Top 3 raid bosses in Cataclysm

I was thinking about this after reading Clara's post on Ragnaros, though a lot of people seem to be reviewing Cataclysm raids lately (Dragon Soul in particular) and it made me think about my top 3 favorite fights in Cataclysm. The thought led me to a weird place.

My favorite fight in this whole expansion is the one that gave me fits of anxiety. It was the fight that kept me awake at night, shaking with dread, the fight where I made mistakes over and over and over again wiping the raid until I learned out how to do it over a brutal, brutal 3 straight nights of raiding the same boss. A rather masochistic exercise, I think.

So, anyway. I thought it would be kind of a fun exercise to see what other people thought, so here is a call-out:


What are your top 3 raid bosses from Cataclysm?

The Rules:

1. You may only pick 3 bosses
2. They must be from a Cataclysm raid
3. It must be a boss you encountered pre-nerf
4. Add a Most Memorable Moment from the encounter, whether a mechanic or from your own personal experience with the boss

You don't need to have killed them - just tried them a good number of times to get a good gauge of the encounter.

Okay - so to start it off, here is my list of top 3 favorite raid bosses in Cataclysm. I wound up sticking to normal-mode bosses to try and keep it universal, though no hard-modes really stand out as being all that exceptional anyway.

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NEFARIAN

This has been the hardest boss to tank pre-nerf in my career as a raid-tank. Kiting adds in Phase 3 was the do-or-die part of this fight and the responsibility of the fight's success was purely on the ability of the tank to get those resets, not to mention the positioning of the drakes and his breath, CD rotation between the healer and tank.

Did I mention the hardest part come in phase 3 after an intense 2 phases where everyone had to execute everything perfectly? DPS and interrupts on the adds in phase 2, surviving the 100k AoE every time you shaved 10% of his health, having a healer or DPS tank the adds in Phase 1 and position them correctly without getting killed...

Pre nerf - this was the most difficult thing I've done in this expansion. This was the hardest fight in all of Cataclysm, specifically for me at least, in Phase 3 and when it was nerfed, I felt really sad that no other raid would ever face up to him at that level. I suppose you could do Heroic Nefarian, but it lacks the simplicity of what made the original encounter so great that it just bit into you and didn't let go. Overall, this would be my favorite raid boss in all of WoW but for Heroic Mimmiron. Firefighter is still the most exhilarating kill I've ever had in a raid, hands down. But Nefarian is a very, very close second.

Most Memorable Moment: I don't know, the moment when Nefarian floods the arena with lava or realizing with head-smacking horror that stunning the adds in phase 3 with Holy Wrath was the biggest mistake I could have made? Either way - brilliant!

RAGNAROS

This fight was more about coordinating your own movement and cool-downs for all the individuals involved, rather than any single particular mechanic that any one person has to handle, but how each individual person helps the raid with damage both incoming and going, with adds in transition phases, and with meteors made or broke this fight. It's an elaborate, choreographed dance that everyone had to execute perfectly.

Not nearly as hard as Nefarian, it was still a worthy and memorable end-raid fight, and it took us a few nights of work to get this. Figuring out how to handle Sons and Scions, two-healing it on our first kill, figuring out positioning for the Smash with Seeds while dodging the fire on the ground, juggling Trap detonations on top of all the AoE going out... nobody was ever bored during Ragnaros (the tanking was relatively boring but I'll give it as pass on that).

Meteor juggling in phase 3, now that I can look back at it in hind-sight, was a hilarious mechanic and I've seen it deliberately knocked into people lately. Bad raiders! No biscuit! Regardless, this fight pushed healing to the limit, and required heavy DPS and demanded precise execution from every single person in the raid, and that's what I loved about it. If they had added some really hard tanking component to this fight, it might have been my favorite fight over Nefarian.

Most Memorable Moment: On our very first pull we coasted through Phase 1 and then at transition I saw the Sons land and zoom to Sulfuras wiping the confident smirk off my face in 3 seconds flat. It was an awesome, "how the hell are we going to do this?!" moment.

