Zul'gurub 7 days before release

The Zul'gurub (ZG) raid is planned to be released on Kronos on the 13th december. On the 6th december I did some testing with Insidious. Results were mixed [0].

First I would like to thank Insidious, my guildmates who came, the Kronos team and all participating players for making the testing possible, I otherwise wouldn't have tried Zul'gurub before its release and I found it interesting and fun.

Due to issues I did not understand very well the current Kronos characters could not be copied on the PTR (originaly intended to last from the 15th to the 22th november [1]) until the 25th november [2], which prevented some players from using the test realm (including me, my character didn't exist) and allowed others to test more, displeasing some guilds. I do not know how much testing happened before the 25th but many issues were reported on the bugtracker, to the moderators (sometimes directly by IRC) and on the forums [3].

Mostly Tekai

It is interesting to note that bugs already confirmed on the 24th october (over a month ago) were still present during our testing [4]. Indeed, Gri'lek used a knockback spell instead of entangling roots (which lead to wierd kiting strategies that didn't work) and did not seem to wait a short time before focusing on the marked player as reported. Also, Gurubashi berserkers never used their fear spell, a troll from outside the room got aggro during our Arlokk fight and Hakkar's mind control removed all aggro, as said on a 22th november report [3]. If developers had solved those issues then the PTR did not show the most recent update. This lead some testers to question what work had been done, what the current status was and whether testing was still worth it.

The Kronos team gave access to some limited GM commands on the 25th november and those allowed me to recreate a character close to my main. I think it was a good idea to increase the chances of testing and bug reporting, even if it did lead to some unusual testing conditions (players getting BiS raid items, spending flasks like crazy, trying to get all possible item buffs, playing with ogre suits) and required some efforts from the players (manually adding each individual item).

Zul'gurub bosses, or a zoo.

We started with Jin'do, then Arlokk, Gahz'ranka, Thekal, Gri'lek and finally Hakkar with a group of about 12-15. To summarise our testing, some trash mobs were not aggro-linked, Jin'do's shades kept attacking us after wipes and reset, they did physical melee damage over 80 per hit, some spell timers were apparently off [0]. Arlokk one-shotted most of the raid in an instant after over 3k+ damage instant whirlwind, she stayed in panther form and panthers weren't always running to marked players, even when in proximity. Gahz'ranka appeared instantly and attacked us after fishing it and cast particularily frequent frost breaths. Thekal went from troll to tiger without transition, the tank reported seeing no rend. Killing the high priests didn't reduce Hakkar's health, he didn't cast blood siphon on all raiders, trash on his platform respawned and he didn't heal for enough during siphons.

Overall while the damage on many encounters was considered too high it wasn't very difficult for our small raid and I do question the raid's difficulty for 20 prepared raiders. Encounters did grossly look like retail in terms of mechanics. Gri'lek and Hakkar did not die, but this was mostly due to them being unpractical and lack of time or motivation. I loved the feeling of exploration I got on this test realm, the impression of being among the few first (even if that may not be the case) to experience the content, the thrill of trying new strategies and the change with new raid partners. But most importantly I felt like I was participating in something much greater, the future of the server, the future of our community.

As I am posting this article it is the 9th december and only 4 days are left until the official release. I am curious to see if the Kronos team will successfully tackle the challenge of releasing quality and polished content. Will they have enough time? What will happen to the most offending bugs?

[Other vanilla articles]