Wow. Wow. This seems really sudden, they just 'released' the T6 art. The graphics look pretty damn cool though. I really like the plate (?) shoulders a bit after the middle of the movie.
Blizzard seem to work real fast lately. Pretty cool.

A lot of it seemed to be different skins of the same models.

Strikes me as very AQ40-ish--similar models/textures for each armor type, and a recolor/reskin for each class. It would make sense that Hyjal would be sort of the AQ40 of TBC; that is, a raid dungeon with its difficulty and loot in the middle of perhaps The Eye and Black Temple, with encounters ranging from mid-The Eye to late Black Temple.

Yea, that's pretty much what it says on the link.

So most likely Tier6.5 or something, a la AQ40 armoclass recolors. Still awesome though.

Wouldn't it probably be more like 5.5?

I don't really think so. Most of the major 2.1 assets were being developed well before TBC's release.

Okay, I'm a little muddy on this part. There are no assets in the game currently that are *known* to be associated with Hyjal? Why isn't Hyjal on the PTR's now, if people are quite nearly at the point where they can be in it on Live? Is Blizzard basically acknowledging that it's too late to test Hyjal before people are already in it, so they're just going to let people test it on Live?

I think they've got BT out on the PTR just as a PR thing, rather than actually hoping to get real feedback from people "testing" it.

Whoever modeled human and orc forarms needs to be shot.

Are people actually close to killing Kael'thas? Has anyone else besides Nihilium actually killed Vash'j?

Hyjal, I think, is still a pretty good ways off for the top guilds, and not even on the horizon for pretty much everyone else.

So, this implies that there are new Mt. Hyjal sets? Interesting.

I've seen people on these boards mention that it was said or implied in a blue post that Mt. Hyjal as well as Black Temple would contain T6 set pieces. But that always struck me as a little odd, especially given the size and importance of Black Temple as the "final" TBC raid instance with Illidan as the last boss. It just seemed more logical that the final raid sets should all come from Black Temple exclusively. So now it seems like Mt. Hyjal has seperate sets assiciated with it. I wonder how they will fit in terms of gear progression.

Last time I heard Solarian was impossible ( even more impossible than Al'ar ) due to some 1-hitting-everyone problem. Judging by the speed they are fixing bosses, and the fact that there was no announced fix to any of the TK bosses in the patchnotes, unlike Vashj, I wouldn't be so sure about that month. Having to wait for fixes isn't really progress ..

I suppose it is kind of a big issue that so many bosses are at a "has to be retuned by Blizzard to be possible" stage. It seems intentional, and hopefully it is, because if not... then it's going to be slow-going if every new boss has to take weeks to get retuned once people finally get to them.

However, my assumption about this 2.1 patch is that it's going to make some fairly wide-spread changes to the raid tuning along with the other raid-related changes. Has anyone actually been doing SSC/TK on PTR?

are there any details out about the Solarian fight? I haven't read or heard a single thing about her and I sadly spend my entire day reading this site/wow forums/wowwiki

The only thing that pops into mind is the promise a CM made, that bosses will be retuned where they were set with the flasked and otherwise buffed dps of the players, so basically they would increase the enrage timers and lengthen the phases, however most of the buggy encounters had problems with abilities not thought through and the boss doing too much dps. Add that nowadays removing abilities is the preferred way ( Tidewalker, Vashj ) and that takes a patch instead of a serverside hotfix apparently. I'm very sceptical about this thing.

All I 'overheard' was what I said in the previous post. There must be something wrong with her ( her? ) to explain the lack of information.

Edit: if there's a specific Solarian thread somewhere I could paste you some chatlogs that have all the details, though it's not much.

I'm kind of terrified that blizzard will balance mobs based on the results they get from the test server. "well thats good to balance mobs, right?" What I'm scared of is that they'll balance mobs around the entire raid having full T5.

And at the current rate that loot drops, guilds will be lucky to have even HALF their members in some T4, much less T5.

People complain about pot progression. But at least we could get pots in a timely fashion unlike 1 drop a week.

From what I understand, Mt. Hyjal and the Black Temple have the same "tier" of raid loot in them (much like SSC and TK). With the tier 6 Chest dropping from Illidan, either the helm or legs will drop at the conclusion of Mt. Hyjal.

So it looks like Mt Hyjal will be Tier 5.5?

There won't really be much tuning done based on test server, really. Pugs will most likely only test the first boss (if they even make it that far). A guild doing an organized run could maybe get ported around by a dev to test specific stuff, but besides that I don't see many of the bosses being tested.

Its hard to say from that video exactly what this armor is. They could simply be new models for random armor pieces (so we dont have to keep seeing red dragonstalker, for example), and not necessarily sets. From that video there were only 3 distinct armor models out of 4 possible armor types.

Likewise here. Someone posted in one of the old raid-progress discussion threads a piece of IRC chat with furor saying hyjal/bt were both teir6. It struck me initially as odd since Hyjal was "in the game" and there was no sign of teir6 anywhere, at least we had knowledge of teir4 and teir5, and the first time blizzard mentions teir6 is in the black temple preview. Nothing has been shown to disprove or prove it beyond that. The vendors for the turn-in could very well be inside of Hyjal itself, but has anyone found a token turn-in for teir6 (assuming it is tokens)?

I remember Naxx being tested to Loatheb at least (that's the farthest boss I remember specifically being tested) by guilds... were people who did that ferried around by a dev, or did they clear that far?

Everything aside from Kel'Thuzad and Saph was tested on the PTR. The devs helped out with ports and stuff.