CHO'GALL

Deal with interrupting Worship, with fire on the ground, with debuffs on tanks, with the adds, avoiding the Shadow Crash, killing the Corrupter and then the Bloods in time, making sure everyone had very low stacks of Corruption going into Phase 2 and the massive DPS burn needed to kill it at the end - another fight where you just can't fall asleep.

If you're slow on that interrupt, the boss builds stacks and the tank get gibbed. You fail to dodge the Shadow Crash, you wind up with a ton of Corruption and get yourself killed. You fail to swap and kill tentacles in phase 2, you wind up hitting like a limp noodle. You fail to turn away to puke at high stacks of Corruption, you kill people. This fight was great, and the heroic version tuned it even better, adding the elemental mechanic to really keep DPS on the razor edge of swap/killing and pushing the meters.

Most Memorable Moment: The night we had multiple - multiple - sub1-million wipes and at least 2 sub 100k wipes. Heartbreaking. Came back the next night to one-shot it, naturally.

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I'm sad that none of the Dragon Soul bosses are memorable enough to stand out in my list, and though I do like some of the Heroic mode fights (particularly Heroic Yor'Sahj and Heroic Ultraxion), I'll remember doing Dragon Soul, but I won't sigh wistfully over fights it, like I sigh over the fights listed above, or other fights from Wrath like Firefighter, or Yog or Lich King or Heroic Putricide or  3-drake Sarth or Malygos...

And while Tier-11 was a lot of hard work and fun, it was really draining on raids to attack the number of bosses at the level of difficulty they came in with. I'm hoping Pandaria finds a middle-ground. I felt Firelands had a just-about perfect level of difficulty for us to tackle but with too few bosses - and the current tier of Normal modes feels vastly under-tuned, and Heroics feels like it is tuned just about right as well, and maybe a hair over-tuned for 10s but that's okay.

Dragon Soul Nerfs

This feels familiar, doesn't it?

I'm glad we've killed Deathwing a couple of times by now, and have the fight down pat and dry at this point or I'd be really pissed as I was over Ragnaros. As it is, I'm just shrugging it off, as I don't really see the point in further tuning this content as it is, if you'll excuse the elitism for a moment, relatively easy compared to pre-nerf Firelands, but difficulty is a relative thing.

That said, Madness of Deathwing is no Ragnaros. And Madness of Deathwing is certainly no pre-nerf Nefarian. It's more on par with, I don't know, Cho'gall maybe, or Ascendant Council in terms of difficulty. Once you know what to do, the fight is entirely a breeze and the right setup lets you breeze through so much of the fight it's not even funny.

To be fair, we had a number of wipes on Madness. Spine took us a night. But ever since we killed these bosses, it hasn't been a problem and we more or less 2-healed the whole place except for Zon'ozz and Spine. If we do all normal modes next week, I imagine we can clear out the place in less than three hours. Though I think our Raid Lead might want to do Heroic Morchok and Heroic Yor'sahj.

I don't know. I don't know that we're particularly great and our gear was more or less at normal-Firelands level when we started this tier. We even missed about two weeks of progression when we didn't have people over the holidays. So are the nerfs necessary? Not for us, they aren't.

But I think they probably are necessary for the guilds that were stuck on Ultraxion or Lootship or Spine. Those fights do have relatively steep DPS requirements.

Are you having trouble 2-healing in the 5th minute when you're getting hit with 300k every second? Can you get one of the adds down before the Sapper spawns? Can you take the hits of fire throughout the fight without loosing people? Can your tanks taunt swap and chain CDs to survive phase 2? Is everyone able to dodge fire and cones at the same time? Do Bloods overwhelm you in the third plate phase over and over? Do you just need a bit of DPS to get over the hump on that 4th limb of Deathwing or to clear the last 2% in phae 2?

If yes, then this will help you get over that little bump and that's not a bad thing.

Maybe another two weeks of gear will help, maybe you need a different strategy or composition, or whatever, but I've been there going in on the same fight, night after night after night and not being able to kill something and feeling the frustration with making absolutely no progress. I remember two years ago (holy crap) that the 5% nerf helped us down Sindragosa when she was wiping us with sub 5% enrages or something crazy for two or three weeks in a row, and then the week the buff hit, we killed her. It stung a bit, but I was just glad to finally be on Lich King.

