Post-Cataclysm it would be interesting to see the new head of the Black Dragonflight attempt to reform it.

Well actually up until Aegwynn who didn't want to give up her power, and Medivh who was corrupted due to Aegwynn's arrogance, the Guardians did have good careers, they went through the ritual, and passed it on to another person, nobody until Medivh died under the title of Guardian.

So Blizzard's plans for Icecrown are out, and... it appears that there won't be an encounter against Bolvar? Maybe he'll be folded into Arthas' encounter somehow? I have to say that I'm a bit surprised that they made such a cool model for him but they won't really put it to use.

There has never been any mention of an encounter against Bolvar. Haven't we always assumed he is part of another counter, most like Arthas? It seems a long and mindless jump to get from what Blizzard said to assumption that Bolvar will not present in IC at all.

We've known for a long time that Bolvar isn't an enemy encounter in ICC. It's hardly news. That doesn't mean he's not going to be a prominent NPC in the raid, and certainly doesn't mean the model is wasted.

[edit] Doh, beat to the punch.

I was hardly implying that Bolvar wouldn't be in Icecrown. When was the last time we had a fancy non-boss model for a single instance, though?

I just haven't seen this discussed. My bad if it has been. I assumed that he was just being held back from the PTR, but then again there's probably been enough information for a while to construct a complete boss list, in light of Blizzard's quotes about the number of encounters, and determine that he wouldn't fit onto it. Nothing else would have been conclusive, however.

I wonder if the gated Icecrown mechanic means that the soundfiles and other media for the Arthas encounter won't be included until months after the patch is released.

It's since it was a pretty big spoiler.

With the gating system being shared with the community, I have to wonder if they will also stagger data with the releases, or simply turn on flags server side to enable different parts of the instance.

This is because we've been told at Blizzcon that Arthas would get the treatment he deserves for his death sequence, including an in-game video (probably akin to Wrath Gate), and it would be pretty big spoiler material if this video came together with the 3.3 Patch.

I didn't remember whether M'uru's resurrection event post-KJ's death was able to be datamined before KJ encounter was opened. This might or might not be the same way Arthas' death event is going to be treated.

It was datamined the moment it was put on the PTR with all the other sound files. Basically they are trying to prevent that this time.

Well, would you look at that:

http://www.scrollsoflore.com/forums/...ad.php?t=5537~

Spoilers on the #25 comic. A cookie cutter storyline. Arguably because of, like someone said before, still being too early to unveil anything more about Cataclysm. Still, I'm actually glad we're going into more mundane stories with the Horde/Alliance split. The comic team has been rather disappointing in handling epic storylines.

On another subject, and for the sake of truth: Having got to Icecrown with my alt, it seems the Horde ambush on the entry gate (after the Wrathgate) wasn't ordered by Garrosh or Krom Blackscar (the airship commander). Rather, the Horde soldiers were on a recon mission (this is stated by Krom himself, in a surprised/ready to go berserk tone). To put it simply, they spotted the Alliance and attacked. The disturbing part is Krom pauses for a moment after knowing the truth and then bursts into laughter and goes "This is what means to be Horde" and "If it weren't for them, the Alliance would be holding that gate" (oh, yes, thank god it's still held by zombie monstrosities). This doesn't add much to the Garrosh discussion, but it does show the level of fanaticism that has spread to the Horde armies towards Hellscream's ways. I've been wondering if Thrall would be exiled, though I can't fathom a motive for the orcs to do so. But with this behaviour, I'd say a military coup-d'etat isn't out of the question.

But then comes the "Garrosh will be a likeable figure" point and it all comes tumbling down.

And hopefully, the mandatory brevity/shortness of combat shouts by bosses will spare us of hearing his prophecies again and again. Apart from the aggro one.

Aegwynn is too major a loss to go into my "slaughter wishlist" for #25, so all I (and other "Kill 'em all" fans) got was one drained Scryer blood elf. And an almost anonymous one at that. Clearly, Blizzard fails (the common type of fail, not the internet-born exaggeration) at killing charismatic characters in shockingly mundane ways. The Wrathgate incident is perhaps the closest they got to it.

Which, of course, is water under the bridge, since every spoiler site has a ton of pictures of him still.

There's, of course, another possible explanation: It's "a" lavaman. It's not a Bolvar model, it's a Cataclysm model that landed (yet again) by error on a PTR build, and removed since it shouldn't have been there. Everybody jumped on the "burning bolvar" conclusion and started looking for similarities, reinforcing the Bolvar meme.

I mean, when they added Saurfang, they didn't hide his name or whatever. It was called "Deathbringer Saurfang" out of the box once he was added. So, why would be Bolvar called a lavaman?

Since Saurfang isn't much of a spoiler and was going to be tested on the PTR while they are keeping EVERYTHING to do with the Lich King fight under wraps by not including a single thing from the fight in the files outside the terrain and his death animation (which is nothing that big). The Saurfang fight and event with it in the big picture is incredibly minor compared to the Lich King fight.

And things are always named oddly for inside the files. Marrowgar is called Bonegaurd, Lana'thel is named Bloodqueen, Putricide is labeled as wightscientist, Deathwhisper is called MinisterofDeath and etc. even Invincible is called Pegasus for his icon. If it was a Cataclysm mistake and they wanted to remove it then they would remove it entirely from the filelist like they did with the masks (the model itself is still there but you just can't load it). They likely broke the model so that you wouldn't see any custom animations such as for example a animation of putting a certain helmet on it's head.

