Paragon Sneak Peek: Ragnaros, the Firelord

Paragon Sneak Peek: Ragnaros, the Firelord
Paragon just released a Sneak Peek of the Patch 4.2 Ragnaros Raid Encounter! It looks like today will be a very eventful day in the world of WoW!

Patch 4.2 Fireland / Ragnaros on Paragon's Website

Message from Paragon
As many of you have been suspecting, we have been playing on Blizzard’s private Test Realm (pTR) for quite some time now doing specialized raid encounter testing. We have had the chance to test all of the 7 encounters in the Firelands raid instance coming in patch 4.2, and wanted to give a small sneak peek of the upcoming content.

Since most of the abilities from the Ragnaros 2.0 encounter seem to have been datamined already, we thought we’d start from that, and release a complete strategy guide for the 25-man heroic mode of the encounter based on our pTR experience.

Between the intensive testing sessions we asked Lazei to write down a few words about the boss:

Lazeil:
"First I have to thank Blizzard for this amazing opportunity; we were given an unique chance to directly make an impact on WoW raid development. We love the game and we of course want to help Blizzard to make the game as good as possible. The first raid tier of Cataclysm wasn't exactly as polished and perfect as we have come to expect from Blizzard, and I guess the developers themselves probably weren't quite happy with how some of the bosses ended up dying. They contacted us, as we had already established ourselves as experts on raid stacking, clever use of game mechanics, and non-stop raiding for days on end, which made us the perfect quality assurance team for fine-tuning heroic mode encounters.

The pTR provided us with almost unlimited raid setup potential. We tried out pretty much everything, as is the Paragon raid mentality. Let's just say that the encounter initially wasn't balanced around having 20 paladins in the raid… Many changes were made, and we're happy to say that the encounter in its current state has near perfect class/spec balance. Even shamans are somewhat useful, despite the pretty much complete revamp they did with the class

As for the fight itself, what an amazing encounter. It's requires a brutal combination of LK25H-like teamplay and pre-change Al'Akir 25H P1 individual player skill. All the other Cataclysm bosses, which were all pretty damn hard to begin with, are easily blown away by Ragnaros 2.0. On top of that, we were told that in the live version there will be a surpise they didn't want to show us yet.

Unfortunately our NDA disallows making available unreleased in-game art, so we cannot share videos or screenshots from our testing. The strategy itself is fair game though, and we wanted to release it beforehand so we wouldn’t have an unfair advantage in the upcoming race. I hope you have as much fun theorycrafting the fight as we did!"

_{This article was originally published in forum thread:
Paragon Sneak Peek: Ragnaros, the Firelord
started by
Boubouille} _{View original post}

Published on 2011-04-01 12:01 AM

255 Comments

G l o w y r m - 2011-04-01

Originally Posted by Fontaiine

ololol lets use icons from Rift to make it look legit ...

Which ones? I'm interested.

---------- Post added 2011-04-01 at 08:12 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Thorzon

I really don't get Paragon's April Fools jokes. They aren't funny or interesting at all. Only an idiot would fall for things like that, especially on April Fools Day.

Only an idiot would think they are actually out to get people to "fall" for it. Not thinking it's interesting? Well, that's just weird, man. It was a decent read and it's fun to think up fights.

I'm not sure why people are saying "try harder" and "not subtle enough". It's a joke, they weren't going for a "let's trick the entire community" thing here. Who says it must be that way? Many good April Fools jokes are pretty obvious.
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Axys - 2011-04-01

Well atleast this is a better April Fools joke then MMO-Champion's one
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Deafknight - 2011-04-01

hate April 1.
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mmocf3a1a1b543 - 2011-04-01

Hmm when reading the frontpage I thought, this must be a joke. But the fight itself seemed really awesome, and not jokeish at all, you would have seen some impossible mechanics or very weird sounding ones. So I hope that this is some attempt of a double layered joke where it actually turns out to be true.
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Gaiadin - 2011-04-01

The real joke is that Blizz makes a hard boss AND DOESN´T NERF HIM!
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Eixel - 2011-04-01

Originally Posted by DrakeWurrum

Too obvious.

Also: It's March 31st still.

The world revolves around america, wait time zones?
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Leatbabiez - 2011-04-01

wow dude wtf thats so fucking unfair!!!! Fuck this im gonna go play rift now d:<
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mmoc6cb714f7c8 - 2011-04-01

I am going to laugh the *bleep* out of me if this is going to real xD, and that they fooled you by making yopu think this is an april 1st joke xD
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Aureon - 2011-04-01

Cue Blizzard commenting that the real joke is that it's real.
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mmoc69f1075d14 - 2011-04-01

So much work went into this lol!!
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mmocc3a97df17d - 2011-04-01

"Even shamans are somewhat useful..." April 1st ?
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FattyXP - 2011-04-01

All the mages and rogues gave it away >.>
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mmocf44ffe3b81 - 2011-04-01

I hate april fool's cause I always fall for it
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Ragedaug - 2011-04-01

Originally Posted by FattyXP

All the mages and rogues gave it away >.>

Those are pretty obviously placeholders for "ranged" and "melee", just as the warrior icon means "tank" and priest icon means "healer". Those aren't part of the joke, that's how a diagram would be drawn up.
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