The Weekly Marmot - Ragnaros and the Rest of Us

[Lore]

[iholycow]

Still haven't done the fight, would honestly love to (especially as a holy pally ). I don't think that any part of the fight is what makes it difficult, It's the sum of all its parts. Having 25 players spend 15-20minutes playing completely perfect each attempt is what is so tough about the fight.

I have never enjoyed this fight to be perfectly honest even on normal. I feel it was just a fight to be hard and not be fun. I get the sense the developers were just like, oh this is too easy what can we add to the fight to make it harder, oh its still too easy what else can we add, until they got it to its current state.

Heroic raganros is not only a guild killer its a server killer. So many servers are now completely barren because that top guild that was keeping it alive is now gone. How can one guild have this much power? Simply because of recruitment between servers. The better the top guilds are on your server the more likely raiders are going to transfer to it, as well as new characters started on it. When the top guild dies the in flow of new players stops and eventually the server just dies. This is why I always congratulate the top guild on my server when they kill a progression boss even if I don't like them as a guild.

Lore keep up the good work, and I hope my guild and yours as well don't fall victim to heroic ragnaros.

ps,

have you hit p4 1-2 meteors yet?

[Aggathon]

Hahaha, one of the best intros so far, imo.

[Pug]

I don't think you can measure boss difficulty by percentage like that. Heroic Ragnaros being 10 times harder than Baleroc just because 10 times more people have killed Baleroc. I don't question the fact that Heroic Ragnaros is a bigger step up than anything else in Firelands, but let's say that Heroic Ragnaros is "twice" as hard as anything else, then we have big majority of people who killed 6/7 post-nerf (25% easier). They weren't good enough to kill it pre-nerf, so let's say that the 6 first bosses is at 0,75 difficulty after the nerf, where they were at 1 pre-nerf. If Ragnaros was twice as hard pre-nerf it was at a 2. The 25% nerf put Ragnaros down to 1,5 in difficulty. It's still much harder than the pre-nerf versions of the other fights, and the 90% who have killed 6/7 hover between 0,75 and 1,5 in "skill". 10 times harder, nah. The real meat in the 6/7 community I don't think is spread out to that point. How do you measure a 10 times as skilled player anyway?

But, yes, they should have made Firelands a staircase instead of a floor followed by a wall.

[JRHShadow]

You mentioned a Nerf but Rag actually got one already (health)? The group that I Raid with is only 2/7 on normals so I obviously dont have experience on the subject except from the Learn 2 Raid site which went over the Rag (Heroic) fight (25 Man), I am not prepared. Though the author did mention that "Heroic Rag doesn't kill players, he kills Guilds", this ture except for the Top end Raid Guilds but even then guilds are banging their heads in on the wall over not downing Rag. There is one thing that I wonder about since I have read little about MoP. MoP doesn't have a main boss like Cata (Death Wing). Can we put in a possibility that Rag & Death Wing (at least in Heroic mode) will be the "Main Boss" so to speak, to kill in MoP? Even with higher item levels, how high of an iLevel does one need to kill (H) Rag with little difficulty and will MoP give people a "Better" chance at killing (H) Rag with better iLevel gear?

At my level I would say congratulations at killing normal mode Firelands but I am glad that at least a Majority of people have not killed (H) Rag. From what I see it's truly a Heroic fight and when you clear him it might go down as your greatest Achievement! One quick thought if Rag in heroic mode seems impossible what do you think about the difficulty of Death Wing and how hard that will be in Heroic mode?

[Fetzie]

I really have nothing to add to that.

Ragnaros is hard. So Hard.

We blast through the first 6 bosses without Well Fed expiring from the fish feast at Beth'tilac. We are not using Bloodlust at bosses that we previously needed it at to prevent having to sit around for 5 minutes while Sated runs out. Then we get to bash our heads against the wall that is Heroic Ragnaros. One mistake is almost definitely a death, and you might as well wipe the attempt right then, a CR'ed healer spawns in with about 10k mana, if the mage dies and his Evocation is on cooldown you can leave him dead - without any mana he is only a drain on healer mana while he does hardly any damage waiting for his mana to fill up.

