Recently a somewhat interesting historical thread came up on R&D about the different version of Ragnaros, for reference here it is: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...ns&T=190861&P=1

But sadly it became overcome with rumors and heresy. I was wondering if one of you could enlighten us on the changes and previous challenges that were faced.

In hindsight, was Rag 1.0 truly impossible?

Wow there's a lot of misinformation in that thread.

From what I understand, the only thing that really changed between the first version of ragnaros, and the version that was actually killed was:

1) His aggro range was drastically reduced.
2) He despawned after 2 hours instead of 1

Originally you could get one attempt in on him, and then if you wanted to try him again you had to rezone in, clear the respawned surgers (they kept respawning even after you killed garr), and then try to attempt him again. However, his aggro radius was huge so your raid had to lava hop towards him while eating randomly targetted 6k nukes.

The first attempt you had against him had lava splashes throughout the whole fight. The second attempt the splashes didn't start until submerging (supposedly), but you couldn't really get him there because he would own you too hard while you tried to get your raid in position.

Fully unresistable ones, too.

Do not wave at the firelord.

No, definitely possible. If I could take a 40-man group into MC to fight Rag v1.0 knowing what I know now, he'd die.

The lava splashes were brutal and unresistable, which ironically meant that FR was useless except for the tank in the earliest version of the fight. He did so much damage and guilds at the time were only moderately geared-up from MC. And because of his massive aggro radius, one attempt a week at him simply was not enough to adequately learn the fight.

the very first rag spawned SoF every 90 seconds as well as had more hp than his current form. I'd like to think with a smaller aggro range and repeatable attempts that he was killable but i'm not sure. Even with the best gear from MC/BWL im not sure if any guild would be able to do Rag 1.0 That would mean doing 5 if not more SoF. MAybe allaince healers would be able to regen enough mana with JoW but even that i severly doubt =(

this thread prompted me to go look through some of the really old WoW movies i had on my computer and i came across Conquest vs Onyxia, strange to see that back when guilds were first doing MC/Onyxia no one used BoS yet today its the source of every Alliance/Horde imbalance thread.

Go watch any of Conquests old MC videos and you can see that they never used BoS for anything. Kinda funny

I believe one of the reasons for this is that aggro generation by dps classes has scaled much faster than tanks - way back then I couldn't really draw aggro off a tank unless I hit it prematurely, now my bolts do double the damage and it's way too easy :)

I mean, I'm sure rogues and hunters could do it back then, but they had deaggros - the real problem is warlocks, mages and healers :(

The release of BWL coincided with the rising popularity of whispercast, which is what really turned the pallie blessing theorycraft into reality.