Raid Testing Schedule - July 21

On Monday, July 21, we will begin our Warlords raid testing with one Heroic encounter from Highmaul, and one from Blackrock Foundry. As this is the very first raid test of the beta, it is quite possible that there will be technical or gameplay issues that disrupt the testing. Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding.

Remember that Heroic difficulty scales for any group size between 10 and 30 players, so feel free to assemble and bring a group of any size within that range. Our general plan is to test every encounter on Heroic difficulty first, and then test sections of the raid on Normal and Raid Finder, alongside targeted Mythic tests.

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below on all Beta servers.

Monday, July 21

The Butcher - Heroic Highmaul
13:30 PDT (16:30 EDT, 22:30 CEST)

Gruul - Heroic Blackrock Foundry
16:00 PDT (19:00 EDT, 01:00 CEST)

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session, change the boss being tested, or cancel a test entirely, due to bugs, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

Important Testing Notes

Q: How do I get into the raid zone?

A: In Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and your garrison, you may speak to Nexus-Lord Donjon Rade in order to teleport into the raid zone while it is open for testing. (The option to teleport into a zone will not be available when the zone is not open for testing.)

Q: What character should I use to test the raid?

A: Whichever you prefer. We will be scaling players' effective level to 100 for raid testing, and their item level to an appropriate threshold for the encounter(s) being tested.

Q: How long does testing last?

A: The primary purpose of testing is to give us the information we need to balance the encounters, evaluate how mechanics are playing out in practice, and identify bugs. Once we're satisfied that we've received that information for a given boss, we'll be shutting down testing. Usually this takes anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours, but there are no guarantees.

Addons are active right now, so yes.

If you're seeing the "must be 100" message, it means that the server hasn't properly picked up the event to open the zone yet. Bear with us. Obviously there are some technical difficulties, but the initial raid tests end up inherently also being stress tests, and our server team is actively working on the issues. Thank you for your patience, and apologies for the inconvenience.

Servers are being taken offline temporarily to address the issues we're seeing - current ETA is around 15 minutes, but I'll update with more information as it becomes available.

(BTW, known issue: The first person to zone in will probably end up in the wrong spot. If you port out and back once others have joined you, it should work fine.)

Issues with access on Lost Isles and Gilneas should now be sorted out - it may still take a bit, but it's definitely accessible.

Make sure your raid leader has raid difficulty set to Heroic before using the NPC to teleport in.

We're going to be ending what little testing has been able to occur - and taking the servers down for hopefully brief maintenance at 3pm PDT (~10 minutes from the time of this post), to try to get things stable for our 4pm test. We'll post further updates as needed.

Thank you for your patience - this is the first time we've had hundreds/thousands of people hitting instance servers simultaneously in Warlords, and it's obviously exposed some bugs and provided invaluable data for our server team to help fix things up. We'll test the Butcher again in a future session, and these initial hiccups will help us ensure a smoother testing experience going forward.

Servers should be coming up shortly for Gruul testing. We've made some headway in addressing the issues that affected the first test - work on that will continue through the evening, but hopefully there will be a bit more stability this time around. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience, and thanks for being patient.