I do definitely agree that Ragnaros is too hard in relation to the rest of the instance. Maybe he is simply still too hard. An extra 5 seconds between traps (P1), seed spawns (P2), engulfing flames (P2-3) and meteors(P3) may even be enough to make him killable for more players. Maybe reduce his health and all damage by 5%. Maybe increase the time between World in Flames flares by 0.5 seconds.

Maybe us 9000 don't deserve to kill him because we haven't been able to? I don't know. It would be nice to get the firelord title and the firehawk sometime, and rag isn't really a fight that you can over-gear later. Part of the problem for ten man raids is that it is a 25 man fight, scaled down for ten mans. A single meteor takes out 20% of your dps or 50% of your healing. The fact that you have more space to maneuver really does not compensate for this. The inability to combat res more than once really hurts here - an "unlucky" P1 death can prove devastating to the attempt if a healer dies in P2. On 25 man you can pick up both players, on 10 man you can't.

This is something Blizzard needs to learn for Dragon Soul and MoP: You cannot take a 25 man fight, reduce the boss' health by 55%, and leave it like that. Some mechanics simply do not work in 10 man. We saw this at bosses like Halfus (some raids took 3 tanks) and Magmaw (in the first incarnation you needed a third tank to ferry adds to the kiter) in T11 and fights like Ragnaros (P3 Meteors) in T12. Of course this would mean a lot more work for the encounter devs, and completely changing mechanics according to raid size would perhaps make the equality less transparent, but I think it is something that is necessary.

[Valaras]

Yes, Heroic Ragnaros is a big pain in the arse. So what? If you cannot kill him and morale has dropped so low that you cannot even see any progress after 2 months and it's no fun for you, then stop. Or even better, pressure yourself to get better.

For example, when we started on Ragnaros 1 month ago progress was slow due to 3-4 people in our 10 man roster just not being able to get used to the abilities that fast. Well, we tried our best to attract and recruit better people and voila, in our first night with a semi-decent roster (we still have no cloth DPS), we reached 30% of phase 4 (legs). I don't wanna say "Oh I'm so good" or anything, I still haven't killed the boss, but all I'm trying to say is that if you handle it correctly, there is no reason not to kill him, provided that you are determined.

In my opinion, there still need to be bosses that are extremely hard, so that only the very best can get the prestige and item rewards of actually killing them. They have made the other 6 bosses easy enough so that everyone who is a bit serious about raiding can easily clear in 2-3 raids and fill up in 391. If they now decide to just give Firelord to everyone, then screw them.

*EDIT AFTER WATCHING*

Yes I totally agree that the pacing in Firelands is crap. But the attitude I don't agree with (it was not claimed by Lore but others) is "This is supposed to be fun so, when it's not fun for me, nerf it so I'm done with it." As I said, if this is not fun, either stop and do something that IS fun or get better and enjoy the amazing feeling of accomplishment when you make it happen.

[MestHoop]

I'm a raid leader of a 6/7hc guild (only killed baleroc after the nerfs because we hadn't gotten to him before that) so we've been in the same boat for a while now as well.
We've actually actively been looking for other things to do to prevent having to do entire raid nights on rag. It would greatly increase our chance of downing him, however the memories of 3.3 and 3.4 were still too fresh in our minds (none of our current officers were in a leading position at the time and the RL back then basically forced everyone to do LK for several nights in a row).

We currently clear firelands heroic on our mains, then finish the night with rag hc on wednesday. BoT heroic on mains/alts so we can get the remaining sinestra gear we need (didn't down her in t11, so some items are actually still useful) + rag hc on Thursday.
On Sunday we tend to do firelands on our alts and then often call the raid when we're done (most of the time people aren't up for rag heroic on sunday or we're missing key players).
So with a 3 day raid schedule we still need to plan ahead, not to run into entire nights of nothing but rag hc.

Probably the saddest thing about this all, was that we thoroughly enjoyed the firelands heroic modes before the nerfs. As a tank, the Alysrazor fight on heroic was amazing! Even when we had it on farm I had to focus not to get hit by anything, feed my worm and keep DPS up on it to kill it in time. Now with the nerfs I can basically tank through tantrums, and adds die so fast that there's hardly anything to avoid to begin with (not to mention the fact I kill them ages before firestorm now, where as before it was always a close call).
I know they nerfed the place because of the low amount of guilds actually making progress in the place, but it kind of ruined the fun for a lot of us. The main reason why we're doing it on alts now, is because at least then the mechanics matter. On our mains we've been able to brute force pretty much every encounter aside from rag, the day the nerfs hit.

