Putting the War in World of Warcraft

There is a list that exists in approximately ten thousand variations. It’s found on gaming websites, forum threads, YouTube videos, and Reddit comment sections. It is the list of the best raids in World of Warcraft. And while the specific order shifts depending on who is writing and what era they raided in, the top tier is remarkably stable. Ulduar. Icecrown Citadel. Throne of Thunder. Black Temple. These are the canonical answers, the ones that win by consensus, the raids that defined what raiding could be.

I want to talk about two raids that are almost never on that list, or when they are, sit near the bottom of it. I want to argue that they might be doing something more sophisticated than any raid above them – and that the reason they don't rank higher reveals something important about how we evaluate designed experiences, and how badly our vocabulary is failing us.

The raids are the Siege of Orgrimmar, the climax of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, and the Battle of Dazar'alor, from Battle for Azeroth. Neither is widely celebrated. Neither would most players cite as their favorite. And yet both have lodged themselves in my memory in a way that Ulduar, for all its mechanical brilliance, never quite has.

When players discuss what makes a raid great, the conversation almost always lands in the same places. Boss design. Encounter variety. The elegance of the hard mode structure. How satisfying the progression felt. Whether the trash was interesting or merely a tax on your time between the real content.

These are legitimate criteria. They are also almost exclusively mechanical criteria. And Ulduar earns its throne by mechanical standards that remain genuinely breathtaking. The hard modes in Ulduar were invisible – you triggered them by doing something in the fight itself, not by selecting a difficulty from a menu. The bosses were creative. The pacing was nearly perfect. It is, on those axes, a near-flawless piece of design.

But here is the thing about Ulduar that nobody puts in the tier list justification: it never asks you to feel anything about Ulduar.

Yogg-Saron is a spectacular boss encounter. The Old God corruption mechanic, the descent into madness, the final chamber – these are extraordinary pieces of fight design. But you never knew Ulduar before it was corrupted. You have no before-picture. You arrive, you discover something terrible has happened, you progress toward stopping it. The location is magnificent, the stakes are cosmically high, and at no point does the game reach into your accumulated history with the world and pull something out that you didn't know was there.

The raids I want to talk about do exactly that. Constantly. Mercilessly.

Most raids position you as a small strike force. However enormous the stakes – a sleeping Old God, a demon lord, a death god sitting on a throne of ice – the framing is intimate. You are the chosen few who can go where armies cannot. You slip through defenses. You delve into depths. You are, in the most literal sense of the word, adventurers.

The Siege of Orgrimmar is something different from the moment you zone in.

The portal into the instance is not a mystical gateway in some neutral location. It is a hole ripped open in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms – a zone that players spent the entirety of the Mists of Pandaria expansion learning to love, a place of extraordinary stillness and beauty that existed as a kind of sanctuary at the center of the continent. And it has been destroyed. The sha corruption spreads from the wound in the earth like an infection. The Vale that was pristine is now a scar, and the entrance to the raid is the scar itself.

This is not an accident. Before you have fought a single boss, before you have cleared a single trash pack, the game has already asked something of you. It has already reached into your accumulated experience of this expansion and twisted it.

What follows is a progression unlike most raids. The first four bosses take place in the mines beneath the Vale – you are descending into the source of the corruption, fighting your way deeper. Then an archmage teleports you to the outskirts of Orgrimmar, and the next two bosses are about one thing: breaching the front gates of the Horde capital. You are not sneaking in. You are not finding a side entrance. You are hammering at the front door of the enemy's most recognizable city, and when it opens, you pour through.

You are the tip of a spear. You can feel the weight of everything behind you.

This is the feeling I keep coming back to when I think about what separates these raids from the ones above them on every list. It is a feeling of motion. Of military advance. Of momentum that has its own gravity. You encounter resistance in the form of a boss fight, you overcome it, and then you continue your advance. There is an implied army at your back. There is an implied race against time at your front. Garrosh Hellscream is right now, in this moment, consolidating power – corrupting his city further, preparing something terrible, buying time with the soldiers he sends against you. He has agency. He is not waiting for you to arrive. Every boss in the middle of the raid is buying him time, and you can feel that.

For a game called Warcraft, it is remarkable how rarely you feel like you are at war.

These raids are the exception.

There is a concept in psychology about the human brain's extraordinary sensitivity to change. We are difference-spotters by nature, wired to notice when something in a familiar environment has shifted. It is a survival instinct, and it runs deep.

Game designers rarely get to use it. Building familiarity takes time – sometimes years. Most games can't afford that investment. But World of Warcraft has been running for two decades, and players carry enormous accumulated experience with its world. The Siege of Orgrimmar spends that accumulated experience like currency.

