2.4 PTR – My first impression

We had our first run of Sunwell last night and had an interesting time with the sights, the lag (oh the lag), the Sunwell trash mobs, and our first attempts at Kalecgos. Here’s the rundown.

--- SIGHTS ---
The island where Sunwell resides… I guess I’ll just call it Sunwell Isle… is not terribly flashy, but rather basic and in tune to the normal blood elf visuals and architecture. I didn’t get a chance to explore more than the Staging Area and the instance bridge due to way too many people in one damn place, but I’m sure it will look fine. I just hope that it’s not a carbon copy of the outside visuals of Silvermoon City. I require depth. I also think that the general layout is a bit too bright. These are corrupt high elves… why is everything still so cheerful with bright colors? It makes my eyes water a bit. =/

--- INSTANCE: SUNWELL 25-MAN ---
It’s another one of those “inside looking out” instances, like those in Hellfire Peninsula. I like it so far, but again, bright colors make seeing the targeting circles on the mobs, and sometimes the mobs themselves a bit hard to see (I’ll have to adjust my gamma just for this instance I think). The layout of the instance, at least up to Kalecgos, is nice and clean. Nice big open areas, no suppression room type places, and no crowded hallways make this enjoyable (the bridges are the closest to being crowded, but they are more than wide enough). Also, putting repair and reagent vendors in the beginning of the instance was genius. Thank you Blizzard.

Now… the mobs. They are fairly straight forward in how to beat them. No tricks or LOS fighting so far, as they are similar to the packs in the area between the Mother and Council rooms in BT. The solo machines are pretty simple too, and they come with spiffy sound effects for their “chain lightning” type attacks. The interesting part was fighting the normal packs with a Scout added in. The Scouts will run to a nearby machine to activate it, and basically create a wipe as you can’t fight the pack, and the Scout, AND the machine. We found out the hard way that the Scout had been changed to make it immune to ALL CC… so we had to rush the Scout and melt it and then deal with the pack with the machine still deactivated (we later pulled the machine solo for loot). Fun stuff eh? We also ran into an interesting bug (we think) with the room at the top of the ramps right before Kalecgos. The mobs in the room, as well as the patrol that SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN UP THERE, were respawning almost immediately after killing them. Moving into the final bridge area before Kalecgos seemed to fix it. It’s not a mini suppression room as pulling the mobs out of the room and onto the bridge makes them evade and reset.

--- KALECGOS ---
This is a unique fight, requiring coordination and lots of communication between raid members. In the fight, you must battle Kalecgos as a Dragon outside, AND battle a demon who is trying to kill Kalecgos as a Human… kind of like an exorcism. Thankfully, both battles should be rather quick as the Dragon and Demon were both dropping fast. The problem was the mechanics of the fight and the rotations needed to defeat both enemies. Due to the simultaneous fight, you need 2 tanks and enough healers and DPS on both ends to win, but thanks to an arcane buffet Kalecgos does in Dragon form, a rotation must be made else the stacks will get too high and people will get 1-shot. We found that the buffet can be removed with Ice Block and CloS, so at the very least, Mages and Rogues can last longer on the Dragon fight than other classes. The portals that spawn to take you into the Demon fight explode arcane damage upon appearing… and they are buggy. You have to click the base of the portal to make it through, as I later found out sitting at a portal clicking like crazy, only to watch it vanish. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to experience the Demon side of the fight that much, but it seems pretty straight forward. You just can’t let human Kalecgos tank the Demon as he won’t survive… oh yeah, and the Demon does shadow bolt volleys. More fun stuff. We know what to do, we just need to work on our rotation and how to communicate it will the entire raid effectively.

--- NEW COMBAT WINDOW ---
It broke the important things. It broke Omen, and SCT, and any other UI addon that involves parsing or changing the combat window. It looks silly and did not need to be changed.

--- NEW INTERFACE WINDOWS ---
I understand they were going to simplify them and organize them, but why change what is working? Now we get to learn the new windows and categories to figure out where all of our custom settings are. Bleh.

--- LAG ---
The outside world lag was to be expected, I understand that much. The lag was fairly OK for most of our 3 hour run in Sunwell with only a handful of spikes (1 of which caused a wipe thank you very much). Combining the different regions and countries into a central PTR was very foolish. They would already lag like crazy, why add to it? Oh, right, almost forgot… CRITICAL ERRORS. I couldn’t remember the last time I got a critical error in WoW (been over 1 year) until I played on the PTR. I had 3 for the night, 2 while loading into the Sunwell instance itself and 1 in the middle of the Kalecgos fight. Others weren’t as lucky as I heard the same people at least 5 times last night exclaim they received a critical error. I at least hope the information we send to Blizzard about the error helps them to correct issues as simple as loading into an instance before this is released.

--- OTHER NOTABLE THINGS ---
1. At any given point outside of instances, you will see at least 2 Rogues with both Warglaives.
2. General Chat is more of a circus than the General Chat on your home server.
3. There are some very clever character names indeed.
4. Count on most of your UI to work flawlessly, except for anything with your combat window of course.
5. Oh yes… there will be lag.