wotlk-classic Wrath Classic 3.4.3 PTR Development Notes: August 30th

[Staff 1,488]

Blizzard have posted the dev notes for the first Wrath Classic 3.4.3 PTR build. We have ICC, the new dungeons, class tuning, the Shadowmourne quest, a new collections interface and even known issues listed below.

WotLK PTR (Source)

In addition to Icecrown Citadel, we have several other features which will soon become testable, and others that will arrive in a future PTR update.

Icecrown Citadel Raid

Testing begins at 23:00 CEST. The raid will close at 23:00 CEST on Friday, September 1.

• Icecrown Citadel is the final major raid in Wrath of the Lich King Classic and has twelve bosses spread across five different wings.
  • The Lower Spire
    • Lord Morrowgar
    • Lady Deathwhisper
    • Gunship Battle
    • Deathbringer Saurfang
  • The Plagueworks
    • Festergut
    • Rotface
    • Professor Putricide
  • The Crimson Hall
    • Blood Prince Council
    • Blood-Queen Lana’thel
  • The Frostwing Halls
    • Valithria Dreamwalker
    • Sindragosa
  • The Frozen Throne
    • Arthas Menethil, the Lich King
• Each wing is fully unlocked for testing on both Normal and Heroic mode.
• Additional adjustments:
  • Similar to Trial of the Grand Crusader, the Heroic mode of Icecrown Citadel has a finite number of attempts. When a raid group runs out of attempts, they will be forced to flee and will not be able to engage in any additional attempts that week.
    • Currently, this number is set to 50 attempts across the entire raid, matching the final state of the attempts counter in patch 3.3.5.
  • Additionally, there will be no restriction or gating to prevent access to later wings of the raid, and all will be fully unlocked at launch.
• PTR Gear Vendors
  • For the first round of PTR testing, we have not updated the PTR gear vendors with gear from Trial of the Crusader and Trial of the Grand Crusader. This is deliberate.
  • If you wish to test Icecrown Citadel, we suggest you utilize the character copy button on the character select screen copy your character from live realms, and utilize your current gear. It is important to us that players and raid groups use their own gear for this test, to help us establish a realistic baseline for how raid groups will perform in this content when it is released.
  • We will test the ICC raid again after this initial test, and we may update the gear vendors with additional gear if we are satisfied with the data we obtained from this first test.

Shadowmourne Legendary Quest

• The Shadowmourne legendary weapon quest chain has seen several major adjustments:
  • Shadowfrost Shards will no longer require that a player in your raid group to have advanced to the quest “The Splintered Throne” in order to drop.
  • The drop rate of Shadowfrost Shards on 25 player normal have been adjusted to match the drop rates of 25 player heroic.
  • The “End” boss of each wing (Saurfang, Lana’thel, Putricide, Sindragosa, and The Lich King) will now always drop a single guaranteed Shadowfrost Shard on both 25-player Normal and Heroic difficulties.
  • Primordial Saronite will be more obtainable as well and will be purchasable from both the Emblem of Frost vendor as well with a new currency gained in Titan Rune Dungeon: Gamma Protocol dungeons. We’ll be sharing more information about Defense Protocol Gamma and its reward structure very soon, so stay tuned for those updates!
    • Developer’s Note: There’s a large opportunity cost to obtaining Primordial Saronite early on as many guilds may opt to funnel all of their Primoridal Saronite to would-be Shadowmourne Wielders. Primordial Saronite is also the main ingredient for many new crafting recipes and obtaining the Primordial Saronite for said crafts will be very difficult early on, leading to a situation where by the time the guild is ready to give out Primordial Saronite for non-Shadowmourne Crafts, the items that can be made with this material are much less relevant. Giving an alternative method to obtain this resource made sense in this regard.

The intent of these changes is to accelerate the acquisition of Shadowmourne significantly. The original Icecrown Citadel raid tier lasted over 11 months in 2009/2010 and while the Icecrown Citadel raid tier in Wrath Classic will last a good long while, we felt it was important to allow Shadowmourne to be enjoyed by more people while the content is still current. In the original game Shadowmourne could take anywhere from 18-24 weeks to complete and similar to our adjustments to Val’anyr, Hammer of the Ancient Kings, we felt that we wanted to err on the side of fun here rather than creating a situation where guilds may only be able to complete a very small number of Shadowmournes before the next major content update. We expect with these changes the time needed to complete Shadowmourne should be closer to 8-10 weeks. Please note that these adjustments are not final, and we may opt to increase or reduce the rate of acquisition, or make other adjustments as needed.

