7. Serpentshrine Cavern (Burning Crusade)
The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft was one of the most influential when it came to the future of raids. It saw the shift from 40-man raids to 10 and 25-man as well was far more tuned and interesting mechanics. Among them, Serpentshrine Cavern stood not only as home to one of the expansion’s main villains, Lady Vashj, but also as a design building block for future successful raids. This was a 6-boss raid where the bosses could be done in almost any order. The bosses were fierce, but fair having multiple phases and revolutionary mechanics for the time. The Lady Vashj fight in particular was a premiere example of how a fight could be a complex amalgamation of order and chaos through scripted design resulting in a fully rewarding fight.
Serpentshrine Cavern also ditched the massive amount of trash monsters to fight in favor of a more streamlined raid and the trash it did have dropped very useful and powerful pieces of equipment. It also saw one of the most interesting boss fights of all time, The Lurker Below, which could only be spawned by having a character with 300 or more Fishing skill cast a line into a conspicuous looking water pool.
