PTR

So as noted a while back I was in the hospital and have been in recovery a good while which has lead to me not talking as much about some of the recent interesting events—namely, PTR and BlizzCon—as I would have otherwise liked.

Recovery however, has been going well and I’m slowly starting to feel like I’m in somewhat good condition again and maybe I can slowly start gaming more again.

BlizzCon

So BlizzCon this year kind of went like expected, we got a lot of new announcements and they all looked quite interesting though the apology at the start did end up feeling a bit hollow since there was no action taken alongside that apology.

Seeing more story content for Overwatch is nice, having recently actually taken the time to read some of the comics the story and the world does seem really interesting so in a way it’s something of a pity that there hasn’t been more story in-game that we could explore.

Diablo 4 seems nice, though while that is a franchise I enjoy it’s not one I’m overly invested in, getting more story to play like with Overwatch will be nice but I’m in no real hurry to get to play it.

StarCraft ended up being ignored a bit it felt like, with not much new content on the horizon though that is somewhat understandable but still a pity since StarCraft was one of my favourite games growing up though I never got into the competitive side of it.

As for the “main dish” for me at least, World of Warcraft, the announcements left me rather disappointed. There was really one primary thing that I had wanted from this expansion, and that was being able to play Night Elf again and that unfortunately got definitely denied in the Q&A they held at the end. This kind of extends to my fear with the new Covenant system, there are some really nice cosmetic effects tied into choosing a covenant however there is also player power gated behind that choice meaning I might again be “forced” to make a choice I don’t really want to make.

As for the rest of the mechanics, Blizzard seemed quite clear in pointing out that most of the systems were in very early stages with them even being unsure how loot would work and 8.3 with the corrupted gear being one of the deciding factors there which means it feels a bit early to comment on all of that, though so far aside from the concern voiced in the last paragraph regarding the covenants the systems do seem a lot better than the ones in Battle for Azeroth with the tower having the potential to be as interesting as Mythic+ was in Legion which would be nice though I am slightly skeptical of the rogue-lite nature of it since that type of game hasn’t really been my jam so far.

Public Test Realm Raid Testing

The PTR has also been out for a while and we’ve gotten to test every single boss I think, some of them even on mythic—and some of them on mythic when they weren’t supposed to be available on mythic; due to some bug on the PTR, for the first Wrathion and Ma’ut testing we were thrown into mythic instead of heroic which while a fun experience was more buggy than the PTR is usually leading to not very useful testing on our part.

As for the rest of our tests, they have gone decently well and given us a rather good feel for the bosses—except N’zoth, that fight was too buggy for us to do any real testing—which is always nice to have in preparation of the actual content. However the tuning has as usual been completely out of whack, so if we actually want to get any practice on the later phases we’ll need to focus on the tests that come shortly before release.

Still, so far the raid seems rather fun with some bosses even bringing in some rather fresh mechanics—looking at you, Prophet Skitra—which is nice to see and others bringing back very annoying mechanics, namely the Void Miasma at Drest’agath—healing people when line of sight is a major issue never really felt fun, and was one of the more annoying parts in the Queen Azshara encounter so I’m not overly thrilled to see it will probably play a major role again.

Overall though, I’m hopeful when it comes to the raid even with the Discipline nerfs coming out on the PTR and look forward to progessing it after a nice holiday break.

So this weekend had some more raid tests open on the PTR, Azshara Heroic on Friday for a couple of hours and all of normal except Azshara for the rest of the weekend and we took a poke in there again. Now the bosses we killed last time around all went down easily, after all they are the early bosses so that is to be expected. Now there had been some changes to the Blackwater Behemoth which overall made the fight significantly easier, though unfortunately they had disabled the use of the artifact fishing pole—or its effect rather, nothing happens when you equip it during the fight. But this time around the damage on that fight was much lower and the pushback also had a much shorter duration, making the fight much easier than before.

Orgozoa

The rest of the raid however, was a bit more interesting. The first new boss on the list was Orgozoa, who actually proved to be a decent challenge to us since we didn’t quite understand the mechanic at first and weren’t sure how to handle the intermission. Now the primary mechanic, at least from a healer perspective, is the Incubation Fluid that he spits on a random player. This is a DoT that lasts for the rest of the phase and deals rather significant damage. That alone wouldn’t be so bad since the debuff wouldn’t spread too quickly since the boss doesn’t use the ability that often but the boss also periodically casts Arcing Current on a player with the debuff that chains up to three targets and spreading the debuff which meant that by the end of the phase we actually had quite a bit of healing to do.

