Wrath of the Lich King
January 22, 2016
After several months of work put into the improved Wrath of the Lich King core, we are now getting closer to releasing it on Deathwing and Ragnaros. As you can see in previous Lordaeron changelogs, we have made enormous progress and reached a level of quality that will greatly benefit all our WotLK realms. Before the planned merge of Ragnaros and Deathwing, both realms will be updated with the core used on Lordaeron currently. Several projects need to be completed before that core swap can be initiated though. As noted in the previous changelog, we have - in addition to our regular improvements - also started to work on Icecrown Citadel and Ruby Sanctum. We have completely rewritten almost all encounters in Icecrown Citadel and Ruby Sanctum by now, as well as fully scripted Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron and Halls of Reflection. Currently we are working on Trial of the (Grand) Crusader to prepare it for Ragnaros and Deathwing. Ulduar has already been scripted from scratch and will undergo another PTR test before the core swap as well to ensure its quality. At that point we will also ask Deathwing and Ragnaros guild(s) to help us gather feedback on Icecrown Citadel, Ruby Sanctum and Trial of the (Grand) Crusader on our PTR. Once those projects are finished and several internal features are prepared, we will be ready to change the core. There is no official date yet, but we expect it to happen towards the end of February.
In terms of general development, we have made great progress on cleaning up remaining quest and dungeon issues and are close to completing that milestone. As written above, Ulduar is already prepared for release with only a few changes left to polish it, but it will not be released on Lordaeron before March because of the progressive realm design. Additionally we have also been constantly fixing spell, combat and general issues as well as improving performance. We are currently preparing to launch Wintergrasp and Vault of Archavon. However, due to performance concerns we may limit the amount of players allowed to join the battle initially. We will monitor performance and make adjustments accordingly. We also have a project in planning stage that will greatly increase performance and allow us to split servers per map once completed, but this is a project of a few months and therefore cannot be expected to have an effect anytime soon. Another changelog will be posted shortly including a few hundred fixes again.
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