Refining Ragnaros Strategies

[Magicbag]

Hi Lurkers.

My guild is currently making good progress on Ragnaros, but our DPS output is lacking. Our sons collapse is well practiced and fairly good but we're losing people pre-sons, especially rogues.

This gets back to our larger problem of insufficient DPS. I think that we need some rogue survival tips. All rogues have decent fire resist 200+ buffed.

Our other part of the DPS equation are the mages and warlocks, and as a mage I can say we're doing fairly well. All of our mages (8) made the top 10 on the DPS meter and the top 5 were mages. We're still unable to get Rags below 60% before the first wave of sons.

I'm asking for suggestions on improving DPS output and the survivability of DPS classes (especially rogues). Appreciate any feedback.
Thanks,
-MB

[castille]

Got a shadow priest? VE works beautifully for keeping the rogues up, and adding a nice single target DPS amount.

[Mirajj]

Our other part of the DPS equation are the mages and warlocks, and as a mage I can say we're doing fairly well.  All of our mages (8) made the top 10 on the DPS meter and the top 5 were mages.  We're still unable to get Rags below 60% before the first wave of sons.

I'm asking for suggestions on improving DPS output and the survivability of DPS classes (especially rogues).  Appreciate any feedback.
Thanks,
-MB
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This could be part of your problem. Your DPS meter should look like this....

-All your Rogues
-Hunters/Mages/Locks

Looks like you are missing some of your crucial DPS folks. When setting up a 'rogue group' to take on Rag, I like to put 4 rogues in with either a Pally (for the pally's FR buff) or a Shadow Priest, for the priests Vampiric Embrace. Also, do your rogues know when to back off, or hold off? Are they dying because they are pulling aggro? They have to be careful to not go full out, or to use their aggro reduction techniques on this fight. Aggro from Rag = Dead Rogue.

I usually have the hunters grouped up, with a LotP Druid, if I can. I also like to put a hunter with Trueshot Aura in with the Mages, to help them out.

[mm262]

The fight vs. Ragnaros is a little tricky for any melee class.

Overall i suggest to look at the fight as a pure DPS fight. If you have not enough damage, you have to give up some of that fire resist gear and go straight for maximizing damage.

If you really want to take FR-gear look at the caps. 171 (with pala aura) is more than enough i think.

As a Rogue this fight is simple if you look at what the tanks are doing. I believe there is a aggro reset every time Ragnaros does his knockback. So stay out of the knockback (ctra should give a warning), back up at the 5 sec to knockback message and wait till both tanks are back and give them 2-3 seconds to build some aggro. Then you can get into the infight and do max dps till the next ae warning.

What kind of fire resistance gear do your rogues wear in this fight? I think it is very bad to give up too much stats for some fr, so depending on what's your gear like it might be the better choice just to take full dmg gear and stay with fire protection potions. You should although have a pala (if you are ally) in every melee group cause of the aura. It is vital for this fight that every healer knows his role. Melee have to be healed. This fight is all about damage and the healing should go like this: tanks > tankhealer > melee > meleehealer. Everyone else should be fine with bandages and fire protection potions.

I hope this is a little help to you. Sorry for the grammar, my english isn't that good :unsure:

[Xanthix]

Here are some tips I hear from our rogues.

Ease up on DPS when the tanks are knocked back. It's good to announce this on voice chat for this reason. Rogues can tank Ragnaros for about 10 seconds, then it gets messy.

Back up and bandage when you are hurt. This helps the healers a lot.

Have at least one healer dedicated to the melee DPS crowd. LOS and range can be a problem, so IMHO it helps if the healer is standing near the melee people.

You can supposedly hit Rag from far enough away that you won't be hit by his knockback, if your positioning is good.

When knocked back, jump while swimming across the lava. But don't attempt swimming if your health is too low - wait for a heal or a bandage.

[Zarathustra]

What kind of gear are you looking at on your rogues? A big part of prep for Ragnaros is getting those epic weapons in your rogues' hands so you can burn him down quickly. Also, you said your mages were doing well, but what kind of fire resistance are they looking at? If they're hovering around 100 they should be fine, Any above that and you can start dropping that fire resistance for more casting gear.

