Watcher
A Timewalking holiday is currently active on the PTR, allowing players to queue for Burning Crusade dungeons via the standard Group Finder UI. Please use this thread for feedback and especially reports of anomalies with the experience.
First off, some context for the feature, since I know there is some confusion regarding its scope and intent: Timewalking is intended to allow players to experience some of our iconic older dungeons in a relevant context, offering a change of pace to max-level and leveling players alike during the event weekends. For players who have nostalgic memories of racing through Shattered Halls in 2007 to beat the execution timer and complete a Trial of the Naaru for raid attunement, Timewalking will not recreate that experience. Sorry. I completely understand, and I have the same memories of needing to two-heal Skyriss at the end of Arcatraz because otherwise if your sole healer got targeted by his mind flay you were likely to wipe on the spot. But it is not possible to recreate that experience without fundamentally redesigning the dungeons, and that's not what Timewalking is about.
What made those terrifying 7-pulls in Shattered Halls terrifying wasn't necessarily the encounter design, so much as the limitations of core class and combat mechanics back then. The default Protection warrior tank would be frantically trying to tab-Sunder through the different mobs to keep them from running off and attacking the healer, while AoE wasn't really possible on pulls like that both because of threat restrictions and because many specs or even classes had no functional ability to do AoE damage. Zereketh the Unbound in Arcatraz has three mechanics: Void Zone (the good old classic), Shadow Nova (a point-blank AoE), and Seed of Corruption (the old warlock spell as it existed back then). Attempting to make that a truly challenging encounter for today's players would require either making all the abilities do massive burst damage (more frustrating than fun), or completely redesigning the encounter. We certainly do update and reimagine old dungeons (e.g. Upper Blackrock Spire in Warlords), and will continue to do so, but Timewalking aims at preserving them in their original form.
At the same time, the content shouldn't feel completely trivial, and we're aware that right now it often does. Some of that is due to scaling bugs (and in the case of some of those bugs, they will completely break any semblance of gameplay as you walk through two-shotting every enemy), but in general combat times are still too short across the board, sometimes not giving adequate time to even experience a creature's mechanics. Tuning is not final, and we'll be iterating on it over the course of the PTR.
Known issues:
- The item level of rewards for scaled-down level 100 players is not final (it will be going up), though in general the intent is for the items to serve as catch-up gear, and not to contend with current raid gear. The quest associated with the event will offer a reward that is attractive to raiders of all levels.
- If you have a pet summoned before you accept your queue, the pet likely will not be properly scaled down, and will destroy everything.
- Some set bonuses and other procs (e.g. the T17 Demonology set bonus demon) are not properly scaling down.
When offering feedback, I'd strongly encourage running an add-on to keep track of group damage, and reporting any notable outliers. And if you're using something with broken scaling, you're certainly free to continue doing so on PTR, but understand that it pretty heavily undermines the rest of the experience and thus your ability to provide meaningful feedback on that experience.
