So the boss is dead, what now?


So, the boss is now dead. What happens now? As most of you know, we want to respect the race by not releasing anything related to our strategy before world second kill. This means we won't publish the kill video, tactics guide, meters, or Bigwigs mods just yet, but we'll do that in the future.

We've also planned on writing something blog-like about the work we did to get the kill. It still feels like it's hard to know what you actually want to see. So please tell us what we should talk about, what you'd like to know about the past race and we'll try to work on that.

To those who wonder what we've been doing after the kill on Tuesday night, the answer is we had a day off. We'll start farming content this week and take it easy until the next race.


Comments

What you did after Lich King kill was great! I would appreciate something similar done in T12 =)

Hi

First of all, great job on the Kill.

Personally i would like to see you guys implementing streams on your farm raids. I have still to see a guild that has actually implemented this properly. To be represeting the top guild in the world, i personally think that many people would like to see live streams from your raids. Where one stream for tank, range, melee and healers is available.

As a tank, i would personllay like to hear how Lazeil prepared for each boss(specially the last 3). What he changed in talents, gear, theoryC. What his biggest problem was when tanking, what was easy, what strategy made it easier for him etc etc.

Keep rocking that first place ranking!

Gratz on the kill. Very impressive how much consistency Paragon is showing since WOLTK.

One thing great also is that you have a very stable roster and it makes Paragon's roster looks very friendly and family-oriented. (Close in spirit to a lot casual guild out there)

Personnally, I'd like to read a sort of "chronology of the kill" : You wrote earlier that it tooks more than 500+ tries to get the kill. It'll be nice to know more about each of the step of the progress from try one to the actual kill which happened 500 attempts later.

Something like :
1-30 : After some pulls we figured out XXX abilties will favor XXX strategy
30-80 : The dps requirement in phase XXX made us realize that we needed to remove some healers etc.
Around try 150 : To burn the last phase, XXX had the idea of farming the trinket from Siamat...
At 200 : Kruf had a nervous breakdown because of the /w harass and decided to add a post on his blog :p
...
500 : Last try, everyone focused, and then...

There must have been so much adjustements on the strats, roster, items, fun facts to get the kill. Please share this with us. (I remember that Kruf did a post about a typical day during progress, hour by hour. it's kind of the same idea)

Congratulation again.

While the chronology requested by Epitok probably isn't plausible (nobody keeps track of the evolution of tactics compared to pulls, it's needless information for the guild), some insight into the process and evolution of said strategies would be interesting.

Little is often known of who are the people who do the prep behind the scenes, and whilst fawning over great individuals is nice and dandy, end of the day it's the strategies which set the top guilds apart. Also, I'd like to have some of my preconceived notions about some of your members involvement in these things confirmed ;)

What would interest me is:
- With wich base raid composition did you begin to work on the Ragnaros HM? When and why did you decide to change it during the many tries? Is this an armory mistake or did Lazeil not take part in the final kill?

- How do you keep alert and motivated during hundreds of tries spawning many days?

- Progression being a race how do you manage the stress? How often do you check the other top guilds' IRC to see whether they downed the boss or not?

- There is a huge difference of stuff between the classes. For example the hunters are way better equipped than the warlocks. Is this pure loot randomness or was it a gearing strategy?

- how do you go about evolving the strategy? After how many tries do you decide to change the strategy and who takes part in the decision?

- how ofter did you reforge / redo you talent trees during this encounter?

- There were hotfixes (for example the many hotfixes regarding living meteors) during the tries. How does this york? Do you and other top guilds have a direct contact to Blizzard to whom you can report bugs? Or does Blizzard analyze your logs without interaction with you/other top guilds?

Anyway whaterver insight you decide to offer will be of great interest. Thanks in advance.

Hehe, once again gratz on the kill. I'd prefer to read a huge article, mostly about what Epitok, Sun_Tzu and Sil asked for already. And if possible, don't split it into parts :)

One virtual timeline of your progression; a huge post to rule them all.

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Starting with the very 1st pull problems and how did u changed the tactic as the guild progressed further and further on. I understand there were some minor bugs&fixes, nothing 2 stop killing it thought, details. What alts you had to play/experimented with.

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The tactic that worked + video + dps/healer meters.

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A short "interview" with individual paragon raiders, 2 paragraphs each is enough:
- How did u see T12; maybe compared with T11 or others tiers
- How was raggy HC? (many say it's hardest boss ever, even if he went down pretty soon for you)

Cheers

What I really wanna know is...and this has been on my mind since i saw the announcement..how the hell did you kill Ragnaros with Smirky in the raid?!

On a more serious note: I think what a lot of people wonder about is, how do you manage to keep the raid motivated throughout so many tries in such a short matter of time? I think most WoW guilds sometimes reaches an invisible wall where they either decide to call it for the night or simply loose hope that the boss can be downed, how do you get that extra 1% out of your members?

A big thanks for all the very good questions and topic suggestion. Keep them coming!

I'll start working on some material already, some of it I'll try to "assign" to other guild members who are interested in contributing.

Awesome to get feedback directly from all of you. Sometimes when you just raid day after day after day one starts to forget what are the most interesting things the public want to know. At least we tried to keep everyone posted on Blizzard forums by telling when when Deva took a crap... ;)

First of all, congrats again!

And my question(s) is, how do you prepare for each fight/encounter (before and after wipes) and how do you choose which combo of players to use? Also, do you usually have players take roles as leaders or do you always let everyone in on the fun? :)

Hi guys,

First, congratz, its always nice to see such dedication on people. (altought im a bit sad to see content cleared so fast).

A thing i dont see that much is trash videos, true that the last raids didnt have as much as this one does, if u guys could do that it would be excelent.