Finally, 60% at Sons is respectable while you're working at it. How are you handling the Sons phase? Are you losing people, or getting right back up to the plate once they're down?

[Magicbag]

Thanks for all the advice

1) we're alliance sorry to not point that out.
2) I can't speak too much about Rogue Gear, I think they're mostly in volcanic leather, but they have a lot of gutgore/lobotimizers/brutality blades out there (even a corehound tooth).
3) Mages are mostly 100-150 FR unbuffed. Is at least a 20-21 Frost spec necessary to get through Rags? I was a heavy arcane, minimal fire spec and was doing about 1/2 the damage of the frost specced Mages while using a lot more mana.

We use two main tanks wearing 300+ FR gear. They have had no problems holding agro that I can see. Our support tends to get tossed around a lot, but other than that we seem to be ok except for the deaths. A lot of rogues are dying and a lot of priests are dying, even before sons. We usually manage to limp through sons, we are still practicing perfecting them, our best total has been 20%.

I have no idea why our hunters are putting out such low DPS. I'll see what we can do to correct this.
-MB

[Tal]

It sounds like your rogues aren't backing up to the edge of the stone spiral when the AoE warning sounds. I can't speak for the problem with the priests but I know as a DPS tank who typically wears 200 or so FR gear on Rag that I have very little trouble staying alive for the entire fight when backing out at the warning. The only times I die are when I'm stupid and draw aggro when the MT is knocked back.

[Treesh]

As a rogue with max 121 unbuffed fire resist, I haven't died to Rag once yet and I haven't sucked any healers dry. Get the rogues greater fire protection potions. Drink one before the fight starts so the cooldown on it will be ready for when you have to drink another because you will have to drink another. Back out of range of the AoE when knockback is announced. If your main tank did NOT resist the knockback, wait a bit before re-engaging. If the main tank DID resist knockback, you can go in fighting. Remember to use feint. When your first greater fire protection potion gets burned through, drink another. If you get hurt, back away and bandage. It's actually quite easy to live through if you pay attention and watch your aggro.

Edit: "Fire" does not equal "first".

[Zarathustra]

If people are getting tossed around, you need to work on positioning. Make sure everyone's evenly spread across the spiral, as there's a lot of real estate you can cover. There isn't any reason for people to be bunched up on this one.

[Mavfin]

If people are getting tossed around, you need to work on positioning.  Make sure everyone's evenly spread across the spiral, as there's a lot of real estate you can cover.  There isn't any reason for people to be bunched up on this one.
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The only real bunch will be the knot of melee (rogues/spare warriors, and a pally or two for aura), standing just to the left of where domo starts, and fighting there, backing up to the point when the knockback warning comes.

At 20 sec to sons, we all run to the right, go across the lava and the warriors and warlocks look for sons. Here's where your raid-wide FR is important. If sons are one-hitting stuff, your attempt functionally ends here.

If i lose a bunch of life while meleeing, I back up out of knockback range and bandage, and sometimes I get a heal while I do it, sometimes not, but I watch my own life a bit.

[Quark]

This could be part of your problem. Your DPS meter should look like this....

-All your Rogues
-Hunters/Mages/Locks

Our Mages and Rogues are actually very, very close in this fight now, with the rest being left behind. Last night it was Usul (mage), Ace (mage), Ramala (rogue), Psybie (mage), Duana (Rogue) IIRC. Our other rogue, Arleas, died like the fool he is! :) There was a total of 2k difference in damage between Usul and I.

Since Mages have absolutely no aggro concerns in this fight, they can pretty much do whatever they want.

[Quark]

Repeating and/or Counteracting what some people said above, but here's my list (partially stolen from my own thread!)

First off, make sure your groups are set optimally. Shadowpriest (Vampiric Embrace) and Paladins go to the meleers first, excluding the MT healers. Melee DPS isn't best as 4 rogues + pally. Rogues do much better damage with a warrior in their group to Battle Shout.

Rogues have to be very careful about the knockback. Getting that right is most of a Rogue's DPS in this fight. The knockback is something like every 30 seconds. If your Rogues are getting hit by it, they're not in the right spot.