New Dungeons – The Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection

• All three dungeons are available for testing now and can be found on the upper balcony of Icecrown Citadel, in Icecrown.
• By default, the Heroic version of these dungeons will benefit from the additional rewards from Titan Rune Dungeons: Defense Protocol Gamma but will see no additional mechanics or difficulty adjustments as other dungeons are getting in Defense Protocol Gamma.
  • Developer’s Note: These three dungeons are some of our favorite content from Wrath of the Lich King, and we were concerned that if we added additional mechanics to these dungeons from Defense Protocol Gamma, many players may never get to experience this content in its’ original Wrath of the Lich King iteration. Most other Wrath of the Lich King dungeons were available in their original form during the first phase of Wrath Classic had their time to shine before Titan Rune Dungeons were introduced in patch 3.4.1, but as these dungeons are only just now becoming available and are themselves a step-up in difficulty over normal heroics, we felt it was important to protect the original 2009 experience here. We will publish more information discussing Defense Protocol Gamma and how these three dungeons fit into the Wrath Classic patch 3.4.3 endgame content in the coming weeks.

New Collections User Interface

• A new collections interface has been added to Wrath of the Lich King Classic to gather Pets, Mounts, and Heirloom items into one convenient location.
• Most pets, mounts, and heirloom items are also now account-wide.
• You will find the collections UI in your micro bar here:

Please note that in order to access your heirlooms in your collections UI, you will need to log into the game world with whichever characters have your existing heirloom items. Simply logging in will automatically add them to your collections for your account.

Please note that account data on PTR may not always be perfectly indicative of your account data on live realms, so you may find yourself missing mounts or pets you feel like you should have. The best bet is to copy all of your characters with unique pets, mounts, or heirlooms to PTR and log into each of them at least once to ensure that those collections items are added to your collections interface.

Class Adjustments

• Hunter - A new skill has been added for Hunters: Trap Launcher: Explosive Trap.
  • This skill can be trained at any Hunter class trainer and is available to all specs.
  • This new skill is not usable in PvP Arenas or Battlegrounds.
    • Developers’ notes: Due to the fickle nature of Explosive Trap’s hit detection in PvE content, particularly against large or sessile creatures, Hunter DPS tends to fluctuate wildly depending less on player skill and agency and more on boss positioning and an element of luck as to whether or not certain bosses consistently trigger traps. With this adjustment we hope to make it slightly easier to position traps in a position where they will detonate, without impacting a Hunter’s performance in PvP.
• Druid/Priest/Shaman – The Wild Growth, Circle of Healing, Ancestral Healing, and Divine Hymn spells have been adjusted to favor players over pets and guardians.
  • With this adjustment, these “smart heal” spells will still attempt to heal pets that are very dangerously low on health, but in general this spell will favor players that are missing health first.
• Warlock – Reduced the internal cooldown of Demonic Pact from 5 seconds to 1 seconds.
  • Optimal play for Demonolgy warlocks is currently to wait several seconds to send their pet into combat while waiting for trinkets and other spellpower-increasing procs to occur, to prevent from locking yourself out of a higher snapshot of spell damage that occur a few seconds after you pet’s initial Demonic Pact proc. This adjustment is merely meant to slightly smooth out optimal usage of Demonic Pact and to allow demonology warlocks to send in their pets into combat a bit faster.
• Warlock – Demonic Pact will now always be 10% of the Warlock’s spell power.
• Warlock – Summon Infernal’s cooldown will now reset on encounter end events, similar to other long cooldowns in Wrath Classic.

Known Issues

• Please be advised that the LFG tool is not functional in this PTR build. We are working to update the group finder tools for this patch and as a result, the previous iteration of the LFG tool is no longer functional but has not yet been replaced with the new iteration.
• There are several interface errors that may appear on login and during gameplay.
• The Argent Crusade NPCs, camps, and Battering Ram have not yet arrived at the entrance to Icecrown Citadel. We expect them to appear in a future PTR update.
• There are several issues with the RP scenes that play after the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter.
• The Flesh Eating Insect swarm trap outside of Professor Putricide room must be triggered and cleared twice before the door to Putricide’s room will open.
• The Frostwing Welp packs leading up to Sindragosa have multiple animation issues and may float when dead.
• The visual effects for Sindragosa’s Frost Bomb and Blistering Cold abilities are not the correct size.
• Sindragosa’s Tail Swipe ability doesn’t properly knock players down and immobilize them.
• Players can see their own Frenized Bloodthirst target “blood drop” visual effect on them during the Blood Queen Lana’thel encounter, even when they do no themselves have the Frenzied Bloodthirst debuff