Life After Ragnaros

Is there life after a boss kill? Ragnaros has now been dead for a couple of days and the members have returned from balls to the walls to normal raiding. I wanted to give the guys some slack and not attack them immediately with interview questions, but now they have rested enough and should still have the kill fresh in their minds.

Manaflask also interviewed Arx and zYN about Ragnaros, and you might want to check the article out.

 

What's going on at the moment a few days after the kill?

Lazei: Slacking. Playing other games.

Lappe: Oh Ragnaros Ragnaros... we meet again, only this time im sure we will kill you - again.

Kruf: At the moment I'm sitting at work, catching up on what happened during my vacation, and in the evening I'm going to be setting up furniture in my new apartment.

Rakez: Nothing special really, planning on doing a bit more outside of WoW now that we're back to the "one raid each week" schedule. If only the caster legendary wasn't so tedious to farm...

Arx: Very busy writing things, no time to slack off yet.

Jhazrun: We're no strangers to lo- wait, no. Winning. To winning, and I imagine most having long since returned to their own routines. At times (read: every hour of every day) it feels like the world-firsts mean more to the forums than ourselves, but who are we to complain? That stuff's golden!

 

Did you expect Ragnaros to go down on that Tuesday night?

Lazei: Yeah. A kill had been possible for a couple of days.

Lappe: I knew we were able to kill it but to be honest I just didn't have the feeling that it would go down. I'm glad it did.

Kruf: No, in fact I was trying to fix a bet with Arx that it wouldn't die before Friday or later...

Rakez: Most of the tries we had into the last phase that night looked really promising. I was definitely expecting a kill that day and was happy to see that most of our raiders seemed to share the same enthusiasm.

Arx: Any pull could have been a kill, so yes. On the other hand we were about to stop for the night, so the pressure was on.

Jhazrun: Did we? Yes, we did. That is, until two 4% attempts and other promising-yet-abruptly-ended tries began wearing us thin. By the time we were buffing up for the final go of the night, our eyes were already on the next reset. Fortune's quite the tease, however, and the rest is rapidly-fading history!

 

What did you do when to boss died?

Lazei: Spammed irc like hell.

Lappe: After the nerdscreams I went silently (didnt want to wake everybody up) to jump around and cheer for our success, god it felt great.

Kruf: After the mandatory screaming on TeamSpeak etc I went to make some food.

Rakez: As our friend Erno put it, those famous beers were ready here aswell. Other than that I was relieved as I knew I'd finally have time to actually go outside for other reasons than going to the store.

Arx: Yelled pretty loud :P

Jhazrun: Myself, I smirked, and let out a chuckle at the cacophony resonating through TeamSpeak. I'd make a terrible sports fan.

 

How hard would you say the boss was compared to previous end bosses?

Lazei: With our gear, harder than any other end boss was with the gear we had when we killed them. With a few more weeks of gear Ragnaros isn't special compared to others.

Lappe: Sure it was hard, not due to tactics and stuff but because of the endless grind of p1 and p2. it felt like my brain was melting down.

Kruf: I'd say it was of similar level of difficulty as Lich King heroic.

Rakez: Hardest boss in cataclysm by far. You could really notice the difference in progress compared to other bosses. You think you master one phase only to discover that you have to change your raid setup to deal with the next one sufficiently.

Arx: I think it's the hardest I've done so far. Trying to get to p4 perfectly back-to-back for practice was quite exhausting.

Jhazrun: I find many things disappointingly attributed under the Holy Grail of "boss difficulty", when all the designers did to earn the spectators' praise was dump waves of high-health adds on the raid, M'uru and the Lich King being the worst false successes of the scene.
Heroic Ragnaros is a hard boss done right. It even avoids falling into the trap of anticlimatically handing out what's basically a free kill just for making it to the last phase with sufficient DPS (I'm looking at you again, Arthas…), as we'd come to realize (to our infinite sorrow) just a few days into our ten-or-so's total progression.

 

 

What expectations did you have towards Firelands, and did the instance meet them?

Lazei: It was pretty much what I expected. First six bosses were too easy and Ragnaros had plenty of small and a couple of bigger bugs. Once again a boss that wasn't tested on PTR wasn't tested by Blizzard either.

Lappe: I was waiting to finally actually kill the damn firelord (and to see the legs!) and oh yes we did it.

Kruf: I had pretty much no expectations, having missed the build-up hype and PTR testing completely while on a business trip.

Rakez: I had no real expectations as I did not participate on all of the PTR tests in 25man. But from what I did see I thought the 10 man heroics were significantly easier than the 25 man equivalents. Overall I was delighted to see that the progress phase of this tier was not that long seeing as it's summer and all.

Arx: The first four bosses were too easy. They simply required a proper tactic and somewhat ok execution. Baleroc, Majordomo, and Ragnaros were good.

Jhazrun: From what I saw on the PTR, I knew I'd have a new boss to call the worst of all time (of all time!), but my resentment was misdirected; I'm so sorry, Baleroc! You may have been stale and repetitive (and bugged for Discipline…), but our few Rhyolith pulls belied just how messy and irritating the guy really was! I made a horrible mistake… Will you take me back?

 

What do you think was Paragon's key to the success?

Lazei: Me.

Lappe: One simple word - Sisu.

Kruf: I think the most important factor this time around was persistence.

Rakez: Good raiding schedule, regular breaks. Also I felt that we were constantly one step ahead of the other guilds in the Ragnaros tactic brainstorming, a benefit of our good alt roster.

Arx: I think dealing with problems as they come is a very good way to deal with a complex encounter like Ragnaros. Plus the fact that everyone can freely throw ideas around.

Jhazrun: Without letting on too much, I credit it to our round-table strategizing: everyone freely bouncing ideas off of each other. Now, for every Lich King spirit-soak there're a dozen Al'Akir mount merry-go-'rounds, but breakthroughs are ten percent genius, ninety percent corpse runs!

 

If you had to design a secret boss after Ragnaros, what would he have been like?

Lazei: Harder.

Lappe: Lootship! I want my epix already.

Kruf: I'd love to see a boss that involves splitting the raid into groups that go do things in separate locations that must coordinate between the groups, a bit like Thorim in Ulduar but much more complicated.

Rakez: A box of loot just lying in an empty room.

Arx: It would be a goblin engineer Shamage, who just wrecks the raid with his blinking doom totem. I'm not surprised that Blizzard didn't give him a raid spot in Firelands though.

Jhazrun: The patch team has done a fine job tying off loose ends with Ragnaros' death, but there's not much a little creative writing can't derail. The primal elemental forces may have been contained for now, but the natural fauna of the plane still thrives, including Ragnaros' secret living weapon: a colossal lava turtle dwelling in a lake of magma. The encounter would involve - among other things - riding those fiery hippogryphs above the lake á la Hyjal quests, dropping people off on top of the boss' back, and picking them up before it submerges again.

 

Thanks a lot for the interview guys and enjoy your rest.