wow Number of Raid Bosses Per Expansion

[Stan 5,046]

We're looking at how many raid bosses each World of Warcraft expansion has introduced.

This chart, created by Reddit user throwaway4201251315, lays out the count of raid bosses across all WoW expansions, including Dragonflight.

The chart's fine details are hard to make out, but it's clear that the original Vanilla version launched with the highest number of raid bosses (about 55-60), whereas Dragonflight had the fewest (around 25-30), a figure similar to what we saw in Cataclysm. Notably, Blizzard's decision to skip .3 patches and the introduction of Fated Raids have contributed to a declining trend in the number of raid bosses in both Shadowlands and Dragonflight.

It seems that players generally prefer raids with 8-9 bosses, finding larger raids like Ny'alotha and Sepulcher to be exhausting.

Comment
byu/throwaway4201251315 from discussion
inwow

Source: Reddit

[Recool 26]

its just the raid size and walkway inc trash

if its a big raid with long walkways and massiv trash it will always feel .... even if there only 5 bosses 
but with less ways to walk from boss to boss and less trash 10-12 bosses are ok too 
 

[TheCake 130]

Quality over Quantity, imo.
But it was nice in WoTLK with the 1-boss Sartherion stuff etc, I think we should have that again.

[Brightamethyst 87]

Yeah. I miss small raids like Onyxia, Gruul, Sarth/Halion, etc. They break up the somewhat exhausting slog of 9-12 boss marathons.

[Nicolae 6]

I would love to see 2 or 3 raids with fewer bosses, with a total of 9, than 1 raid.

One raid per patch feels a bit empty for me.

They could play with this, 1 raid with 5 and 1 with 4 and so on.

[Cham79 76]

Lower Quantity for similar quality

[Migol 433]

I'm perfectly fine with Boss counts as is, but I do miss the "one off" lair bosses like Gruul, Magetheridon, Onyxia and so on.

I absolutely do not miss the hours and hours of trash clearing of Vanilla raids though.    Just no.

[Arcling 887]

10 bosses at maximum is fine in my opinion. It should be about the quality of encounters and not quantity and I don't mind if there are some small 1 boss raids.

[Grumar 186]

I like my raids to be 12-13 bosses, either that or i would like for them to return to doing smaller raids to fill out a tier like in BC. DF felt half baked and cut short just like WoD, if your expansion is just pushing 3 raids with out even 10+ bosses each it comes across as rushed or just lazy. I hate how blizzard is trying to say we're going to get so much more content sooner just like in DF during next 3 expansions when DF has been one of the worst expansions raiding content wise. shows me there is a very bleak future for raiding all because blizzard is using this rushed expansion as a blue print moving forward for some reason.

Edited December 5, 2023 by Grumar