As the premier MMORPG for over a decade, you'd better believe that World of Warcraft has a lot of surprisingly tough bosses and dungeons eager to punish any unprepared adventurers.
- World of Warcraft has wake-up call instances (dungeons).
- While the earliest just contain slightly tougher monsters, with bosses almost indistinguishable from the monsters around them, one of the first to step beyond this was Shadowfang Keep. Packed to the gills with monsters that drain life, summon allies, become magic immune, curse, stun, slow and silence. And has a boss that teleports around the room shooting at you, and transforms one of the party into his worgen slaves.
- Lord Godfrey, Arugal's replacement, uses a Pistol Barrage that kills anyone that stands in it, puts DOTs on random players with Cursed Bullet, and summons adds.
- Another shock is the mid-level Zul'Farrak instance, where a bad pull will lead to half the dungeon coming down upon you. Much of the stereotype of Death Knights as bumbling idiots comes from the fact that they begin at a higher level than these instances, so the player hasn't taken the Death Knight into any instances at all when everyone else is supposed to be on the ball.
- Heroic dungeons in Cataclysm served as a wakeup to players whose experience with Heroic difficulty was in WotLK. The difficulty spike was more akin to what players experienced in Burning Crusade.
- Progression raiding is sprinkled with what are called "gear check" bosses; no matter how clever you think you are, you simply have to have a basic level of stats or these guys will pound you into the dirt. The prime example of this being Patchwerk, from Naxxramas. He does only two things: Beat the tanks, and beat the tanks harder once he's below 5% health. He has a short enrage timer, though, after which he will mercilessly oneshot anything that happens not to be himself. So you are standing there, and the only thing you have to do is beat him hard, so he falls before the enrage is hit. He is meant to be a check, if you gear suffices to bring him down. If not, the rest of the bosses would have murdered you anyway.
- Each time there's a new expansion, the new dungeon accesible immediately to the player has quite challenging bosses. In Burning Crusade, they give you Vazruden and Nazan in Hellfire Ramparts and Broggok in Hellfire Blood Furnace. And in Wrath of the Lich King, there is Keristrasza in Nexus. Also, at max level (70 in The Burning Crusade, 80 in Wrath of the Lich King, and 85 in Cataclysm), characters may begin entering heroic dungeons, which are powered up versions of the standard ones, as well as raid dungeons intended for 10 or 25 players (the original game had 40-man raids). These are significantly more difficult than normal dungeons in terms of the level of gear needed to survive, the skill and coordination required of players, and often the challenge of getting a group together in the first place. Also, raid dungeons lock players into a particular "instance" of that dungeon for a period ranging from 3 days to a week, making consistent and prompt attendance essential. The result of this is that new players who have never tried to tackle endgame content face a brutal learning curve, especially if they can't get into a guild that's been raiding for a long time and can train them. In the original World of Warcraft, this dungeon was Molten Core; Karazhan served the function in The Burning Crusade, and Naxxramas is the Wrath of the Lich King equivalent, although Blizzard has made a conscious attempt to lower the bar to raiding by making the latter relatively easy.
- The second boss of the Construct Quarter Grobbulus inWrath of the Lich King definitely qualifies, since players will often elect to face him early in the dungeon. Although previous bosses are designed to be beaten through sheer power, Grobbulus lays deadly patches of poison gas where he stands and summons additional mooks throughout the encounter, necessitating strategic movement and co-ordination. Gluth and Thaddius serve to drive Grobbulus's point home (although many guilds will elect to fight Gluth and Thaddius close to the end).
- Almost every starting zone also offers a Wake Up Call Boss in the form of a quest requiring the player to kill an elite NPC that is significantly more challenging than the normal enemies the player has fought to that point. The most well known of these is Hogger, a level 10 mob in Elwynn Forest, who is so infamous for slaughtering newbies that he's become a Memetic Badass as well as a That One Boss.
- Sunwell Plateau could be described as an entire wake up call dungeon, but specifically the first two bosses, Kalecgos and Brutallus, who were both significantly harder than Illidan (the final boss of the dungeon before SWP,) forced a large number of players to learn to play or go home. Countless guilds maybe scraped a Kalecgos kill or two but failed to make so much as a proverbial dent in Brutallus, causing them to give up (or perhaps even just break up entirely.) M'uru had a similar effect on the guilds that made it to him.
- A late expansion example is the trio of dungeons released in "Fall of the Lich King", at a point where everyone got used to breezing through dungeons even on heroic difficulty on autopilot. Many of the bosses could be considered this, depending on how long it takes for the player to realize that they have to pay attention this time. The Devourer of Souls would be the first, often catching players off guard when he uses a new attack at low health, a wandering beam that swiftly kills anyone standing in it, as well as making people kill themselves with his mirrored soul spell. All of the bosses in Pit of Saron count to some extent as well.
- The abominations, Festergut and Rotface, are this for Icecrown Citadel. The former is a DPS race that requires the party members with the spores to stand in the right place to spread them to the rest of the raid to avoid a wipe when he uses Pungent Blight. The latter requires players who get Mutated Infection to kite the slimes on them to the person with the large slime without running into anyone else's slime on the way, in order to control the rate at which large, explosive slimes form. In both of these, all the players have to know what they're doing in order to survive, and many Icecrown Citadel raids do not get further than these two.
- One of the most notorious examples came pre-expansion in the form of Blackwing Lair. The very first encounter is Razorgore the Untamed, the second hardest boss in the instance. Note encounter, not simply first boss. Razorgore requires an unbelievable amount of guild coordination and several good tanks that can reliably hold off multiple enemies at once. If you manage to beat Razorgore, the very next room is home to Vaelastrasz the Corrupt, the hardest boss in the instance (including Nefarian). Vael requires so much fire resistance that he makes Ragnaros look like a cigarette lighter in comparison, and you only have a very limited amount of time to kill him, requiring the raid to do a huge amount of damage. Blackwing Lair was a notorious guild killer back in the day. Even with Wot LK and Cataclysm (20 & 25+ levels, and shiny new equipment), Vael is still not a trivial fight.
- Razorgore becomes difficult for a different reason with a high level group. He has less than 500,000 HP (about what most heroic WOTLK 5-man bosses have and what Cataclysm 5-man trash mobs have), and is easy to kill, but many groups will try to kill him before destroying the eggs, leading to a wipe when he casts an instant-death spell on the entire raid upon dying. This serves as proof that players can't simply zerg their way though old raids.
- Every boss in the early instances of Cataclysm will kill you in one hit if you don't obey their mechanics; this is meant to re-temper players after wrath content was made easy by the accessability of gear.
- All of the bosses in Blackrock Descent qualify. Rom'ogg binds the party with chains which must be broken before he one-shots the entire party. Corla requires the party to balance a stacking debuff between the player characters and a few cultists to keep everyone from being transformed into a drakonid (and mind controlled in the case of the players) and invariably causing a wipe. Karsh Steelbender has to be run through flames to remove his armor (which reduces all attacks to Scratch Damage) but also buff his damage, and if the debuff falls off the party is hit by an aoe for massive damage. Beauty regularly fears the party and will enrage if Runty is killed. Finally, Obsidius has three minions that must be kited (and which always attack the most recent aggro) and regularly switches places with one of them.