As it is, my expectation and my performance is based on completing at least all of normal content pre-nerf and as long as I can manage that, I'm happy. And we've more than managed that this time around. To everyone else who's waiting to get over that hump - I hope you're able to make the magic happen before the nerfs hit, but if not, I'm sure you'll have those shiny titles after January 31.

HOW TO: Ragnaros 10-man

Since the first six bosses in Firelands are rather silly and easy post nerf, I figured I might write up how we do Ragnaros as guilds might still be stuck on him. The way we do the Intermissions in particular are a bit different than most guides so maybe it'll be helpful for someone.

Also, it took me a while to do this because I wanted to experiment with making animated GIFs and see how that goes, so this is an experiment! :-) I don't know. Hopefully it's helpful! If you think I'm doing something wrong, please let me know.

There are also some Paladin Tank specific tips at the bottom.

RAGNAROS (10) NORMAL 


2 tanks, 2 healers, 6 DPS
Unless your DPS is very high (which is to say, if you can push phase 2 with 5 DPS taking only 2 seeds and if you can handle Intermissions with 5 DPS), you want to do this with 2 healers.

6 DPS will also trivialize Phase 3 as you can get through it well before a 3rd meteor forms. If you have more than 3 melee DPS, you might have a bit of trouble but it should be okay with a bit of practice.

You want to set up your groups so you have 1 tank, 1 healer and 3 DPS in each group for ease of positioning in phase 3.

Phase 1
Main things to handle: Smash, Knock-back and Traps

This is a very simple phase - positioning almost doesn't matter. Melee should be tight up against the boss on the lip of his hot-tub to his side to mitigate Parry and they will never have to worry about Smash. The ranged and healers can position themselves at a angle to the Smash as it falls. The only way you might take damage here is if Ragnaros lines up a knock-back and a Smash so that you get knocked into a wave - just strafe towards or away from the Smash to mitigate this as necessary. Also, if a trap lands behind you, move away so you don't get knocked into it.

Dedicate a Mage to handle the traps - they will have no trouble with every single one, but failing that you can rotate paladins (bubble), Shadow Priests, Rogues, Hunters, Warlocks.... this shouldn't be much of an issue, just make sure you have the person call out before detonating it and making sure the raid health is high enough to sustain the damage. Doing it after a knock-back once the raid is topped off is probably best.

Tanks should swap off after 3 stacks of Burning Wound, and we found that taunts were actually messy if the debuffed tank kept DPSing due to very high Vengeance stacks. We found it better to just pull off for a few seconds to ensure safe swaps to avoid gaining a 4th stack of Burning Wound. With tight taunting, you can make sure neither tank ever has more than a 3-stack.

This phase should go very quickly and you will get used to the mechanics after a couple of pulls.

Intermission 1
We have a very strict positioning, that we use for both transitions. I'll illustrate using our composition:

Balance Druid - Rogue - Feral - Mage - Priest - Arcane Mage

At the very least, the 2 people at either ends should be ranged, but if you can get four ranged and have 2 each on either side, it would be even better.

This is not a strict formation - the DPS will have to adjust left or right and decide who takes 2 based on the position of the hammer. There will be 2 DPS assigned 4 adds and 4 DPS with one each. No matter where the hammer falls the DPS with single adds need to clean up their add first before shifting over to help with the spares. This is an animated image that will show all 3 positions of hammer.

We trained on the first set of adds with no help from the Tanks until we got it right. That way our DPS was used to handling it on their own and the tanks could cleanly pickup the extra adds in the 2nd intermission without having to worry about splitting attention between the sets of adds.

Now that we have it down, the tanks do help with the adds, but we've drilled it into the DPS that it's their jobs to get the adds down and the positioning is super-simple, as people just need to remember who they're standing next to and they will know where to go. The shifts aren't that complicated either. Just make sure your DPS at either end is careful of the last add on their side as it will go through the lava to get to the Hammer if it's on the left or right, and you do not want melee running into that. Healers can regen mana here for the most part. Also, don't run into the hammer. Hammer.

