The "world first" tag is nothing formal anyway. It's just something we name so. Does it matter whether it's on test realm, bugged, whatever?

Historically, any boss that was killed on a PTR either died many times as soon as it hit the live servers (Razuvious, Anub'Rekhan, etc.) and was meaningless or saw massive changes from the PTR version (Heigan, Twin Emps, etc.) and thus was meaningless.

I just think it's mind-boggling that they would release videos of their kills. It's unfinished content. I can't be the only one who thought "wow, this is where the whole 'put out a video first' trend really jumps the shark," can I?

Did a GM deathtouch the boss in the video? If not then I'm guessing that'll be the new low.

Actually Naj'entus is probably pretty well-tuned by this point. He's the boss everyone who's done any BT at all on the PTR has done, and Blizzard has been watching it for weeks. I'm also not really seeing the video as an "OMG we're so great getting t6 world firsts" boast... it's more just sharing something interesting. I was personally curious to see an organized look at a BT boss. I'm sure many others are too.

So... http://www.mmo-champion.com and http://www.worldofraids.com list pics that Curse posted, they apparently killed the 4 bosses in Hyjal last night (the GMs didn't death touch, only despawned the waves between bosses).

And then they fight Archimonde. Man, he's huge. You overlook him channeling the world tree (looks like a warlock drain soul on the tree, lol) and then run down and fight him it woul seem.

Anyone gotten to the last camp and see the speeches? It just seems bizarre to fight Archimonde, unless the infinite dragonflight have somehow trapped the wisps he's gonna die anyways so wonder how they are explaining it.

It also seems that T6 tokens drop from the Hyjal bosses, which would kind of explain the lack of T6 loot from the first few BT bosses. But wasn't there supposed to be some sort of AQ40-ish T5.5 in Hyjal?

EDIT: curse's raid leader has a writeup at http://boards.worldofraids.com/topic-3907-1.html, he basically says that the bosses are fun, there is way too much trash, the trash is too hard, Thrall is too buff, and the patch needs to be delayed so Hyjal can be tuned better.

I hope Blizzard puts out one of their "zone previews" for Hyjal that explains the whole Archimonde fight/lore. I can see why Jaina, Thrall, and Tyranda are working with alliance/horde due to WC3 lore but wouldn't they all freak out about the draenei, since the spaceship hasnt landed yet?

People were guessing when they said this. For all we knew, Archimonde could had dropped all 5 pieces of T6 if Blizz so desired. As it is, if Hyjal and BT split the T6, it's the same as SSC/TK so that's nothing new. Of course, this raises the question as to what the hell items we saw in those "hyjal graphics" video. Maybe the possibility of a group of non-set items that compliment each other for each class?

Archimonde is blue? That's too bad, in Warcraft 3 the Eredar were red and had a more ornate get-up that made them look more demonic.

We killed all 4, not that it means much anyway, we had a GM who was with us despawn some of the trash or kill full waves of it so we could test the bosses. It's hard to say how hard the bosses will be if you had done the waves before, Rage Winterchill and Anatheron were do-able but Kaz'ragal in particular would be very very hard, it's a hard fight on it's own when you have full mana, so going into that fight on 75%-50% mana would be almost impossible. Hyjal still needs alot of tuning, im hoping they dont release the patch yet, and instead work on tuning this zone, its such an amazingly fun zone it would be worth the wait.

As for the person asking about speeches before Archimonde, I didnt notice any yells and could only see 1 whisp. Tyranda ask's you to go fight Archimonde and gives you an item to help on the fight, she joins in the fight a little later but doesnt seem to do much. The fight itself though is one of those very "epic" ones that was talked about in another thread, you just feel very very small whilst fighting him, and when he uses finger of Death he turns the whole zone red, it looks great when he does it, it's just such a huge contrast to a zone like SSC, tons more fun .

Archimonde is pretty spot on with his look in the end of the undead campaign's cinematic.

Am I the only one who sees the massive amount of balance issues that arise from permanent spell haste in terms of healing? Spell haste point for point is better than any other throughput stat in the game atm.

The main issue I see with spell haste/Haste for non-healers is that most damage classes are already running up on the aggro ceiling.