The boss also spawns three adds at a time that were rather easy to deal with though they do leave after them a pool that needs to be soaked—in our case the tank could soak all of the pools alone—or they will explode wiping the raid, this mechanic was actually present on the trash on the way to the boss.

Finally for phase one, the boss occasionally does these circles on the ground and you need to move out, it can get rather tight since it’s basically a “dance” mechanic where most of the room fills up with them and you need to move out until they disappear and then new ones spawn. This goes on a couple of times and the fight goes back to normal—the only thing to watch out for here is that people stay properly stacked or spread so that the debuff doesn’t jump to new people.

Then there’s the intermission which just seemed to be a case of run down the spiral quickly enough in order to interrupt the boss or you wipe, watch out for the mushrooms that knock you back on the way down.

After the intermission comes phase two, and honestly I can’t really say anything overly memorable about it even though I ended up healing it alone since our other healer died on the way down. The debuff from phase one seems to be back, but only one player ended up getting it so it was really easy to heal through. I guess the adds changed from mind benders to naga, or maybe both? Didn’t do much from what I remember, though that might change on higher difficulties. Once we got into phase two, we killed the boss and in general we didn’t have that many wipes here but I’m still interested to see the boss on mythic especially with how the damage was in phase one to see how extreme it will end up there—especially since we were only thirteen or fourteen while playing this boss so the room will feel much more full with a 20 person raid.

The Queen’s Court

The next boss was The Queen’s Court consisting of two bosses: Silivaz the Zealous and Pashmar the Fanatical as well as Queen Azshara a bit in the background toying with the players.

This boss in retrospect actually surprises me with the amount of mechanics there were that were relevant on normal since my expectation at least is that there are maybe a couple main mechanics for normal and the rest start being relevant on heroic and up but on this boss there are actually two different fail checks which can instantly wipe you along with the spear throw from the melee boss that will probably instantly kill a single player if not soaked properly—same idea as the charge in King’s Rest for example, the more people in the way the less damage the actual target becomes, though do keep an eye out where you stand if you get targeted since it leaves a damage effect on the ground.

Now, the first mechanic which could wipe you is one of the abilities Azshara uses, Queen’s Decree and more specifically Form Ranks. This spawns—for us at least—three circles in the middle of the room each of which need to be occupied by one player and if they are not when the decree expires they explode dealing damage to the whole raid with the damage at least on the PTR being such that all three circles being empty wipes the raid.

There was a second decree that while not quite as bad could still potentially kill players who didn’t know how it works or notice that they had it, Deferred Sentence. This decree gives you an increasing amount of stacks that are reduced when you move however you take damage from moving, but if you don’t move all of the stacks explode at once at the end for some decent damage. This wasn’t too bad on normal but I could see this killing people on mythic especially depending on what other sources of damage are active at the same time.

The second potentially wipe inducing mechanic were the Potent Sparks, three of them spawned around the room and started slowly losing health and when they die they explode dealing damage to the whole raid and apply a debuff increasing damage taken from that explosion by 100%. So not a new mechanic, but still you need to kill them staggered so that the raid doesn’t wipe. These never really posed a problem since it even seemed that the debuff might be missing on normal and our damage dealers did a decent job of making sure they didn’t all explode at the same time anyway so the damage we did get from the normal explosions was easy to heal against.

Beyond that, the boss had some other funky decrees and random damage, but nothing overly noteworthy since they were all quite easy to get the gist of the first time one was affected by them. There was a particularily annoying decree though, Repeat Performance, which silenced you if you cast the same spell twice in a row. This wasn’t too bad as a Discipline Priest since I could just weave healing and damage but it seemed to annoy some of our damage dealers a lot.

Za’qul, Harbinger of Ny’alotha

Now for the final boss of the evening, since we tested Azshara on Friday and the normal bosses on Saturday. This one seemed rather overtuned especially for our group size which did make it a very cool boss to play but also meant that we unfortunately did not down it—also thanks to it getting rather late and people wanting to go to sleep.

This was probably the most fun boss we tested even including Azshara since there was actually a decent bit going as well as some interesting mechanics for healers, namely the fears.

Phase one

Phase one of the boss is fairly straightforward and doesn’t last for too long, from 100% to 85%. Some adds spawn that you need to kill and a few players get feared—interestingly, for us even at the end when we were playing with ten, three people got feared which seems to indicate that even for small groups three healers might be preferred. Now the fear lasts for eight seconds and is dispellable, so if that was all it wouldn’t have been too bad for us, simply one person that was running around a bit longer since we only had two healers, but what made the fear probably our main cause of wipes was the fact that it explodes when it runs out or get dispelled and for a lot of damage—three simultaneous explosions killed pretty much anyone who wasn’t a tank.

