Eye of Eternity is a great instance

I was reading this post on Larisa's blog and one of the end of year rewards really bugged me. Eye of Eternity was awarded least successful raid of Wrath so far. Without going into the merits of EoE just yet, I doubt I am the only person who thinks TOC is the worst raid Blizzard has ever made. TOC should win hand's down, lazy design, repetitive, some unoriginal encounters and forcing PVP. It made me quit raiding! So TOC is the clear winner for me.

Back to Eye of Eternity I find it frustrating how people are quick to judge the raid. Possibly my best memories of this expansion come from my guild conquering Malygos. The fight itself is my favourite style of boss, one with clearly differing phases. My favourite bosses in Wrath have been ones with phased fights, Malygos, Yogg-Saron and Mimiron. They're probably the only fights in the expansion who have any sustained challenge to them, and even now lazy raiders can cause a wipe there. There's a certain joy in nailing one of the phases, and then slowly improving until you have perfected each phase for the first kill. Malygos really set the standard for the phased fights in this expansion, and I'm certain the Arthas encounter will be like this, which is an exciting thought.

As for the three phases themselves, I found them all amazing. The first one was a gear check. If you don't have enough health, dps or healing on your gear, progress was going to be slow. Death Knights were given a chance to shine by death gripping the sparks. The first time I realised I could Killing Spree out of the air phases, I had to give myself a pat on the back for the extra dps I would be doing on the ground; every second counted if we wanted to get to Phase 2 fast enough.
Phase 2 was a dream for melee, flying around on magic UFO type things killing crazy mobs? Yes please! And then for the ground to collapse underneath you and ride a dragon to help kill a crazed one. The fight felt very cinematic, and being part of this epic fantasy battle was special. I remember how many nights my guild spent trying to kill him, and finally downing him was a real rush. As far as strictly 10 man progression raiding guilds went, we had arrived.

I feel the real unpopularity of this raid is not down to the vehicle mechanic at all, but actually down to bad players. Firstly for the first three or four months of the expansion this was the only un-pugable raid, and for players fast becoming familiar with face-rolling content, one wipe is unacceptable. The tendency was to blame it on so-called bad mechanics, than admit their own failure. The raid was not even very difficult despite the initial gear check, but it did require coordination and perfection. In ten man we knew we couldn't afford to lose anyone, so healing had to be perfect and players had to be careful not to be clumsy and lower their health (if we didn't have a priest, we even took health scrolls). The dps our gear gave us did not afford us any slip ups, or we would hit enrage. PuGs were going to struggle with this one. People should understand this was the final (normal mode) boss of the initial Wrath content, it was not meant to be easy or pugable. Certainly all three phased fights I've mentioned were unpugable for many months, because attempting to coordinate these with strangers is next to impossible unless higher level gear is carrying you.

The vehicle part of this fight is also criticized by people, but again I think this is a failure of the community rather than the fight itself. The ease of this stage is laughable if you spend ten minutes actually figuring it out rather than blindly spamming all buttons and dying fast. The first thing I would normally do is set /follow on our raid healer, this let me focus on doing my job rather than worrying about flying around, and I think half our raid did this because they were comfortable with that. As for the actual combat element, all I had to do was spam combo points just like my rogue, and leave some energy for defending myself. Oculus pre-nerf was actually far more challenging than this. Blizzard even made a daily quest for us to learn this overly simplistic mechanic, but this was beyond a large chunk of players ability.

Larisa says TOC was better because it offered fancy loot; I know Malygos dropped the Best-in-Slot BOE rogue ring which sold for 10k, so the gear was pretty damn good for my guild and we made a habit of farming Malygos once a week (usually one shotted after our first kill). She also says people didn't run it because it was unpopular, but I maintain it was because of it's difficulty; TOC is hugely unpopular but everyone runs it for free and easy gear. In fact one of it's major failings is that each week's staggered release of bosses were farmable so soon. This was never the case for Malygos; with the approach to casual 10 man raiding, you needed to be in a guild that had a very small core of raiders who had geared up fast rather than a spread of less well geared players, to even attempt Malygos. Hatred for content will never stop people from running it if gear rewards are promised; difficulty will.

Sometimes I do feel sorry for Blizzard, everyone is screaming for harder content but anything that takes more than five minutes work is bad. Maybe I am being overly arrogant about my personal experiences in this raid, but the vast majority of my guild have very similar feelings on how much they enjoyed the Malygos fight, so I definitely think it has more to do with how you approached it.