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wotlk-classic Wrath Classic 3.4.3 PTR Development Notes: September 15th
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By Staff
We have two changes arriving to the Wrath Classic PTR today. First off there's the Omen of Clarity glyph nerf from earlier this week being reverted. Secondly, the Lich King Heroic encounter in Icecrown Citadel has been modified in both 10 and 25 man modes to address a common tactic and make the fight more difficult.
PTR (Source 1, 2)
Greetings,
With this week’s PTR build we pushed an adjustment to the Omen of Clarity glyph to reduce all physical damage dealt by 5%. Upon reviewing this further we have decided to revert this change, which we have just deployed via hotfix. We’d like to thank everyone who has participated in the patch 3.4.3 PTR and given feedback about this and all of the other new content and features coming in the 3.4.3 Fall of the Lich King patch.
Thank you!
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Greetings,
We will soon push a hotfix to the 3.4.3 PTR that contains a small adjustment to the Lich King encounter on both 10 and 25 player heroic modes. This change will cause all damage inflicted to the Lich King, Raging Spirits, and Vile Spirits to be dramatically reduced for the following 45 seconds after the Lich King has cast Harvest Souls to transport the raid into Frostmourne during Phase 3.
A common tactic we are seeing to deal with this part of the phase is to have classes that have the ability to self-resurrect deliberately die before the Harvest Souls cast when the raid group is drawn into Frostmourne, and then accept a resurrection outside of the Frostmourne room to be able to continue to damage the Lich King while he is essentially inactive during this 45 second window. While our adjustment is definitely a change from how the fight behaved in 2009, we do feel that this would have been adjusted back in 2009 if it were more prevalent, as it encourages the stacking of certain classes to potentially trivialize part of the phase.
We plan to have this adjustment deployed to the PTR via hotfix very soon. Thank you for all the data you’ve helped us gather so far in this PTR period, and we look forward to you joining us in the fight against the Lich King when the Icecrown Citadel raid goes live on Oct 12th!
Thank you!
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By Staff
Blizzard are bringing back the Joyous Journeys buff, with an extra 50% experience for players!
XP Buff (Source)
The roads in Northrend are icy and fraught with danger. To help you continue your journey, players will get the benefit of the Joyous Journeys experience buff*, which will increase experience gains by 50% for all players through level 80! It’s a great time to finish leveling a character, create a new one, or invite friends to join you in your adventures.
Players can also visit any innkeeper in the capital cities and Dalaran to turn the experience buff off or on. The Joyous Journey’s experience buff will be available during the Ice Crown Citadel content update and until further notice.
*Experience buff not available in modern World of Warcraft® or World of Warcraft® Classic Era.
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By Staff
Blizzard have posted the dev notes for the first Wrath Classic 3.4.3 PTR build. We have ICC, the new dungeons, class tuning, the Shadowmourne quest, a new collections interface and even known issues listed below.
WotLK PTR (Source)
In addition to Icecrown Citadel, we have several other features which will soon become testable, and others that will arrive in a future PTR update.
Icecrown Citadel Raid
Testing begins at 23:00 CEST. The raid will close at 23:00 CEST on Friday, September 1.
