◊ Cadfael

EU PTRs are unavailable right now. We have 8pm, prime time

So I guess no disaster happened and they will be updated and lots of new infos will be forthcoming soonish.

 

• Jager

I know I'll be taking the day off work to race for that world first kill 20 minutes before the next guild.

Just kidding of course. Over a hundred guilds will be killing the first 3 bosses by 10pm EST day of patch I imagine.

 

• Icetro

Regardless, you seem to be missing the point of the PTR - it's a testing ground with an enormous amount of testers so Blizzard can get sufficient feedback to determine whether or not the encounters and dungeon as a whole are too easy, too hard, just right, etc. As as been noted earlier in the thread (even on this same page), the general agreement is that Kalecgos is a nicely tuned encounter that doesn't throw purples at you, but doesn't knock the raid dead either.

You'll have plenty of time to practice Kalecgos once it goes live, don't sweat the PTR stuff. Go play with Brutallus instead, he's cuddlier anyway.

ninja edit - Damn I'm slow, "(even on this same page)" doesn't really apply anymore. Carry on.

 

• Snowy

Nobody gives a shit who kills Kalecgos first when it goes live. Or Brutallus. Or Felmyst. Anyone who is half intelligent knows that simply depends on when your realm comes up and if you have a full raid force who took that day off work/school/whatever.

They're disabling Kalecgos because they don't want guilds to have to clear him and his trash every single night just to test the next bosses. It's really as simple as that.

Benefactors' Bar, where you get free English lessons:

 

flyingtoastr

US servers are also both down. I think its safe to assume the patch will be deployed by tonight for our raiding pleasure.

 

◊ Malan

You're right, we don't care - but what I said will hold true. First guild to do it will have a pretty little picture up on all the news sites talking about what their drops were, and the WoW forums will be spamming it on every board.

Vyktianity already has over 75 billion followers. The first verse in his book "Gift of the Wild" is "In the beginning Vyk cast lifebloom and then maul."

 

◊ Vectivus

It's just publicity - no one really cares, and will likely let it slide. The hardcore will have their time to shine - if <We've Never Heard Of You Before> gets the "world first live Kalecgos" kill, why not let them have their 15 minutes?

I mean, I maintain our guild got the "world first live Nalorakk and Akil'zon" kills, and no one seems to mind.

 

oldmandennis

I've been saying this since before they announced personal ratings. It stops people from making new teams to drag other ratings down, it makes it much much tougher to sell points.

The problem is there is no way to pick out your lighthearted hopping around for fun from people selling points, stealing points, and boosting ratings. In an actually competitive system without loopholes, you **can't** have a fun game of arena. Losing needs to have consequences, it's the nature of the system. Given a choice, I think most people would rather see the arena system improved to cut out the loopholes then be worried about casual arenas. Battlegrounds, alts, 3 different brackets, and soon PvP dailies give you plenty of chances to have fun pvping with your friends. You can be serious about at least one bracket.

 

richard

Did anyone even kill Kalecgos on EU test realms?

 

◊ Praetorian

On the live servers? No, not really. Who got the world-first live server Anub'Rekhan kill? I have no clue and neither does anyone, because everyone expected Anub'Rekhan to die immediately. When Patchwerk died that was more noteworthy because 95% of the guilds that saw him on the PTR thought he was impossible or somehow bugged. People only care about kills of things that weren't killed on the PTR or got buffed considerably since the PTR incarnation.

 

◊ Praetorian

Yes, many guilds.

 

impossible!

ShS/Hemorrhage is already really powerful in an arena setting given the while "bag of tricks" thing; boosting the damage potential of this tree would probably throw it out of whack completely. The issue is the two dagger related talents -- Imp. Ambush and [much more importantly] Opportunity -- that are completely out of place seeing as how the entire rest of the tree is unaccommodating of dagger play.

edti: And the obvious natural shortcomings of Backstab against Sinister Strike.

 

Abaxial

The entire purpose of the PTR is to make sure fights aren't broken, not for your guild to learn it. I guess it sucks for EU since they have had more copy issues but again the purpose is to test and tune fights not for guilds to learn it.

<Unregistered> what happens in 2.3?
<Kalman> Skill is eliminated from the game.

 

Vulkaire

I would imagine any small changes/fixes they have left to do on him could easily be done by their internal test team. The bulk of testing has already been done, a few minor tweaks wouldn't require mass public testing most likely. I also wouldn't be too surprised if they did tweak some of the fights before putting them on live just to lessen some of the edge of those guilds who did get extensive "testing" time on them.

 

Bogeywoman

Anyway, back to the patch notes. It appears from the official patch notes on worldofwarcraft.com that Demonic Knowledge is being nerfed to 12%, down from 15%.

