What makes raid encounters "fun"?
I agree with Devro here. Pre-BC Raid groups had 20 - 40 people in them and on many encounters, possibly even the entire instance, it only took 20-25 people giving 100% to pull the raid along. As the main puller in my last guild I had to give everything that I had and constantly be paying attention while staying at the top of the dmg charts. For many of the rest of the raid members a simple /follow or autoshot would make it seem as though they were putting out any effort to the raid.
I feel that Blizzard has definitely improved on this with the new instances. Every person has to pul their weight or else the raid will not be successful. It just takes one person to slip up once on any given encounter to ruin a boss attempt. With the respawn timers the way that they are it can be devastating to be on a 2nd or 3rd attempt on a boss and have someone slip up on their certain duty because then you have to clear all the way back to the boss and setup all over again. The time that doing that each time takes is very consuming on the raid and definitely takes up a large portion of the raid time.
Also, group composition. This is something that can make or break a raid as well. If you do not have a certain group composition then your raid will have a very difficult time at defeating or clearing to a certain boss.
On an end note, the thing that makes raiding fun for me is the teamwork, the dedication to clear an instance from each member, and being able to look back on months past. It is fun to be able to look back and be like "I remember when such and such boss was hard and we couldn't beat him. Now he is too easy." I can name out many bosses like that.
I don't know why but I remember our first Nef kill having the sweetest taste of all of them. There is no particular reason other than we just wanted to take him down Soooooo bad. We took down Chromie and then hit a wall with Nef for quite some time. Once we took him down the first time he was still hard for the next few times because we seemed to get different sets of Adds for the next few weeks.
(First kill was black and blue BTW)
Neffy was always an important one because he was the biggest and baddest in the game for a loooooooong time. T2 chest was the best there was until Naxx came around.
We dropped him the night before the Naxx patch - we have a habit of doing that with new bosses. If only there was a patch once a week we'd be farming Illidan by now ;p
I agree. Nef definitely gave a guild a great feeling after downing him for the first time. I had just left my guild back in December and helped a guild down him for the first time a couple months before BC released. It was a great feeling that I was able to be there and help them out with it even though BC was right around the corner.
After that I joined a guild that was killing bosses in Naxx and we killed Noth and Maexxna for the first time in my first raid with them and then after that they stopped raiding since there was only a couple more weeks to BC. It is still a great feeling to be able to down bosses for the first time, not just for the satisfaction of the first time kill but because of all of the work that led up to that one fight.
I agree Tarz. If your luck was that great I think that your guild would be on top of the WoW world right now. LoL.
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DevroWhat makes raiding most fun for me would include the following: a personal challenge, obligated teamwork, and rewards that match the effort of the encounter.
By personal challenge, I mean that the encounter would have to force me to play in such a way that I can not slack off without letting my guild nor myself down.
By obligated teamwork, I mean that the encounter should force a guild or raid group to rely and trust one another to conquer a particular encounter. Encounters that allow 5-10 people in a raid to sit back and do very little (as certain members of my Naxx guild operated before TBC was released) while still achieving success is not fun to me.
And finally, by rewards, I mean items that are actually worth using after working so hard to complete and encounter. So many of Gruul's (pre-nerf) and Magtheridon's items are somewhat lame for the effort and teamwork required.