Icecrown Citadel is the final major raid in Wrath of the Lich King Classic and has twelve bosses spread across five different wings. The Lower Spire Lord Morrowgar Lady Deathwhisper Gunship Battle Deathbringer Saurfang The Plagueworks Festergut Rotface Professor Putricide The Crimson Hall Blood Prince Council Blood-Queen Lana’thel The Frostwing Halls Valithria Dreamwalker Sindragosa The Frozen Throne Arthas Menethil, the Lich King Each wing is fully unlocked for testing on both Normal and Heroic mode. Additional adjustments: Similar to Trial of the Grand Crusader, the Heroic mode of Icecrown Citadel has a finite number of attempts. When a raid group runs out of attempts, they will be forced to flee and will not be able to engage in any additional attempts that week. Currently, this number is set to 50 attempts across the entire raid, matching the final state of the attempts counter in patch 3.3.5. Additionally, there will be no restriction or gating to prevent access to later wings of the raid, and all will be fully unlocked at launch. PTR Gear Vendors For the first round of PTR testing, we have not updated the PTR gear vendors with gear from Trial of the Crusader and Trial of the Grand Crusader. This is deliberate. If you wish to test Icecrown Citadel, we suggest you utilize the character copy button on the character select screen copy your character from live realms, and utilize your current gear. It is important to us that players and raid groups use their own gear for this test, to help us establish a realistic baseline for how raid groups will perform in this content when it is released. We will test the ICC raid again after this initial test, and we may update the gear vendors with additional gear if we are satisfied with the data we obtained from this first test. Shadowmourne Legendary Quest
The Shadowmourne legendary weapon quest chain has seen several major adjustments: Shadowfrost Shards will no longer require that a player in your raid group to have advanced to the quest “The Splintered Throne” in order to drop. The drop rate of Shadowfrost Shards on 25 player normal have been adjusted to match the drop rates of 25 player heroic. The “End” boss of each wing (Saurfang, Lana’thel, Putricide, Sindragosa, and The Lich King) will now always drop a single guaranteed Shadowfrost Shard on both 25-player Normal and Heroic difficulties. Primordial Saronite will be more obtainable as well and will be purchasable from both the Emblem of Frost vendor as well with a new currency gained in Titan Rune Dungeon: Gamma Protocol dungeons. We’ll be sharing more information about Defense Protocol Gamma and its reward structure very soon, so stay tuned for those updates! Developer’s Note: There’s a large opportunity cost to obtaining Primordial Saronite early on as many guilds may opt to funnel all of their Primoridal Saronite to would-be Shadowmourne Wielders. Primordial Saronite is also the main ingredient for many new crafting recipes and obtaining the Primordial Saronite for said crafts will be very difficult early on, leading to a situation where by the time the guild is ready to give out Primordial Saronite for non-Shadowmourne Crafts, the items that can be made with this material are much less relevant. Giving an alternative method to obtain this resource made sense in this regard. The intent of these changes is to accelerate the acquisition of Shadowmourne significantly. The original Icecrown Citadel raid tier lasted over 11 months in 2009/2010 and while the Icecrown Citadel raid tier in Wrath Classic will last a good long while, we felt it was important to allow Shadowmourne to be enjoyed by more people while the content is still current. In the original game Shadowmourne could take anywhere from 18-24 weeks to complete and similar to our adjustments to Val’anyr, Hammer of the Ancient Kings, we felt that we wanted to err on the side of fun here rather than creating a situation where guilds may only be able to complete a very small number of Shadowmournes before the next major content update. We expect with these changes the time needed to complete Shadowmourne should be closer to 8-10 weeks. Please note that these adjustments are not final, and we may opt to increase or reduce the rate of acquisition, or make other adjustments as needed.
New Dungeons – The Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection
All three dungeons are available for testing now and can be found on the upper balcony of Icecrown Citadel, in Icecrown. By default, the Heroic version of these dungeons will benefit from the additional rewards from Titan Rune Dungeons: Defense Protocol Gamma but will see no additional mechanics or difficulty adjustments as other dungeons are getting in Defense Protocol Gamma. Developer’s Note: These three dungeons are some of our favorite content from Wrath of the Lich King, and we were concerned that if we added additional mechanics to these dungeons from Defense Protocol Gamma, many players may never get to experience this content in its’ original Wrath of the Lich King iteration. Most other Wrath of the Lich King dungeons were available in their original form during the first phase of Wrath Classic had their time to shine before Titan Rune Dungeons were introduced in patch 3.4.1, but as these dungeons are only just now becoming available and are themselves a step-up in difficulty over normal heroics, we felt it was important to protect the original 2009 experience here. We will publish more information discussing Defense Protocol Gamma and how these three dungeons fit into the Wrath Classic patch 3.4.3 endgame content in the coming weeks. New Collections User Interface
A new collections interface has been added to Wrath of the Lich King Classic to gather Pets, Mounts, and Heirloom items into one convenient location. Most pets, mounts, and heirloom items are also now account-wide. You will find the collections UI in your micro bar here: Please note that in order to access your heirlooms in your collections UI, you will need to log into the game world with whichever characters have your existing heirloom items. Simply logging in will automatically add them to your collections for your account.