Now, there's two problems with this. First, the initial knockback will not show up in CTRA or similar addons. The rogues should be timing it themselves. Second, when Ragnaros comes back up, you'll have no idea how long till he does the Knockback. Rogues shouldn't jump in until it happens. At that point, CTRA will once again fail to time the next one right.

The other part of the knockback is that it wipes aggro. So my sequence is something like this:
Backstab, Backstab, Backstab (Knockback warning).
Backup to edge of lava.
AoE Knockback
-- IF -- tank resists Knockback, jump in right away
Feint, Slice and Dice
Backstab, Backstab, etc

-- IF -- tank is knocked back, you must first wait for MT2 to get aggro, then do the same thing.

[MongoJerry]

Got a shadow priest? VE works beautifully for keeping the rogues up, and adding a nice single target DPS amount.
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Yikes. Really? Mind Flay has a short range even with shadow reach, and since Ragnaros's genades only hit mana users, you don't want mana users to be near your melee dps folks if at all possible.

Our rogue survival tips are:

1) Station a couple of healers on the outer ring who are assigned specifically to heal the melee dps.

2) Train the melee dps to back away and stop attacking (for a while we had them turn around to make doubly sure) a few seconds before the time comes for each punt. Melee dps usually die when they stay next to Ragnaros after the tank gets punted and get one-shotted by him. All of them need to be trained to back out of melee range every thirty seconds when the punt warning comes up.

Btw, "melee dps" here does *not* include shamans or paladins. No mana users should be anywhere near the dps rogues and warriors, because you don't want them to get grenaded.

[Mavfin]

[snip]

2) Train the melee dps to back away and stop attacking (for a while we had them turn around to make doubly sure) a few seconds before the time comes for each punt. Melee dps usually die when they stay next to Ragnaros after the tank gets punted and get one-shotted by him.  All of them need to be trained to back out of melee range every thirty seconds when the punt warning comes up.

Btw, "melee dps" here does *not* include shamans or paladins.  No mana users should be anywhere near the dps rogues and warriors, because you don't want them to get grenaded.
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#2 is *exactly* what we do, we back out on the 5-sec warning and wait for knockback

[Boutros]

If your rogues really do have 200+ FR and are dying, then it is because they are pulling aggro, not because they are getting knocked back. One way to help this is to have them not back out when a knockback is coming. The knockback deaggros everyone within range, even if it is resisted, which can realy help the rogues stay below the aggro threshold. Obviously, if and when a melee dpser pulls aggro they should back out of melee range if there is a tank on Rag and take it slow for a while after the tank gets things under control.

[redinter]

Another thing to remember is that ranged dps do not grab aggro (unless Ragnaros remains untanked) so all ranged dps should nuke their hearts out, hunters doesn't need to feign either. The only people who should be concerned with aggro management are rogues and warriors, rogues should feint when possible, even do a vanish, if they get too much aggro.

Healers shouldn't be dying, if they are, then the spreading is bad. have them spread a bit more, and stay at max range from their asigned groups.
As some have already said, the first times you try him, buff up with whatever you can, but most importantly are the fire resist potions. With my warlock I can hold on with only 1 for the entire fight, having 150 FR buffed. This allows me to maximize damage, I also bandages myself when needed or use a pot/hs, no sense wasting healer mana. Felwood plants are also an important addition to everyone. Wizard oil, sharpening stones, elixires, flasks, all its there to help you get up that dps. It will be costly at the beginning, but this will help you tackel the encounter until you get better gear.

Also prevent people from wearing too much FR items, some people try to raise this so high, that they gimp themselves too much. Volcanic is bad in this case, preferably to go with damage gear, than to not do damage at all. We did a policy of 1 crafted item per person, from those that need cores, prioritizing on melee first, helped lots.

once you get him to 40-50% before sons, you will be looking fine. If you are handling the sons spawn right, you should loose minimum people there. its very important that tanks react fast to grab them all, even bears should do their share here.

