Let me preface this by saying that my guild is at the same high-end bottleneck that many other guilds are experiencing at the moment. Void Reaver and everything in Serpentshrine sans Vashj are dead, and of the remaining three encounters open to us (Solarian, Al'ar, and Vashj), none seem particularly appealing. We've put in solid nights of attempts on each, but choosing one to put serious time in is very difficult, especially considering that all three of these encounters are being re-tuned on the PTR.

Personally, I would really like to test all three of these encounters in their new and improved forms, but facing the usual array of Test Realm bugs (instance lockouts and resets, crashing, instability, etc) in addition to full trash clears in TK and a full instance clear in SSC is . . . unappealing. And, like I said, testing them on live is equally unappealing, because of the sheer difficulty of the encounters at the moment, as well as the impending changes. Basically, what I want to know is this: are there any guilds out there testing existing content on the PTR? Can anyone provide any information as to how these encounters might have changed, specifically? Does anyone know if Blizzard allows/supports testing of these encounters on the PTR? Any insight that anyone could provide would really assist us (and countless others, I am sure), as we decide which boss (if any) to turn to next.

Yeah, were at that same point aswell, it would be nice if we could some how petition a gm to use this death touching ability they are freely using in Black Temple to clear out the trash to each of the retuned bosses so that some guilds can actually test them before live release for once

I've debated whether or not to transfer the guild over to mess with the newly tuned raid zones to see what the differences are like, the problem for me at least is it feels debateably pointless when we could be working on stuff on live servers and trying to get that dead.

Either way, I just can't wait for the patch to go live. Mostly the trash changes will hopefully make clearing trash not so rediculously time consuming. We finally got enough flagged up for TK so we went and gave Void Reaver some attempts, but the trash is just like SSC, a big wall of hp that isn't particularly challenging, just time consuming. In any given raid trash takes up far more time than time spent killing bosses we can kill or learning bosses we haven't killed.

I was under the impression very little retuning has actually been done, are you sure significant changes are in?

FWIW I went in with a pug (pre 4/25 patch) to SSC and Maulgar, the trash didn't seem any different and Hydross now has a 500% debuff (didn't notice any other changes, we wiped in under a minute multiple times). Me and 4 others water walked to Lurker and didn't find any changes on him either, obviously we died before we got to adds. Our pug wiped on Maulgar so wasn't really able to test it but I don't think Gruul/Maulgar have changed at all.

Some of the changes are listed in another thread about the patch notes on PTR, however a quick summary of the ones I can remember off the top of my head:

Hydross adds are having their HP lowered
Hydross will also deal less melee damage, however his debuff will stack up to 500% now.

Leotheras will have less HP, and will whirlwind less
Leotheras demons (whispers things) will have less HP.

Lady Vashj will no longer mind control in phase 3
Sidenote: Phase 2 of Vashj seems a bit out of wack, it will definintly need some retuning with the loss of consumables. I don't see it being possible to keep up with the spawns unless you have a fully potted raid (pre nerf)

Alar's pathing will be more predicitable
Killing Alar's adds will be more beneficial

Astromancer has already been nerfed to have approx 2 mil less hp according to Nihilum
And I believe the patch notes say that Astromancer adds will have less hp, or will not be as abundant I think.

Hope that helps.

I'm pretty sure Hydross was slightly changed, or it was in those most recent notes, the adds having less hp, he hits for less. Other than that, there isn't a ton that needs changing I figure in SSC - FL is fine, Morogrim is fine, Lurker is fine, I haven't messed with Leotheras but it sounds like he only needs a slight bit of tuning. Void Reaver is fine, and while Al'ar and Solarian are obviously "doable", they seem to both need a bit of tuning, which notes have indicated Al'ar has less hp and there is a change with the adds. Vashj will probably be significantly easier too just without the MC as that sounds like the biggest complaint about the encounter.

The biggest changes to SSC and the Eye will hopefully be just lower hp trash, a bit more cc options in some pulls. Its just significantly time consuming per pull even if no one dies.

It wouldn't hurt them to lower the hp on the other bosses slightly as well to keep fight times similar with the flask changes, but lowering hydross add hp is definitely the best way to ease the burden on that fight.

But the real question we all want to know: Did they lower the hp on the little spawns that the Underbog Colossus' make when they die.

To clarify, these are the changes that interest me:

-Lady Vashj can no longer use the ability "Persuasion".
-Toxic Spores no longer deal damage upon impact.
-Arcane Resistance will prove much more effective against High Astromancer Solarian's spells.
-High Astromancer Solarian now summons fewer Solarian agents, and the Solarium Agents now deal less damage.
-The Al'ar encounter has been significantly reworked. Her movement around the room will now be more predictable, Al'ar's hit points have been reduced, and killing the Embers of Al'ar will now be both much more possible and more rewarding to the raid.

The Al'ar encounter seems like it might be entirely different, and on an entirely different level of difficulty. The Arcane Resistance note about Solarian makes me wonder if they haven't entirely reworked that encounter as well. Finally, lthough it isn't mentioned, I would certainly like to know if any changes to phase two of Vashj were made to compensate for the lack of consumables. These all *sound* like very significant changes, and all in need of testing.

Again, though, the problem with testing these encounters is that there is a hell of a lot of trash to clear, and absolutely no guarantee of support if we get hit with lockouts or other raid-destroying bugs. I would love nothing more than to give Vashj, Al'ar, and Solarian a few nights each on Test - but it's not worth the risk. From the lack of response to this thread, I guess that no one else has deemed it wise to go for these encounters on Test either. The information that I am looking for (first-hand accounts of retuned fight mechanics) just isn't out there, I suppose, and that is just a little disappointing.

I have been very curious as well with retuning of current content, moreso really than my curiosity with Black Temple and Hyjal. There's a lot of little things and some big things that really should be retuned in SSC and I'm curious to see if there's more sweeping changes that have been done but not listed. Hopefully we'll be able to put a decent amount of nights in over the next week fews on some of this stuff.

Some of these would be relatively easy to get a read on.

Have any stealth classes considered stealthing to some bosses and suiciding with mobHealth on to get an approximate read on the degree of hp nerfs?

Wouldn't you need to get it to 98% to get any kind of reasonable value?