Please note that account data on PTR may not always be perfectly indicative of your account data on live realms, so you may find yourself missing mounts or pets you feel like you should have. The best bet is to copy all of your characters with unique pets, mounts, or heirlooms to PTR and log into each of them at least once to ensure that those collections items are added to your collections interface.
Class Adjustments
Hunter - A new skill has been added for Hunters: Trap Launcher: Explosive Trap. This skill can be trained at any Hunter class trainer and is available to all specs. This new skill is not usable in PvP Arenas or Battlegrounds. Developers’ notes: Due to the fickle nature of Explosive Trap’s hit detection in PvE content, particularly against large or sessile creatures, Hunter DPS tends to fluctuate wildly depending less on player skill and agency and more on boss positioning and an element of luck as to whether or not certain bosses consistently trigger traps. With this adjustment we hope to make it slightly easier to position traps in a position where they will detonate, without impacting a Hunter’s performance in PvP. Druid/Priest/Shaman – The Wild Growth, Circle of Healing, Ancestral Healing, and Divine Hymn spells have been adjusted to favor players over pets and guardians. With this adjustment, these “smart heal” spells will still attempt to heal pets that are very dangerously low on health, but in general this spell will favor players that are missing health first. Warlock – Reduced the internal cooldown of Demonic Pact from 5 seconds to 1 seconds. Optimal play for Demonolgy warlocks is currently to wait several seconds to send their pet into combat while waiting for trinkets and other spellpower-increasing procs to occur, to prevent from locking yourself out of a higher snapshot of spell damage that occur a few seconds after you pet’s initial Demonic Pact proc. This adjustment is merely meant to slightly smooth out optimal usage of Demonic Pact and to allow demonology warlocks to send in their pets into combat a bit faster. Warlock – Demonic Pact will now always be 10% of the Warlock’s spell power. Warlock – Summon Infernal’s cooldown will now reset on encounter end events, similar to other long cooldowns in Wrath Classic. Known Issues
Please be advised that the LFG tool is not functional in this PTR build. We are working to update the group finder tools for this patch and as a result, the previous iteration of the LFG tool is no longer functional but has not yet been replaced with the new iteration. There are several interface errors that may appear on login and during gameplay. The Argent Crusade NPCs, camps, and Battering Ram have not yet arrived at the entrance to Icecrown Citadel. We expect them to appear in a future PTR update. There are several issues with the RP scenes that play after the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter. The Flesh Eating Insect swarm trap outside of Professor Putricide room must be triggered and cleared twice before the door to Putricide’s room will open. The Frostwing Welp packs leading up to Sindragosa have multiple animation issues and may float when dead. The visual effects for Sindragosa’s Frost Bomb and Blistering Cold abilities are not the correct size. Sindragosa’s Tail Swipe ability doesn’t properly knock players down and immobilize them. Players can see their own Frenized Bloodthirst target “blood drop” visual effect on them during the Blood Queen Lana’thel encounter, even when they do no themselves have the Frenzied Bloodthirst debuff -
By Staff
Blizzard announced Wrath Classic Patch 3.4.3 will soon become available for testing along with Icecrown Citadel on August 29.
Wrath Classic Phase 4 will soon be up on the PTR. Specifically, the Icecrown Citadel raid will be available for playtesting on Tuesday, August 29 at 2:00 p.m. PDT.
(Source)
We will soon open a PTR for testing Wrath of the Lich King Classic version 3.4.3, the patch that includes Icecrown Citadel.
We intend to open the raid for initial public testing on Tuesday, August 29 at 2:00 p.m. PDT.
The first raid test will likely close after three days.
Please note that this schedule could change with little or no notice, should circumstances arise.
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By Staff
Blizzard announced on the official forums they've suspended almost 117K WoW accounts for cheating or exploitation over the last month, July 2023. This official post comes from the Wrath Classic forums.
The accounts involved were suspended permanently or for 6 months.
(Source)
To provide more transparency on the actions we take against cheating and exploitation, here is a breakdown on the number of actions that were taken over the last month, July 2023:
Total Exploitative WoW Account Actions in July 2023: 116921
All of these actions were for cheating or exploitation, which primarily result in permanent bans or 6-month suspensions. This number does not include other actions such as those taken on accounts with character name or in-game language violations. We continue to evolve our methods and act against these malicious accounts on a daily basis.
Thank you!
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