Your warlocks should keep CoS and CoE up all the time, it increases mage and warlock/shadowpriest damage by 10%, which will make a big difference. Also as said before, a shadow priest will help you buff the damage warlocks do. Our shadow priest usually stands on the outer ring, as close to the lava as needed, so gets splashed a bit, but with fire pots and good FR, shouldn't get too much damage.

[mm262]

Thanks for all the advice

1) we're alliance sorry to not point that out.
2) I can't speak too much about Rogue Gear, I think they're mostly in volcanic leather, but they have a lot of gutgore/lobotimizers/brutality blades out there (even a corehound tooth).
3) Mages are mostly 100-150 FR unbuffed.  Is at least a 20-21 Frost spec necessary to get through Rags?  I was a heavy arcane, minimal fire spec and was doing about 1/2 the damage of the frost specced Mages while using a lot more mana.

I have no idea why our hunters are putting out such low DPS.  I'll see what we can do to correct this.

1) My Guild is Alliance too, we build 2 Meleeteams like this: 1 Warrior (BS), 1 Pala (Aura + Heal staying at the edge of the lava at max range from Ragnaros) 2-3 Rogues. If you have Shadowpriests take 1 into each meleegroup. We didn't encounter the Problem MongoJerry describes with Ragnaros shooting our manaclasses and that way our melees...

2) Try to take off all the FR gear. Go straight to max-damage. You need FireProtPotions that way, but 2-3 is the maximum needed for the melees. FR is only really needed for tanking sons with a rogue... like others (and me) told you before, your Rogues (and other melee) _have_ to back off when AE Knockback warning comes in. Than stay away till your tanks both are back and had sufficient time to build aggro. Maybe start with feint and than do max dmg.

3) Tell your mages to do the same thing i said about rogues. Get off the FR and max-dmg. Frost is better than fire here. Try to take as many +dmg items as possible. You only have to last 4-5 minutes with your mana and it should be enough if you take 3 managems, evocation and maybe a pot. You really need +dmg not stats.

4) Hunters... take one Pala to judge manaleech on Raggi. This way your Hunters shouldn't get oom and do more dmg. Tell them to put away their pets because of the Ragnarosbombs... staying crowded is very bad in this fight. Line the Hunters up at 40 yards range.

[MongoJerry]

1) My Guild is Alliance too, we build 2 Meleeteams like this: 1 Warrior (BS), 1 Pala (Aura + Heal staying at the edge of the lava at max range from Ragnaros) 2-3 Rogues. If you have Shadowpriests take 1 into each meleegroup. We didn't encounter the Problem MongoJerry describes with Ragnaros shooting our manaclasses and that way our melees...

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.

If your rogues really do have 200+ FR and are dying, then it is because they are pulling aggro, not because they are getting knocked back. One way to help this is to have them not back out when a knockback is coming. The knockback deaggros everyone within range, even if it is resisted, which can realy help the rogues stay below the aggro threshold.

No, what usually happens is that the main tank gets punted and some members of the melee dps stay in melee range. A main tank punt eliminates everyone's aggro. However, if there isn't a tank on Ragnaros, Ragnaros will turn to one of the people who are in melee range (i.e. the melee dps who didn't back out) and one shot them. The second tank then comes in and starts building aggro, of course, but there's always a couple second delay in the process. If the melee dps aren't trained to back out just before a possible punt, then you'll lose a melee dps person on every unresisted punt.

[mm262]

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 do 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.

Don't get me wrong. I believe you. It's just that we didn't encounter this problem. Maybe we really have found a setup where only the priests/palas get bounced, maybe it's luck.

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.

I think it's my lack of english that you took me wrong. I don't really think you need to take shadowpriests. In fact if you are low on healer classes you don't want a shadowpriest to do damage in this fight. It's more vital to keep the tanks alive an let other meleedps survive.

Anyway, in a typical MC run we have a setup where 2 of our priests can do damage. I admit we have a little weird roster, since we are very crowded on hunters, mages and priests. But if you actually have the opportunity to let some of the priests do damage you do not only increase the damage the warlocks do, you can benefit from that embrace. It is not enough to keep melees alive but it helps the paladins to do their job flashhealing every melee in range.