5 of the Hardest World of Warcraft Raid Bosses

World of Warcraft has had some tough bosses over the years, so let's look back at some of the Hardest raid bosses WoW has had (in our opinion).

We've not included anything from Dragonflight or Shadowlands for now, as recency bias gets in the way a little. But, that's enough admin, for now, time to get into this list.

C’thun 

C’thun was unkillable in his original form and with the gear available to players pre-Naxxramas raid tier. Back in 2006, it was discussed among hardcore players that the fight was actually mathematically impossible, even with everyone alive. As Classic rolled around, people used private server information to dispute the claim, however, as people point out in the Reddit post, private WoW servers are simply not a reliable source due to them not always getting the code spot on.

As we moved into Classic, C’thun in the post-nerf state hasn’t caused many guilds a lot of problems. C’thun is the only Classic boss we’ll include here, because, unfortunately, Classic has shown that WoW back in the day just wasn’t as hard as we remember. The players are better, and the bosses are better tested and patched faster. C’thun does live on in infamy to this day as “the hardest boss in Vanilla,” so for that alone, it deserves to be on this list.

Mythic Uu’nat

 The most recent boss on this list, Uu’nat, was the first boss in the BFA mini-raid Crucible of Storms. Uu’nat is a slight oddity on this list, as he’s not a final boss. It was a fight that caused guilds issues even in Heroic, my own guild was stuck on it for some time; however, our kill actually moved us into the top 1000 guilds in the World at the time. The boss was just tactically that complex, mixed with the fight's length and the fact that you needed everyone alive at the end even to kill the boss.

The fight was eventually killed by European guild Pieces after 731 attempts, claiming their first world 1st in the process. Pieces would later go on to claim the world first of the entire raid tier, putting the guild firmly on the map as one of the world's top World of Warcraft guilds.

Muru (Pre-nerf)

Only 5 guilds managed to kill it in this state – lots of people had to go leatherworking due to bloodlust/heroism. Even after the first nerf, it was still nearly impossible to kill. It took a third flat HP nerf to the boss to help. Muru would have probably stayed in this near unkillable state for longer if it wasn’t for Blizzard wanting people to move onto Kil’Jaedan, the final boss of the Sunwell raid. Had Muru been the last boss, it might have stayed that way for months.

Kil’Jaedan is statistically also one of the most challenging bosses in WoW; however, that had a lot to do with Muru not being killed, thus fewer guilds actually had a chance to take him down. Kil’Jaeden did get his shot as a true hardest boss later in WoW, when players finally fought the fully formed version of the boss.

Legion Kil’Jaeden 

While his Burning Crusade appearance was one of the least killed bosses in WoW, his second iteration in Legion goes down as one of WoW’s hardest. With over 650 wipes before European guild Method got a world first, it would take the second-placed guild 900 attempts before they finally fell the boss. It was a tactical mess of a fight and another long one at that. It was also one of the few bosses to feature a secret Mythic phase at the end of the fight, leading to even more on-the-fly tactical work being done by top guilds. Especially so in a time before streaming of the WoW boss fights.

Blizzard had to tune the fight mid-progress after guilds said it wasn’t possible to kill. In an appearance on the WoW Podcast “Allcraft” Method leader Sco noted that after 400 wipes, Blizzard finally nerfed the fight. It would take them another 200 to finally down the boss.

Heroic Lich King

The Lich King took Paragon 170 attempts to kill, which might seem like a low number considering the wipe count. However, this was back when you could only pull a boss 50 times a week in Heroic. Now, that dosn’t mean Paragon took 4 weeks to kill the boss, it just meant they had an army of alts running the encounter as well, both to test tactics and actually attempt to claim the world first.

The fight wasn’t a particularly buggy one; however, it was well-known for a guild that was banned for abusing a bug with Saronite Bombs. What happened was, when using this consumable, you could “regrow” platforms that would negate the Valkyrie mechanic, causing them to drop you off on the platform rather than off the edge. The guild, Ensidia, did this during the Normal version of the fight (when this Valkyrie mechanic was not present). They claimed they had no idea the bomb was doing it. Blizzard, however, issued the guild a temporary ban anyway, meaning they had no one to progress in Heroic.