Don't try too hard to earn that blog-comment Pulitzer, man.

Not trying, I said this exact thing before almost a week ago, and the most I got was "LAWL U WAN DEM TO REDU FITES?!"

I for one, like your writing style, it is a breath of fresh air in a normaly stale room full of words rambled together missing letters to look "leet"

Yeah, I could get behind this idea. A small something to give each boss a bit of flavor, but that's easily picked up by a PUG (green stuff is bad, mmkay). I think that's kind of what they were going for with the different jousters -- the Mage has Sheep, the Rogue drops poison zones, the Hunter has lightning arrows (woot, Amazon!), etc.

The article just obsesses over this encounter WAY too much. Recreating a raid boss you pick using a convoluted system and then all your abilities regress to some arbitrary level? It's literally HALF of a boss encounter in a 5-Man (Eadric being the other half). That's like complaining that the barber shops don't include a 3-D model editor to create your own haircuts or that the Oracle/Frenzyheart dailies don't have a rich interaction system a la Mass Effect or KOTOR 2.

Yeah, it seems rather odd to go from a group of champions having something unique to their respective classes (sans the lightning arrow unless Diablo counts heh) to a bunch of bosses that we fought, who suddenly seemed to lose everything they could do. True its just something brought forth from our memories, but honestly?

Who could forget some giant dragon breathing flames down on you and 39 of your mates? Or having to play Ring Around the Rosy with some wrinkly undead fellow and the volatile, toxic walls of goop he happens to conjure up in some pattern, as if teasing you. And I can bet you that every alliance player can remember how badly Hogger messed them up their first time against him.
Hell, I roll Horde normally, but long ago I dabbled with a human warrior, and I played up til I got face to face, mano e gnollo, with Hogger, and he promptly shoved my cruddy shield up places that shouldn't get splinters...

One reason people were probably so excited about this particular fight, was the fact we could face off against something from the old world content, bring a little zing and nostalgia to the encounter. But what kind of zing can you get when you know that one of the most dreaded and craftiest of end-game bosses (Onixya) is not only just as powerful, but also has the same abilities as the lowly gnoll cheiftan we probably took vengeance upon many times over once we hit 20?

None, if any at all. The only reason lore-wise that these shadows can fight on our level, is because we remember fighting them as mighty, imposing beings at the time, which doesn't change when we move on (because from that lore point, we didn't kill Onixya 50 times), so when brought forth from the memories, they are capable of fighting us. So there is no excuse for them not to have at least one tool of original destruction from their bags-o-tricks.

@ Epik, thanks for the compliment

And Jab, sometimes I wish the local barbershops did have that kind of technology... I'd like to see how my hair might look in a mohawk, without you know... actually shaving a large portion of my head and applying enough gel to pin down a shitsu to keep my hair from following the laws of gravity... =P

Just to add this, but I saw this on the 3rd page, Scott has a bloody long list that I rather like. Could use a tweak or two, but overall is something I was actually expecting Blizzard to do with this encounter.