Realmfirst Ragnaros 10-man kill by Whipe, Frostmane EU.

This tier was a long and strange journey. We peaked world #5 (10-man) after getting Staghelm down, and ever since we started Ragnaros HM progression, we've revised both the raiding group and tactics time and time again.

We started with clearing traps in p1 like everyone else, until we noticed we didn't have to. As you can see in the video, we had loads of traps that we ignored throughout the fight, we only had to take them if ranged failed at positioning them properly. This requires ranged to pay attention in p1, but since there's not much else to do, it wasn't hard to argument in favor of this strategy.

At first we single-targeted down the seeds in p2, where we ran from one side to the other, having predetermined positioning at the edges of a healing rain. This worked so-so, and it was not uncommon to get 5 seed-waves in p2 before pushing into intermission.

When we started training p3, World in Flames had priority, and once people had learned it, we switched to normal mode and did p3 until we wiped (with no DPS on Ragnaros, just to train on handling the boulders, until we got overrun). This provided us with a nice boost in time, since it went faster to get to p3, and it was easier to focus on the boulder training once we were there. And with a tactic that was unaffected by WoF, something people already knew how to handle, it did not matter if we trained on normal mode or not.

Our issues pre-nerf came in p4. While everything before p4 was nerfed, I like to think that p4 was "fixed". Our biggest issue was the mind-numbing 10 minutes to get into p4, and people had lost focus by that time. Stupid mistakes were done again and again. And again, and again, and again. And agaaaain. 'nd agaaaaaaain (etc). The nerf provided us with the chance to get into p4 while people still were focused, and the kill came shortly afterwards. It might be worth mentioning most of our p4 progression was post-nerf, our #1 reason of wiping pre-nerf was fatal individual mistakes, time and time again, before we even got to p4. Obsiously, none of them were mine. Or well, I did manage to die once from own fault of ignoring our raidleader and relying on a timer. In my defence, more deaths occured for listening to him and ignoring own timers. :p

It didn't help that getting at least... five D/C's / game crashes / BSOD's from various people during Ragnaros evenings was considered standard. Or that people had job / social calls very frequently. It wasn't far from being a standard to invite sub-par raiders just to get a raid going (the bane of non-hardcore 10-man raiding), which meant we had to teach new people the fight, all the while they did 6-12k dps.

Any way, it was definitely the hardest boss I've progressed on, and hearing how many guilds got disbanded because of this boss, I'm glad it didn't break us. It's a good sign for the future, and hopefully we'll perform better next tier.