[Talvirr]

This fight is soul crushing. The difficulty of the 6 bosses before H Ragnaros is a serious issue, a bubble has been created in the community which contains 9000 guilds with raiders either getting burnt out or looking for a 7/7 H guild.
Raiders in these guilds have been stripped of progression, instead of working hard for the 3rd or 4th Heroic kill and gaining that feeling of satisfaction they are facerolling to 6/7 H and hitting the wall that is H Ragnaros.

H Ragnaros is a brutal encounter that has next to no room for error, even with perfect execution bad dreadflame/cloudburst/trap locations can destroy a solid 10 min attempt. With perfect execution the dps/hps check at certain parts of the fight mean many 6/7 H guilds won't see phase 4 or if the do it will be with 2+ meteors.

With so many 2-3/7 H guilds getting to 6/7 H the night after the nerf bat hit everything, dissatisfaction has set in amongst much of the raiding community bogged down on H Ragnaros. As a 7/7 H guild we are in an excellent spot recruiting wise looking forward to 4.3 but this is hurting the raiding scene in general.

If the nerf to the first 6 bosses hadn't of taken place, would we still see the same amount of guilds at 6/7H after this amount of time? And if it didn't happen, wouldn't it have allowed blizzard to nerf H Ragnaros again by now so we had more staggered progression and more H Ragnaros kills.

[Hnetto]

If you consider that 1000 guilds killed him and imagine that all off them are 25 man you have about 25000 people that killed Ragnaros Heroic. Consider now that WoW has 11 million subscribers. If you do the math you will realise that 0.22% of the WoW population killed Heroic Ragnaros.

Honestly he did not need to be such a brick wall in the way of progression. My guild has been bashing heads with him for about a month and i am starting to feel like Lore.

There is a limit on the amount of punishment that you are willing to take when you are trying to have fun.

[Revennant]

Hello,

I am a RL of a 7/7 hc guild and visit this web site every day for the past 10 months or so. Thought I just add a few things to the conversation. I'll try to be direct and short.

Is Ragnaros Heroic very hard compared to everything else? Yes.
That problem comes mainly due to the other 6 bosses being very easy in comparison. So where is the mistake? In my opinion when Blizz nerfed everything, they did it wrong.
~ Should have either nerfed only Ragnaros, and not touch the rest - so the fights get closer to one another in terms of challenge.
OR
~ Ignore all that and give a HP/+Healing/+DMG buff that stacks in time (like in ICC)
Honestly I believe it would have been a lot fairer if they hadn't touched anything but Ragnaros.

Does Ragnaros cause people to get raid burn out? Yes, for sure.
But that is how you tell apart the hardcore players and the those that just play for giggles. It is not the prize in the end it is the journey to that prize that makes the adventure epic. If you killed KJ or Illidan after 2 nights would you still remember it today? No.
It took us 2 months to kill Lich King heroic back in Wrath and it was one of the best experiences I have ever had in WoW and as for Ragnaros Heroic it took pretty much the same amount of time (minus 2 weeks maybe).

As for Lore -
Mate, you are the leader of this guild and if you do not tell people that you can kill this boss, if you don't or try at least, to keep their spirits high, it ain't gonna happen. Don't say "Who is going to die to Lava Wave this time? "Sigh"", but rather "I will stay on this boss and keep trying for 2 more months if I have to, but we will get him down. And when we do, it will be the greatest thing that ever happened to us in-game."

Here comes my personal opinion and I hope I do not offend anyone.
Not everyone is supposed to kill this boss. Remember how many people got to clear Naxx in Vanilla? Not many.
And I don't say that cause I killed it, no (Ragnaros, that is). If it's too hard, my guild wont be able to kill it either, some other will be though, so just roles are swapped. I rather not kill a boss and have some others achieve it, than everyone killing it. That is just no fun.
Which brings me to the previous statement - Not everyone is supposed to kill Ragnaros heroic. Think about it as Normal and Hard modes. There need to be something to separate these guilds apart.
If your players get hit by Lava Waves after 2 months of wiping, if the majority of people are not excited about the encounter and the glory that lies behind the kill, if the guild morale is low due to people not wanting to wipe, well then you not supposed to kill this boss.

