With the Iron Horde at our doorstep, more heroes are needed to step up and face them on their turf: Deep inside Highmaul, Blackrock Foundry, <insert T18/T19 raids here>. To prepare them, our scouts and failed survivor parties have given us intel on how to better face these threats.
The Proving Grounds now has a secondary feature in addition to its current one: Simulated Raid Environments! This new option allows you (and 19 illusions) to test your mechanics and role knowledge on specific fights. You can choose from one of four roles (Melee, Ranged, Healer, Tank) and one of three difficulties (Normal, Heroic, Mythic), and your success is heavily weighed on your performance!
- If you fail at mechanics, such as dodging fire or other avoidable attacks, more of your raid will start failing to dodge as well.
- If your DPS is low (as a DPS role), your illusionary allies will also be lacking DPS.
- If your healing low (except on the pull), you'll notice people dropping quicker.
To better test mechanics, most of the random elements have a much higher chance to target you for things to do, such as avoiding Flame Gouts on Kargath, or being picked for Crystalline Barrage on Tectus. Make sure you do well or your illusions won't have such an easy time surviving!
- To motivate players, your allies will give you cheers and encouraging messages when you do well ("<Name>, good job avoiding that fire!" "Way to kite Kargath into the fire, <Name>!").
- To help players understand mechanics (or roles!) they do poorly at, their allies will also help them out with some hints ("I bet Kargath doesn't like fire" "I need healing! <Name> please assist me!" "We must do more damage immediately to down these Warmages!")
- If at any point the player reaches 1 health, the simulation will immediately end, preventing their death, but also requiring a restart of the entire fight.
Needing some help or friendly morale? You can bring up to 4 (real) allies with you, and they can be any role as long as they fit into the 20-player comp!
Finally, to encourage players to actually take the time to learn these fights on their time, successfully completing every boss in a raid for the first time will reward players with a Normal-quality item from that raid, picked at random! (Normal-quality Cache of Highmaul, for example) These caches will only be given out once per completed raid, per player, however, but you're more than welcome to come back and test your abilities, or simply to brush up before a raid night!
TL;DR
- Proving Grounds now lets you test 20-player raid bosses, alone or with up to 5 players (doesn't have to be 1T, 1H, 3D).
- You'll get ONE cache of Normal-quality raid loot from the raid you completed, for the first time you do it (non-repeatable quest or achievement).
- You can test any difficulty except LFR, and pick any role, even if it's not your role.
- Illusionary allies will do better or worse based on your performance. Imagine your allies to be equal to your skill based on how well you do on a fight. You WILL NOT succeed (and even get curbstomped) at the fight if you do poorly, and you'll pass significantly easier than your guild raids if you do everything perfectly.
- You can try as much as you want, just like proving grounds, to test your DPS/Healing/Tanking, to improve at a mechanic you're bad at on a specific boss (without the glares and negativity of your guildies/peers), to see how a specific new/old boss goes, or your general mechanics awareness.
Idk, just a little idea I thought of that would make Proving Grounds infinitely more useful than it just sitting there as a minor inconvenience for new players to do outdated content (Heroic Dungeons).