World of Warcraft: Game-Wide First Ragnaros Kill

Guild Ascent on the server Medivh takes down Ragnaros for the first time anywhere on April 25th, 2005.

Yes, I was too lazy to switch out my fiery enchant for something else, and no, we didn’t use Ventrillo back then. Those skills you say I should be using? Completely different back then, or just plain broken.

Screenshot of the aftermath: www.aggybong.com/random/gaming/byerag.jpg

Also, despite what some others think, Ascent WAS first anywhere. Some links:

http://www.forumsx.net/showthread.php?t=27477
http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/16397-WoW_world_first_list
http://www.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/ascent-guild:-ragnaros-bites-the-dust/

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Update: There’s a lot of hate on vanilla. I get that. It’s a completely different game now. However, some of you call it easy and boring and say we didn’t know how to play when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Keep this in mind: Out of the millions playing the game, our group of 40 was the first to take him down after months of trying.

The game was so hard back then for completely different reasons than what make it hard now, and it was so bad that they had to constantly nerf raid zones after Molten Core because such a low percentage of the population even got to see the zones, let alone kill a boss or clear the entire place.

I stole a post that sums it up pretty well:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/935211-Ragnaros-(Molten-Core)-Killed-World-First!!?p=12188657&viewfull=1#post12188657

There is a lot of crap and nostalgia about Vanilla raiding – but there’s also some truth.

Notice how dps players had to heal using bandages? How melee back in the day had to watch aggro? How adds would spawn in phase 2 – and the raid had to CC those adds? How there were knockbacks that everyone had to consider during the fight? How mana was NOT infinite and healer ressources as a whole were pretty limited? How a lot of resistance buffs and gear were needed to gain enough survivability to even get close to a boss kill?

I didn’t enjoy Vanilla raiding – and Molten Core is still THE most boring raid instance of all in my opinion. When compared to any of the Xpacks, it was sheer boredom (and the grinding required to gather raiding buffs etc. was brutal – in a very unfun and unpleasant way). But just because the dps rotations were a lot more simple and boss mechanics rather easy to grasp doesn’t mean that you didn’t have to watch your step and execute with rather small margins for error. This was especially true for the tanks – there was no way in hell that the backup tank would be able to gain aggro right away, if the main tank died. So, if the main tank died, it always meant a lot of casualties among the dps and healers.

The game has evolved to be a more fun game – and a faster game as well. But that shouldn’t mislead anyone to believe that raiding in Vanilla was oh so easy. It wasn’t. But it was definitely less fun.

PS: When Blizzard redid Naxxramas for WotLK, the instance was nerfed to be a shadow of it’s former formidable Vanilla self. Why? Because even at level 70 in TBC, most people simply couldn’t complete the original Naxxramas. It was – still – too hard and unforgiving. I’m not saying that’s good or bad game design; I’m just pointing out that raiding back in Vanilla could be incredibly hard and have game mechanics that would still wipe a 40 man level 70 raid, 2 years after Naxxramas could be called “Current raid content”. You can’t say the same for any raid instance introduced in TBC or later.