[2023] Wrath Classic 3.4.3 PTR Development Notes

We’ve opened the 3.4.3 PTR for preliminary testing.

There are many closed and non-functional aspects of the PTR initially. Please read on for more information.

The ICC raid will open for testing at 2:00 p.m. PDT today, August 29. We appreciate your patience as we address issues being encountered in the first few hours of this test.

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 2:00 p.m. PDT. The raid will close at 2:00 p.m. PDT 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.

Random Dungeon Finder

The first iteration of the Wrath Classic random dungeon finder is now available for testing.

You’ll see options to queue for individual dungeons as well as Normal Dungeons, Heroics, Defense Protocol Alpha, Defense Protocol Beta, and Defense Protocol Gamma. Please use the random dungeon finder to queue for Defense Protocol Gamma dungeons and let us know what you think.

• For this test environment only, the item-level requirement for using RDF to group for Titan Rune Gamma dungeons is 200. This is intended to streamline testing in an environment with template characters and upgrade vendors available.

This feature is still under development, and there are a few known issues and incomplete functions.

Known Issues

• The premade group finder portion of the tool is not yet implemented and is missing from the interface. We intend to add that in a future PTR update.
• The rewards for daily dungeon completion are not yet finalized. Currently all of these activities award 2 Emblems of Triumph and gold.
• When queuing for a Defense Protocol Alpha, Beta, or Gamma, you still must sometimes click the Mysterious Device object to activate Alpha, Beta, or Gamma protocol. In the final release we intend for the desired additional difficulty to be automatically active upon porting into the instance.
• Group chat inside of groups formed via RDF is using Battleground chat instead of Instance or Party chat. At this time, you’ll need to type /bg to speak with your group.
• When the dungeon queue pops and the pre-dungeon ready check appears, the “ready” check marks do not fill in for each group member as they accept the queue. This is a visual bug that will be resolved in a future PTR update.
• There is currently a 15 minute timer for requeuing after doing a Random Dungeon.

We encourage you to please utilize the bug reporter for any other issues you find with Random Dungeon Finder.

Titan Rune Dungeons: Defense Protocol Gamma

The new Defense Protocol Gamma mode is now available for testing. You can find this via random dungeon finder or by manually travelling to dungeons and activating the mysterious device inside and selecting “Defense Protocol Gamma”. For this iteration of Titan Rune Dungeons, creatures inside dungeons deal increased damage and have increased health, and there is a single unified mechanic across all Wrath Classic dungeon “families” to compliment the additional mechanics from Defense Protocol Beta, which are still present. Upon entering a dungeon with Defense Protocol Gamma active, an agent of the Argent Tournament specific to your faction will be present and offer each player a selection of additional beneficial buffs to assist them in the dungeon. Please experiment with these powerful abilities and let us know what you think!

Rewards

• Every boss in Defense Protocol Gamma dungeons will drop a Defiler’s Scourgestone currency. This currency may be used to purchase item level 245 Trial of the Crusader 25-player raid rewards from either Korralin Hoperender in the alliance area of Dalaran or Kolara Dreamsmasher in the Horde area.
  • Developers’ notes: This is a continuation of the Sidereal Essence model we introduced with Defense Protocol Beta and we felt it would be better to award one of these from each boss rather than a single currency from the final boss to encourage players to clear more of the dungeon and not skip as many bosses. Boss skips can cause a lot of friction in groups, particularly in Random Dungeon Finder groups. The Ulduar drops in Defense Protocol Beta are still in place in Gamma, and other than this new currency no additional rewards have been added.
• You can expect to be able to earn 5 Emblems of Frost per day doing Defense Protocol Gamma dungeons in the final release, however, this is still a work in progress and Emblems of Frost are not yet awarded for Heroics or Titan Rune Dungeons. We intend to have this updated in our next PTR build.

Please note that these rewards and values may not be final.

Defense Protocol Alpha Adjustments

We’ve made an adjustment to reduce the total health of creatures in Defense Protocol Alpha by approximately 25% across the board. Additionally, creatures in Halls of Lightning and Halls of Stone now also deal less damage.

