It had to be the first time out raid team took down Ragnaros within Molten Core in World of Warcraft. This took 40 people working together for months working our way past all the other bosses and then trying for weeks to finally kill him. I remember when he went down there were 7 of us still alive, only one healer up. Everyone on Ventrilo was screaming for joy when he died. I remember jumping to my feet screaming "%#$ YA"! It was the feeling of months of hard work paying off. Nothing feels better than when you put in a lot of hard-working into anything, and it pays off. The Jouncy to get to that point is the best. The victory at the end if just the icing on the cake.
Well... Boss/Mob... Raid... Thats hard to say...
Basicly, not only the "Endboss" is, what most players remember (thats what i find out, chatting with other, old MMORPG-Players), they remember whole Raids or Events. It was not only "Raiding 'Venril Sathir', it was "Raiding 'Charsis' or 'Raiding 'Lady Vox', it was 'Raiding in Permafrost'. I personal having good memories about the classic dungeons (original EQ, RoK and SoV), also the Planes, like Fear, Hate and Sky. It was not only "Taking down the Boss", it was more like the "Whole Event", you know... Preparing an hour, before eveything starts, chatting with friends, guildmembers, raidmember, coordianting transports, getting more friends to the event and stuff. Then, entering the Dungeon, burning down the complete entraces at one (depends on the dungeons ofcorse, hehe) and then you notice, how harder it becomes, they deeper you get into the dungeon. at the beginning it was like "HA! No problem! Easy beans!", but then, it becomes slower, more tactical, more commands from raid/groupleaders. In the last part of the journey, ppls start dying (sometimes), they need rezz's, re-buffing... And then, finally, THE BOSS! Sometimes impressive, gigantic monsters, sometimes, cute looking rotting frogs... And killing the endboss is like, the dot on the "i", as a bonus. Someone will get a decent loot, some wont. But that wasnt the important thing, back then. It was the event in it whole. Sure, it was cool, to get a cool weapon or a new robe... but hey... you managed to survive an raid through an zone, youll never be able to visit alone, right? You socialized with others, friends and stuff. "Kill the Boss" is just a proof, you finished a Dungeon ;).
And: I really(!) hope, you not going to make "1-way dungeons", like in WoW, or even instanced **it... Keep it real, keep it like in Vanilla EQ, ok? Thank you :).
Our (My wife and me) special raid mob was Trakkanon in EQ2. It was our first raid dungeon with a hardcore guild and there was plenty to do in the raid, as well as looking out for, while fighting him. Trakkanon used to pick two random people in the raid and placed an explosive detrimental effect (Mark of repulsion) on them. You then had to run out the raid. If not, the raid would be knocked up and back into the lava. Well, this was drummed into everyone's head by the passionate raid-master, and we even opened up, what we thought, a detrimental window looking out for the icon (Hourglass picture). The fight would start and BOOM! everyone would go flying. This would go on and on for a couple of hours. We knew it wasn't us because we never once saw that damn hourglass picture in the detrimental window but no one was owning up to the mistake.
So after a failed raid session, we accessed the situation and noticed the window we were staring at the whole time was our beneficial window and not the detrimental window! Man did we feel foolish!! But what an epic fight! I think it took the guild a couple of months to get to Trakkanon and a couple more months to then down Trakkanon. The guild had to work together as a unit and everyone had to be aware of their surroundings, so no one could slack. Once we downed him for the first time, the cheers over the microphones were deafening!
I also think the epic nature of the fight was that this was the last mob of an epic dungeon that dropped the raid breastplate for us to complete the raid set. Back in those days, having a full set of VP gear meant something and people noticed. Such great memories!!
Zinbar said:...It was the feeling of months of hard work paying off. Nothing feels better than when you put in a lot of hard-working into anything, and it pays off. The Jouncy to get to that point is the best. The victory at the end if just the icing on the cake.
So true! As a guild going forward, you feel so good taking on future raid bosses knowing, as a unit, you can down anything. True teamwork.
Finally clearing ALL of Fear in EQ1. We did the hole camp in the back of the zone so everyone could get there and waited until the set time and 40 people logged in at once and it was on....the first time we did Hate took us a little over 8 hours. Just the fact that anyone could get in on the raid, there was a Brell Serilis board on the web and if you met level and had the required spells/resists you could sign up for a role in the raid or you'd get on stand-by for when the person selected had to go you'd get the call and be summoned. I doubt me and the wife have that king of time but the fact that we only ever had the time once in a while made it special to go. Great game hope a lot of the mechanics and game play and hardcoreness of EQ make it into Pantheon. Man I will never forget so many moments in that game. Too many to start listing here.
Che'drak The Ancient or The Direvine Matron. 2 pita raid encounters, but the cheers when we killed them was epic. To be one of the first 5 guilds in the world to down them felt spectacular.
