it a nice edge.
Mimiron
Ulduar was a taste of the new - a raid full of complex fights, and my guild's first advancement beyond the entry tier of raiding in an expansion, because Ulduar was the first long-form (not one or two boss) raids we cleared after an expansions initial multi-boss raid tier. I liked a lot of the fights in there, but Mimiron was my favorite. He was engineering-related, he required you to watch what you were doing and where you were standing, and he was a complex, multiphasic fight. I still haven't gotten to do his hard mode. :(
Blood Prince Council
Icecrown Citadel was a continuation of Ulduar for us in some ways - new, complex fights and a new tier conquered. I should be listing Putricide, or Sindragosa, or the Lich King here, because they were all complex, changing fights. But I associate Putricide with the exodus of several of our raid leaders, and Sindragosa with the stumbling of our 25-man raid (and our quest towards the legendary axe, since the person we were sponsoring stopped showing up to them). And, let's face it, the Lich King, like Deathwing, is just too long a fight. I like fights in the ~6 minute range - long enough I can and should be watching to use my five-minute cooldowns twice, but short enough that my hand doesn't cramp up.
So how does that lead to the Blood Prince Council? I like the fight because I got to do something entirely different most of the time - I often got tasked juggling the balls. In 10-man, between me and my pet, I could generally handle them alone. When I'm not healing, I've got pretty good awareness of what's going on in the room, and I really liked the change of pace.
Halion
We got a bonus raid in Wrath of the Lich King - the preparation for Cataclysm brought us a Twilight dragon to fight, Halion. Halion was, hands-down, my favorite fight of the expansion. I was generally in the twilight realm and got to deal with the cutter; the balancing of damage between the parts of the raid in either realm, the stuff to avoid standing in, the dancing around to keep ahead of (or just behind) the cutter - overall I found it to be the most satisfying encounter in terms of design and challenge.
Nefarian (Blackwing Descent)
Cataclysm meant another expansion, new raids, and a more-or-less end to the guild's 25-man raiding, which we had done for most of Wrath, parallel to 10-man raiding. The initial tier gave us three raids to deal with - two mid-sized and one short one. I liked Valiona and Theralion in the Bastion of Twilight, but for the tier, my favorite fight was Nefarian in Blackwing Descent.
Nefarian is a great boss. He apparently hates all his minions, but he talks to the raid throughout the whole fight. He knows you're there, and he's confident (despite having been killed by, presumably, you before, in Blackwing Lair) that he can handle you even if his minions can't. This is a great throwback to the Rend Blackhand fight in Upper Blackrock Spire, where he observes and gives commentary and advice throughout the fight.
The fight itself gives you three phases, with a persistent electrocution effect at every 10% throughout. One of the interesting change-ups about the phases in Nefarian's fight is that they're not reliant on his health; you can't push him too far in phase one just because of the interplay with Onyxia's electrical charge; she'll blow up and wipe you if you ignore her too long, so you have to kill her and transition the phases. But phase two is a three minute phase regardless, and if your healers can handle it and you had enough ranged damage, you could burn him once the adds on the pillars are dead. Phase three is more complex compared to some burn phases, since you have to both not stand in moving fire and have your second tank kite around the skeletal adds.
We worked on him for weeks and I never resented it.
Ragnaros (Firelands)
I mentioned Firelands earlier, about how the fights are generally all more complex than the kind of fights we saw in Vanilla raids. Ragnaros was two cycling phases in Molten Core, but faced on his own turf, he's apparently much more devious and resourceful.
I liked Firelands overall; there was a lot more trash than the initial tier had, but it was all upfront. Once you got most of it out of the way, that was it, with just a few more pulls per boss. Between Staghelm and Ragnaros there's just an elemental and two worms, which, while admittedly more than was between Executus and Ragnaros, is just two pulls.
The fight was probably the first real adrenaline rush I got in Cataclysm, which was a bit disappointing given how many things we had killed by that time. There were positioning challenges on occasion, but really most of those stemmed from my camera angle and that damned fire gate that pops up to fence you in for the fight. It's the same problem I have on things like the Gunship in Dragon Soul: I turn to move, and suddenly I can't see anything, and damn it, I may as well have a cat in front of my monitor. (New cat hasn't yet learned that mommy can't see through him when she's playing her game but you can sit in my lap but wait I can't move my arm now could you--yeah, that kind of cat issue.)
But it has a nice first phase - stand around and shoot stuff but don't stand in the bombs and avoid the fire waves; the sons actually do something besides just mana drain now, so we have to kill/slow them fast. The second phase is also a nice challenge: stand apart, collapse and AOE, and hey, don't stand in the lava that spawns or the fire waves. The third phase? Boulders. (I may or may not have killed a warlock by feigning two off myself. Ahem.) The third phase has just enough tension built in the escalation of boulder-threats to make it enjoyable but not insanely frustrating if your raid is on its toes.
Warmaster Blackthorn
Okay, so Warmaster Blackthorn isn't really my favorite fight in Dragon Soul; Yor'sahj is, because I like the Skittles combinations and that which ones you kill decide how you react for the next part of the fight. (Personally I'd say kill the add-spawning one every time, but that isn't a universally popular choice. I just hate the adds.)
The most satisfying fight for Dragon Soul (in normal 10-man, not looking-for-raid), however, has been Warmaster Blackthorn, or really, "Keep the Boat Alive!" Warmaster Blackthorn has given us the epic kills of half-the-raid-dead-but-we-got-him, and it's sometimes got skin-of-the-teeth recoveries for not losing the boat. It's got two and a half phases, both challenging:
First, you have to keep the boat alive by blocking damage to it from the twilight dragons, while simultaneously killing the attackers they're dropping on you and keeping goblin sappers from blowing the ship out from under you. Oh, and you have to kill those twilight dragons that are spitting stuff at the boat, too.
Secondly, you have to deal with the attackers' leader, Warmaster Blackthorn and his steed, the twilight drake Goriona. I called it two and a half phases because the first part of the second half is dropping Goriona so she'll stop dropping void zones on the boat. Once she's gone (not down, gone; I do wonder if she's going to be back in the future), you can focus on the Warmaster, whose Shockwave can be a pain to get out of if he happens to drop it equally around you. Shockwave while Goriona is still around is especially dangerous, since if he stuns you, she tends to drop a void zone on you.
I'll admit there have been points during this expansion where I wonder if I'll keep raiding. I don't have the time or the energy to keep pushing multiple toons through, and as much as I've missed raid healing, I don't have the time to go back to it regularly in alt runs (and it's been intimidating to try in more complex content). And then we got to Dragon Soul. I liked the Firelands fights better, but the low-trash design of Dragon Soul? If they stick with this, if they keep the fights challenging but the time commitment to raiding at a reasonable level, I'm not going to worry about staying in it with at least my hunter.
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