Legion’s Heroic raid testing begins tomorrow
Hot off the heels of the alpha’s triumphant return, Watcher has just taken to the forums to announce that raid testing will begin tomorrow, January 15 starting at 2:00 p.m. PST. While testing will be limited to Ursoc in the Emerald Nightmare raid zone, this sort of forward momentum has me excited for what more we’ll see in the coming weeks.
Of course, during this round of testing “instability is not only possible, but almost a certainty” because, well, this is the alpha and it’s still in its infancy. But a raid test is a raid test, and we’ll be getting a taste of it very soon (provided servers don’t decide to throw a tantrum and shut down on us). Full details and Watcher’s rather humorous post after the break.
Remember that Heroic difficulty scales for any group size between 10 and 30 players, so feel free to assemble and bring a group of any size within that range. Our general plan is to test every encounter on Heroic difficulty first, and then test sections of the raid on Normal and Raid Finder, alongside targeted Mythic tests.
As this is the very first raid test of this alpha cycle, one of the main purposes of this test is to stress our servers and the Legion codebase, so instability is not only possible, but almost a certainty. And yes, class design (let alone balance) is far from final, many specs are not available, artifacts will not be fully unlocked yet, and we’ll certainly be revisiting this boss in the future for true tuning data. If you’ve read all of that and have a masochistic streak and still want to help us out with this first raid test, here are the details:
Friday, January 15
Ursoc – Heroic Emerald Nightmare
14:00 PST (17:00 EST, 23:00 CET)
As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of an alpha environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session, change the boss being tested, or cancel a test entirely, due to bugs, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.
Q: How do I get into the raid zone?
A: In Dalaran, Orgrimmar, or Stormwind, you may speak to Nexus-Lord Donjon Rade Sr. in order to teleport into the raid zone while it is open for testing. (The option to teleport into a zone will not be available when the zone is not open for testing.)
Q: What character should I use to test the raid?
A: Whichever you prefer. We will be scaling players’ effective level to 110 for raid testing, and their item level to an appropriate threshold for the encounter(s) being tested.
Q: How long does testing last?
A: The primary purpose of testing is to give us the information we need to balance the encounters, evaluate how mechanics are playing out in practice, and identify bugs. Once we’re satisfied that we’ve received that information for a given boss, we’ll be shutting down testing. Usually this takes anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours, but there are no guarantees.
And as an added bonus, Watcher channeled our own Adam Holisky in a follow-up to his post:
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