The Race to World First would be even more amazing with 3 completely unknown bosses and us getting to see the guilds actually create strategies from the ground up, as we've already seen from the final boss being the most exciting, and being the only one not tested on the PTR in ONE difficulty.īalance and bugs. Top raiders already love this idea and are asking for it specifically. (This wouldn't be the case this time around, as there are already datamined abilities available, but if this became the norm for the last few bosses, it would be easy to simply not even put the data on the PTR to begin with in future raids.)Ī change in the way fights are perceived: every mistake a player makes is actually a learning experience, and not a failure to have already learned the fight from videos, guides, or to just incorrectly have followed the addon that tells you what to do etc. The amazing experience of learning a boss blind, knowing absolutely nothing about what's going to happen when you stand in front of them - no guides, addons, WeakAuras, nothing. But here are some of the pros and cons I go over in-depth in the article: In short, I think it's absolutely, 100%, without a single doubt worth it, no matter the cost (yes, even very buggy encounters), because that 'fresh' feeling is what raiding in World of Warcraft is supposed to be, and it was so amazing back before the PTR. Since I actually raided progression back in the days when the PTR didn't actually exist, and was present for the very first raid boss PTR test as well, I have a pretty good overview of both sides, so I went over the pros and cons. In the full article over on Raider.IO, I talk about the amazing feeling of going into a raid 'fresh', meaning without having seen anything about the bosses, whether it's actually testing it on the PTR, watching kill videos, or reading guides about it. With Anduin being the 'final' boss for the first week, and the last three (the Jailer, Rygelon (aka not-Algalon) and the Lords of Dread) won't show up until Mythic week, it really is a perfect opportunity for them to just not be tested on the PTR whatsoever and for everyone to have to see them on live servers for the first time. With Blizzard announcing that they're thinking about skipping PTR testing on the final 3 encounters of the 9.2 Sepulcher of the First Ones raid, I wrote another of my idealized concept articles, as I really REALLY think it would be an excellent and very important idea to implement.

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