Additional Known Issues

• Achievements related to Defense Protocol Gamma are not yet implemented.
• The Emblem of Frost rewards for daily completion of a Titan Rune Dungeon are also not yet fully implemented. You will be able to earn up to 5 Emblems of Frost a day for completing a Titan Rune Dungeon similar to how it works now in the Call of the Crusade update with Triumph Emblems.
• There is an issue in Utgarde Keep that can sometimes cause players to become permanently stuck in combat.
• The Macro interface is currently broken and has many visual and functional issues in addition to causing interface errors. Apologies for the inconvenience.

We’ve deployed an update to the 3.4.3 PTR.

Build: 51384

Icecrown Citadel Testing

As with the last round of raid testing, all bosses and wings of Icecrown Citadel are available on both Normal and Heroic difficulties in 10 and 25 player raid sizes. The raid will become available today (September 15) at 2:00 p.m. PDT and will remain available until Wednesday (September 20) at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

ICC Bug Fixes and Adjustments

• The doors leading into Icecrown Citadel are now open and players should be able to zone in normally once the raid unlocks.
• The Volatile Experiments in the Professor Putricide encounter should now properly create Gas Clouds.
• The Unbound Plague debuff in the Professor Putricide encounter should now properly jump to nearby players.
• Fixed an issue causing players to be able to see their own Frenzied Bloodthrist visual effect at all times during the Blood Queen Lana’thel encounter.
• Fixed a visual issue during the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter that caused the blood power missiles to not appear to fly back from the affected players to Saurfang.
• Fixed an issue where Deathbringer Saurfang could rarely cast Boiling Blood on the entire raid.
• Fixed an issue causing Necrotic Plague to be able to bounce to unintended non-player targets during the Lich King encounter.
• Fixed a visual issue with the RP event that plays after Deathbringer Saurfang is defeated causing Varok Saurfang to carry his son like he is pushing a wheelbarrow. This really killed the somber mood.
• Fixed a visual issue where the Frostwing Whelp trash mobs leading up to Sindragosa would float upward after being killed.

New Quest Log and Quest Tracking

The Quest Tracking feature is now available to test. In order to interact with the new quest tracking functionality open your quest log (hotkey: L), select a quest in your log and click “show on map”. This should open your map with Quest markers and area blobs to show you where the quest objectives are located. Additionally, opening your map (hotkey: M) and selecting a zone where you have active quests will also display the quest tracking functionality. You can toggle this new quest tracking on and off by opening the map and checking or unchecking the “Show Quest Objectives” checkbox.

Please note: implementation is not fully complete on this feature and there are a few bugs and bits of missing functionality.

Known Issues

• Minimize/Maximize isn’t fully implemented. The only available map view is full screen currently.
• Some dungeon quests do not open the map when you click Show Map from the quest log and will either open no map or open your current zone’s map.
• Highlighted Quest will linger on the last selected slot instead of the last displayed quest.

We’ve deployed an update to the 3.4.3 PTR.

Build: 51470

Icecrown Citadel

We’ve received a lot of feedback and bug reports from Icecrown Citadel testing, and we plan to have one more raid test next week from Tuesday, September 26 at 10:00 a.m. PDT to Friday, September 29 at 5:00 p.m. PDT.

We’ll post an update with bug fixes and other adjustments specific to Icecrown Citadel sometime early next week.

Titan Rune Dungeons – Defense Protocol Gamma Adjustments

We’ve added achievements for each defense protocol gamma dungeon, including a meta achievement for completing all of them. As a special thank you from the WoW Classic Development Team, we’ve also added a special reward for this meta achievement that is new to Wrath of the Lich King Classic; the adorable ghostly pup, Arfus!

• Developers’ notes: For some time, Arfus has been an unofficial mascot to the WoW Classic Dev team, and we thought it would be nice to get a model made for him and added into Wrath Classic so we could share our love for this good ghostly boy with all of you. Please note that the model visuals and sounds we have in the current build are not complete and we should have the completed version in our next PTR build early next week. The WoW Classic Dev team wants to express our sincere gratitude for joining us on the 3.4.3 PTR, as well as for playing Wrath of the Lich King Classic with us! THANK YOU!
• Trinkets, Rings, Necklaces, and Cloaks from 25-Player Ulduar Hard Modes have been added to the Deflier’s Scourgestone vendors in Dalaran for 60 Defiler’s Scourgestones each.