I’m somewhat sceptical that the fear will remain with that tuning in the raid, since every single application would seem to require some pretty heavy cooldown usage to be manageable—remember, only eight seconds between the first and last blast at best—and I’m doubtful that is all that possible with how often the fear comes. I’m expecting that at least on normal the explode damage when dispelled gets removed, seems like that would end up as a heroic or mythic mechanic to give the boss that extra bit of something.

Phase two

In phase two all the players get sucked into the Fear Realm where everyone gets a stacking debuff which dealt a minor amount of damage, stacking up every 20 seconds. For the most part, this phase was over so quickly that the debuff wasn’t relevant, but in phase four you need to re-enter the Fear Realm in order to kill the adds from phase one since they don’t take damage otherwise, and the debuff puts a bit of time pressure on that especially for smaller groups.

The second new thing was a debuff put on a couple of players which left spots on the ground so you had to keep moving while placing them in order not to die. It also made the available space in the already somewhat small bossroom smaller, so I can see this being problematic on mythic and for bigger raid groups since I’m assuming more people get the debuff. It also seemed a bit buggy or overtuned, since you always seemed to take the damage when a spot got put down, usually there is a grace period for the player with the debuff so they have time to move out—will have to see if that gets changed, if not it puts a decent amount of extra strain on the healers.

The debuff is especially bad if it comes in conjunction with the fear which we had happen a couple of times, both debuffs on the same player with pretty consistently lead to their death. Any players with the debuff as the fear came were also more likely to die since the damage from the fear explosion along with the damage from the debuff was tricky to heal against.

Finally for phase two, occasionally a tentacle comes from the side of the arena and tries to poke the raid. The area for this was decently big and the effect always seemed to go towards the middle, so keep an eye out on rifts that form on the sides of the arena. The damage was healable for us, but might very well be a one-shot on higher difficulties.

Phase three

Phase three doesn’t have that much new going for it, you can enter the Delirium Realm where you get a haste buff but all other players are hostile to you, so only really makes sense for damage dealers but not too many of them since you still have the dispel mechanics to deal with. This phase generally went by really quickly and I barely noticed we were in it, but it did introduce the Delirium Realm to us so that we knew what was going on for phase four.

Phase four

The final phase and as far as we managed to get. The first thing that happens is everyone gets pulled back into the normal realm and you now have to manage the abilities by going into the correct realm in order to counter them. The summoner adds from phase one are up? Go to the Fear Realm in order to damage them so they don’t keep summoning more adds. The boss gets an absorb shield—yes, a new mechanic—and starts casting to deal high damage to the whole raid? Enter the Delirium Realm and get rid of the absorb shield to stun the boss and interrupt the cast, damage from other realms doesn’t affect the absorb shield.

It seems the boss can also split himself, creating a copy in each realm which start giving him more energy and when he gets full, I guess that will wipe the raid. I don’t belive we actually saw this mechanic in action, probably comes into play later in phase four than we manage to get to.

Finally, the fear from the earlier phases gets buffed, dealing more damage than before through the explosion making it even harder to heal against. In addition, players in other realms are phased out so you can’t heal or dispel them which probably means this will be a minimum three healer boss, though I guess when someone in the Delirium Realm gets the debuff they just need to get out of there since they can’t be healed anyway since everyone is hostile there. So two healers might be possible, but the damage at the moment really is quite heavy and I’m not sure there are enough cooldowns to deal with it with only two healers.

The boss—despite the tuning and incoming damage—seemed really fun. I am very interested to see the final version, if it stays anything like it was on the PTR it will definitely end up being one of the blocker bosses for many guilds.

Azshara

Now, Azshara. This was a heroic test, which meant we were scaled up a bit but also had more mechanics to tend with and the tuning was probably a lot rougher than for the normal tests along with a much shortened timespan—we only had an hour and a half or so to test Azshara—all of which meant we didn’t end up defeating her or getting overly far actually.

Phase one

The fight starts with Azshara spectating and her sending out two lovers to deal with the raid. These need to be kept either in line of sight of each other or out of line of sight depending on the cast, believe Painful Memories was the cast where you needed to separate them but can’t remember the name of the other cast—should be fairly obvious though. The melee lover also occasionally throws a spear on a random player which needs to hit one of the two pillars in the room or it deals significant raid damage. It will also hit any player in the way, so the path to the pillar needs to be made clear. This seemed to be a bit buggy for us, where the spear would occasionally hit an NPC and explode or hit the pillar but still explode, so will probably be an easier time on live.

