EY AMIGO, EL DODGE-O EL SULFRAS SMASH-O?

Ranting time.
So after 10 nights of working on heroic Ragnaros, I have learned a few things, actually scratch that I already knew this shit, but I was merely reminded of it. After I think 250 or so attempts, we finally made it to the last phase, which is when the real fight starts, so basically we made it through the pre-fight RP.

While I realize that most of the people who read this and actually play wow will probably disagree with me, I'm used to that.

The point of the matter is that it's no longer a hard fight. Seriously, the fight is really really simple. The whole fight merely consists of a bunch of "stand here" and "move here"  mechanics. With mechanics of this nature, there are only three possible things that make them difficult mechanics.

1. Not knowing were to stand/move
2. Not knowing when to stand/move
3. other mechanics that make standing/moving less ideal.

Now, on Ragnaros, there aren't any meaningful mechanics that fit in to option 3. and more importantly, on any fight, the moment you figure out when and where to stand/move, that mechanic becomes a non-issue. Unfortunately, not only do people learn at different rates, people are also inherently stupid, so not only do they continue to suck at simple mechanics that already have a working solution, but they also pretend that those mechanics are magically still difficult.
To paraphrase, once you figure out a solution to a mechanic, that mechanic is no longer difficult.

Now to be clear, just because a mechanic is unforgiving, that does NOT mean that it's a difficult mechanic.

Paragon said Heroic Ragnaros was the hardest fight ever created, and they are the best guild in the world.So why believe me?

There are two things that people commonly forget about how raiding in a world class guild is different than raiding in a regular guild.
The first, and most important difference, is information.
When a guild like paragon gets to a new fight, there are no boss strategy guides for them to watch, there are no boss mods to tell them when a certain ability is going to happen. They do everything from scratch. Hands down the most difficult thing to do in raiding is to create a strategy, as opposed to copying one from someone else. Don't believe me? Try to get your guild to do a fight without any person ever watching a single kill video or strategy guide for it. see how long it takes you to get a first kill.

The second difference is gear at the time of the first kill.
The thing about raiding in a world class guild, is you are playing with some of the best players in the world (who would have thought?). Every character has a DPS limit, meaning that for that characters given gear, there is a theoretical maximum to how much DPS that person can do. as gear improves that DPS limit increases. People who are good at WoW will almost always be able to be at 90% of that limit, or higher. Therefore, there is a Raid DPS limit, where if every single person in that raid was DPSing at their personal limit, the raid DPS would be X. Where the hell am I going with this? A guild that kills a boss two weeks before another guild, had to do it with two weeks LESS gear. meaning that their play had to be closer to perfection  in terms of DPS in order to achieve the same raid DPS as the other guild. as time goes by, gear gets better, making it easier to reach the required DPS, which could also be met by simply not being awful, which has nothing to do with encounter design.


Heroic Ragnaros has been available for a long time now, every guild working on him has way better gear than paragon did when they got the first kill, I promise you.

Working on heroic Ragnaros is no longer about learning the fight, it's about learning how to not fuck up the fight, and learning how to not suck at DPS while not fucking up. These are pretty straightforward things to do, the only issue is that if you fuck up, you are probably going to wipe. The fight is extremely unforgiving, I will not argue against that. You fuck up moving from seeds you die, you fuck up AoEing the elementals you die, you pop a trap at the wrong time you wipe, you fuck up world in flames you die. There are a lot of little things that will cause a wipe. But that doesn't make the fight hard, each individual piece of the puzzle has a very obvious spot for you to put it in, but if you don't put it there the puzzle can't be completed.

Unforgiving ≠ Difficult

As an analogy, difficult mechanics are squares, and unforgiving mechanics are rectangles. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. if you had 30 seconds to get away from every one in the raid, and failure resulted in a wipe, that wouldn't be hard. Now what if you had 5 seconds? That seems to be a bit more difficult to accomplish huh?

/rant