Because one of the problems on this raid is the trash we need to deal with.

I saw the other day BWD run in a Mage pov, (sorry didnt got the name) wich was an alt, do you guys do separate raids with your alts? Cause it would be nice to whatch those also, im suspecting that they arent as geared or even have 2 main professions, so less "perks".

Other then that, i wish u all the best luck in the world, hope one day ill go to Finland learn the language and then give you all a boost ;-).

/hug
Evo

You killed Lich King heroic world first, then did it with the 0% buff.

You've killed Ragnaros world first and should now kill it using a shaman.

What i would really want to see:
An epic movie, but im sure thats coming, as you said when someone else downs him.

That blog:
What kinda hours did you spend? Was it a whole day at a time, with little to no sleep?
Is the fight a skillcheck, or was it hard mainly due to the lack of gear?
What kinda theorycrafting did you use?
Why did you pick the raid comp that got the kill? What do those classes have that counter the fights mechanics so well?
How did the dungeon journal influence the kill, and the tier as a whole?
Was the fight/tier fun? hard?

Even though i guess we all know this one:
How does it feel to get a world first end-raid boss kill, on a dude as epic as Ragnaros?!

I would like to see your grade on the bosses. From Easy->Boss Quality->Challening->Hard bosses.

live streams of farm raids would be sick :)

One thing you could tell us now.....how much space all the FRAPS footage took up

Is it true that you guys stacked death knights because hand of ragnaros can be stealed with dark simulacrum ? And if this is true was this working as "intended" ?.

Dark simulacrum didn't work on anything on the encounter.

Congrats Paragon!

One thing that you should remember is that the majority of viewers have no first hand experience with the fight and so we often miss the complexity or difficulty of certain mechanics or tactics. When a strategy is executed correctly it can look pretty simple.

I remember watching your heroic LK video and thinking how ordinary the first two phases looked, it didn't get exciting until the end of phase 3 when you killed him after the enrage. I didn't understand, until I actually tried the fight, how tough it was to heal Infest. The Valkyrs in phase 2 looked boring, three slow stunnable adds come in and you cleave them down. I had no idea how fast them moved and how much health they had until I attempted it myself.

If you don't know what the fight looks like when you do it wrong it can be hard to appreciate the skill that goes into doing it right. Do you have any wipe footage still Frapsed? I think it would be fascinating to see a companion video that included some snippets of wipes. Show us how quickly the raid wipes if ability X isn't healed. Show us how fast add Y moves if not controlled. Explain tactic Z and then show with video how, while it might seem simple on paper, there are a host of things that can go wrong while actually executing.

FIrst of GZ on the kill.

LIve stream as some ppl already said would be SOO sick

also how can you keep on going even after 400+ wipes

Hi, gratz on the kill.

Video of all 7 bosses would be great ! Well maybe not shannox ...
Streams with vocal could be nice as well.

And of course detailed logs :)

I remember in Wrath, Method released a video of their guild wripping through naxx at 2x speed during t8 content or something. Was really fun to watch a top world guild go back through old content and steamroll through . I realize this has nothing to do with Rags kill, but I think a lot of people would like to see the worlds best guild do past content for fun.

Gief a timelapse vid from the whole clear like the one from icc, best wow-raid video ever IMO. Another one would be epic

Hello guys.
First of all i wanna congratulate you for this epic acm !
I love Nerd screams so please put it at the end of the video. <3

kind regards

About the Video that will be released later on as soon some other guild killed Rag Heroic, would you please add some of the wipes you got clear to a kill? or even maybe a wipe that happened at the start of the pull. That would be great to see.Thanks anyway

And Grats on the kill and i hope you kill it once again this reset before someone else :D

I would like to see a comparison between T12, T11 and T10.
Also it would be very nice to hear something about your "road to world first".
When i startet playing it was all about Nihilum and SK, then i took a break. After i returned you made all World 1st up until now. How did the guild started? When? What were your intentions at the start?
*im sorry if any informations like that are already official, then pls link em to me in PM*

We've read all these marvelous ideas for articles, blogs and much more and will start working on at least some of them. Thanks again, there are some real pearls there that we never even thought about.

We discussed grudger's idea of explaining how hard the fights actually are by releasing a video which had a lot of "fail tries" in it. Somehow we felt that we'd rather just keep on publishing actual kills and try to explain the complexity of the encounters in words. I guess every pve player has had their own share of wipeing, and we don't feel we want to show you more of what you are already tired of in your own raids.

Cheers for the kill,

I would be really interested to hear something about the mobility of your core players between specs and classes for the rag hc kill. How long did it take to figure out the ideal setup for the fight?

Best of luck, zack

Gratz on the kill.

Something that many many people want to know is if you guys are paid to play?

Your LK video was one of the best wow videos I've watched, the commentary, the music used, the intro, the nerdscreams, everything was awesome. Someone mentioned the idea of commentary or some on screen captions like around pull XX we figured out this would be cool as well.

Congrats again!

Congratulations Paragon!

I would like to hear more about how you go about developing a strategy - do you have any kind of formulas you run through when approaching a new encounter? First try X, then add Y, etc? Or is it more of a spaghetti-test-throw-everything-at-the-wall and see what sticks?

How do guys theorycraft together? For instance, there's been some speculation on certain casters using the blue trink from Tol'vir for the H Ragnaros kill; who comes up with these kinds of ideas and how are they shared among the team?

How much "support staff" do you have? We noticed alot of the players went Engineering for this kill - I can't imagine the team running around and farming their own mats when they have a full raiding schedule to contend with...

Again, GREAT job and looking forward to seeing this kind of expanded content from you :)