If there is one thing Blizzard isn't lacking, it is money. They got money everywhere. And where does that money come from? World of Warcraft, of course. Plain and simple, it's all about WoW. In 2007 Blizzard's revenues were a whopping 814 Million Euro (profits aren't known yet, but it should be approximately 200 Million Euro), the release of The Burning Crusade being a major factor there. WoW is such a good cash cow that even the Vivendi Chief Financial Officer Philippe Capron (Blizzard is owned by Vivendi) praised World of Warcraft : “We are clearly running out of superlatives for Vivendi Games, especially World of Warcraft". Now besides it being funny that a CFO is talking about video games, it of course shows the immense impact World of Warcraft is having on a 22 Billion Euro company.

Now the fact that Blizzard earns (a lot) of money isn't bad, they're a company whose final goal is earning money (ye ye, they also want to satisfy customers and save some rain forest somewhere) and they are obviously good at what they're doing. But still, the knowledge that they earn so much money makes you look differently at certain things, like the low quality of new content, which is important for me as an end game raider. Patch after patch we're confronted with flawed boss mechanics and/or bugged encounters. And as Blizzard is a company and we are their customers, we should get a working, bug-free product, especially if they are making so much money off of selling that product to us. But apparently Blizzard doesn't find it necessary to spend some extra money on developers and testers to ensure that we, their customers, get what we pay for - a working product.

Now how many broken products did Blizzard sell me? Sadly too many and if there was a decent alternative I probably would have switched to another supplier already. Now which products were the worst in my eyes? A little list.

At number 5: Al'Ar. This golden birdie is seen by many as one of the best raid encounters in design and biggest failures in practice. The initial Al'Ar was supposed to land at random spots (on the high ring) in phase 1 and spawn little birdies each time he took off. These spawns were supposed to work as an enrage timer as he would spawn more and more as time passed by and you would be overrun if you didn't DPS him down fast enough. This created a really high paced, mobile and thrilling fight. It wasn't enough that the pace at which Al'Ar spawned its adds was completely out of control and impossible to keep up with, but Al'Ar would keep spawning new ones. I estimate we had around 30 spawns being off-tanked by the time we actually managed to kill him, just to find out that there was a phase 2 - not good. Phase 2 was also completely overtuned, 20k random charges, random fire patches and 150k damage meteors that the raid had to soak up followed up by a 3-4k AoE on that same spot that healed Al'Ar and then created three more spawns, an ability that he used every 2 minutes. Very hard to deal with, impossible as you still have the 30 adds from phase 1 being off-tanked. So all in all a very well designed encounter that was just destroyed by bad tuning.

At number 4: Magtheridon. This old ruler of Outland is supposed to be an entry level raid encounter in TBC, but he certainly wasn't tuned like that. Raids with fresh 70s that had just geared up through Karazhan and heroics were confronted with an insanely overtuned encounter, wiping any raid that even dared to enter the lair. It started with the trash, packs of 3 caster mobs doing AoE fears, 3k AoE shadow bolts and hitting like a truck; with today's standard they should have dropped T6 items. If you managed to kill these packs and reach Magtheridon, you were confronted with no less then 5 of these mobs guarding him. Attacking these guards would start the encounter and Magtheridon would join the fight in a few minutes. To make it a bit harder, these 5 guards also spawned elementals on a regular basis, as they had to be stronger then the normal trash, of course. If you managed to deal with the 5 adds before Magtheridon joined in, then the real encounter could start, the oh-so-feared cube clicking. That part of the encounter is basically the same as today, except that the debuff the player received after clicking a cube was 4 times longer than today, and each cube needed a 4 player rotation on it to stop Magtheridon from doing his AoE. As an extra bonus, Magtheridon would aggro all the trash in his liar, which was on a 1h respawn timer - nothing beats hordes of trash jumping you - while you are fighting a boss of course. Again an encounter that was designed quite ok, but the tuning was just horrible.

On number 3: Lady Vashj. Final boss in Serpentshrine Cavern, so she is supposed to be not just tough, but also a special kind of encounter, worthy of a final boss. Again, the design was outstanding, three different phases, a new raid mechanism - again, really good. But the tuning... Phase 1 was maybe slightly undertuned, not really bad as a warm up round, but phase two and three were just insane. Phase two is about disabling the forcefield around her, loads of adds spawning, some of which contained the needed items to dismantle the forcefield in question; a good plan, just too bad that the spawning rate was ridiculously high and that all adds had way too much HP. The raid was simply being overrun. After some tuning by developers and a lot of practice it was possible to overcome this phase and see what phase three had in store. Now phase 3 was a blast, basically the same as phase one but now there were also rays being spawned that bombarded the raid with an AoE attack. The killer in phase three was without a doubt the mind control ability, 5 players were mind controlled and received a +500 healing/+100% damage buff, one shotting the other raid members. Anyone that was Mc'd was of course invulnerable to crowd control, as that would be too easy. Not to forget that phase three was on a 4 minute timer also, so it was do or die, most of the times ending in the latter. Again the proper tuning of an encounter proved too much to ask from Blizzard.

On number 2: Gruul. I've seen a lot of raid encounters (all), but this one is the worst I've ever seen in terms of game mechanics. Again, we're talking about an entry level encounter, meant for new raiders and guilds, so doing this encounter should get guilds/raiders used to 25 man raids, but I think all Gruul did was chase guilds/raiders away from the raid scene. If one of the first raid bosses was this hard, unpredictable and annoying, then the rest had to be even worse. Gruul was - and is - a DPS race against his growths, each growth enhancing his damage. Bottom line is if you don't kill him fast enough, he will simply kill you. The ability that will kill you is shatter, one of worst abilities ever used in WoW. It's completely random, the players can hardly do anything against it and it can kill your entire raid with one bad throw. Combine this with Gruul being slightly overtuned and you got an encounter born from nightmares. The design team that made this encounter should be demoted to designing shrubbery.


And in the number one spot : Morogrim Tidewalker. What? Wait, Morogrim is damn easy, a lot of people will say. Well yes, but that is Morogrim 1.3 (I think) and I am talking about Morogrim 1.0. And Morogrim 1.0 was a completely different encounter than it is today. I don't think I've ever seen a boss wipe a raid this fast, time after time after time. He just blew us away, we lasted 55 seconds tops, 60 if we were lucky. The problem wasn't really Morogrim himself, he did the same as today, not much, but the adds he spawned... Damn! Today he spawns two groups of six murlocs each, not too hard to deal with. But back in the old days he used to spawn four groups of six murlocks each, and on top of that he also spawned four water elementals who did an AoE attack and were immune to damage! Any mage or lock trying to AoE the murlocs would sure as hell draw aggro of loose murlocks. So yeah, someone at Blizzard thought it would be a good idea to make sure that the 28 adds were al tanked and then killed by single target DPS, only 28 adds per wave, shouldn't be too hard, you had 45 seconds until the next wave - perfectly doable. Needless to say we withdrew quite fast, realizing we were outmatched.

My top five of bad encounters, Kael'Thas and Archimonde just didn't make it, they were too good. Too bad for them!