The Oculus

We have increased the scaling and damage output of the drakes in The Oculus to better align with each of the difficulties. We’ve also set up new rewards:

• Gamma now drops 2 more Defiler’s Scourgestone in the final chest.
• Other Heroic, non-Gamma difficulties now drop 3 more Emblems of Triumph in the final chest.
• The Reins of the Blue Drake should now drop in all heroic difficulties of Oculus via Random Dungeon Finder.

Fixes and Adjustments

• Fixed an issue preventing players from being able to queue into Burning Crusade Heroics
• Fixed an issue with the minimaps in certain areas of the Caverns of Time and Old Hillsbrad Foothills.
• Fixed an issue that prevented deep wounds and other similar DoT effects from ticking on Rogues in stealth.
• Fixed an issue that sometimes caused a client crash when viewing certain player buff tooltips from across zone boundaries.
• Fixed multiple interface errors in the Random Dungeon Finder and Premade Group Finder.
• Fixed an issue that caused freshly created characters to begin with 150 riding skill.
• Added a Lich King Raids heroic difficulties to the Start a Group interface in the premade group finder.
• The Random Dungeon Finder tool no longer defaults you to the group role specified on your talent pane, and you’ll need to select a role before queuing for an activity.
• When searching for an activity in the Dungeons and Raids or Dungeons areas of the premade group finder, the search bar will now allow searching for specific raid sizes or difficulties.
• When Starting a new group in the premade dungeon finder, a default title is now assigned to an activity if the party leader does not have an authenticator and SMS Protect active on their account.
• Fixed an issue that caused the Argent Crusade tents and siege engine objects outside of Icecrown Citadel to have too short of a view distance.
• Fixed an issue causing groups formed via Random Dungeon Finder to use Battleground chat instead of instance chat.
• Made various adjustments to the order activities are listed when starting a Dungeon or Raid group in the premade group finder.
• Fixed an issue that was allowing you to queue into lower level dungeons after outleveling them.
• Added a level 80 requirement to the Kalu’ak Tribe Exalted reputation reward, Mastercraft Kalu’ak Fishing Pole.

The PTR has been updated with
Build 51505

Icecrown Citadel

Icecrown Citadel raid testing will resume on September 26 at 12:00 p.m. PDT and will close on Friday September 29 at 5:00 p.m. PDT.

Bug Fixes and Adjustments

• Fixed an issue causing various abilities in the Professor Putricide encounter to occasionally deal more or less damage or healing than intended.
• Fixed an issue causing Lady Deathwhisper to occasionally Mind Control tanks and offtanks.
• Fixed an issue preventing long cooldown abilities from resetting after wiping to Festergut.
• Resolved an issue causing Prince Valanar’s Shocking Vortex ability to only ever target a tank rather than random raid members during the Blood Princes encounter.
• Fixed an issue where players that had fallen off of the Lich King encounter area to be ported to the middle of the encounter are and become resurrectable during the encounter.
• Fixed an issue causing Sindragosa’s Tail Smash ability to not properly stun players affected by it.

Bug Fixes and Adjustments

• The Glyph of Omen of Clarity now reduces all physical damage dealt by 5%.
• Fixed an issue preventing players from entering Sunwell Plateau during the quest “The Purification of Quel’Dalar” without being in a raid group.
• Fixed an issue causing Bronjam’s Soulstorm to cause damage in the middle of the encounter space.
• Fixed an issue causing pets dragged from the pet collections interface to the action bar to not be able to be interacted with.
• Fixed an issue allowing each rogue to be able to apply multiple versions of Wound Poison to the same target.
• Fixed various issues with Mounts not respecting mounting restrictions and being able to be mounted in places they shouldn’t.
• Fixed several issues causing certain options in the options menu to be non-functional.
• Fixed a texture issue on the NPC Colosos in the Alliance area of the Argent Tournament Grounds.