"Epic" is hard to define. I tend to like more technical battles with interesting mechanics. I'm not much of a fan of "max dps" type fights.
2 Raid bosses come to mind that had good mechanics/interesting battles.
~The Titan in DDO was an interesting fight.
You couldn't hit him unless his shields were down. You got his shields down by hitting him multiple times with a large laser that was suspended over the fight area. One player could move around the "gun" on a grid using a control panel.
The laser would only actually hit the Titan if he was knocked to the ground. There were a bunch of pillars around the room that could be attacked and knocked over...and if you knocked them over in the right direction, with the Titan positioned in the right place they would hit the Titan and knock him dowm. You had a couple second window to hit the titan with the laser while he was down. The tank would have to position the Titan in the right place for it to be targeted by the laser.
There were upper ledges where some players could hide during the pillar/shield taking down stage. The titan would do a ground smash knocking people down off the ledges. Once it's shields were down after multiple hits he was attackable by everyone. It was an interesting and creative fight design. I have never seen another fight quite like it.
~Another boss fight I enjoyed figuring out, the first few times especially, was emperor SSra fight in EQ.
It has been awhile but this is what I remember: There were multiple adds in the room (the emperors guards) that had to be dealt with in different ways. Some of the adds couldn't be mezzed. They had to be slowed and offtanked for the whole fight because their spawn time was very fast. These guards were no joke, they would ruin your raid if not handled. Others could be mezzed...again, they had to be controlled the whole fight because of a fast (almost instant) spawn time. The Emperor himself had a fairly large ae...and the fight took place in a fairly small room that had "cubby" areas on the side. The adds would have to be controlled in these cubbies or the ae would hit them and break their control (I think the emperors ae had a dispell component to it as well as damage). It was helpful to have the main tank position the emperor as far in the corner as posible, away from the controlled mobs.
The emperor himself had a decent amount of hitpoints for the time so the fight was a little bit long and the guard mobs had to be controlled the whole fight or they would tear up your raid. So it ended up that there had to be a couple tanks, a couple healers 1 or 2 slowers and a couple enchanters/ bards all dealing with the emperors guards the whole fight while the rest of the raid killed the boss. It was a fun fight to figure out. A lot of positioning and tactics.
I have so many memories I can't even begin to think of them all.....its like getting an academy award and thanking everyone and forgetting someone like your spouse. I'll leave something out but off the top of my head:
I remember some insanely high HP mob off of Echo Caverns, I think, - it was a total zergfest and it took hours of raiding chipping away to beat him.
Xegony was so painful when we were Time flagging - our guild probably wiped on her over a dozen times. We were so exhausted after weeks of trying we didn't even celebrate when she finally died. It was memorable because of how HARD it was. And we were so close for so long.
All the other guild and open-raid Time flagging raids were the best times ever.
One of my favorites was Phingel Atropos - just such a challenge and different environment than your typical raid location.
Helping people with their cleric epic was a great memory. I was completely humbled every time I got so much help with my epics (mage 1.0, chanter 1.0, chanter 1.5/2.0, rogue 1.0).
My most satisfying ever was when I three boxed (with three mercenaries) Morrell's Ascendant and beat that by myself (on the second try) - not a raid but it was epic!
I also loved the raids on City of Mist - it was all so dangerous and so scary.
1. This one isn't reall a specific raid boss, the best raid I was ever on had to deal with a bad break in of Fear that resulted in 6h corpse run which consisted of multiple guilds. While this resulted in a couple lost levels was probably the most memorable experience I had in any MMO. As pissed off as I was with the week it would take me to grind back those levels, it was a good time.
2. Emp Ssra. Main reason is that it required teamwork, everyone felt effective. It wasn't just a tank keep tank alive spank type of fight.
*edit* quick shoutout to burrower event, cause was not expecting that mayham the first time we came accross it.
My favorite and most memorable boss encounter has to be Shiver, an APW raid bos in VG.
The first time I ever fought Shiver was when I was the leader of our guild's raid force. It was a challenging fight to lead but also a lot of fun. It was one of the first fights that required a lot of micro-management. Instead of issuing one command and the entire guild acting upon it, I had individual roles for many people. There was a group of people who had their mez duties. We had to MT the boss. We had to engage and disengage at certain health percentages. There were adds that when died bursted an aoe fire which was needed if a player became frozen. At certain percentages for the boss players would have to run and hide from him or they'd wind up frozen. So on and so forth, the fight had a lot of moving parts. (my memory is not pristine so don't quote me on those strats but they are close if not accurate)
I remember going in each night hoping it would be the night we'd be successful and for a few nights of utter dissapointment we'd have to collect ourselves and try and try again. After so long we'd call it a wrap or go fight someone else easier to take our frustrations out on. Leading a raid is a ton of fun but can be strenuous at times because you have so many people depending on you. Not only do they expect you to know the answers and to have the proper strategy to win but they also depend on you to make sure the other 23 people are doing what they are supposed to be doing and that they don't screw up.