In addition to the lovers, there are three seals in the room which keep the water outside under control and these need to be kept charged—charging them is as easy as standing in one but this does give you a stacking debuff reducing maximum health by 10% per stack which lasts for the rest of the phase. The energy in the seals get reduced by two things, Azshara which is unavoidable so just recharge them, and hulks I believe they were called, which spawn in the middle of the room and run to a seal and start stomping it to bits. These need to be killed as quickly as possible so they don’t drain too much energy from the seal. They were also crowd controllable once and it seemed if you stunned them at the right time they would change their mind on which seal they wanted to go to which meant they had a further way to run so more time to damage them without them breaking the seal. The best timing I believe was just before they reached the seal and started casting, but it wasn’t 100% consistent and might have been fixed for live anyway—if not, definitely something to try since it makes the damage requirement easier. Azshara also occasionally charms a player and forces them to walk into the middle, which could be bad when there was damage spots on the ground which got put there by one of the tank mechanics of the lovers I believe so try to keep the middle area clear and interrupt the charm when possible—I’ll be honest, I didn’t quite get a clear idea of how this charm mechanic worked since it was mostly the damage dealers dealing with it.

Intermission

Then we have the intermission, where Azshara decrees you have to do something—or maybe even two things—and if you don’t you get stacks of a debuff that will probably kill depending on the amount of stacks. I believe the primary decrees were: stand alone, stand together, move, stay still, soak the arcane orbs. All fairly straightforward and the arcane orbs need to be soaked anyway so they don’t explode, though the move decree was a bit unclear how it worked since we had players moving yet getting stacks of the debuff. A theory we had was that it left small spots on the ground which applied the debuff, so moving back and forth or in a small circle wasn’t enough but we didn’t get to test that theory properly—also possible the ability was simply bugged on the PTR.

Phase two

After the small intermission Azshara enters the fray and you get to deal with a couple new mechanics: a dispellable debuff as well as another charm. The dispellable debuff explodes when dispelled or when it runs out after 20 seconds, echoing of every other player with the debuff or Azshara that are in line of sight which basically means hide somewhere and get dispelled. This might get interesting on higher difficulties or with more players since there is a level of coordination required so that you don’t explode each other or echo from the boss exploding the whole raid.

The new charm mechanic actually properly mind controls a player making them attack the raid and gives them a decently sized absorb shield which needs to be removed in order to break the mind control—this seems like one of those mechanics which will be easier in big raid sizes since the amount of incidental damage will be higher and fewer players actively need to switch on the mind controlled player in order to break the mind control.

There was also a new seal in the middle whose energy needed to be kept low instead of high so that it doesn’t explode the raid, I believe decharging it gave a similar debuff to charging the other ones but since we didn’t spend a significant amount of time in this phase I’m not quite sure.

Conclusion

All in all, the bosses even on normal were a decent amount of fun to play for the most part—looking at you Blackwater Behemoth—and I’m now looking forward to the raid more than I was before. Even the first boss which tends to be trivial could have some interesting wipes up her sleeve thanks to the color mechanic which tends to lead to trouble so it will probably be quite fun progressing here “for real”. I guess I now just need to wait a couple of weeks or so for the raid to come out, we’ll see if Blizzard sneaks in some more raidtests in the meantime and if we end up participating in those.

We took a poke at Operation: Mechagon yesterday on the PTR and it was a surpising amount of fun—especially since the tuning on some of the abilities is a bit extreme yet. We didn’t get to start quite from the beginnging since some people in the run had already killed the first couple of bosses and we also had the small extra challenge of doing the third and fourth boss on hard mode since they had begun that sequence—this made the encounters a bit more interesting though the hard mode mechanic didn’t seem that bad though it did mean I needed to play my druid instead of my priest which made the healing requirement at times more challenging since I have less experience healing with the druid and timers aren’t available yet so it was rather difficult to try to predict when the damage would come.

King Gobbamak

The first boss we fought was King Gobbamak. The boss fight seems to normally be fairly straightforward with some players needing to stand in the tank hit to split the damage as well as get charged so they can run to the pylons that stand around the boss area and charge them so that they kill the adds that the boss continually spawns. What made this fight more interesting for us was partially the hard mode—additional adds get spawned that follow the players and leave goop on the ground that kills you very quickly. These adds were also the reason we wanted a druid with mass entanglement. But the really difficult part was the area damage that the boss periodically does, stomping the ground and dealing heavy damage to the group along with rocks that fall one-shotting players. We actually two healed this boss at least for those damage phases since they ended up being just too much for my druid without the ability to predict them accurately.

