Refining Ragnaros Strategies

[castille]

It's not a matter of opinion.  This is an absolute fact.  Ragnaros grenades only mana users.  Now, if your guild has found a position that allows shadow priests to deal damage without being in grenade range of your melee dps, then that's fine.  But whatever you do, you don't want those shadow priests to be within grenade range of your melee dps.  Otherwise, you end up with all your precious melee dps flying off into the lava, greatly decreasing your overall dps.

It's funny to me that your emphasis is so much on shadow priests.  I'm a shadow priest, but our guild has our shadow priests focus on healing rather than dealing damage in this fight.  It seems far more important to make sure that the melee dps stays alive and as much as I like vamp embrace, it alone isn't going to cut it.  It'd be far more important for priests to conserve their mana for healing in case something goes wrong.  If you have a significant number of warlocks in your raid, then I could see assigning one shadow priest to make sure Shadow Weaving is pumped up, but otherwise all priests ought to focus on healing rather than on dealing damage -- unless you have some wierd raid setup where you have an overload of priests.
No, what usually happens is that the main tank gets punted and some members of the melee dps stay in melee range.
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You are probably familiar with the tiny lip of rock where the rogues can go to be safe from any damage of that minor AoE knockback that Ragnaros does. Just across the lava from that, there's a spot that juts up, along where the ranged DPS should be standing. Most of the time, this is where melee DPS goes to hop across to their spot. If you have a shadow priest standing here, he can hit the entire group with VE. I might have a little more +dmg gear than most shadow priests, but this easily handles almost 75% of any damage they do. This, with the melee healer tossing a renew on them, will easily keep them topped through the whole fight. One of our locks on Stormrage takes him down every time now, and almost every time, I'm in a rogue group VEing them to full. DPS is really the key to ragnaros, because he will eventually wear down any raid who can't throw the requisite amount of force at him quickly enough.

[Magicbag]

I wanted to get more info on what mage builds worked best for Rag. I have a 28 Arcane/23 Frost build right now. I respecced just for the fight. My Damage setup gear has 213+ToEP, however only 60 FR in this mode. Self-buffing adds a little, but is it enough?

Next I wanted to ask about +2 crit vs +dam with regards to frostbolts. I have a few equipment choices like Briarwood Reed vs. Eye of the Beast. Not sure what to use.

Thanks for the interesting discussion.
-MB

[mm262]

i do not play a mage, but from what i hear talking to our mages fr isn't vital for a mage in this fight. 60 should be enough. Take a fire protection potion before the encounter and all should be well. Most of our mages are either arcane power/frost or arcane/iceblock skilled. It seems to be a matter of feeling whether you think you need iceblock or want to go maxdmg.

I suggest to go heavily with +dmg in MC. Stats aren't that great, maybe a little stamina can help but it isn't really neccesary. You can get a lot of items with pure +dmg from the AH and some other dmg gear out of Scholo/Strat/BRS... I think +350dmg isn't that hard to get but it helps a lot.

Whether Crit or +dmg is better, you should do the math. What does an Frostbolt actually do in numbers? 750, 800? 2% crit is less than 2% more dmg if i am right... 2% of 800 are 16dmg... so if your frostbolts do 800 dmg +16 dmg should be better than 2% crit. Crits although do more aggro so i would prefer to minimize crit if you don't do pvp.

Hope, this helps... :rolleyes:

[Magicbag]

i do not play a mage, but from what i hear talking to our mages fr isn't vital for a mage in this fight. 60 should be enough. Take a fire protection potion before the encounter and all should be well. Most of our mages are either arcane might/frost or arcane/iceblock skilled. It seems to be a matter of feeling whether you think you need iceblock or want to go maxdmg.

I suggest to go heavily with +dmg in MC. Stats aren't that great, maybe a little stamina can help but it isn't really neccesary. You can get a lot of items with pure +dmg from the AH and some other dmg gear out of Scholo/Strat/BRS... I think +350dmg isn't that hard to get but it helps a lot.

Whether Crit or +dmg is better, you should do the math. What does an Frostbolt actually do in numbers? 750, 800? 2% crit is less than 2% more dmg if i am right... 2% of 800 are 16dmg... so if your frostbolts do 800 dmg +16 dmg should be better than 2% crit. Crits although do more aggro so i would prefer to minimize crit if you don't do pvp.

Hope, this helps...  :rolleyes:
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The info helps alot. Based on the numbers I should think about respeccing back into arcane power, because I'm not a defensive spec and definately using the briarwood reed over the 2% crit. This will be better for controlling my trash agro as well as improving my overall damage slightly.
Thanks,
-MB

[mm262]

:blush:

hups... i have to correct the math above:

actually +16dmg should not enough to get the dmg the crit does because you will not get 100% out of +dmg for your frostbolt... more like 81,4% if i remember correctly...

so it's more +16dmg*(100/81,4)= ~+20dmg needed to equal the 2%crit (thinking of a crit as 1% more dmg... casters don't benefit that much, do they?)