I still remember that night when we finally defeated Shiver. A big reason why it was so memorable was not because we finally one, though that feeling was great in itself, but because we won very unconventionally. After a few days of going in and wiping and then revising our strat we finally created our final strat, the one that worked. We just needed to execute it properly without flaw. Everything was going great, going smoothly. We had cleared a few of the adds and had one left. All we needed to do was get the boss to the final 20%, hide and then switch to the final add and burn that down, unfreeze our tank, and then burn the boss down. Well, something had happened to where we killed the add but our tank never got unfrozen and because the boss placed a debuff on the MT that basically made it so no other tank could step in to tank we had to band-aid the situation and do it quickly. IIrc we could still rope the player even thuogh they were frozen, either way we moved Shiver to our MT so they could take the brunt of the damage and the rest of the raid just unleashed. There was nothing stopping us from this victory. In the end it was a little sloppy and ugly but we won.
For me, this was one for the books. Not only did we overcome the challenge and finally defeat Shiver, we won when the raid appeared to be coming undone. Such a great night. I can still hear the cheers over teamspeak.
You guys didn't disappoint! Awesome stories and epic bosses, I am glad to see so many good memories being relived!
@Dravid, Shendu was awesome man! :)
We raided The Hole in EQ and killed Master Yeal. A good friend of mine who played a rouge got the serpents tooth dagger, and that was a big deal at the time. The entire zone was so cool at the time I will just never forget it. It took quite a long time to complete. The night before we did not have enough people and we all died. I remember a guy got on a low level halfling cleric that pledged to the God Brell Serelis and was able to drag our bodies out. The Hole was so deep that if you fell into it you would zone on the way down.
I was not there, but I remember it reverberating through the game of Everquest; and that was the 200 man raid in 2003 that managed to kill the unkillable Dragon, The Mighty Kerafyrm. Turns out he was immune to all spells except the Wizards Spell Manaburn and the Shadow Knight Harm touch spell. About 300 Million Hit Points and I remember reading at the time that he had an AE spell so powerful it killed everything in the entire zone. That is some Epic stuff right there and deserves a mention just because we are talking about raids.
First Plane of Fear raid. 24+ uniterrupted hours of fights, wipes, respawns, a zone crash resulting in full respawn, more wipes then finally killing the last NPC in the zone. Everyone managed to get something they needed, nobody walking away empty handed. Plane of Fear was the only zone in all of EQ1 that I truly was always nervous about zoning into.
Early EQ planes were probably the most memorable for me as well. They were truly frightening early on. Compared to what we know about mmos 20 years later, we were all giant newbs and pretty horrible at the game if we're being honest. It was really fun though. It never took us 24 hours to clear Plane of Fear, but we wiped a number of times before clearing everything and killing Cazic.
Its just one more reason Pantheon must be even harder than EQ. What we wiped doing with 40 people could actually be accomplished with a single group of smart players (4 groups of 50s for Cazic).
Dullahan said: Its just one more reason Pantheon must be even harder than EQ. What we wiped doing with 40 people could actually be accomplished with a single group of smart players (4 groups of 50s for Cazic).
I agree 100%, although I think the difficulty curve should start similar to EQ so as not to run off new players. The curve should be a steep one though because even those new players will be grouping and raiding with MMOG vets.
Abacda said:Finally clearing ALL of Fear in EQ1. We did the hole camp in the back of the zone so everyone could get there and waited until the set time and 40 people logged in at once and it was on....the first time we did Hate took us a little over 8 hours. Just the fact that anyone could get in on the raid, there was a Brell Serilis board on the web and if you met level and had the required spells/resists you could sign up for a role in the raid or you'd get on stand-by for when the person selected had to go you'd get the call and be summoned. I doubt me and the wife have that king of time but the fact that we only ever had the time once in a while made it special to go. Great game hope a lot of the mechanics and game play and hardcoreness of EQ make it into Pantheon. Man I will never forget so many moments in that game. Too many to start listing here.
Man, I remember that one with our group. Had to have a survival pack too. Munchies, soda err beer and a break schedule!
It was insane but the best memories I have in the game.
Ox
My most Epic would be killing the contested Avatar of war in EQ2 on a pvp server. We fought with the Qeyno factions for hours before finnaly gaining the upper hand. With our block force in place and fighting off the 60 or so People trying to stop us we pulled it. the fight went great until about 10 percent health was left one of the healers in the Main tank group lost connection and the MT went down. Snapping Aggro to my paladin I tanked for as long as I could using every clicky and spell I had to stay alive after I went down at 2 percent the mob went appshit crazy killing people left and right. We had about 3 people left when a Bards auto attack went off and killed the mob. Server first kill and my Paladin got a shiny Bracelet that the MT didnt want so I got for zero DKP :D