Phase 2
Main things to handle: Smash, Engulfing Flames and Seeds


Here is all of Phase 2. I spelled it out in detail below, but I think this illustrates it in an easy way.

Pick a side, doesn't matter which one, but you need to gather up while staying 6-yards apart. Staying within Melee is preferable unless Engulfing Flames is on the inner ring. Dodge the first Smash as it comes, wait for Seeds to land, watch out for Engulfing Flames and then as soon as Seeds land on YOU (the timers are slightly off for this, so you need to watch your own feet and move when you see the spinny thing under your feet)! Now, book it to the opposite side using any (safe) speed boost you have, and gather up on the other end as fast as you can.

The positioning is tricky here but every time you move you need to gather up on the boundary between the two nearest Engulfing Flames zones. That way as soon as it hits you can move in or back and not take damage from that. You can drop a raid marker on both sides to identify where you want to gather up.

Shortly thereafter, Seeds will explode and rush you - group up, use ONE raid cool-down here (Aura Mastery, Barrier, Divine Sacrifice, etc.) and AoE the adds down. Now, quickly, either step into Melee or spread out a bit because you're going to get another Smash shortly afterward. This is a not as tight a moment, as soon as the adds die, your raid needs to position itself for the Smash. You have a short amount of time to call it out and adjust. But it's very easy to get focused on one thing and miss the Smash here, especially as you'll have a lot of ground effects going on - know what's going to happen and be prepared.

Right after Smash is the ideal time for DPS cool-downs as you'll have a few long seconds of burn here with only Engulfing Flames to worry about.

60 seconds later, the second set of seeds land - same as before. Run to the opposite side on the boundary of the two Flames zones.

Now, this is the tricky part. 3 things will come at the same time right after the Seeds explode - the adds are rushing you, the Smash is about to come down, and Engulfing Flames is about to go off. This is the make it or break it moment. You WANT Flames to be in the middle or far back so your entire raid just moves onto the lip and avoids everything. That's ideal. But it won't happen like that every time. Chances are you will have Flames in melee range and you will have to do a lot of dodging to avoid the Smash in addition to moving back out of range.

The most tricky thing in both these situations is making sure you tank stays in melee range or Ragnaros will swing and murder anyone else who is in range - usually a rogue (sorry Vesti).

By now, Ragnaros should be sub-50% and you should make a call depending on your DPS and the time remaining before the next cast of Seeds if you want to push him or take a 3rd set of seeds. With 6 DPS this is not a problem, and you can easily push it with 2, as a 3rd will strain your mana and you might not have a 3rd raid-wide cool-down to deal with a 3rd set of adds.

The less time you spend in this phase, the better.

Intermission 2
Just handle it exactly as you did Phase 1 - the only difference is that you want to keep at least one Son alive for a little while and kill it as close to the end of the phase as possible. Tanks should pick up one Scion each and bring them to the center, mark one for focus and DPS can swap to it as their adds are cleaned up. Ideally you want to get at least one add down before transition into Phase 3 but it isn't too terrible if you don't. Your raid will have to watch out for Blazing Heat and not give a fire boost to the Sons but it is generally not an issue with a bit of awareness.

If you can handle the Sons in phase 1, you can handle the Sons here. The only trick is to get one of the adds below 50% to slow it, use knock-backs, stuns, Death Grip, etc. to delay its journey as much as possible and really burst on one of the Scions. Cleaves and such will get the other one low - they each have 1.5 million health, so you'll need to hit a few short-cool-down DPS boosts to get one down before transition.

Phase 3
Main things to handle: Smash, Engulfing Flames and Meteor


Group up loosely in the middle, dodge any Smashes or Flames that come your way, get any remainingScions down quickly, hit Heroism and all your really big damage cool-downs, trinkets, take that potion and go nuts. You have a good, long period to really burst him here with very little, very predictable movement, and you can get him through as much as half his remaining health very quickly if you transition with no Scions.

About 60 seconds into the phase, the first Meteor will spawn. Ragnaros should have 30% - 25% health left. Immediately, your raid should split - remember how you split your raid into 2 5-man parties? Group 1 goes left, Group 2 goes right, and whoever is being chased by the meteor knocked it back into the center once they've kited it to their side. The raid just keeps on DPSing and dodging Smash and Flames.

