Hello front page! Long time, no see!
I wasn't present for our Azgalor kill, which occured Monday night before the patch. I have, however, fought Azgalor in the past, back in Warcraft 3. And he was really hard then -- you couldn't kill him. For anyone who played the WC3 single player campaign, I hope you'll agree that Blizzard definitely got that map right, forming the basis for what would become the Battle for Mount Hyjal raid zone.
Now, as I said, I haven't played this encounter, nor any encounter since Al'ar, but I get the distinct impression from reading the forums that this is not one of the finer fights in the game.
In fact, it sounds like it's a combination of several of the worst fights in the game, implementing idiotic mechanics from such gems as: Grand Widow Faerlina, Gruul and Vaelastrasz. Given Tigole's often-quoted epic rant against bosses with death touch, you'd think he'd shy away from implementing that on a fight like this. On Vaelastrasz it wasn't even that bad (well, after they removed the encounter's reset timer), but Azgalor now comes with a death touch after about forty minutes of painful trash waves (and everyone just loves trash waves like this while learning an encounter).
Now, to add to the stupid of this fight, there's a wicked Rain of Fire. It's targeted, mind you, so if you run melee heavy your melee will spend half the fight running out of RoF and trying not to die to DOTs. It can presumably target the NPCs that melee him too. It was stupid as hell having this mechanic on Faerlina and it's even more stupid now, thanks to this next ability: the AoE silence.
An AoE silence isn't a terrible mechanic I'll admit; it has its uses for gear checking and finishing off a badly weakened raid. But when you couple it with largely unavoidable damage on your melee classes, and your healers randomly getting death touched by Doom, you really do have the makings of one of the worst fights the game has seen in a while.
Oh well. On to Archimonde, my pretties. Good luck.
Edit: Except there was nothing bad about Faerlina. =(
Edit: Who wrote that? Yes there was! Awful, awful fight. Probably the worst one in the zone. --arc
Edit: Faerlina was one of the best encounters in Naxxramas, and everyone LOVED it. loved.
Edit: Mystery editor must have been in a different Naxx than the rest of us. --Star
Edit: I bet it's Yamato. Who does he think he is editing my news post, the guild leader or something? Anyway, Faerlina sucked, end of discussion. --arc
Edit: Your old lives, your mortal desires mean nothing! You are acolytes of the master now, and you will serve the cause without question. The greatest glory is to die in the master's service... =x
Edit: That was the best part of the fight! --arc
Edit: I loved Grand Widow Faerlina! --Seraph