Firelands Sneak Peek: Ragnaros, the Firelord

(April Fools' 2011)

As many of you have been suspecting, we have been playing on Blizzard’s private Test Realm (pTR) for quite some time now doing specialized raid encounter testing. We have had the chance to test all of the 7 encounters in the Firelands raid instance coming in patch 4.2, and wanted to give a small sneak peek of the upcoming content.

Since most of the abilities from the Ragnaros 2.0 encounter seem to have been datamined already, we thought we’d start from that, and release a complete strategy guide for the 25-man heroic mode of the encounter based on our pTR experience.

 

Check out the strategy guide from here

 

Between the intensive testing sessions we asked Lazei to write down a few words about the boss:

Lazei:

"First I have to thank Blizzard for this amazing opportunity; we were given an unique chance to directly make an impact on WoW raid development. We love the game and we of course want to help Blizzard to make the game as good as possible. The first raid tier of Cataclysm wasn't exactly as polished and perfect as we have come to expect from Blizzard, and I guess the developers themselves probably weren't quite happy with how some of the bosses ended up dying. They contacted us, as we had already established ourselves as experts on raid stacking, clever use of game mechanics, and non-stop raiding for days on end, which made us the perfect quality assurance team for fine-tuning heroic mode encounters.

The pTR provided us with almost unlimited raid setup potential. We tried out pretty much everything, as is the Paragon raid mentality. Let's just say that the encounter initially wasn't balanced around having 20 paladins in the raid… Many changes were made, and we're happy to say that the encounter in its current state has near perfect class/spec balance. Even shamans are somewhat useful, despite the pretty much complete revamp they did with the class.

As for the fight itself, what an amazing encounter. It's requires a brutal combination of LK25H-like teamplay and pre-change Al'Akir 25H P1 individual player skill. All the other Cataclysm bosses, which were all pretty damn hard to begin with, are easily blown away by Ragnaros 2.0. On top of that, we were told that in the live version there will be a surpise they didn't want to show us yet.

Unfortunately our NDA disallows making available unreleased in-game art, so we cannot share videos or screenshots from our testing. The strategy itself is fair game though, and we wanted to release it beforehand so we wouldn’t have an unfair advantage in the upcoming race. I hope you have as much fun theorycrafting the fight as we did!"