More Ragnaros Thoughts

[KiloVictor]

So, the walls are nice, but if everyone groups up in front of a wall, it just means more pain for everyone.  Better some lone mage get knocked back into the lava than 8 players go airborne and suffer 2,000 damage in an instant.  This goes double for main tank healers - one blast in that pack and the tanks lose all healing for 4, 5 seconds and the healers have to waste time/mana all healing each other as well.
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There are lots of ways to position for this obviously. What we use is a spread for ranged DPS and a clustering pattern for MT healers. The spread is spaced such that only one person at a time is hit by the random knockback, and we only lose the odd ranged DPS class when they can't get out of the lava fast enough.

For healers, we utilize the short wall furthest in on the spiral - it's just behind the "standard" tanking spot for Rag. We have too many people in that small area to be able to space out of the random knockbacks, so we simply double up. Have two people stand on top of each other and you can usually limit the knockback to only affecting one or two healers at a time. And more FR increases your resist rate of course; I run about 250ish when I'm on MT heals.

For dealing with the Sons, we found it really useful to have druids drop into bear form - with decent FR, they can even tank Sons to keep them away from the mana users. Then once Rag is about to re-emerge, we have them Innervate a priest (if needed) and take over MT healing for the first 10 seconds while the priests regen. If you can get a decent druid-priest transition organized for the end of each Sons wave, you should be able to last through several waves without losing the MT and all your healers.

Also, you might want to practice your positioning with the raid before triggering Rag. Have people set up in DPS formation and then call for the collapse to deal with the Sons and make sure everybody's going to the right spots. If you can keep the Sons out of camp, you can easily go through several waves while you're learning the encounter. As long as you can tank Rag and heal your MT, everybody else can be mopping up the last Sons or regenning mana to be ready for the next wave of Sons.

In fact, we found that putting the emphasis on managing the Sons waves was the breakthrough for us. We probably went three or four waves on our first kill, but they were clean and controlled, and we just eventually wore Rag down between waves. When we worried about max DPS and getting him to a certain percentage before the first Sons, we typically were too low on life and mana to weather the Sons.

Hope that helps. Have fun!

Kv