Mythic Castle Nathria raid testing continues this week on the Shadowlands beta

Castle Nathria is the seat of power for Sire Denathrius, the Vampire Lord of the Venthyr, and the first raid that players will be assaulting in Shadowlands — and raid testing is well underway in the Shadowlands beta. If you want to get an early look at Castle Nathria (and squish some bugs), you can join in. This week’s Castle Nathria testing is on Friday, September 25, covering two Mythic encounters, so expect a tough testing run.

The raid is ten bosses long and just from reading the Dungeon Journal, I can already see a good variety of encounters. There are a couple of council fights for your multi-target classes, a healer encounter, and some giant beasts that will test your tanks to their limits.

Not in the beta, but curious about the raid? A great deal of testing has already happened, and preview videos are making their way around. Check out Fatboss’ guides for an in-depth look at the first three Castle Nathria bosses, with more no doubt to come.

But if you are in the beta and you’re up to the challenge of Mythic raid testing, here are all the details:

Raid testing is one of the most important parts of any patch or expansion beta. It lets the developers get some important data about how each fight feels, and lets them see early situations that players might be able to break for unfair advantages. Remember when Death Knights could use Dark Simulacrum to copy Sinestra’s Wrack ability and do tens of millions of damage with that one single cast? Proper testing helps to avoid situations like that making it to the live servers. Blizzard has an internal team that does what they can, but there’s nothing that compares to the amount of raw data they get when they open testing up further. Plus we’ve seen what sort of shenanigans players like Rextroy can get up to when they put their mind to breaking the game.

Once raid testing starts we know that we’re getting closer to the actual release of the content. It’s among the last things that get implemented and tested due to how many other systems are connected to it. After all, you can’t really get a good feel for how the raid works if you don’t have your endgame progression systems in place. The actual time from the first raid test to the launch can vary wildly but we know that it shouldn’t be more than a few months now — barring any hugely unforeseen explosions on their part. Looking at the two most recent raid tiers, Azshara’s Eternal Palace had a raid testing phase of just over a month while Ny’alotha was closer to three months. If we follow a similar schedule with expansion testing, that would put us on track for an end of October or beginning of November release for Shadowlands.

You can also use testing as a chance to get an early feel for what class you might want to make your main. Performance can vary wildly between solo, 5-man, and raid content — so having the chance to experience the group stuff early can help to nail that choice down for you.

Whatever your reasons for jumping in on the testing, have fun storming the castle!