[MongoJerry]

You are probably familiar with the tiny lip of rock where the rogues can go to be safe from any damage of that minor AoE knockback that Ragnaros does. Just across the lava from that, there's a spot that juts up, along where the ranged DPS should be standing. Most of the time, this is where melee DPS goes to hop across to their spot.

As there are several "standard" formations for taking on Ragnaros, I'm having trouble picturing exactly where you're talking about. In our case, we have the melee dps ranged around the "hook" in the center of the lava and the main tank tanking on the opposite side. This spot allows our main tank healers to spread themselves out well to avoid grenading each other and those healers who have no choice but to stand near each other can stand against a wall and not get thrown into the lava.

If you have a shadow priest standing here, he can hit the entire group with VE. I might have a little more +dmg gear than most shadow priests, but this easily handles almost 75% of any damage they do.

Trust me, you don't want to get into a shadow priest equipment competition with me. With my standard PvP setup, I have +356 damage/healing and could get to +420 damage/healing if I wanted to. That plus the old ZHC makes Neriad quite a face melter.

My main issue here is the short 26-yard range of Mind Flay. Considering that you have Ragnaros then your melee dps then yourself in a line, it seems like you're getting really close to a spot where you can end up grenading the melee dps that you are trying to heal.

Meanwhile, you're expending a great deal of mana, something shadow priests are notoriously short on, dishing out damage rather than healing. That's great for the first part of the fight, but you'll run out of mana by the time the Sons come around, leaving you coughing and sputtering in the Son's phase and afterward. Call me old fashioned, but I think that priests of all types deal more damage by keeping other players alive rather than dishing out damage themselves.

[Quark]

Meanwhile, you're expending a great deal of mana, something shadow priests are notoriously short on, dishing out damage rather than healing.  That's great for the first part of the fight, but you'll run out of mana by the time the Sons come around, leaving you coughing and sputtering in the Son's phase and afterward.  Call me old fashioned, but I think that priests of all types deal more damage by keeping other players alive rather than dishing out damage themselves.
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It's funny how you keep trying to deny what we do every week. Genkar is the majority of our healing, and I'm damn sure a Rogue hasn't died without pulling aggro in over a month and a half.

[Mavfin]

It's funny how you keep trying to deny what we do every week.  Genkar is the majority of our healing, and I'm damn sure a Rogue hasn't died without pulling aggro in over a month and a half.
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Suffice to say, MJ, our setup is different than the one you run every week. The *only* melee'ers (warriors or rogues) to die have been ones who drew aggro after a MT got knocked back. That's it. The shadow priest does the rogues with VE mostly, and the warriors take care of themselves, and maybe get help from a pally when they're seen to back up away from Rag with low life. Usually if I start a bandage, I'm healed to full before it's halfway, by someone.

Different people do it different ways, *and* we have all the healers we need. No shortage. So, if the rogues need a little boost, there's excess healing capacity to take care of them. We're pretty happy with getting him to 21% before the sons show up. No, we're not min/max/server first, but we get it done. :D

[MongoJerry]

It's funny how you keep trying to deny what we do every week.  Genkar is the majority of our healing, and I'm damn sure a Rogue hasn't died without pulling aggro in over a month and a half.

There's no need to get testy. No one's denying that you are doing it, but I am trying to understand how you are getting it to work. I've been killing Ragnaros since May of last year and have been playing shadow spec'd for six months. I do know my subject material, and I have concerns about suggesting this strategy as a general rule for other guilds attempting Ragnaros.

Different people do it different ways, *and* we have all the healers we need. No shortage. So, if the rogues need a little boost, there's excess healing capacity to take care of them.

Aha, that seems to be the secret. So, it's not a function of shadow priests being a fantastic source of healing. What it is is that your runs have an excessive amount of healers in them, so you can afford to have some of your priests go shadow and deal damage. That's fine. I mentioned that above as a possibility. However, most guilds have the opposite problem -- they're usually short on healers. In that case, you don't want to waste a priest's mana dealing damage when that priest should be keeping people up and reserving mana for emergencies.

I'm still curious about your positioning. There's no way with the orientation our guild uses that you could do it. Mind Flay has too short of range to hit Ragnaros from the outer ring, and you definitely wouldn't want a shadow priest to be up with the melee dps, getting them grenaded. I suspect that you use a mirror image of our setup, which is interesting to me, because we've found our setup to be the least chaotic for main tanks and main tank healers. Oh, well, it just goes to show that everyone has their special style.

