The Doomwalker is a boss mob
Boss is a quite general phrase used for several special types of mobs. The following boss types exist:
- Instance boss
- Outdoor boss
- Faction leaders in cities
Characteristics
A common characteristic for all bosses is that they have a unique name and appear only once in the game. Bosses are harder to kill than the "normal" elite mob of the same level, and all bosses are immune to Crowd Control. Bosses are usually divided into three classes of difficulty:
- miniboss
- normal boss
- skull type boss
Mini-Bosses are usually found only in instances. Good examples are Gatewatcher Gyro-Kill and Gatewatcher Iron-Hand in the Mechanar - they both hit hard and need a concentrated effort of the party, but are still not as dangerous as a real boss. Minibosses usually have smaller loot tables than other bosses.
The normal bosses are the most common variety. Every instance features several bosses (usually 3-5 for a 5 man instance).
Skull type bosses are the hardest mobs to kill in WoW. Their level is not displayed as a number, but as a death's head sign. These bosses actually have a "dynamic" level - when a numeric level is required for some calculation, they are considered to be 3 levels above the player character involved in that calculation. That is, if both a lvl 60 warrior and a lvl 65 druid both tank the same skull type boss, the boss will make crushing blows on the warrior as if it was 63, and on the druid as if it was 68. Similarly, the boss will resist their respective powers as a 63- and 68-level creature would.
Bosses usually have their own special loot tables. Nearly all BOP rare and epic items in the game stem from boss kills.
In the battlegrounds, boss type mobs can also be found. Alterac Valley for example features Vanndar Stormpike and Drek'thar as skull-type end bosses.
Boss Fights
The culmination of PvE are the raid level boss fights. Bosses in 5 man instances can be very tough and challenging, and may cause many wipes, but the raid bosses are designed to be a real challenge. They may take several evenings to learn, some may appear to be impossible to kill at first. Coordination and discipline of the whole raid are required, frequently one error by the least of the raid members may immediately cause a wipe. Many boss fights consist of different phases, where raid members have to pay attention to different aspects of the fight.
for an example of how a single member of a group can cause a wipe, see Leeroy Jenkins