Classic Blog: Wrath Release

Intro

With the release of Wrath of the Lich King today, I want to do another update on the changes and hopefully clear up some questions you might have.

If you still have questions, suggestions or feedback - the best way to contact us is on Discord.

Wrath Blog Updates

For Wrath, I hope to do more frequent updates through more frequent posts like this one. Whenever changes are made, we usually discuss them extensively on Discord. Not everyone is an active participant in every discord discussion, so the hope is to clarify and add some of our thoughts and perspectives behind some of the decisions made.

We have grown significantly as a team since the initial release of Classic Vanilla. Learning to adapt to the Classic community and navigating through the obstacles of supporting an older game takes time. TBC was a huge learning experience for us, and we hope to go into Wrath with a sturdy foundation for supporting the future of Warcraft Logs Classic.

Thank you for supporting us along the journey! I wish you a great Wrath release and as always, join us on Discord to participate!

Speed and Trash Requirements

We're making significant changes to how we're doing speedrun rules and requirements in Wrath. The main one here is increased trash requirements to fulfill to prevent preclearing, but also a change in penalty for missing the requirements.

Any trash that is accessible before the first boss is engaged is required so that preclearing can't occur. That means you have to kill things out of your way if it can be engaged before the first boss to not get a time penalty. Trash that is very far out of the raid's path can be ignored IF IT'S SEPARATE MOB TYPES so no shenanigans can happen (or if the trash is in never touched sections of the raid).

Time Penalty

Instead of having 'Without Skips' and 'With Skips' categories, we're implementing time penalty for missed mob requirements. The time penalty for format: [# to kill] [name] (id)

If a raid partly misses the trash requirements it will face a time penalty, which is 300s / [mob type count] for each missed mob.

Example: You need to kill 10 bears in a raid, but you only killed 9. That means your complete raid time gets a time penalty of 300s/10 = 30s. If you only killed 8 bears then 60s get added to the complete raid time and so on.

Progress

Check out the complete Combined Progression Rules for T7 article for full information.

We have basically finalized the rules we are going with for this combined tier of progression. When creating the initial draft, we worried about the amount of support work going into moderating, but after more discussion on Discord and through DMs, we have realized the value of combining and having actual rules for progression.

In general, we try not to impose too many rules for progress, as it is more an in-game Blizzard metric. This has generally meant "anything goes" as long as Blizzard allows it. For Combined Progression, that is a separate WCL only category. We can decide more rules for what goes for this - and generally we do (as seen in T5 and T6) with a lot of success.

This is the last combined tier until potentially Cataclysm. For #1 boss progression ranks that award server first titles, we are planning on showing these in addition to combined progress.

Obsidian Sanctum

For progress, the number of drakes left alive during Sartharion won't be tracked for progress. It doesn't matter which difficulty you kill the boss on.

For parsing, ranks will sort by number of of drakes, then by your rank.

The buff to OS3d happened very late and we do not have the time to add support for OS3d progression.

Naxxramas

Read about full boss changes in our article on Tier 7: Parsing Rules.

This article has been updated to add:

Noth the Plaguebringer:

Damage to Plagued Champion/Plagued Warrior is excluded.

Spec Detection

There will be an article similar to the TBC Spec Definition for Wrath soon.

This is one of the more discussed topics on Discord and there's a lot of misconceptions about our support. In Vanilla, there was no talent information given about players in logs. This means our small team of 1 could not support specializations in a way we are able to do now.

For TBC, talent distribution was added. This means (if combatant_info is present) we are given the amount of talent points the player has taken in each talent tree. This does not give specific talents taken information, and we mainly determine specs based on majority talent points taken.

We have historically only created additional specs if they perform a different role (Tank/Heal/DPS) than the usual spec does. For example, Dreamstate healed instead of traditionally DPSing as Balance, but having multiple specializations (e.g. Shadow/Fire Destro) would not qualify for this.

Tanks

With the release of Tier 6: Black Temple / Mount Hyjal, we re-designed how we determined tank specializations to more accurately detect actual tanks. We now have fleshed out Damage Taken Requirements for tank specializations.

For Death Knights, we have decided to have two additional specializations, Lichborne and Runeblade.

Lichborne is the Frost DK Tank specialization, and Runeblade is the DPS/Offtank (Failed tank requirements) specialization for Blood.

There will be an article with full requirements soon.

You can find the current draft on Discord in the #wrath-spec-discussion channel.

Summary

Thanks for reading! Please let us know if you have any feedback on this article format. We hope to do more frequent updates in the future and nailing down the ideal format for posts like this is a part of that.

If you have any questions that were missed here, please reach out on Discord or on Twitter! We'd love to hear from you.

Hope you have a great Wrath of the Lich King release!