Beware, there be spoilers beyond this point!
Today, while playing through the dwarven part of the Dragon Age: Origins storyline, I came across something interesting. Besides the obvious things like spells* that work more or less exactly like their World of Warcraft counterparts (Cone of Cold like it's namesake, Living Bomb = Seed of Corruption, for example), there were three encounters that either looked or even played rather similar to existing boss fights in Blizzard's MMO.
* EDIT: Ok, these spells are actually quite generic. I don't play many RPG games anymore, my bad. It wasn't my point anyway.
The first one was a room with 4 golems standing in a semi-circle. Approaching them activated them one after the other died. This is very similar to the last chamber before the final boss in Uldaman, although there's no gas to turn off, and the channeling altar is missing.
The second one was closer to the original. A long corridor with a line of golems standing along each wall. Stepping past a certain point would activate two of them, so it was required to proceed with care without activating them all by accident. This is almost exactly like the room after the second boss in the Halls of Lightning dungeon introduced in Wrath of the Lich King, where iron vrykul (think vikings) are lined up along the walls, and several of them randomly break lose to attack the group once stepping over certain points.
The last one was only by looks, but still quite apparent. A big room with blueish lighting and a pillar in the middle. On that pillar were four faces, one to each side. Approaching them would spawn ghosts, after a while, an anvil would glow. Touching it would inflict damage to the face opposite to the anvil, and the pillar would turn, showing a different face. The actual raid boss works different and only has three faces, but visually, this is similar to the Reliquary of Souls encounter in Black Temple, a high-end raid instance in the older expansion "The Burning Crusade".
I thought this was kind of a neat approach to give this roleplaying behemoth some kudos, even more because it's not totally obvious to someone who's not playing WoW a lot.
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