Two Bosses Enter: The Curator vs. Archimonde

Two bosses enter... but just one will get to leave in our continuing series of fantasy boss deathmatches. We've selected 32 of the most dangerous and most interesting bosses around the World of Warcraft, and every week at WoW Insider we present you with another hypothetical boss fight. And the best part? You get to decide who wins!

This week we're considering The Curator from Karazhan and Archimonde from the Caverns of Time. Interested in learning a bit more about these two bosses -- and letting us know which one you think would be the best? Keep reading!

The Curator does both melee damage and arcane damage -- but the main danger when you encounter him are the Astral Flares he summons every 10 seconds during the fight (until he's out of mana). Each Astral Flare has a decent amount of HP and does both damage with both melee combat and a chain lightning ability. The Curator can summon ten of these friendly fellows before he runs out of mana -- at which point he'll use an Evocation ability (lasting 20 seconds). While Evocating he does no damage and takes more damage, so if you can survive until the first Evocation, it's the ideal time to bring him down. But if he doesn't die here, he'll go right back to summoning Astral Flares.

At 15% health, he'll enrage, increasing his melee and arcane damage, but stopping the summoning of more adds. And after 12 minutes, he'll berserk, which results in a wipe for a typical raid.

For full fight details, check The Curator's page on WoWWiki.

Archimonde does very respectable melee damage as well as incredibly high shadow damage. His special abilities include:

• a 5-6 second AOE fear, cast every 30 seconds

• Airburst, which does some damage and tosses the target high into the air

• a very high shadow-damage DoT

• Doomfire, a trail of fire that does damage to anyone who's in its path (painful for feared targets)

Archimonde has an incredibly high damage potential -- let's hope The Curator has some shadow resist gear to counter it. And worse than that, whenever anyone dies, the entire group takes some damage and is either silenced or takes 50% more damage for six seconds. Ouch.

For full details on the Archimonde encounter (though they're a bit sketchy), see WoWWiki.

Now, before you start to think this fight is just going to be an easy win for Archimonde, let's set some ground rules. While The Curator is a mid-difficulty boss in Karazhan and Archimonde is one of the hardest bosses currently in the game (with some guilds claiming he's a more difficult fight than Illidan), these fights wouldn't be any fun if we went into them always knowing the boss from the highest level instance was automatically going to win. Therefore, we want to assume that The Curator and Archimonde are the same level, and have similar health and damage capabilities. We're comparing their fighting styles, not drawing up a spreadsheet of hit points and average damage.

But that said, tell us what you think!

I hate to say it, but voting for this round is closed. But you can check the results of this round here and keep an eye on each week's matches as they occur here!