I think I sound like a dick right now, but we went through the same problems in the past, but we conquered them. And so should you. And if people don't follow you, well then too bad for the guild and that's their loss, cause when you kill it in 4.3 it will mean almost nothing.

[Taelas]

We had a Realm First! Ragnaros announced yesterday. The top guild on my server, Unity Path, have just managed to kill Heroic Ragnaros -- after around two months of working on him, I believe. (I don't know when exactly they got 6/7, but I think it was 7th of September, which is exactly two months ago.)

[Elliot Walls]

I, for the most part, agree with you.

Let me step back - I'm a normal mode raider. I only rarely, I mean RARELY, touch heroic modes. I stay in normals not because I'm not good enough, but because I play the game for fun. If I resigned myself to the soul crushing stress of heroic raids my stress level would skyrocket.

I want to take what you said one step further. Ragnaros, at this time, needs to be brought in line with the rest of the bosses in Firelands, in both Normal AND Heroic. It's unacceptable for him to be this much harder than everything else in the instance. We were 6/7 the week after the nerf happened (2/7 prior), so we've now been grinding our head on Rag for many weeks. We usually put 4-6 hours every week into Ragnaros, and we have made progress. We are now getting into phase 4 fairly regularly. We've been into phase 5 a number of times, as well. On our best attempt was last night, we managed to get him to 22% health before we bit it.

As a normal mode guild, this is getting soul crushing. We're decent players, we've beaten everything else on normal, but Ragnaros is far and away harder than anything else we've encountered. It's like the LK fight all over again, only we're not yet at the end of the expansion. I'm worried that we'll start losing raiders soon, if that happens then we can kiss our chances at Rag goodbye. It would take days or weeks to acclimate someone new to the fight.

This is what I would do...
Reduce the number of adds from 8 to 6 in the in-between phases, eliminating the two closest adds to the hammer.
Reduce his health and damage by another 10 percent.

If they decide not to nerf Ragnaros, then many good raid teams may never get him in this cycle. I think that's a shame.

[Bovinity]

If they decide not to nerf Ragnaros, then many good raid teams may never get him in this cycle. I think that's a shame.

This isn't a troll or sarcasm, but to say that "good raid teams" can't kill Normal Ragnaros unless he's nerfed even more is a bit of a contradiction.

[Shaidar]

I can't say for sure since I lead a 7/7H guild but I have a couple ideas as to why Ragnaros feels so much more difficult/worse than previous bosses despite not necessarily being harder or worse. As Lore mentioned I don't think it has anything to do with Rag himself, but rather the difficulty, especially after the nerfs, of the first 6 bosses.
Now obviously the difficulty of the first 6 bosses doesn't really statistically effect the amount of time it takes a given guild to kill Rag. Presumably it takes a group the same amount of time to learn Rag regardless of when they make it to him as long as it occurs w/in a certain gear tier. What changes is who is able to reach him before the next nerf or next tier of gear gives more room for error.
One of the important things that is extremely relevant here is the motivation of the guilds/players who are able to spend this time working on rag currently. For those who are motivated by loot, Rag feels like a progression wall, you hit him and you get nothing for 2+ months that gives you a reward response. However, for those motivated by progression and who view loot as merely a means to an end, Rag is full of rewarding progression milestones. The first time everything clicks and seeds go flawlessly, the first time you push 1-2 meteors in phase 3 and so on. I think one major point Lore misses and that some replies in this thread have touched on is that it's really important for the raid leaders to identify and positively reinforce these progression milestones as actual accomplishments. Sure, that wont satisfy the loot driven players but if killing Rag is your goal than you really don't want those kind of players around anyways.

Hmm I'm rambling, maybe I'll just throw this into the RL guide for heroic rag when I do it this week.
Cheers,
-Shaid

[Scottpoet]

So Paragon killed Ragnaros after 500+ attempts amounting to probably 100hrs of time spent. Then Method achieved world second about a week later and I would guess probably put in closer to 1000+ attempts albeit 200hrs. Both of these guilds are good enough that their players are competitive with other heroic raid guilds in gear a full tier above them.