This is doubtless because multipliers on our spell damage will go beyond what's intended when woltk comes out, although I confess that it's a little annoying that it happen on *that* talent as opposed to, say, demonic sacrifice, because what the nerf ends up doing is pushing theorycrafters even harder towards the repetitive and tedious 0/21/40 and away from more 'skill' specs like affliction, demo, and the like. On the other hand, woltk will change enough that one might as well cultivate patience and hope they took those other concerns into account in the 51 point talents etc.

 

Kyrillian

I'm more interested in the dmg molten armor will do to all attackers, and the subsequent impact procs. I played most of season 2 as deep frost with impact and increase range on fireblast, it was a great build to counter melee dmg. I found with the buff to arcane shot I was losing my molten armor at an alarming rate in 2s and 3s, so I went the standard 17-44 build for s3.

My main issues with a Pom/Pyro build were always the survability of it. If the changes go live that buff mana shield and blink I feel it will tip the scales away from frost as the preferred pvp/arena spec. Heroism scorch spam followed by an IWIN button will be interesting to see.

 

Riallatar

I understand why they're doing it, but have they thought about the potential that future changes on PTR might reintroduce bugs that were previously fixed, or new bugs entirely to that part of the zone?

I mean, that's like saying, "We're gonna disable all other 25-mans, because they've all been tested before."

We all know how often seemingly unrelated things break in software development.

 

Valen

For the smaller guilds, killing first 3 bosses is a big deal, because whoever has tested this on PTR will simply get to last boss way faster. Frankly, 1-2 other guilds on our server had already played on PTR and our raid was scheduled for friday simply because we couldn't copy earlier. Now, server firsts matter for guilds of our caliber who can't fight for world first kills. So this is simply unfair, no matter how you look at it.

Question is, if blizzard wants to test stuff like this, why don't they simply invite 5-6 top guilds into PTR?

 

Earthhoof

They're clearly less worried about that than they are about overall tuning -- they've got Kalecgos to a place where they're happy with the fight, it's well-tuned. Brutallus and Felmyst are, quite clearly, suffering something between moderate tuning issues to wholesale problems with the concept of the fight (weren't there Naxx bosses whose entire concept was fundamentally altered while on PTR? My memory is failing me). So they're expediting the testing of those encounters so that they can feel comfortable about the quality of the *content itself* and worry about bugs later.

 

Tunch

Any sign on PTR that the cast-cancel bug involving npc death while casting a spell on a different npc has been fixed?

 

Spherus

If all Blizzard wanted to test was the 25 man, they could do a smaller group of guilds to test 25 man content. But 2.4 introduces literally dozens if not hundreds of changes to many different aspects of the game in addition to new 25 man and 5 man zones. Stress testing changes provides more information than a smaller subset can provide, at least in a timely fashion.

One thing a lot of people are missing is that "testing" and "practicing" are not the same thing - the former is Blizzard's goal, the latter is what a lot of guilds racing for world/server/whatever firsts want. Leaving content on the PTR for an extended period of time has always led to content being cleared incredibly quickly on live which is clearly something Blizzard has taken steps to try and prevent.

The only really scary thing to me about removing things from PTR in order to more thoroughly test the rest of the zone is that Blizzard has a very bad track record of introducing errors/bugs into "old" content - I was surprised when I came back to raiding in TBC to find things in Naxx (Saph's room) and even BWL to have a lot of bugs that, in some cases, weren't even there when the instances were first cleared.

Edit: Tunch, glad to hear at least 1 other person has experienced that pain on live :X

 

• Xaviera

Raiding isn't just about the firsts, especially when it's content that they're having you test on the PTR's. It's completely fair that they're letting the players test the content to make sure it's not a shitstorm when it goes live. We're really sorry that not every single guild can finally transfer over and learn the first 3 bosses. In this case, Kalecgos was duly tested - a lot - and their goal is done. They're only doing a service to their players by hiding the content from them until live, now, that way they aren't burning out more people than necessary.

And if you're at the guild / server progression level where killing the first 3 bosses is a big deal, I'd wager a guess that noone else on your server was able to test them either. There was plenty of time, even guilds that were ridiculously casual have had time to copy everyone over by now. The rest of the guilds that actively wanted to test stuff and experience it have done so, and that's why it's disabled now.

Like Brutallus 4.0, I had heard it was impossible, but we still spent a few attempts trying different things to see just how feasible it was, that way we could make "intelligent" suggestions/reports rather than just a facerolled "NERF THIS PLZ". I wanted to know just how unrealistic / broken it was.

There's competition, and there's testing, and there's a place for both. There's absolutely no reason to whine about them disabling the content once sufficiently tested and tuned, though.

 

Garanthir

I think what seems to be lost on you is that the test realm's function is to QA the software. I repeat QA the software. The whole dive in and practice on the boss for "first kill" is something that's cropped up and outside the intent. I really hope Blizzard does not somehow change testing to accommodate narrow myopic views like yours. It's simply silly...