Patch 5.5.3 PTR Development Notes
We wanted to take a look at the result of this week and give an overarching idea of the state of the raid. There are still a lot of kinks to be worked out, like certain boss mechanics completely missing (and in the case of Durumu the Forgotten, the whole encounter missing), and class tuning is around the corner as we approach the second week of testing this upcoming weekend.
Throne of Thunder Difficulty
Gathering a sample size that is not heavily skewed can be quite difficult when looking at the PTR, as only the upper percentiles of raiders tend to spend time testing the raid before it goes live. That said, a lot of people had a certain expectation of the difficulty curve of Throne of Thunder that may have been slightly overstated.
On 25-man Heroic difficulty, bosses like Jin'rokh the Breaker, Horridon, Council of Elders, Tortos, Ji-Kun, and Iron Qon offered very little resistance in Phase 2 gear to the guilds who did venture into PTR this week.
With that said, raids with a similar caliber of players did struggle with some of these bosses on 10-man with Horridon and Council of Elders standing out as particularly unforgiving bosses due to having fewer dispels, combat resses, and cooldowns to deal with certain punishing mechanics. Most guilds should be able to tackle Jin'rokh the Breaker on Heroic, even before completing the rest of the raid on Normal difficulty.
Jin'rokh the Breaker dying before second Lightning Storm
With all that said, the raid is no pushover, even for the best guilds out there. Bosses like Dark Animus will require a lot of coordination and progress to defeat. This was the major roadblock on the PTR for a lot of guilds, leading to north of 50+ pulls to defeat the boss on Heroic.
While Dark Animus can be quite an engaging fight for a lot of people, such as tanks who have incredibly high DPS throughput due to being Vengeance capped for an extended period of time, while managing Anima into the Massive Anima Golem and managing tank swaps due to Explosive Slam; melee DPS in particular felt very limited in their role as their duties mostly entailed DPSing the boss while dodging Anima Font.
The next big roadblock was Lei Shen. This is quite an intricate fight that requires a lot of coordination, and due to the encounter being bugged on the PTR, there is also limited information regarding how difficult certain parts of the encounter truly are.
All in all, the overall feeling from this first test is that the content offers an adequate challenge, but not necessarily more so than anything we've seen before in World of Warcraft Classic. Future testing with more encounters working properly and potential class tuning may perhaps change our view on this topic.
Bugged Encounters on the PTR
This raid test session was not without bugs, and for many encounters, it meant that they couldn't be properly tested.
Horridon
Despite a lot of people complaining about Direhorn Spirit on Horridon being bugged due to randomly one-shotting people who were not targeted by a spirit themselves, this mechanic is working as it did back in the original Mists of Pandaria. People targeted by the spirits that use abilities that drop threat, such as Feign Death and Fade, will have their spirit attack another target. Since the spirit is invisible to everyone who it did not originally target, the player who gets Threat will thus not be able to see it.
Ji-Kun
One of the core mechanics of Ji-Kun, Feed Pool, was not implemented during the testing. This is a core mechanic to the encounter, limiting the available area on the platform while offering a risk-reward system to people who soak the pools, giving them a permanent damage increase, granted they don't die from soaking the pool.
Durumu the Forgotten
Due to the Light mechanic (such as Infrared Light) not working, this fight was disabled on the PTR and could not be tested. After the first few hours of the raid being open, Blizzard gave the boss 1 HP to allow people to progress to the next few bosses in the raid. Hopefully, these bugs will be resolved before next weekend.
Primordius
Tanks were unable to get debuffed by Malformed Blood or Black Blood. This is a core aspect of the fight as juggling stacks between the tanks will significantly speed up the process of killing the boss and the Viscous Horrors. You could still progress past the encounter by focusing more of the ranged's attention on the Horrors.
Lei Shen
While only a few guilds made it all the way to Lei Shen, the fight had some very notable bugs, with the most notable being that all platforms became electrified except the platform that was supposed to be electrified. The guilds that spend the most time on the PTR do not openly report their findings, so whether they were able to bypass this and finish the encounter to test Ra-den is unknown.
There were other smaller bugs present during the raid testing, and if you encountered any, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
High-Performing Specializations
Staff from Blizzard has confirmed that we'll be getting class tuning ahead of the next raid testing session this upcoming weekend, so this reset is not very indicative of how specs will actually perform once Throne of Thunder is released. That said, we saw a few outliers stand out in this raid tier.
DPS
Despite being on the lower end of the throughput spectrum during Phase 2, Arms Warriors and Elemental Shamans found themselves performing well due to certain encounters playing into their strengths, and while they aren't necessarily the DPS that will always top the meters, the strength of Stormlash Totem and Skull Banner is amplified even further this tier. Because of the increase in secondary stats, Skull Banner provides more relative strength, and Stormlash Totem scales with attack power, meaning tanks who get an enormous spike in Vengeance this tier will benefit even further from having multiple Shamans in the raid.
While testing Dark Animus, Stormlash Totem attributed 22,9 million damage to the raid in the first 30 seconds of the fight, adding 760,000 DPS to the raid during that time period.
As was to be expected, we saw Affliction Warlocks perform well on certain encounters where they could make good use of Soul Swap and are expected to rise in value as they get access to Unerring Vision of Lei Shen and Sinister Primal Diamond.
Tanks
During testing, we saw a decent amount of diversity in the tanking department. The least represented class was Blood Death Knight in 25-man Heroic, despite being able to handle certain mechanics well with Anti-Magic Shell. Because of the increased Vengeance levels in Throne of Thunder, the Blood DK toolkit doesn't seem to perform very well with the current tuning.
On the flipside, the clear outlier during this first week of testing seems to be the Protection Warrior. Due to the outrageous Attack Power scaling of Shield Barrier (which was buffed by 10% during Phase 1), the Warrior was able to maintain very high Vengeance levels without ever risking death.
Brewmaster Monk performed very well, particularly in 10-man, as there are a lot of opportunities to spread Guard on the raid due to bosses having damage amplifiers, multiple adds, and high Vengeance moments.
Healers
The healing situation is looking very similar to Phase 2, but some specs gained relative strength over others due to the encounter design. For example, the value of Healing Rain from Restoration Shamans is diminished due to a lot of encounters not allowing for the raid to be stacked.
Holy Paladins seem to be performing well, both HPS and utility-wise. Discipline Priests continue to ramp in power and will likely be a staple pick for most guilds going into Throne of Thunder as well.
Future Class Tuning
While it's impossible to predict what changes we have in store, WoW Classic Designer, Zirene has stated that the current plan is to do tuning in two phases. Much of the power level of certain classes will come once they acquire powerful gear, trinkets, and legendary meta gems, and tuning around those things will make certain classes weak early on during progression.
"...we are discussing whether to do ALL or most of our changes for the full phase at the start, or if we do prog changes, then a second round of reverts later based on the big trinkets and players having more gear.
We think two big visits are likely better than one"
Most tuning will come in the form of reverts of buffs that happened in Phases 1 and 2, with a few classes getting buffed. Likely contenders for nerfs are Affliction Warlock, Fire Mages, and Protection Warriors, but many more will be on the chopping block come this week.
How do you like this approach towards class tuning? And for those who tested the raid on the PTR, how did it feel? Is the content too easy or too difficult? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below!
