Ragnaros Talents

Level	Choices
1	? ? ✓
4	? ✓ ?
7	? ? ✓
10	? ✓
13	? ? ✓
16	? ? ✓
20	✘︎ ✓ ? ?

Sulfuras Hungers is a good Quest-based Talent that adds a hefty amount of damage to Empower Sulfuras, which, in turn, increases your waveclear and survivability.

Contrary to the damage coming from other sources, the bonus damage provided by Sulfuras Hungers does not scale, meaning that it will stay the same for the whole game. As a consequence, quickly completing the Quest will result in a significant boost during the early game that will slowly fall off while transitioning into the late game.

In order to complete the Quest, you must drastically reduce the Health of enemy Minions by using Living Meteor and Basic Attacks, so that Empower Sulfuras will be enough to finish them off. Using your Basic Attack on the Wizard Minion in the middle of the wave of Minions will result into Empower Sulfuras hitting all of them.

Shifting Meteor is a decent Quest-based Talent that empowers Living Meteor by increasing its damage as soon as you pick it. Upon completing its Quest, this Talent provides a hefty 30% duration increase to Living Meteor, which translate into an equivalent range and damage potential increase.

Although the damage increase is notable, the true power of this Talent lies in the ability to redirect Living Meteor, making the Ability much more difficult for opponents to avoid.

Thanks to its redirect effect, Shifting Meteor synergizes with other Living Meteor-based Talents: Molten Power at Level 7, Meteor Bomb at Level 16.

Engulfing Flame is a good Talent that heavily increases the damage of Blast Wave and slightly increases its radius.

Thanks to the additional damage provided, Engulfing Flame has strong synergy with Tempered Flame at Level 13 and Blast Echo at Level 16.

Fire Ward provides you with an excellent way of mitigating Ability-based damage that scales directly with how many Heroes—and for how long—you can successfully hit with Living Meteor.

Slow Burn is Ragnaros's only form of crowd control besides his Sulfuras Smash Heroic Ability, making it quite unique in this aspect.

The Slow it applies is particularly useful for keeping opponents within the area of effect of Living Meteor, or simply for keeping them around for Basic Attacks and subsequent Empower Sulfuras hits.

Catching Fire is a good Quest-based Talent that provides you with a respectable amount of self-sustain. The activated effect is particularly useful against burst damage, but takes longer to kick in than the Fire Ward alternative.

Hand of Ragnaros is a good Talent that provides a significant amount of cooldown reduction to Empower Sulfuras, the area of effect nature of which makes it particularly effective against team compositions featuring multiple melee Heroes.

With Hand of Ragnaros, you should see to always try and hit as many Heroes as possible so as to always trigger the cooldown reduction effect to greatly increase your sustain damage and survivability.

Molten Power is a good Talent that, when hitting enemy Heroes 5 times with a single cast of Living Meteor, refunds 30 Mana and reduces its cooldown by 7 seconds, so you will be able to cast it again within 4 seconds.

When going for Molten Power, your goal becomes to hit at least 2 enemy Heroes with most of your casts of Living Meteor, better if with the help of a fully stacked Shifting Meteor at Level 1.

Blistering Attacks focuses on improving Ragnaros's single-target damage output against Heroes. Making the best out of this Talent may be tricky, as it requires you to change the way in which you use your Abilities. In general, however, the goal becomes to alternate between delivering Basic Attacks against Heroes and using Abilities in a way that they hit as many targets as possible to significantly reduce the cooldown of Blistering Attacks.

While the bonus damage coming from Blistering Attacks only works on enemy Heroes, any enemy unit can be used for the purpose of reducing its cooldown. Living Meteor is particularly good for the task because it delivers quick packets of damage in an area of effect. All of Ragnaros's Abilities, however, deal damage in an area of effect, meaning that hitting a Minion wave is generally enough to reset the cooldown of Blistering Attacks.

In this section we discuss when and why to pick a given Heroic Ability. If you want to read how they work and/or you are looking for some tips on how to use them, check the dedicated section in the Abilities and Strategy page.

Sulfuras Smash is a situational Heroic Ability that deals a huge amount of burst damage and also Stuns, with increased effectiveness at its center.

