Icecrown Citadel Testing - October 15, Blue posts

[Boubouille]

Update - Added the latest blue posts

Icecrown Citadel Testing - October 15

We are scheduling a raid test for Icecrown Citadel tomorrow at 7pm EDT/4pm PDT for the two US PTR Servers. Lord Marrowgar, the first boss of the raid zone, will be available for testing. The trash leading up to him will also be ready for testing.

The Icecrown Citadel raid test schedule will be very flexible, and can change at a moment's notice due to build status, bugs, and server issues. Remember that this is the test server, so things can, do, and will break from time to time. Check this forum for the latest US Icecrown Citadel raid testing schedule information in the weeks to come.

The EU region will have a different raid testing schedule, which I will announce on their forums in the near future as I have further information and more bosses are ready for testing.

Blue posts

Azshara in Cataclysm
When Cataclysm is released, Azshara will finally be a fully quested zone, complete with lore and other coolness. (Source)

Waiting for battle rez cooldowns in heroic ToC
The main consideration that drove this change was the limited attempts in ToC heroic. It's not fun to feel like you are supposed to sit around and let your long cooldowns come back up. We really like the limited attempts mechanic though and might use it again in the future, so we wanted you to feel like the battle rezes would be reasonably available. Yes if you wipe in 2 min you might not have it available again, but you probably shouldn't be battle rezzing that quickly into a fight anyway. (Source)

Death Knight
Scourge Strike on PTRs

• 1) Scourge Strike should crit for 200% damage like other DK spell effects.
• 2) The Shadow part of the damage should never miss if the physical part hits.
• 3) The Shadow part of the damage should never be decreased additionally to the physical damage. It should not "double dip" from resilience et al. Example: My physical portion that hits for 2000 is reduced to 1000. The Shadow part should then hit for 1000 (modulo bonuses) and not 500 or whatever.
• 4) The Shadow part of the damage will still be increased additionally by talents and anything else that buff Shadow damage. It will "double dip" in the DKs favor. Example: My physical portion hits for 2000 and is reduced to 1000. The Shadow portion hits for 1500 because I have +50% Shadow damage.

Scourge Strike Damage
Only the physical damage can be reduced. The Shadow damage can only be buffed, since it is essentially already reduced by the physical mitigation, resilience or other defensive effects.

The intent was just to split the damage into part physical and part Shadow. We didn't want the split itself to be a penalty, if that makes sense. (Source)

Druid
Rejuvenation nerf in 3.3
I think our dislike for Rejuv blanketing gets oversold on these forums. We nerfed Rejuv because Rejuv was too good. Druids do have a lot of heals and ideally they would use all of them (and HT proponents even crop up from time to time). On the other hand, it's challenging given that when a relic or set bonus props up one spell, that is probably going to be a popular spell. We're fine with that to some extent. It's interesting when certain pieces or tiers of gear lead you to want to change up which spells you favor.

We changed Gift of the Earth Mother because it was a problematic talent, as I'm sure many of you could agree. It's one thing when class mechanics make a stat less optimal for you. It's another when a talent totally stomps over a stat that shows up on a lot of gear.

We want Nourish to be a good spell, yes, but I think it has been for some time. None of these changes will kill Rejuv either.

[...] To be honest, we may revert the Rejuv nerf. This isn't 100% finalized yet, so please don't say we promised anything.

We definitely wanted to nerf Rejuv. However we also wanted to fix Gift of the Earth Mother. That change wasn't necessarily aimed at further nerfing druids, even though that was the outcome. It was aimed at not making haste such a wonky stat for Resto.

In short, we think the GotEM change both nerfed druids and fixed the haste scaling problem so the Rejuv duration nerf may not be necessary. Stay tuned. (Source)

Priest
Vampiric Embrace as a buff in 3.3
VE is unlikely to work with Mind Sear. Just sayin. (Source)

Shaman
Tier 10 Elemental Relic
The Elemental totem is haste, not crit, and I believe it is a 30 sec duration. (Source)

Reincarnation cooldown
We might drop Reincarnation to 30 base, talented to 15. That's a slight nerf to the talent, but at the same time taking the cooldown that low might make an unattractive talent more attractive. (Source)

[...] We were concerned that a really short cooldown on an ability that rezzes you and only rezzes you would lead to bizarre behavior. Shamans could just commit suicide every fight knowing that they could come back. Standing in the fire too long? No problem. Too far away from where you want to be? Just die. Out of mana? Just die. Yes you might lose dps or healing time, but we still think it would happen and we think it would look weird.

Soulstone by comparison can easily be used on the "wrong" person (if they don't die) and Rebirth can't be used at all if the druid dies. In some ways, Reincarnation is the only cooldown that you are guaranteed to see every fight as soon as it becomes that dependable. (Source)

[FireBorne]

Nice!

[treston323]

Yes!

[Heeth]

hope they did a good job on this one. Can't wait to see it

[santoslhalper]

I'm waiting till it goes live but I can't wait to hear about it!! SS / Videos please!

[TheTacoMan]

I really hope they only test like the first 3 or 4 bosses so we have to go into ICC with a little bit of guess work to do.

[Jazzun]

we cant kill the lich king yet? this is really being drawn out

that's the point

[Deleted]

I really hope they only test like the first 3 or 4 bosses so we have to go into ICC with a little bit of guess work to do.

I hope so too. However, it's unlikely to happen based on previous PTRs. I wish Blizzard had a bigger internal QA team.

[Telie]

Fun :

[Daodan]

Hmyea. The impression I've gotten so far is that Blizzard is really trying to make ICC a special experience. A truthfully awesome raid. This would involve some clever mechanics and cool tricks, that unfortunately need plentiful testing (I partially based this off the achievements). I would really hate to see ICC in its near entirety being beaten on the PTR though.

[TheTacoMan]

I hope so too. However, it's unlikely to happen based on previous PTRs. I wish Blizzard had a bigger internal QA team.

Yeah I know it most likely won't happen but I can dream can't I?

[Denalian]

Gawd, give us EU testing...and enough guildies willing to give it a shot.

[mackmustard]

WTB trash like Ignis' on 3.2 PTR plox

[Deleted]

WTB trash like Ignis' on 3.2 PTR plox

Anything but

/this

[Annoying]

NoooooOOoo!

This is like the superbowl of raid instances. You can't reveal fight mechanics in public testing like this! WTF blizzard.

[ohshift]

any info if there will be any drops?

[Ernalash]

NoooooOOoo!

This is like the superbowl of raid instances. You can't reveal fight mechanics in public testing like this! WTF blizzard.

LOL but sad true, I thought that they will not release the entire raid in the PTR. At least, one can pay no attention to the videos and explanations, but it's almost impossible to do it, because all of us want to see and live THE FIGHT of this exp.

[Sanguissa]

Damn i would gladly pay one more euro per month just for blizzards personal testers, so we wouldnt actually see any of raids before they are released..

Ofc, Ill propably get "so dont watch that ptr lol"ed, but Iam too curious for that.

[Organoth]

I really hope they allow for some more extensive testing b4 the patch is released. The was almost no testing for ToC, true it's a simple Raid but I feel that player testing is so important. I'm the only person in my guild who tests on the PTR so I need to be able to help them through it on live.

[FireBorne]

WTB trash like Ignis' on 3.2 PTR plox

No thanks, stupid time consuming trash. Trash leading to Kogalon was nice.