[MongoJerry]

I want to clarify my position on this. First of all, I'm genuinely curious about this tactic and want to know how you make it work. My questions and concerns were real questions and concerns, and I'm trying to picture how you get around the problems I've brought up. It sounds like from your comments, however, that this tactic is not applicable to the way our guild orients itself during the fight, so scratch the idea of using it on our raids.

However, my primary concern gets back to Magicbag's original post. What you don't seem to be getting is that this idea of using shadow priests with vamp embrace healing melee dps is an advanced raid tactic that depends on two things:

1. Having a group of melee dps who know how to position themselves and move during the fight so that they don't take extra damage.

2. Having plenty of healers who can suplement the shadow priest's heals when the shadow priest is running on fumes late in the fight.

However, Magicbag is in a guild that is still learning the fight. Since melee dps are dying so much, obviously his guild hasn't yet mastered #1. Plus, the fact that people are dying also means that they don't currently have an excess of healing power (#2) available to them. Maybe later, once Magicbag's guild has Ragnaros on farm status, it'd be a good idea to suggest this tactic as a way to have some fun and shorten the fight by 10 seconds, but right now Magicbag's guild can't afford to use it.

[Kevin]

I want to clarify my position on this.  First of all, I'm genuinely curious about this tactic and want to know how you make it work.  My questions and concerns were real questions and concerns, and I'm trying to picture how you get around the problems I've brought up.  It sounds like from your comments, however, that this tactic is not applicable to the way our guild orients itself during the fight, so scratch the idea of using it on our raids.

However, my primary concern gets back to Magicbag's original post.  What you don't seem to be getting is that this idea of using shadow priests with vamp embrace healing melee dps is an advanced raid tactic that depends on two things:

1.  Having a group of melee dps who know how to position themselves and move during the fight so that they don't take extra damage.

2.  Having plenty of healers who can suplement the shadow priest's heals when the shadow priest is running on fumes late in the fight.

However, Magicbag is in a guild that is still learning the fight.  Since melee dps are dying so much, obviously his guild hasn't yet mastered #1.  Plus, the fact that people are dying also means that they don't currently have an excess of healing power (#2) available to them.  Maybe later, once Magicbag's guild has Ragnaros on farm status, it'd be a good idea to suggest this tactic as a way to have some fun and shorten the fight by 10 seconds, but right now Magicbag's guild can't afford to use it.
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This is a legit curiousity on my part, what is your typical raid composition for Rags? I'm wondering what horde things of as excessive healing because I know from playing both sides that alliance has a big advantage in mana pools and mana regen thanks to paladins. So excessive healing for horde side might be different than alliance side. I'm still very curious.

I'm also looking for a good shot to show our positioning for you. I'll get back on that.

[Mirajj]

Aha, that seems to be the secret.  So, it's not a function of shadow priests being a fantastic source of healing.  What it is is that your runs have an excessive amount of healers in them, so you can afford to have some of your priests go shadow and deal damage. 

When making the raid roster, I tend to bring along 4-6 priests (More often than not, 1 of them is Shadow), 2-5 Druids, and 2-5 Pallys. I will almost always not have a problem with the number of Priests, but the Druids and Pally numbers fluctate quite a bit. The strat/positioning stays the same.

I'm still curious about your positioning.  There's no way with the orientation our guild uses that you could do it.  Mind Flay has too short of range to hit Ragnaros from the outer ring, and you definitely wouldn't want a shadow priest to be up with the melee dps, getting them grenaded.  I suspect that you use a mirror image of our setup, which is interesting to me, because we've found our setup to be the least chaotic for main tanks and main tank healers.  Oh, well, it just goes to show that everyone has their special style.
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I'll show you the pic we used to refine our strat. Check out this page and go to the first pic on the site. This pretty much is what our setup looks like, with a few very small and not really noteworthy changes. If memory serves, the 'hook nook' that Castille (Genkar) is talking about is labelled with a blue "M-1" on the pic.

[Snowy]

Mind Flay has too short of range to hit Ragnaros from the outer ring[right][snapback]105195[/snapback][/right]

Not true. I have no problem hitting him from the outer ring, on the south side, standing right near the lava. I'm in a group with all the warlocks, so they can lifetap to their hearts content. Our rogues are really good at backing off, and not drawing aggro, so they dont need much in the way of heals. It took a few attempts for them to get it down smoothly though.

However MJ is right in that you don't want shadowpriests here if you're having problems keeping people alive. On the other hand, if the problem is just lack of DPS and you can keep people alive until attrition wears you down, then yes a shadowpriest is a good thing to have here.