You should pick this Heroic Ability when the strategy of your team revolves around bursting down a single Hero. If your team has access to some crowd control effects, you can easily land it from the distance as a follow up to them.

Slow Burn at Level 4 can be used right before Sulfuras Smash to Slow enemy Heroes who are in melee range, increasing your chances to him them with your most powerful Ability.

Lava Wave is a good Heroic Ability that can heavily reduce the siege power of the enemy team by killing all their Minions when they attempt to take down your Structures and allows Ragnaros to soak Experience without actually being near enemy Minions.

We find this Heroic Ability particularly interesting on bigger Maps (such as Blackheart's Bay) because it indirectly gives global value to your team.

Avoid picking this Heroic Ability on Towers of Doom, though, because the lanes are so short that you will not be able to soak as many waves of Minions as usual with it. You can find more details in our Lava Wave Timings guide.

Cauterize Wounds significantly increases your combat survivability, especially when coupled with the cooldown reduction to Empower Sulfuras.

Tempered Flame has the potential of granting you an impressive Shield, for some welcome survivability against burst damage. The caveat is that you must see to have Blast Wave detonate near as many opposing Heroes as possible, however, do not expose youself to do so because taking more damage than the Shiled being generated will result in a loss of value.

Tempered Flame synergises with multiple Blast Wave-based Talents: Engulfing Flame at Level 1 that increases its damage, and Blast Echo at Level 16 that duplicates its effect.

Resilient Flame provides an impressive amount of survivability when matched up against team compositions featuring Stuns.

Giant Scorcher is a good Talent specifically designed to punish team compositions featuring multiple Heroes with high maximum Health (such as Azmodan), by dealing percent-based damage to them.

This Talent synergises well with Hand of Ragnaros, but only if you can manage to hit multiple enemy Heroes at the same time and thus trigger its cooldown reduction effect.

Meteor Bomb adds a considerable amount of damage to Living Meteor, especially if you manage to hit enemy Heores with the center of the explosion.

This damage, however, only happens when Living Meteor ends, making it really hard to get value from this Talent without the help of Shifting Meteor at Level 1 that gives you the ability to redirect Living Meteor.

Blast Echo repeats the effect of Blast Wave, which doubles the benefits of Tempered Flame and Engulfing Flame, granted you self-cast Blast Wave.

This Talent can be exploited to double the duration of the Movement Speed increase provided by Blast Wave, or to manually apply it to an ally and then automatically get it on Ragnaros.

The extra Movement Speed increase is useful for positioning to ensure that the second Blast Wave hits enemy Heroes as well as to push forward or retreat when necessary.

Flames of Sulfuron is a weak Talent which makes Sulfuras Smash apply a longer Stun than usual and a Slow.

We do not recommend picking this Talent because it cannot compete with the other options in the same Tier. If you want to make Sulfuras Smash stronger, you should go for Heroic Difficulty instead.

Lava Surge is a good Talent that gives you a second charge of Lava Wave and reduces its cooldown by a good amount.

Pick this Talent when you want to boost your macro when your team has fewer Keeps than the enemy team and you need to constantly destroy enemy Catapults or when you want to pressure the enemy Core with your own Catapults.

Heroic Difficulty's Health increase incidentally improves Molten Core's duration, on top of the large damage increase the Talent also provides. The massive cooldown reduction also permits a much more liberal use of the Ability.

Combined together, these powerful effects make it more difficult for the enemy team to end the game against Ragnaros or, even better, greatly help his team to end the game at the first chance they get.

After picking Heroic Difficulty, Sulfuras Smash deals 25% more damage when being cast during Molten Core, making it the best Level 20 choice when playing for burst damage.

Submerge is your answer to being the target of your opponents' undesired attention. The Stasis effect provided by this Talent is long enough to avoid many dangerous Abilities, and may even be used as a tool to draw important cooldowns, only to see them go to waste.

The healing effect it provides is respectable as well, and may help you fight back upon emerging. Remember that your cooldowns continue to progress as you are Submerged, perhaps allowing for another round of Abilities in an otherwise dire situation.