That kind of was the whole fight though, kite the boss around the room due to the bots and activate the pylons. Somewhat simple but a relatively hard healing check at the moment—I’m guessing that will be nerfed before the dungeon goes live, but on the other hand it will be much easier to manage with proper timers so maybe it isn’t necessary.

HK-8 Aerial Oppression Unit

Next came the Aerial Oppression Unit, the boss that activates the hardmode on the three previous bosses and killing them on hard mode makes this one activate its hardmode as well. Though now that I think about it, I’m not sure if we played this one on hardmode or not, since I don’t actually know if they played all the three previous bosses on hardmode or not and I did not pay attention to the name of the add.

Anyway, this boss begins with just an add on the ground being attackable and you can’t leave a circle around this add or you get ported back in. During this phase the bots describe by King Gobbamak spawn again and follow players as well as bombardements going through the middle of the circle. The phase was rather trivial for the most part with not overly much going on as long as one managed the bots well—again, this is why I was on my druid.

After this add gets killed, the Aerial Oppression Unit starts channeling and a tesla coil activates on one of the platforms on either side of the entrance. This tesla coil needs to be activated to interrupt the channel from the Unit however the way to there is trapped and you still have the bots that should not be kited up there so I rooted the bots one last time before we went up.

There are three types of traps: smaller bots that teleport you to the beginning of the maze; vents that electrify and stun you for five seconds as well as a rotating thingymajigg that also teleports you to the beginning. This part is fairly straightforward though you do have to try to be as quick as possible and the vents aren’t always overly clear as to when it is safe to go over them—recommend waiting until they activate and then going over quickly. We did also find that it was actually possible to avoid the first set of traps by just going around the edge but this was very fragile and somewhat risky so not sure I recommend that though it does cut down on the time significantly—I’m also expecting this be patched away before the dungeon goes live but you never know.

After the tesla coil is activated the Unit stops channeling and falls down to the ground and takes double damage for 20 maybe 30 seconds—didn’t look at the time of the debufff that exactly. After the debuff expires it flys up and you start from phase one again with the add on the ground. We needed two activations of the tesla coil to kill the boss and more than that might put undue stress on either healer mana or just the risk that more mistakes get made since the intermissions are somewhat dangerous if they take too long. Still, it was a fun fight and was fun to see more mechanics and phases on a dungeon boss again.

Tussle Tonks

After that you start going into the actual Mechagon complex and are met with the Tussle Tonks. This fight consists of two bosses, a big bot and a tank. The tank follows a random player, occasionally charges another random player and knocks them back as well as rarely doing very heavy area damage made worse by the arena actually being rather large and us being somewhat spread out so it was at times difficult to have everyone in range of area heals.

The bot on the other hand starts with three stacks of extra armour reducing damage taken by 99%. The tank needs to kite the bot to one of the hammers that are around the arena in order to remove one of the stacks—it bugged out for us though and the first hammer immediately removed two stacks which was convenient. The bot also occasionally does a whirvelwind attack which the melees need to watch out for as well as spawning mines.

The third enemy in this fight is actually the arena which occasionally spawns sawblades in a few different patterns as well as those hammers mentioned earlier—I belive they can also hit players if you are positioned poorly.

All in all the fight was relatively trivial outside of the area damage of the tank since few abilities did significant damage and the arena was probably a bit too big to make dodging some of the mechanics difficult as it was rather easy to spread out or simply stand so that you never got hit by the sawblades. The idea is neat but probably still needs some tuning.

K.U.-J.0.

After defeating the Tonks you get thrown down into the garbage disposal of Mechagon—some reward for winning the fight. Here was some rather nasty trash that had a rather significant area explosion on death that can be avoided through line of sight—would recommend this since we did have some deaths due to these explosions.

After the trash you finde a cute mechanical dog by the name of K.U.-J.0. and it is the next boss. The fight was actually even more simple than the previous one unfortunately. The boss has four main mechanics: a very heavy damage over time effect on the tank that needs to be dispelled immediately since the damage it does is completely overtuned—luckily it comes seldom enough that you always have dispel ready; secondly crates fall on players at increasingly frequent intervalls, these simply need to be dodged; the boss also heats up and does heavy area damage which needs to be avoided through line of sight—in other words, hide behind the crates though move away from them afterwards since they will explode; and finally the boss charges random players and does moderate damage.