It is possible that the revenge change of damage may have some minor impact(have not tested so am only theorizing) when it crits, and the shield slam bonus on t6 is a nice threat booster, but the fact remains that as long as devastate is barely better than sunder armor for threat, warriors are limited by the GCD and all the spell haste in the world isnt going to change the amount of damage casters can do in a given fight.

For healers, this is awesome, because the longer heals become even better since they are larger and take less time now. It will allow more variety in selecting what to cast, and shorten the time between big hits and hp recovery.

If they do increase tank aggro gen though, then yes, this ability could get broken, but at this point I don't really feel like it has any real potential to be broken, as most fights do rely on aggro control.

Perhaps this will mean that in certain situations tanks that can generate better-scaling threat than warriors will become more attractive.

Like druids.

There are ways to increase warrior TPS statistically. They seem to at least be trying to itemize weapon skill in non weapon slots in the T6 zones (well, at least 1 item), and that definately has a significant impact on TPS, mostly because getting avoided tanks your threat so badly. The set bonuses, the only one which would have any impact on TPS is the 4 pc in terms of extra HS per minute, but again nothing massive, and messing around on test it seems to proc once per minute or so. 10% damage on shield slam is pretty minor too. Actually I am pretty underwhelmed by almost all the warrior tanking set bonuses - for whatever reason they don't see a reason to change horrible set bonuses, rather just shift stats around with debateable effect.

The thing about healers, is that they don't have to spam cast. Spell haste is perfectly balanced for dps true, but for healers it dramatically changes gameplay. If haste is stackable to the point where long heals take 1.5 seconds to cast, a lot of encounters that are heal intensive are suddenly much easier. Spell haste not only allows them to heal faster, it gives healers more time to regen and hence they will wind up with more mana not less (since the total amount of healing required is a set amount, determined by the boss dps).

Also at that point, since a slow heal now becomes as fast as a normal heal, wouldn't you end up needing less healers? Your now healing a HUGE heal, it what your normal heal time was before....

There might be mana or logistical issues (4 healers may have the throughput but what if there are 5 tanks?) that have to be dealt with, but your point is true.

The point is, I think spell haste really needs to be carefully doled out because otherwise not only will any item with spell haste automatically become the de-facto standard on that slot (if I was a raid leader I'd prioritize that ring for healers over dps if a healer version did not exist), but boss balance would have to be dramatically tweaked. High spikes would not nearly have the same impact if paladins are dishing out 1.5 second holy lights that crit for 7k (which doesn't even require that much +haste if they have the light's grace talent)

Well of course when you need multiple tanks, multiple healers is always good.
But lets so for example, you take the Morogrim fight, 1 tank, 1 mob. Now if you need a minimal of 5 healers without spell haste for the MT, then with spell haste you might only need 4 healers, keeping the same amount of raid healers, you are able to bring in an extra dps, melee or caster, which in effect cuts the fight time down, and total healing down too.

But like most items I've seen so far, it's all leaning on the dps side, and not healing, so is this Blizzard's intent to try and not nerf the health of timered fights, and give us faster hitting attacks rather than harder hitting attacks to balance pvp at the same time?

Well, the did get a drop of Blood-stained Pauldrons, which have the same graphic that we saw in the Hyjal armor sets movie. The name also reminds me of the Blood-soaked set from ZG, which while not having a set bonus did share a naming and looks like a set.

Blizzard is completely aware of the issues of expanding threat with progression based dps increases. They havent screwed it up yet. Blackwing lair saw the introduction of Shieldslam. AQ era saw the higher rank heroic/revenge books. I think there were some mechanic changes in naxx, i dont recall, but the 6 piece dreadnaught bonus was there in naxx. They have a good track record of not messing up with single target threat. If they get lazy and its becomes a real issue, im sure they'll just start slapping a +threat % mod on gear or enchants.

It decreases the amount of reaction time needed, and somewhat decreases the necessity of "predicting boss attacks 3 seconds beforehand".


Any individual spellhaste item will be about the same as that one, or 3% spellhaste, which turns your 3.0 second heal into 2.91 seconds, or the equivalent of losing 90 latency off your connection, as far as reaction time goes. Significant? Yes. But game-breaking? If it were, people with 180 latency couldn't even attempt to raid.

When you stack up many slots with +haste/+damage over +healing, you begin to lose huge amounts of mana regen and +healing, and that will eventually come to bite you in the ass something terrible.