What. Tyrande is mounted and Thrall is not? Lore blasphemy!

I was a bit afraid it's just one big continous Rajaxx. And indeed it seems to be, with even more bugs. :P

I see what you did there.

In any case, this should be a rather large (albeit refreshing) change in the way raid instances flow, generally speaking. I mean, if you wipe to the first boss, I assume that would mean you'd have to clear the trash to it each and every attempt? What if you wiped to the second... double trash reclear? It'll be interesting to see how this is handled.

I would sincerely hope that they would have a mechanic in place that would let you restart from the last withdrawal point. By that I mean the point at which Jaina forces you to withdraw to Thrall's camp, and the point at which Thrall forces you to withdraw to Tyrande's camp. Kind of like how if you wipe on a certain part of Durnholde Keep you can pick it back up from the last boss you killed. But then again, the Black Morass didn't have such a mechanic, and this seems a lot more reminiscent of a large scale Dark Portal event than anything else.

It seems to me that the different sub portals inside the initial zone in would be just for that purpose. You start out with only the port to the Human camp open, and as you beat each wave the gates to the Orc/Night Elf camps would open, allowing you to jump back in to the instance at the point where you last stopped. I assume if you wipe on the boss at the end of the human waves, that you would have to re-clear each wave though.

Seeing all that - where do Infinity dragons come in all this? It's all good and well that we're there to fight Scourge and Burning Legion, but that alone wouldn't warrant making it actual CoT instance. Any dragons lurking around yet?

Still holding out hope for the delicious juicy irony that Archimonde has detected their interference and turned them all into frostwyrms to use against you.

I was in a pug raid earlier tonight and we managed to make it to the abomination portions of the event in the human encampment after a few tries. Attempts could probably have benefitted from having some shamans in the raid, but can't have everything in a pug.

I'd be delighted if this ended up being a kind of raid-level DotA gameplay, where a death or wipe just means you rez and run back to the action. This doesn't mean it has to be mindless zerging without tactics, but the tight silver scale (in regard to deaths) raid most raid encounters are based on gets kinda tiring sometime.

jimmy doesnt, but johnnny is still there, selling it.

It looks definetly quite nice and it feels like the fight in WC3 where you have to defend the tree.

Remember, air comes ever 4th wave, bosses every 6th and don't forget to maze ;D

I just noticed that Horde UD that go into Mount Hyjal don't change their apperance.

No Undead were freeded until long after The Battle of Mount Hyjal. I find it odd that Alliance forces would just welcome Undead into their base. >_>

It's also missing 90 foods worth of Dryads and a giant collection of Ancient Protectors.

There are Ancient Protectors at the Night Elf base. From the alliance base take the back path and you can ride through the horde base to the Night Elf base.

The corpse run from GY to the first base is fairly long, 3-5 minutes, I don't think you can really "zerg" the instance except for the first few deaths.

The waves definitely need some more tuning I think, it gets overwhelming very, very fast. I'm not sure how the waves are setup either (its a bit buggy so very easy to "break" the waves), do X mobs come after a certain time, or after the previous waves are dead, or ? We had at one point over 20 ghouls, 10 spiders, and 10 necro/mages around and they just owned us hard.

At one point I was in with 6 warlocks and 4 mages and we were just AOEing everything, it was absolutely nuts but fun.

Has anyone gotten to stage2 (going to horde base) yet, does Jaina call for a retreat or does she die? I don't remember my WC3 scenario

I take it you've never been to Theramore?

The objective in the WC3 campaign was for the forces to hold off the Burning Legion/Scourge long enough for Malfurion to blow the horn to stop Archimonde (I think). Each base is subsequently overrun with Jaina teleporting to the next base up the line, Human –> Orc -> Night Elf. Maybe the infinity dragonflight’s involvement isn’t reviled until later (Perhaps they attempt to slay Archimonde, thus causing the night elves not to have to sacrifice there immortality, and we have to defend Archimonde)

What. This would be consistently and utterly contradictory to every nugget of lore we've seen and considering that both of the CoT instances thus far focus on preventing the Horde from ever becoming the idea that we'd be doing anything other than helping to fulfill the Burning Legion's invasion is pretty far fetched to say the least.

You needed to hold them up long enough for enough wisps to gather at the World Tree to successfully blow it up and take Archimonde with it. But yeah, close

Defend him until he reachs the top so the timeline can stay the way it is, i.e he gets wispified.

it seems like there are a lot of wc3 spells used in here i think thrall summoned a pair of purple wolfs, the necromancers spawn 2 skeleton melee or mage from corpses. heres a shot of thrall beating down a necro with his dire wolves summon in the orc encampment

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...607_103055.jpg

Presumably they are screwing with the defenders to allow Archimonde access to the World Tree before the wisps go nuclear on him, since preventing Thrall from rallying the Horde in the other two CoT instances would have had the same effect.

edit: The defenders are in no position to kill Archimonde in any other fashion than the Night Elves giving up their immortality. There simply isn't any other alternative that doesn't end with Archimonde destroying the world as we know it, but for the ID to be facilitating that role still doesn't tell us if they are on the payroll of the Burning Legion or of the Old Gods.

I'd not thought of that but I love it! ... every time you die you could be set back into the "Queue" to be "retrained" at the barracks ... instead of Res and run you would be queued

Similar to the way it happens in battlegrounds - every 30 seconds all members who are dead come back to life

In terms of raid tuning it could probably set to res up every 5 min or something ... but still *something* new and novel that kept the pace up would be welcome!

Do they find Draenei coming to help any unusual?

If you're interested in that kind, have a read at the trilogy "The Axis of Time" by John Birmingham (Weapons of Choice, Designated Targets, Final Impact).