And that’s the fight. We had one wipe because I underestimated the damage from the tank debuff and didn’t dispel it immediately—at the time I also didn’t know how often it stacked so I wanted to see if the tank survives until the second stack—but after that we killed the boss easily. Not every boss can be difficult but it felt a bit strange to have two easy bosses after two hard ones.

Machinist’s Garden

This is were the dungeon gets a bit annoying and puzzle-y. First there is a loading belt pushing you back while you need to dodge flame jets, not really difficult but a bit annoying especially since the belt isn’t that wide—here again you could avoid the pushback through going right on the edge but I did not even end up trying that since the belt was already narrow enough.

Second comes a stealth section where you instantly get teleported to the beginning if you fail and if you wipe on the next boss—Machinist’s Garden—you have to both of these again though you can disable the flame jets. Now neither of these two sections were difficult just something that you needed to do calmly which can be annoying after a wipe—luckily we didn’t have many of those on the next boss. However, these will be very annoying once the dungeon gets turned into a mythic+ dungeon since you are under time pressure to do them quickly however this makes you much more likely to fail and the whole group suffers from individual fails in the sense that they need to wait for individual players. It is cool that Blizzard at times does something different with dungeons but these sections just don’t really fit into mythic+ unfortunately.

The boss however was, again, not overly interesting—I’m getting the feeling that only the overtuned/hardmode bosses really were interesting for us. Was mostly just dodge the flamethrowers that spawn in the middle and go around the room, kill the small plants that shoot at random players before they kill the player. I actually can’t recall any other mechanics though I’m pretty sure there were others—we did kill the boss with two dead players so it wasn’t exactly trivial just felt a bit uninspired from a mechanics point of view somehow. Though I guess having a mechanical garden that turns out to be deadly is as a concept interesting but it might just be more difficult to turn that into memorable mechanics.

King Mechagon

Now, the final boss King Mechagon. This was actually a rather cool proper two phase fight with a decent duration.

Phase one

The boss flies on a small machine reminiscent of something like Mimiron’s Head. During this phase the boss regularily targets one player with a Giga-Zap which does heavy damage and leaves a nasty dot. For this players need to be a bit spread out so that two players don’t get hit—getting hit a second time from the zap is deadly since the debuff also doubles the damage received.

There are also small stationary bots around the room that deal ticking damage to players around them, the boss regularily recalibrates these causing them to move to a new position as well as dealing damage to players on their way there.

Finally, the boss occasionally flies into the air and stars bombarding the ground with a laser following one player. This deals deadly damage if you stand in the laser and moderate-heavy damage to the whole group—as a healer, pay special attention to the player that still has the debuff from the zap since they will die quickly if not healed.

Phase two

After the boss mocks you for only disposing of a piece of furniture—his flying machine—he jumps into a big robot suit on the far side of the room from the entrance. As the flying machine is broken he will no longer fly into the air but the two other abilities from phase one are empowered, the small bots now constantly fly to new positions and the Giga-Zap is now considerably wider and is cast three times in a row each time on a new player.

The boss also periodically throws a magnet into the room, which sucks all the small bots into one spot, dealing area damage to the whole group which gets reduce the farther away you are.

Phase three?

The King jumps out of the big mecha suit and melee attacks the tank. No mechanics, just kill him—a bit like the last boss of The MOTHERLODE!!!.

All in all, this fight doesn’t have that many mechanics however the tuning of those mechanics—especially the Giga-Zap in combination with the area damage—still makes it rather challenging to heal. This also made it for me at least the most mechanically interesting fight in the dungeon, since it was all healable without timers but you still needed to be on your toes the whole time and anticipate potential sources of damage the whole time. The intervals of the mechanics was also fast paced enough to keep the fight interesting the whole time—a fitting end to the dungeon.

Conclusion

I find the dungeon to be rather fun, though there are some parts I already see being very annoying once it becomes available on mythic+. Still, as it is it does give something of that raid feeling in a five player group and as such I think Blizzard has succeeded with their goal and I’m sure the few tuning issues there were will be fixed before the dungeon gets released on live realms. It was also really fun going in and poking on a dungeon beforehand, getting a early look at the abilities similar to how it felt doing the raid on the PTR. Learning by doing is afterall much more fun than just watching guides of other people doing it.

So, go do the dungeon once it comes out, seemed fun!

