Bug Report

by Gimmlette

It's a known fact that when Blizzard changes something within the game, there is an inherent risk that change breaks something else. This is a case in point.

This is the first elevator you take when you go into Serpentshrine Caverns. I've started running this raid because I need the battle pet that drops off Lady Vashj, the end boss, for the Raiding with Leashes II achievement. The raid was the 4th one you ran during Burning Crusades and dropped tier 5 tokens and equivalent gear. This elevator and the one after this were notorious for claiming lives. You'd think you could make it and you'd jump, only to miss the elevator by 2 seconds and plummet to the bottom, a considerable distance, while your guild mates pointed and laughed. Battle pets were added to this raid during Mists of Pandaria but it was soloable once you hit level 80.

With the arrival of Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard had to do an item squish because the sheer size of our health pool and the amount of damage we were doing was leaving astronomically large numbers on our screens. They went back to the old dungeons and raids and changed them to reflect that we are much, much stronger and the numbers we see on the screen are not the kind of damage we're doing. Along the way, some things, like this elevator, were broken.

I know it doesn't look broken, but trust me on this. You're a level 100 and you want to get the battle pet so you take the elevator down. As it nears the bottom, to save time, you jump off. Wait...what just happened? You disconnect from the game. Logging back in, you discover you're in free fall from about the middle of the elevator shaft. Splat. Now comes the run back to Serpentshrine from the graveyard. If you'd waited until the elevator had reached the bottom before running off it, you would not have used up all the time you thought you would save plus whatever else it takes to find your corpse.

I thought it was me, just me, and then it happened to another guild member; the exact same thing at the exact same location. I put in a ticket, but this is not something that is high on the list of things to fix. If you're running Serpentshrine for the battle pet, do yourself a favor and wait for the elevator to get all the way to the bottom. That corpse run can be frustrating.

Bug Report

by Gimmlette

Today's Bug Report comes courtesy of Mogu'shan Vaults. This is the Elegon encounter. If you've never been here or done this raid, the boss, which is a sparkly dragon, shows up under those discs hanging from the ceiling. A clear floor shows up under him.

During the encounter, you need to kill an add, kill some balls of light and then destroy pillars situated around the floor. The floor will despawn during the fight, too, so you have to be aware of any warnings you're getting. Spectacular Death has a policy of requiring a 50 gold donation to the guild bank if you don't get off the floor before it despawns. You do no healing, tanking or dps if you're somewhere at the bottom of the hole, so heed the warnings and get off.

We discovered that if you kill the boss too fast, which can happen when your raid is made up of level 100s, you break the encounter. This raid's mobs are level 90. We kind of killed Elegon really fast and when his loot chest spawned in the center of the circle, the floor did not. The toon to my right, Minaithelan, tried a few different ways to get to the chest but it was for naught.

What to do? Well, first of all, don't have everyone in your raid submit a ticket to notify the game masters that you've had an issue. We had over half the raid submit tickets and while that got us quick attention, the GM's were not happy. Designate someone, preferably your raid leader, to put in the ticket explaining what happened.

Secondly, you can wait 30 minutes for what's called a "hard reset". Everyone needs to leave the raid instance and they can leave the raid. Go pick herbs or pick on horde or another boss. At the end of 30 minutes, have the same person who started the raid, invite everyone back in. Under their portrait's drop down menu, click "Reset all instances". Supposedly, this restarts the raid from the point you left off. You should be able to get to this chest and finish up the raid. We simply disbanded and came in two days later to finish the raid. The GM's sent me all the loot which I couldn't hand out to people so I sold it and stuck the proceeds into the guild bank. Elegon drops a mount which looks just like him so people are running this raid frequently for that mount.

But, as we've discovered with the Mount Hyjal Burning Crusades raid, doing all of this is not a guarantee of getting the raid to work. As nice as it is to just blast through older content, you are probably going to have to go slower than you'd like just so you don't break it.

Ironically, while searching the former WOWInsider site for all the times Spectacular Death had been mentioned in their "Around Azeroth" column, I stumbled across this.

Guess we're not the only ones to have a floor issue.

Bug Report

by Epicurian

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series revolving around the things we find which are broken or can be broken. With 7 years of "organized" game play, we have some experience with this.

Our first bug comes from the Burning Crusades raid The Battle for Mount Hyjal. If you aren't familiar with the raid, you access it in the Caverns of Time. If you take the dragons to the bottom, when you land, it's to your right. There's a "park", sort of. You run through the sand to a portal. That portal takes you to the first room of the raid. This is where the tier 6 vendor and original Burning Crusades jewelcrafting pattern vendor are located. Tier 6 tokens are obtained from Hyjal, Black Temple and Sunwell. It used to be, you had to get a couple people to form a raid with you so you could get into this room; so annoying. Thankfully, that's not the case anymore.

We've been running Hyjal in an attempt to get my warlock her T6 gloves to complete the Malefic set. I really like the looks of it. There are a lot of people who feel gear set design was at its zenith with Burning Crusades. We'll explore gear sets in an future post. Anyway, I've been trying to get the gloves to complete the set. Some guild members came along to make the process of clearing the raid faster. At level 82, I would have a bit of difficulty but it wouldn't be insurmountable. Still, having people willing to come along on a legacy raid makes things go quicker...until they don't.

The raid is divided into 3 parts. You start with the Alliance portion. Two mini-bosses spawn after waves of demons. Once crushed, you move on to the horde area. This is where the bug shows up. We killed the first waves and the first mini-boss, a big cow-looking thing with a really cool sword, is supposed to show up. He never did. There is a set time between waves of demons and that time passed with nothing coming. We ran around and discovered demons had spawned in the Alliance side, which they aren't supposed to do. Then, wave 6 of the first 8 in the horde side spawned again. That's where rock elementals arrive.

We endured this for a good half hour before deciding we'd broken the encounter. Turns out, this is a known bug. Here's what you do. Generally speaking, if you run out, hit "reset" and wait 30 minutes, the encounter does a hard reset and you'll pick up where you left off. We discovered that didn't work in this case. We actually logged for the night and came back the next day, only to have the encounter freeze at the same place. Don't kill the waves too fast. The mobs don't have much health and are easily one-shotted. You might have to remove gear so it takes you longer to kill them. There are frost dragons who show up. Let them land on the ground and then kill them. And, you can let Thrall die or take off all your gear and have the mobs kill you. Either case considers the event a wipe and can reset the counter.

Unfortunately, for us, none of these methods reset the raid. We weren't able to get the mini-bosses to spawn. At that point, you have no choice but to leave and come back after the Tuesday reset. It's hugely frustrating to the casual player because you just want to finish what you start. Still, if you've ever done the raid and not had time to wander around, having the encounter bug out on you gives you plenty of time to see things. Go to the demon area over by the Alliance zone. Creepy.