Here it becomes a game of kickball - every time it's knocked back, the meteor will pick a different target and move towards them. It's also immune for a few seconds after each knock-back, so you want it as far into the middle as possible. Make sure there is one person on each side who's responsible for jugging it so everyone isn't just focused on Ragnaros assuming someone else will handle it.

Ideally, you want the meteor picking people on the opposite side so it has to travel to them before getting knocked into the center again and so forth. Chances are it will target people in the same group repeatedly and if it's very close, have the person run out and kite it to the opposite group. But if RNG isn't being really terrible, you should still be able to burn the boss with only one meteor up. More meteors will spawn every 30 seconds (or so it seems) after the first one, but I think the pace might increase after 3 meteors. On our training runs, we saw as many as 5 at a time. That was kind of. Crazy.

At this point, if you're able to deal with the meteor okay, you should be able to kill him. Knock back or kite, either way, you're very close, and all you need is one clean pull at this point. If Rag is at 15% or so, and the meteors are getting too close for comfort - maybe try and have a tank with high stacks or DPS run out with one all the way towards the back while the rest of the raid pushes Rag over.

I do believe that if executed correctly, you can easily get this phase down. The only trouble is that most people will not get a lot of time to practice this as the focus you need to get through Phase 2 and the second transition has drained you (and the healers) and you just kind of tunnel-vision into getting him down to 10% and meteors hit people and you wipe.

The other strategy is to simply have the person who's targetted kite it away from the raid and have the raid move away from the meteor but it requires a great deal of personal responsibility and if a healer gets targetted you need to hit it right away to get it switch targets. We were able to kill him with both strategies but splitting up and playing kickball made it seem more organized for us.

Also, with this other strategy phase 3 can wind up looking like this.

Please note that while I did make the other GIFs, I didn't make this (very awesome) one, I found it while doing random searches for information. Whoever made it is, obviously, awesome.


Paladin Tank specific stuff:

- Use WoG to heal your co-tank after swaps
- If you go into Phase Transition with a Trap up, you should take it, use a bubble after reaching the apex of your parabolic journey, and you should land okay.
- Use Divine Sanctuary for one of the two Seeds (co-ordinate with other raid-wide cool-downs so you don't use them all at once)
- Holy Radiance after Seeds while you still can (still grumbling about the added cast time to that spell in 4.3)
- You can take 1 meteor hit if you're Bubbled, or LoH someone who just got hit by Meteor to save their life


Good luck!

Ragnaros: Night 1

Phew. Ragnaros reminds me a lot of Lich King - very tightly tuned mechanics, very high individual raid performance requirements and a very fun fight.

Trash:
The first Lava dude puts slabs of lava cutting off travel over the platform  every so often - we just kind of hopped around and it wasn't too onerous, but I saw that on the first cast, we were stacked and it forced him to put one right under his own feet and since he has a cast, if we backed up or moved up, we should be okay. Not bad at all.

Killing two Magmaws so easily is a bit sad. They put fire under your feet, dodge it. When they submerge and re-emerge, make sure tanks are in place to pick them up. Focus one down then the other. Doesn't matter which one you do first. Or it didn't for us.

Phase 1:
We actually cleared all the way through the first phase into the first transition on our very first pull! Of course, I'm pretty sure that was exclusively on the shoulders of the healers who got us through a ton of mistakes. But we quickly spent the next hour cleaning up Phase 1 so it has become a non-issue at this point - it's a very simple phase as long as a few things happen exactly the same every time:

• Everyone has to be the right distance from each other and they need to make sure they're not getting knocked into lava from the knock back
• The person who's triggering the traps (our awesome mage took every trap) needs to give the healers a heads-up and watch the timers to make sure two AoE's don't go off at once
• Everyone needs to dodge the lava waves from the hammer (especialyl if there's a knock-back coming right afterward - tanks and melee need to be smart about how they're dodging the lava here)
• The melee WAIT for the tanks to be in melee range before getting into melee - especially on the pull and after the knockback. Our feral kitty and rogue were dashing in over and over and getting hit for 150k until we figured out they were just getting to the boss faster than the tanks after knock-backs. Just have them wait 2 secs

That sounds like a lot but it's really not. It's very rhythmic and organic once you get into it.

