I mean it’s not about testing the raids themselves, but about testing how the raid feels and certain aspects of certain classes. Like hunters, if hunters can’t FD and drink mid boss fight that’s something that needs to be addressed. If Garr’s minions don’t send you flying half way across his room when you melee them to death that’s something that needs to be addressed.
But my thought is it shouldn’t take more than a month to do a thorough test. You give players 2 options. Start at lvl 60 or lvl 1. Since there is no DM at launch, gearing up a raid for some initial romps into MC and Ony shouldn’t take more than a week or two I would think. Players starting at lvl 1 will be able to test the rest of the game to make sure nothing was over looked. Primary thing to be looking for in the world is anything bright purple.
As long as it needs to be. Also I would feel much better if they gave us pre made characters and told us to test a specific part of the game rather than give us free roam. Betas are for testing, not for getting early access.
I thought the zonewide combat ping was introduced before the end of Vanilla? I distinctly remember telling the Paladin to stop lagging behind and keep up now that he can’t OOC Rez people who fall down.
2 - 3 months. Im serious. Im sold on the idea of letting the tourists who would normally rush the servers day 1, then leave a month later get their fill of the game during the beta instead. Let them fiddle around in the beta, and ignore the launch. Then we wont have to have heavy sharding if any sharding at ALL come launch.
Yep, in classic because it was a pulse hunters could still feign and drink before the next pulse, and once you started drinking you could continue until damaged/interrupted. That was doable until TBC.
I guess it depends on what they plan to test in the beta. If they’re planning to test every phase it’ll take awhile and they’ll probably need to provide pre mades so all levels of content can be tested.
If it were me I would set first 2 weeks of beta for leveling only, no dungeons, raids etc. Then after open dungeons for 1 week. Then for the last week or 2 allow for instant 60’s to test everything other than raids. On week 3 when I opened dungeons I would also invite specific players 80ish max to test raids but it would not be open to every beta tester only those I was confident could properly test the raids. Ideally all testing would be done in 1 month however I would continue until I felt 95-98 % of all fixes were accomplished.
You do realize that you park warlock alts in Azshara so your hunters can use the single usage ones that have no cooldown, get summoned to Azshara and pick them up, and get summoned back, right?
Considering the only way to get rep outside of the raid, (few dungeon bosses included) in silithus is until you reach honored right? How are you going to level that many hunters within two weeks of launch, level your main, rep grind your alts, gear your main.