We don't have a problem with healing as we are extremely shaman heavy - usually 7 or 8. At the beginning we recognized this, and so I went shadow and we dumped a shaman out for additional dps.

[lfd]

I'll show you the pic we used to refine our strat. Check out this page and go to the first pic on the site.
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Incidentally, in the dead-end directly above "MT2" on that picture is where I stand my shadow priest. You can just hit Rag with mind flay by standing right on the lip, which is what I tend to do after stacking shadow weaving on him. I don't recall off-hand if I'm in useful range of anybody but myself for VE, but I'm not there primarily to heal anyway; I can assist healing both MTs though. The best part is that I'm in no danger of being knocked back by anybody getting grenaded, nor of knocking anybody back. :)

[castille]

Trust me, you don't want to get into a shadow priest equipment competition with me.  With my standard PvP setup, I have +356 damage/healing and could get to +420 damage/healing if I wanted to.  That plus the old ZHC makes Neriad quite a face melter.

Genkar has around 7.5k mana raid buffed, and only has +336 dam/heal. It's not the best setup, but I did say 'most shadow priests'. A lot of them sacrifice a fair bit of stats to get +dam/heal, and I recently shifted stuff around to get more stats while not sacrificing much in damage.

My main issue here is the short 26-yard range of Mind Flay.  Considering that you have Ragnaros then your melee dps then yourself in a line, it seems like you're getting really close to a spot where you can end up grenading the melee dps that you are trying to heal.

There's a channel of lava in between you and the rogues. You might grenade another mana user if they're too close, but they don't have to stand anywhere near as close as you do to the edge of the lava to reach the melee DPS -- and they can stand in completely different spots.

To describe the spot I'm talking about a bit better, the melee 'spot' is practically on top of where Domo stands when you go to talk to him. There's a ledge that sticks out just a hair .. let me see if I have a screenshot of it somewhere. I'll reply later if I find one. Sorry, it's not sounding too clear, maybe I'll just have to take a screenshot of saturday of where I stand.

Meanwhile, you're expending a great deal of mana, something shadow priests are notoriously short on, dishing out damage rather than healing.  That's great for the first part of the fight, but you'll run out of mana by the time the Sons come around, leaving you coughing and sputtering in the Son's phase and afterward.  Call me old fashioned, but I think that priests of all types deal more damage by keeping other players alive rather than dishing out damage themselves.
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Actually, I push myself to run out of mana when the sons come out, because then they can't burn it away, and I spend the time fighting the sons with wands, letting the melee take them down, and regen via Wisdom and spirit. It works really well, I'll often have about 70% mana back. Some of the stats I found that I sacrificed that hurt the most was spirit. Can't wait to have Spirit Tap back.

[Magicbag]

However, Magicbag is in a guild that is still learning the fight.  Since melee dps are dying so much, obviously his guild hasn't yet mastered #1.  Plus, the fact that people are dying also means that they don't currently have an excess of healing power (#2) available to them.  Maybe later, once Magicbag's guild has Ragnaros on farm status, it'd be a good idea to suggest this tactic as a way to have some fun and shorten the fight by 10 seconds, but right now Magicbag's guild can't afford to use it.
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We are actually blessed with an average of 6-7 priests per raid. However, none of them are vampiric specced. I think we're just getting grenaded too much at this point. As we continue to educate the melee to live longer for themselves and educate the support to spread out of grenade range (plus work on good FR), I think our numbers will improve!
-MB

[Mavfin]

When making the raid roster, I tend to bring along 4-6 priests (More often than not, 1 of them is Shadow), 2-5 Druids, and 2-5 Pallys. I will almost always not have a problem with the number of Priests, but the Druids and Pally numbers fluctate quite a bit. The strat/positioning stays the same.

[snip]

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Note that I didn't say we had a ton of priests, just that we had plenty of healing for the Rag fight.

[Snowy]

I'm a moron and am directionally challenged -- that's what I get for posting at work earlier. I found a picture of where I normally stand -- it's on the WEST side. This was from our first Rag kill back in January, quite a bit has changed since then, but the position remains the same.

http://img95.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ragdead9ay.jpg

edit: found a much better picture, this is my preferred spot.

http://img230.imageshack.us/my.php?image...ion6ba.jpg

[oldmandennis]

I'll show you the pic we used to refine our strat. Check out this page and go to the first pic on the site.  about is labelled with a blue "M-1" on the pic.
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Ahh the Pacinoobs. I know them well. Gear != PvP skill, but if you get a couple of untamed blades on you, you are not going to have a good time.

[Magicbag]

Thanks for the help guys. We managed to take him down on our second attempt. Rags was 41% pre-sons.
-MB