So we did some PTR raid testing yesterday, the first four bosses of Eternal Palace on normal with item level scaled to 405. This scaling made the raid a bit of a challenge actually, along with the tuning otherwise probably being completely out of wack on account of it being the PTR where that tuning is being done. Sometimes the raid test are also intentionally overtuned to allow people to properly test the mechanics and not just steamroll them—was probably also the reason for the item level scaling. Of course, none of us knowing any of the mechanics along with playing two healers for 15 raiders also contributed though I think having a third healer would just have made it boring—it was still normal after all. But my point is, people on live realms will probably have better gear and more of an idea when going in so it will be easier.

Another slightly annoying thing was, while we did have the Heart of Azeroth scaled to level 60 theoretically unlocking a major and minor essence slot, only the major one was available since we would have needed to visit the heart forge in order to unlock the minor essence slot. Now why we didn’t do this, well that scaling was only enabled inside the raid, so once we would have been at the forge we would no longer have had the neck at level 60 and as such the slot would not have been available to unlock. To be fair, I’m somewhat doubtful that most normal raiders will have that slot unlocked when they start with the raid anyway though that will depend on how much easier it becomes to get levels in the Heart of Azeroth with the next patch and how much time we have until the raid is released but it would still have been nice to be able to test a minor essence in addition to the major one.

Abyssal Commander Sivara

The first boss was pretty trivial and I think we ended up killing it on our first try. The boss basically had the mechanic from Guarm, where everyone gets a color and you shouldn’t run into people with another color. In addition to this the boss occasionally shoots out arrows in all directions that also have a color and you should be especially careful not to get hit by the ones that have another colour though even getting hit by your colour is bad since it is also a debuff with a small ticking damage effect and a secondary negative effect. These secondary effects seemed to a bit buggy, for example one of them was reduced healing but it reduced healing by 0% in other words not at all.

The last mechanic that was enabled on normal was a random player getting targeted by a spear of another colour that a player with the colour matching the spear needs to soak. Soaking this spear stuns you until someone removes the spear, which then of course also needs to be done by a player with the same colour as the spear.

All in all rather simple but it was also the first boss on normal. It could get somewhat interesting on mythic depending on tuning, but being the first boss the tuning probably won’t be that hard. Still, the boss at least had mechanics you couldn’t ignore unlike the first boss of Battle of Dazar’alor so that is a plus.

Blackwater Behemoth

The second boss we did was the Blackwater Behemoth, Blizzards new attempt to make an underwater boss. Or to be more exact, a boss with a third dimensions since the previous attempts weren’t really underwater but rather floating in the air—those bosses being Kael’thas as well Al’akir.

This seemed like it could potentially be the hardest early boss though again will depend on tuning. One of the big problems with this boss is being under water, which means that your movement speed is heavily reduced. Along with this, spells that you cast on the ground don’t necessarily hit you while you are swimming above the bottom of the cave, this was a big problem for me in the beginning since I tend to use Angelic Feathers as my movement speed ability and those are put down on the ground—later on I started swapping my weapons for the Underlight Angler, the artifact fishing pole from Legion. I would definitely recommend getting it if Blizzard does not nerf it before release since it’s a huge movement speed increase while swimming and actually allows you to swim against the pushback the boss does.

The other difficulty with this boss is the primary mechanic: everyone except for the main tank is heal immune—absorb shields worked while we were testing, which will probably mean that discipline priests will be rather strong here early on. To remove this immunity, you need to kill the pufferfish that are on the platforms around the boss but with the correct timing since you only have two of these per platform and the boss switches platform on a timer not dependant on health. This means the boss is also something of a damage check, since you need to be done with the boss before you run out of the fish and your raid is heal immune and slowly gets killed by the damage from the boss. The boss rather constantly does a chain lightning type cast on several players that increases in damage the more it jumps so the raid needs to be spread out—rather difficult for melees as well as while one is getting the pufferfish buff. The pushback which is a channeled casts also does a decent amount of damage so having players healable and topped up before it comes will probably be rather important—on our kill try we ended up focusing the pufferfish before the boss on the second platform for example. It will also be interesting to see how some tanks deal with this since the boss deals a large amount of damage to the whole raid if no tank is in melee range and it is of course hard to be in melee after the pushback.

The final mechanic are the intermissions, now these aren’t really anything more than swimming from one platform to the next however there is a small catch: if you are healable a fish from the depths will come and eat you while you are moving in between the platforms instantly killing you. This is also true outside of the intermissions so players need to stay on the platforms though there is a few second grace period so you can see you are in danger. During the intermission you also need to be careful not to swim into the jellyfish that are on the way since they also give you the healable buff.