Phase 2 and 3:
We didn't get too much time in this, but with so many abilities gone from this phase, it should be significantly easier (no knock-back, no traps). The Seed seem to be like the Defile/Valkyr mechanic - run out/group up/run out - but I think we should be okay, as long as we can dodge the flames on the ground. It feels kind of like a Heigan dance. While being chased by living bombs. And getting 30% of Rag's health down. But I'm not too worried about it. Yet.

Phase 3 replaces the seeds with Meteor tanking - which I don't know how complicated it is. We should be able to push him over before we get more than 3 hopefully as the more meteors we get the lower our DPS will be on Ragnaros. Our DPS has been pretty high lately, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed - our basic strat on LK was that if we got to phase 3 and all the adds from transition were dead, we could basically just kind of bum-rush him the rest of the way. Blunt, but it worked. I'm hoping the same sort of thing (or something similar) works here.

Transition Phase:
This is the hard part of this fight.

The first transition and second transition are the same except for the second transition having 2 extra adds that complicate things significantly. 8 adds spawn around the platform and rush towards a randomly placed Sulfuras and if they hit the hammer, it's a wipe. You need the 5 DPS and 2 tanks to split up and handle the adds, stun, slow and kill them before that happens. But the nature of the thing is that it's very random and the placement of the Hammer gives you about 5 seconds to figure out where everyone is going and what to do, communicate that, and get into position at the same time. So it took us probably ten attempts in the transition phase to put something together that looking like it was starting to work.

We had to be very explicit about where the melee were going and where the ranged were going with relation to the hammer - the melee and tanks would always take the 4 closest with specific people assigned left to right and the ranged would be on the rest. It worked a couple of times, but we were still having the odd add slipping through. I really want to nail this to the floor and put a rug on it before we get to the second transition phase because we need this phase to be like clockwork before we handle the two extra adds in that phase.

I was talking to Thistle afterward  and she said she wished we could just replay the fight to get an idea of what's going wrong in the transition and I so wish you could do something like that. Starcraft lets you watch a whole match but there it's just a series of action that have to be duplicated, the amount of data in a 4 minute long raid encounter can be significant. Maybe I should try FRAPsing a raid...

It was a fun night learning this fight and I wish we had one more night to go back to him with, but we'll get there again next week, and we'll have another handful of items upgraded which should help numbers across the board. Every week we come back it will get easier, so we'll see how it goes.

I'm not ready to push lock-outs yet - maybe in a couple of weeks, but not yet. The way I do lock-outs is that I will push a lock-out on the first night, and if we can't kill him, we just go back the second night, drop the lock and do the other bosses - this lets us have the best of both worlds. If we kill him - yay! If not, we can still get our gear without risking getting stuck on an old boss for whatever reason and not getting to him on the second night.

Anyway. It's fun to have a really tough boss to sit on for a couple of nights. I'm already hungry for next week. Rawr.

Hyjal is backwards

Ever since I did Hyjal back in December, I've been thinking about why I don't like that quest line. And I think with 4.2 and the invasion quests, it finally makes sense to me. Hyjal is written backwards. It starts where it should end and then tries to back out of that, and winds up feeling trivial instead of challenging and threatening.

I think one of the big problems with Blizzard is that they are writing on such an epic scale they can't see what makes stories good - they do not let us as characters experience struggle. And yet, it is exactly struggle that makes heroes what they are. It's in the wake of loss that victory has meaning. That is why Wrathgate was so widely accepted as a genius move - it was about the heroes making a massive mistake and being absolutely ruined because of it. It was about the loss of names we thought were immortal.

Cataclysm - and Warcraft in general - could use some more of that.