The front half of the raid takes place in locations players already know. The corrupted Vale. The gates of Orgrimmar. The main thoroughfare of the city itself – the place you've landed on a flight path a hundred times, the auction house, the bank, the familiar layout of enemy territory that you've navigated since the beginning of your relationship with this game. And in every location, something is wrong. The architecture is the same and everything else is different. The sha corruption bleeds through the streets. Garrosh's loyalists have remade the city in his image. The Orgrimmar you knew is gone, and what replaced it is a monument to what happens when a faction turns on its own values.

Your brain does the comparison automatically. You don't decide to feel the wrongness – you just feel it. The before-picture exists in your memory, and the after-picture is what you're standing in, and the distance between them is the emotional engine of the entire raid.

The Battle of Dazar'alor operates on the same principle, but the city in question is one Alliance players spent a single expansion exploring rather than years. The designers compensated by making the city itself extraordinary – the golden pyramid of Dazar'alor, tiered and magnificent, is one of the most visually striking locations in the game's history. You climb it. You advance through its levels. You fight your way into the throne room at its heart. The geography is the narrative: progress is conquest, and the city communicates its grandeur and its age with every step you take through it.

Both raids understand something that dungeon-crawl design usually misses: a location is not just a backdrop. It is a character. And like any character, it can be wounded, transformed, lost. The best raid design makes you feel that loss.

Here is a complication that neither raid resolves, and that I think is part of why they resist easy ranking.

Both raids are experienced differently depending on which faction you play.

In the Siege of Orgrimmar, the Alliance player is a conqueror. You are the invading force, and Orgrimmar is enemy territory that has fallen to something monstrous. You are delivering justice. The moral position is clear, the momentum is righteous, and when you finally reach Garrosh, you are the instrument of accountability descending on a tyrant. It is a satisfying story.

The Horde player is in a civil war.

The people you're fighting through are your people – or were, before they chose Garrosh's side. The city you're tearing apart is your city. The NPCs around you aren't obstacles; they're your faction's loyalists who made the wrong choice. You are not liberating Orgrimmar. You are dismantling it from the inside, hoping there will be something worth saving when you're done.

Same bosses. Same hallways. Completely different emotional story.

The Battle of Dazar'alor takes this further by mechanically enforcing the perspective shift. The raid is structured so that both factions play a portion of the content as members of the opposing faction – not just thematically, but literally, your character model changing, your racials changing, your place in the story changing. For three bosses in the middle of the raid, you are playing as the enemy.

As the Alliance, you breach the palace and reach King Rastakhan's throne room. Genn Greymane demands his surrender on behalf of Anduin Wrynn. And Rastakhan – who has ruled the Zandalari Empire for over two hundred years, who watched his patron loa die and made a desperate bargain with the loa of death to keep his kingdom alive, who has spent an entire expansion fighting to protect his people – refuses. He will not bow. Zandalar will endure long after the Alliance has crumbled to dust.

You kill him.

His last words, before he dies, are his daughter's name.

And then Genn Greymane says "Rastakhan chose his fate when he sided with the Horde." And Shaw says "We can savor our victory back in Boralus."

Those lines land as hollow and ugly, and they are supposed to. Because the writing made Rastakhan sympathetic. He wasn't a villain. He was a king defending his home. And you just killed him.

Then the perspective flips. You become the Horde. You see what you did from the other side. And then you hunt Jaina.

Compare this to Garrosh: a warchief who turned his capital into a military prison, who unearthed an artifact of Old God power and used it to corrupt his own people, who betrayed the Horde's leaders and murdered anyone who challenged him. There is no ambiguity in Garrosh. He earned what's coming. You are justice.

Rastakhan earned nothing except a foreign invasion he couldn't survive.

This is the moral spectrum these two raids are navigating, and it is a spectrum that most raids never touch. You can rank Ulduar by its hard modes. You cannot rank what it feels like to realize, halfway through a boss fight, that you are the villain of this story from a certain point of view. There is no tier list category for that.

I want to say something about music, and I want to say it carefully, because there is a complication.

Players can turn the music off. In World of Warcraft, as in most PC games, the audio settings are fully in the player's hands. This means that any design decision that relies on music being present is built on sand. You cannot make music load-bearing. The raid has to work in silence.

The Siege of Orgrimmar works in silence. The geography, the momentum, the familiarity weaponized against your accumulated experience – none of that requires sound. The emotional architecture stands without it.

But the Battle of Dazar'alor has a secret for the players whose music is on.