So if you are in a guild, that once upgraded firelands in gear you can raid as effectively as Method, raiding 4 nights a week for 5 hours would require you to raid 10 weeks (2.5 months) straight of ragnaros. Even with Paragon's amazing world first at 500+ attempts that is still 5 weeks of work on a fairly ambitious raiding schedule.

From practical point of view, that is just too much time for 25 people to come together and not make any progress.

[Bovinity]

So Paragon killed Ragnaros after 500+ attempts amounting to probably 100hrs of time spent. Then Method achieved world second about a week later and I would guess probably put in closer to 1000+ attempts albeit 200hrs. Both of these guilds are good enough that their players are competitive with other heroic raid guilds in gear a full tier above them.

So if you are in a guild, that once upgraded firelands in gear you can raid as effectively as Method, raiding 4 nights a week for 5 hours would require you to raid 10 weeks (2.5 months) straight of ragnaros. Even with Paragon's amazing world first at 500+ attempts that is still 5 weeks of work on a fairly ambitious raiding schedule.

You're forgetting that guilds like Paragon were doing the pre-nerf version of Rag and probably doing it with gear that would get you rejected from most 6/7H guilds now. Plenty of 3-night/week guilds are downing H-Rag now.

[Hnetto]

I agree that not everyone is supposed to kill this boss. However, neither the stepping stone between 6/7 H to 7/7 H should be so huge, nor the amount of people having sucess in this fight should be so small.

Either, the way to heroic Rag should be a tiny bit easier or the rest of the heroic modes should not be as easy as they are now. Personally i think the second is the correct one. Once the nerfs hit we breezed thru content that would have taken us much longer to go thru.

[Code_Man65]

Ok, as someone who is 6/7H and has put in some time on Heroic Rags I am going to chime in. Is Rags a huge step up from every other boss in the instance? Oh hell yes. Is he brutally hard? Yes. Is he a guild killer? Most definitely. Did Blizzard screw up by keeping him this hard this long? I'm leaning towards yes. Let's look at a couple things that I think are big factors in what makes him such a brick wall and guild killer.

1. He has an exceptionally small room for error. Even post nerf a single death before P4 can completely screw you and each phase has things that can kill someone easily and sometimes without them being able to do a thing (I.E. you get knocked back in P1 into a lava wave). You have to be basically flawless for 10 minutes to even get to the really hard portion of the fight. Everything before that is considered the "easy" part. Very few people can play mistake free for that long. And the seeds throw your communication into focus. I have noticed more and more guilds moving to mumble simply because of P2 (side note: give me mumble over vent any day, wish my current guild would move to it). On P2 if you are even a little slow you die.

2. For most people it just isn't a fun fight because of how much you have to do. Now, I realize fun is subjective but I have seen this statement from many people at this point. While I think the final boss needs to be harder than the others in the instance making it this much harder is going a bit too far.

So what needs to be done? To be honest I am not sure. They could nerf him in someway that keeps him hard but not soul crushing (maybe lower the amount of seeds and sons that spawn and increase the meteor timer) or leave him alone and let him stand as a boss that only 2% of WoW's raiding population killed while he was relevant.

[Talvirr]

So Paragon killed Ragnaros after 500+ attempts amounting to probably 100hrs of time spent. Then Method achieved world second about a week later and I would guess probably put in closer to 1000+ attempts albeit 200hrs. Both of these guilds are good enough that their players are competitive with other heroic raid guilds in gear a full tier above them.

So if you are in a guild, that once upgraded firelands in gear you can raid as effectively as Method, raiding 4 nights a week for 5 hours would require you to raid 10 weeks (2.5 months) straight of ragnaros. Even with Paragon's amazing world first at 500+ attempts that is still 5 weeks of work on a fairly ambitious raiding schedule.

From practical point of view, that is just too much time for 25 people to come together and not make any progress.

We are a 9 hour a week guild which downed H Ragnaros about a month ago (6/7 H prenerf), with the gear from all those weeks of clearing and the strats being published it still took us 270 wipes but its far from the effort that the leading guilds put in.

In all honesty if a guild is putting in 20 hours a week and making no progress then maybe they are not up to the challenge and should step back. Also there is a big difference between no progress and no kill, once you have trapped the meteor in phase 4 you have seen the fight. It is just purely an execution issue from that point on.