Think about what happened in 3.1 through 3.3 - nothing. Did we as heroes ever loose ground? Did we have even one setback? Was there ever a point where we saw Dalaran under threat even though it was a 30 second flight from the Citadel? Did the Lich-King more or less tolerate a Renaissance Faire on his doorstep for months? By the time we killed Arthas, it was a foregone conclusion. We were on a relentless march forward with barely a false step along the way.

The victory was not earned in blood and we felt cheated.

In general, Cataclysm feels half-done. We know why we're in Throne or Bastion - there are clear indications even if a few quests leading directly to raids would have helped, but what about Nefarian? There is absolutely no questline devoted to his threat in the end-game. Even something local to Orgrimmar and Stormwind where the old Lady Prestor and Lord Nefarius stories could easily have been done as they tried to re-gather their resources and suddenly we were aware of their threat and moved in before they could get too far down that line - which would explain the limited resources Nefarian seems to bring to bear.

Anyway. Back to Hyjal - I'm going to take a stab at it by looking at Hyjal and seeing how it might have been done so as to follow this back-and-forth swing of loss, regroup and victory.

So imagine, if you will, a different Hyjal storyline. One in which Hyjal is whole, or as whole as it was before the invasion - nascent forests, lush and green, blue streams of water, rich with animal life when an urgent call goes out for help to put out forest-fires. You arrive to see a small volcano and elementals - nothing too much to worry about but as you fight and quest, you find that on returning to your quest hubs, they are overrun, and you have to move back, further up the mountain to regroup - echoes of what happened when the Scourge came.

Over and over, you try to contain the fire but are pushed back, more and more powerful Fire Lords appear, and take over the lower levels of Hyjal and you continue backwards, imploring the Ancients for help but even their intervention isn't enough - only after all four are summoned are they able to put up a defense, but it's too late - by then, much of the forest is already gone, the forces of Ragnaros are on the doorstep of Teldrassil and the world-tree is truly threatened on all side, as Ragnaros' lieutenants wander openly, transforming Hyjal into a part of the Firelands itself.

We are left with dailies to combat the skirmishes against wandering fire elementals and rescuing druids from behind enemy lines and such - we are under siege. You are sent as an emissary to call for help, but the world is too fractured, too busy dealing with their own local problems to care much about a tree on some distant land.

Desperate for something to happen, we become a part of Malfurion's gambit - while the bulk of Ragnaros' forces are on the offensive, he suggests a daring attack against the enemy. He calls for resources to be gathered from the enemy, that he will collect and use to open a gateway into the Firelands itself - dangerous dailies with rich rewards, perhaps.

Imagine, further, a small instance within the barrow-dens. With all this disruption, the various prisoners held by the Wardens are breaking free as the Wardens are called out to battle. Staghelm is making a move, aided by unknown forces that have infiltrated the Dens, perhaps even druids who lead us in and then mislead us while they rescue Staghelm, we see the betrayal and corruption of Druids first hand - a sign of things to come later.

4.2 finally arrives and Malfurion, along with the Aspects and the Elders having gathered enough resources finally opens that gate - straight into the Firelands itself, bypassing all the defenses Ragnaros has put in place. The Avengers of Hyjal take a skeletal crew into the Firelands along with the adventurers and begin their own invasion - one of foliage. The quests can continue as they do now - we plant our own trees in the Firelands and solidify our foothold even as Ragnaros recalls some of his forces, aware now of his exposed flank.

The fight is two-fronted - the invasion and the repel - do dailies in Firelands to grow the trees, and do a new (shorter) questline in Hyjal to retake the land. As quests are completed in Hyjal, the Guardians move forward, take new land, open new dailies and quest hubs, regrow their lands bit by bit.

Meanwhile, the fight continues in the Firelands - adventurers raid against Ragnaros refusing him the opportunity to advance against the tree himself, and tangle up his strongest lieutenants. 4.2 ends with the fires of Hyjal finally extinguished, and Ragnaros finally defeated.

This keeps things very close to the way they are but it just changes the tone of things and adds a palpable sense of desperation to things - it brings a sense of danger. Something sorely lacking in the game right now. With phasing technology being so evocative in its ability to change the world, I think the storytellers can afford to be a little more risky and let us loose things at the end-game a little bit.

It'll make the victories all the more meaningful.