I recently wrote about how I love the new Ragnaros fight.
I had to re-read that entry after last night’s raid.
It was rough.
First of all, four of our regular players (fury warrior melee officer, resto shaman lootmaster officer, resto druid and one of our warlocks) had declined. Then we had a bunch of tentatives — a mage, another resto druid, a hunter and a feral druid.
That left us with exactly 26 people as Accepted.
And we had a no-show. At least one of the tentatives, the mage, managed to escape from dinner with his in-laws to join us. ;)
So we had 26 people.
3 MS tanks
5 MS healers
18 MS DPS
We had the pally tank and DK tank tanking and had the warrior tank DPSing (he was originally a DPS before he joined us) primarily for the stuns and such.
But we had five healers. We normally do Rag attempts with six, since we’re still learning and there are lots of mistakes being made and such.
Last night, we did all of our attempts (18 of them) with five healers.
Two holy paladins, one disc priest, one holy priest and one resto shaman.
We could have asked an elemental shaman to go resto for us (since he was resto for us in T11) but felt that his knock-backs were more important than another healer, particularly since, if everyone did what they were supposed to do, we healed through damage just fine.
I spent the vast majority of last night calling out battle rezzes. Let me tell you, it’s not easy and/or fun to call out three battle rezzes on damn near every attempt.
Issues:
– Melee pulling aggro. (Sidenote: can ranged pull aggro, or is this like the original fight?) Part of it was due to tricks of the trade timing and such, but still. Disappointing.
– People standing in Engulfing Flames.
– People getting hit by Lava Waves.
– People getting hit by Sulfuras Smash (on the second Molten Seed part of P2).
We basically got zero work done on Ragnaros this week, just spent three hours wiping at various times, usually in Phase 2.
I’d like to think that Phase 1 is pretty clean by now, but it’s not. We had way too many Lava Wave deaths, period, but several in P1.
Transition 1 is coming together nicely, from what I can tell. Lucky me, I get to stun two Sons of Flame! I’m actually not horrible at it, either. The worst thing in the world, though, is watching #6 make a beeline for the hammer after my shitty Avenging Wrath stun has worn off. (Although it would be #5 making the beeline if I swapped and Hammer of Justiced #6.) It’s like, there’s nothing I can do. Absolutely nothing. Except say “Watch 6!!!”
Our problem is P2. People don’t understand seeds (although we’re discussing that right now in our raid review thread and people are slowly learning how Molten Sees work) and people aren’t stacking properly and/or are dropping Molten Seeds too close to our stack point.
A multitude of small mistakes and it’s just like… guys. We have 5 healers. We can’t heal you through bad stuff. Hell, we can’t heal OURSELVES through bad stuff. Lots of healers ate waves last night (I ate ONE in all of our 18 attempts and bubbled through it) and some were guilty of not stacking quickly enough and getting beaned by Sulfuras Smash or Engulfing Flames or whatever.
I think the most frustrating thing about the whole night is that I KNOW we can do better. Individually, we are pretty darn good players who don’t tend to stand in fire.
But some of our most noteworthy DPS ate lava waves as though they were a rare delicacy last night.
Some of our top healers just didn’t manage to avoid avoidable damage last night.
The learning curve is steep and I had no options last night once one of our DPS said he’d prefer to sit due to a migraine. I literally had 25 people in the raid and one guy with a migraine on standby.
The summer slowdown hasn’t forced a cancelled raid as of yet. This week is going to be tough, with the melee officer, resto shaman and resto druid out. We’ll see what we can pull off, but I hope that everyone’s efforts are better than last night’s or else we’re just gonna be screwed for the majority of this reset.
Having said that, even despite some healer issues with environmental damage, I have to say that I’m pretty proud of the five of us for being up to the challenge of 5-healing Rag. Avoidable damage aside, we did great in terms of healing. Just need to work on not standing in bad stuff. :)
I believe threat works like Sinestra, where it won’t switch to someone outside of its melee range no matter their threat. The reason I don’t know for sure is because tank threat on this fight is literally unshakable due to Burning Blast. Working on heroic, I specifically have to tell my dps not to Misdirect me on this fight, not even on the pull, because it causes more issues than it solves.
My understanding is this: If a ranged DPS pulls aggro, it won’t do anything. He only attacks people at range if there is nobody in melee range.
Also, yeah. I took a few more enviro-hits than I would have liked, but I like to think my track record still has a pretty good average. :
Not to belittle your accomplishment or anything but raganos is easily 5 healable… It’s even easy with 4 healers… People don’t die unless they stand in bad… The only healing intensive part is seeds…Which become much easier to heal when done properly. And with about 15 seconds of 0 damage down time before each transition (after u heal the last trap in P1) that’s plenty of time to plea / conc pot.. We 2 heal this fight in 10m every week and like u said above… If people die it’s cuz they stood in something. Raganos is 99% personal accountability. No1 gets hit… Make it to p3 a bunch. The boss will die. Anyways don’t let them convince u to go back to 6 heals if u can do it with 5. It will make p3 much easier the more dps u can have come.
Sry for the wall-o-text
Gl
Iron