All in all, it was actually a surprisingly complex boss for normal and I will be very interested to see how the tuning ends up being on live—this boss could pose some real problems for some guilds. Also, only the first four bosses being available I’m not actually sure if you can just skip it, we could definitely have done the bosses in another order so maybe that will be the solution for some.

Radiance of Azshara

This boss also surprised me a bit and was probably the second hardest one for us. It was basically a more complex version of the Wrath of Azshara from Eye of Azshara in Legion. So the mechanics that were the same: the boss is in the middle of a ring and you play around the boss—also, don’t use Shadow Step if you are a rogue—as well as the Arcane Bomb: players get debuffed with a bomb that explodes after a while stunning players in an area, dispelling the debuff allows the debuffed player to also avoid this explosion since the bomb is then left on the spot the player was standing when they got dispelled. The boss also spawns arcane tornades you need to dodge that knock you back and damage you when you get hit by them—with how much stuff is going on in this encounter this can easily lead to your death through a chain reaction.

Now the primary new mechanics—on normal at least—were the intermission in which adds spawn in one of four places that you have to get to since the rest of the room gets heavy ticking damage and the boss is taking reduced damage. Killing these adds allows you to damage the boss again as well as removing the ticking damage from the rest of the room. These adds consist of one big add that does a knockback with heavy damage which was the really dangerous part since getting kicked back outside the safe zone could easily lead to death. There were also smaller adds that need to be controlled and damaged down to prevent them from casting chain lightnig on the group.

The second new mechanic were lines of mines that spawned making moving between the different parts of the room rather difficult especially when one was trying to reach the adds. There were at times small gaps between the mines but we primarily worked around this by having one of the tanks soak one of the mines allowing the rest of the raid to get through—soaking a mine does spawn a new tornado though so need to stay careful.

All in all, mechanically the boss seems rather simple but like Wrath of Azshara back in Legion it’s just rather easy to be overwhelmed by all that is going on at the same time as well as the rather heavy movement requirement. We also tended to have a bad habit of spreading out a bit too much meaning it was at times difficult to keep players within range which was especially bad when they needed to be dispelled. Will be interesting to see how the boss plays on mythic—I’m expecting it to be interesting.

Lady Ashvane

The last boss we did was Lady Ashvane and she was rather trivial for us especially compared to the two previous bosses, we killed her on the first try. The boss starts with a big absorb shield that needs to be damaged down so that the boss actually takes damage and after a while she will recast her absorb—apparently this shield will keep getting bigger with each cast so it will be something of a damage check.

Corals also spawn periodically that then spawn orbs that move to the boss increasing her absorb shield. These orbs can be soaked by players but doing so triggers an explosion damaging the whole raid—this means that the longer the fight goes on the more damage will come in. Now these corals can be removed through an additional mechanic: several players get marked with a colour in pairs. After the debuff expires damage will be dealt between these pairs and can be used to remove the corals. We managed to keep the corals quite well in check though I imagine this will not be as easy on mythic. I think this will heavily influence the difficulty of the fight as well as how big the damage check will be.

Another mechanic that could make these marks more difficult to play are the stuns: for us three players got put into a water bubble and stunned within. To remove the stun the bubble needed to be destroyed. Now we did get some warning before this happened though we didn’t really use this to stack up which we should probably do on mythic. However, depending on the timings on mythic these bubbles might come inconveniently timed along with for example the marks which might make the positioning for those much more difficult.

Finally, the tank debuff or hit the boss does leaves a damaging spot on the ground so the boss needs to be moved around the room. I guess the room filling up will be the soft enrage, though I’m guessing the healers will be out of mana and the raid will have exploded to the orbs before that happens.

Now the tuning for Lady Ashenvale seemed rather easy and we got her down on the first try. But there were some interesting mechanics in there that could prove problematic on mythic and I’m hoping the boss will be more interesting to play there.

Conclusion

The testing was actually surprisingly fun and I’m looking forward to doing more in the future. Us being almost a full guild group with one external player probably helped, but still being able to do even normal bosses in a version where they can present some level of challenge was fun. It was also a great opportunity to get something of a sneak peek on the bosses that will probably be more valuable than our first clear on heroic since with the smaller raid size along with only two healers means there was more to do as well as more responsibility placed upon us two. In the heroic week we generally have enough healers that I don’t tend to have to do much and as a consequence don’t really learn what is dangerous on the different bosses. Now this can of course change between difficulties as abilities get added to the boss but still it gave some idea how the bosses actually work.

So, hopefully there are more raid tests soon!