The orchestral suite that plays through that raid – anchored by the piece called “Zandalar Forever” – is some that I believe is among the finest music World of Warcraft has ever produced. It has a raw energy, a forward momentum, a quality of something being built and then released that matches the raid's narrative arc almost perfectly. And at its center is percussion. Heavy, insistent, unmissable percussion. Drums.

This is not accidental. Drums are pre-linguistic. They bypass the analytical brain and go straight to something older – heartbeat, march, urgency. You don't decide to feel the drums. You feel them. And in a raid that has already primed you with the sensation of military advance, of being the tip of something massive moving forward, the addition of that sonic layer is almost unfair in how effective it is.

Some players experienced the Battle of Dazar'alor as a good raid. Some experienced it as something they will carry for years. The content is identical. The difference, in many cases, is whether the music was playing.

This is what I mean when I call music a force multiplier rather than a foundation. It cannot create emotional resonance from nothing. But where emotional resonance already exists – where the design has already done the work of making the player feel something – music can take that feeling and make it enormous. It is additive in the best possible sense. It elevates what already works into something that transcends the category of "game content" entirely.

The players who will never know what they missed are the ones who turned it off.

I want to return to those tier lists, because I think they reveal something important.

When Siege of Orgrimmar appears on a best-raids list, the language around it is almost always narrative. "The most cinematic raid in WoW's history." "Palpable stakes." "A raid that gave you the feeling of being part of something larger." When it doesn't appear, the criticism is almost always structural – it ran for too long as the only available tier, causing burnout; some of the bosses in the middle felt like filler; the subterranean Garrosh sections lost the momentum of the city assault.

These are fair criticisms. The raid is not mechanically perfect. But here is what strikes me: the criteria being used to evaluate it are the wrong criteria for what the raid is actually doing. Asking whether Siege has elegant hard mode design is like asking whether a war film has good car chases. It's a real question. It's just not the right question.

The raids that consistently top the lists – Ulduar, Throne of Thunder, Black Temple – are masterworks of encounter design. They are studied, iterated, praised for specific mechanical innovations that influenced everything that came after them. They deserve their position.

But they don't make you feel like you're at war. They don't weaponize your history with the world against you. They don't put you in the moral position of a conqueror and then force you to see what conquest costs. They don't end with a king's last word being his daughter's name.

The things that make Siege and Dazar'alor special are things that are genuinely difficult to articulate, and because they're difficult to articulate, they get underweighted in the discourse. Emotional resonance doesn't have a tier. Moral complexity doesn't have a ranking system. The feeling of momentum – of being the tip of a spear, of an invasion with real stakes and real consequences – doesn't fit neatly into a rubric built around encounter mechanics.

So the raids get acknowledged. Sometimes warmly. And then they get ranked below the ones whose excellence is easier to explain.

Some games are great because of their gameplay. Some games are great because of what they mean. And we have good language for the first category and almost none for the second.

This is not a WoW-specific problem. It shows up everywhere that critics and communities try to evaluate designed experiences. The games that win "best of all time" discussions are usually the ones whose excellence is most legible – the tightest mechanics, the most elegant systems, the most innovative design decisions. The games that lodge in memory and refuse to leave are often the ones doing something that's harder to name.

What Siege of Orgrimmar and Battle of Dazar'alor are doing is building emotional architecture. They are constructing conditions under which players might feel something genuine – not the satisfaction of a well-executed pull, not the dopamine of a tier piece dropping, but something closer to what you feel watching a film that catches you off guard. Grief, maybe. Moral discomfort. The specific weight of winning a war and not feeling clean about it afterward.

They use familiarity as a weapon. They create momentum that feels like more than mechanics. They give players different moral positions depending on which faction they're standing in. They fill the air with music that hits older and deeper than analysis. And they do all of this while also being functional raids with tuned encounters and loot tables and all the infrastructure that the game requires.

That is not a small achievement. It is, in some ways, a harder achievement than making a mechanically perfect encounter – because mechanics can be tested and iterated, but emotional resonance depends on a thousand variables you can't control, including what the player brings to the table from years of accumulated experience.

The players who knew the Vale of Eternal Blossoms before it was destroyed. The players whose music was on. The players who, as Alliance, felt the guilt of Rastakhan's last breath, and then, as Horde, felt the righteous fury of pursuit. Those players had an experience that no tier list has ever properly accounted for.

They were playing the same raid as everyone else. But they were in a different story.

And I would argue that getting players into that story – making them feel something they weren't expecting to feel inside what is ultimately a repeatable piece of game content – is one of the most sophisticated things a designer can do.

We just haven't figured out how to give it the credit it deserves.