Except that Saurfang was "hidden." The initial achievements (Storming the Citadel) and all other references were to "The Deathbringer." Even Blues referred to him as such on the forums. It was not confirmed "Deathbringer Saurfang" or even labeled as such until his fight began testing, at which point the cat is rather out of the bag unless they'd gone through the intense effort to rename him, give him a different model, and have different speech from what would occur on live.

Rapid guessing was that the Deathbringer was Saurfang, but there was no confirmation until he was accessible.

Occam's Razor - lavaman's clothing scraps match Bolvar to significant degrees of similarity. A randomly created lavaman mob would not be so congruent. The vision on Yogg was labeled "Burning Champion." It is therefore logical to make an assumption that the lavaman is Bolvar.

Hence rapid guessing is lavaman is Bolvar, but there is no confirmation until (if/when) he becomes accessible. Chances of lavaman not being Bolvar are low, however there is always the possibility that lavaman/Bolvar will not be used at all. Blizzard has scrapped plans before.

What exact role Bolvar will play in or after Icecrown has yet to develop. Having this as something to look forward to seeing, rather than something datamined months in advance is rather nice.

That brings up an interesting idea.

I wonder if some time in the future they'll start doing PTR balance/bug testing using unskinned models with no voice acting or emotes.

Swapping out the strings, skins, and/or models probably wouldn't affect the code or balance testing much, and then they wouldn't have to let out as many spoilers.

I'm not really sure if they do PTRs mostly for actual balance testing, or if it's more to let out sneak previews and generate hype, though.

I edited the above post to add periods before the double newlines.

It would be spoiled as soon as the patch went live, so it would be extra busy work.

It's fine how they've gone about it, and with the Icecrown raid, it really shows they care about this stuff. It's on the community as far as if they want to spoil things.

With the gating system though they could easily exclude those files until that portion of Icecrown was opened up. Then treat each new wing opening like a small patch, filling in those files.

I suspect the results wouldn't be worth the effort. Unless they're very scrupulous about model matching you can wind up with minor variance which can vastly impact a fight.

For instance, don't underestimate how important a minor difference in hitbox size can be. A tiny hit box on a boss that chains or AOEs (KT blocks, Thorim Lightning, Beasts Paralytic Toxin) can vastly inflate the difficulty of some mechanics, while a huge hit box is "easymode." Conversely a huge hit box can run into parry issues (melee is not actually behind the boss) and range to boss-centered AOE abilities (Gormokk stomp).

Testing something with hitbox size X and having it go live with size Y can make a stiff fight utter faceroll or a simple fight exceedingly difficult. Doubtless there are other minor effects which could go astray if the model isn't properly tested.

Of course they could test real models internally and dummy models on PTR, but how long before a real model made it in the PTR build by human error and all their effort is subsequently wasted.

It used to be that a patch would go live and people would experience brand new bosses with the learning curve involved. It could take weeks for tactics to develop and spread to guilds that weren't bleeding edge. Now with PTR testing everyone can go into battle armed with this foreknowledge. Knowing this Blizzard can up the difficulty of fights, thus producing better bosses. They're also able to do the latest thing of limited attempts. Going in with zero knowledge you could spend attempts just reaching phase 2, suddenly have new abilities with which to learn and deal, wasting more attempts. Your average (non-top-100) guild could even waste all its attempts before it fully understood all a boss could do, making it hard to accurately tailor their gameplan.

I think the hitbox is separate from the actual model, or at least it could be.

I mean there are some dragons like Ony that you can hit from 20 yards away, and there are others where you have to be right up underneath it with your guy's weapon models actually connecting with the boss' model to hurt it.

I agree that it's probably pretty irrelevant in any case. If you don't want things spoiled, don't read MMO-Champion, and if you do want things spoiled, you can probably figure out a way to spoil it for yourself unless Blizzard goes to truly epic trouble code-naming everything in their game files.

I edited the above post to add periods before the double newlines.

If anyone wanted to double check the likelihood of Blizz simply yoinking out any models that might have had to do with the Arthas encounter script, they could check to see if the King Menethil model is still in or not.

Re: "how do we know Lavaman = Bolvar", there's various images floating around which directly compare components of their bodies as 100% matches, such as the boots/greaves & belt. On top of the whole "Immolated Champion" and "Fate of the Young Paladin" and dozens of other dotted lines which all lead to the same point, I think we safely concluded that it's definitely not "just some generic mob/boss model leaked from Cataclysm."

And as for, "Why go to all that trouble designing a model for an NPC in a single instance", considering he is the Alpha to Arthas' Omega, and this particular dungeon will close the book on nearly 10 years of built-up story - it's pretty clear that Bolvar will be instrumental in the downfall (and according to the leaks - "resurrection?") of The Lich King. This isn't just some guy patrolling the stables of Karazhan; this is a very powerful character who has endured more than most heroes in the WarCraft Universe and survived through sheer nobility. He's gonna play a big role in Icecrown and I'm certain people will be reminiscing about "how awesome it was when Bolvar "Flame On" Fordragon took down Arthas" a few years from now.