Cheating on a beta server. They say we learn for a life time.
Most of the time the issues with raid bosses is halfway through or towards the end of the fight. With regular testing most groups usually only barely make it through so the bugs arent even observed. you can easily buy the gear of the live AH and transfer it to beta to raid test with too.
Ok let me tell you about the point of raid testing
It’s not to actually kill the boss....it’s to test mechanics. You can go in on that crazy shit because it works and it makes wiping for hours fun
Whitemend + Spellfire is going to make for some extremely annoying caster twinks.
Already a few in the 70s bracket who are fucking problem.
It will be interesting to infer based on how class balance is at launch, what impact this widespread exploit in testing had on the balance of the overall game and how aggressively blizzard will want to curtail similar practices in the future. Other than that however, the extra data gleaned from groups getting deeper into boss fights means it isn't a total loss to allow this to happen.
Tbh, I'm not sure why Blizzard let's people use it. I don't see how it enhances the quality of the data they gather, since it's an entirely unrealistic use case that just adds more variables they need to account for later. But it needs to be mentioned that blizzard's raid testing is hardly the hallmark of quality preperation either. There are obvious bugs that they could have caught themselves before they waste a couple hundret people's time, but anyway, broken gear can help people to actually test as well (could be achieved with buffs though) for the cases where an encounter is so broken that tanks get insta-gibbed or unrealistic early DPS/HPS checks.
You are welcome, Metzen. I hope you won't fuck up my underground expansion idea.
I mean there really isn't any "outrage" except from the op. Test servers are test servers, there's no reason to be upset about people testing stuff on them.
As to your question - are you trying to say that under normal circumstances you would equip a piece of BC gear before going into a raid?
I mean testing isn't tuning... The fight is simply there to see if the boss mechanics don't actively break or can be bypassed. How much dmg, healing, mitigation you are doing is irrelevant.
How did so many repliers get confused about something so simple? Christ.
TBC gear won't scale up on live, this isn't about people "finding bugs to fix". The scaling only happens here.
For a real answer to the op: I assume the kind of people who beta test raids are so obsessed with numbers that even when it's in a testing environment that doesn't matter, they STILL feel like they need to min-max everything. It's pretty sad, really.
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Uh, gear won't scale on live, so your point is meaningless here. And it literally IS a practice round for the people doing it. That is why they are there. Do you really think people are raiding on beta to help test? They are there to get an edge.
Amazing that people still dont understand what "testing" means
This entire argument in itself is semantics. Cheating implies that someone is taking an advantage that isnt available to everyone, and that its a contest in which there is a uniform set of rules in order to achieve a merit-based ranking. Its a PTR on which you run a set of tests and then the results are wiped forever aside from internal data. Nobody takes these results to mean anything.
As stated by others, the boost in power is so they can see more of the fight and expose more of the problems.
This really should say "Why are people allowed to do stuff on a test server that wont go live." It would make a lot more sense.