While you’re busy clearing Titan Rune dungeons and getting Sidereal Essence for those sweet, sweet gear upgrades, Blizzard is hard at work preparing World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Classic phase four, and we’ve got your early patch notes.
Phase four will introduce WoW’s most iconic raid in Icecrown Citadel, three awe-inspiring dungeons with The Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection, and the Shadowmourne Legendary weapon quest. Besides all this spicy content, the patch will have a couple of class adjustments for Hunters, Warlocks, Priests, Druids, and Shamans, and a handful of necessary hotfixes.
Without any further ado, here are WoTLK Classic phase four early patch notes.
Does WoTLK Classic phase four have a release date?
WoTLK Classic phase four will release on Oct. 10. But Icecrown Citadel, the fabled raid where players finally stand united against the Lich King, will open two days after the release of the patch, on Oct. 12.
WoTLK Classic phase four patch notes
Icecrown Citadel
The highlight of phase four is the Icecrown Citadel, a place where we’ll finally witness the fall of Arthas Menethil, better known as the Lich King. Icecrown Citadel will have 12 bosses in five different wings. Here are all the wings and bosses in Icecrown Citadel:
- The Lower Spire
- Lord Morrowgar
- Lady Deathwhisper
- Gunship Battle
- Deathbringer Saurfang
- The Plagueworks
- Festergut
- Rotface
- Professor Putricide
- The Crimson Hall
- Blood Prince Council
- Blood-Queen Lana’thel
- The Frostwing Halls
- Valithria Dreamwalker
- Sindragosa
- The Frozen Throne
- Arthas Menethil, the Lich King
It’s important to note that the Heroic mode will come with a limited number of attempts, meaning if you run out of pulls, you won’t be able to engage bosses anymore.
Shadowmourne Legendary quest
With the release of Icecrown Citadel, we’re, of course, getting the Shadowmourne questline. For this, you’ll need Shadowfrost Shards which can drop from bosses in this raid. Blizzard is making some changes to this questline:
- Shadowfrost Shards will no longer require that a player in your raid group to have advanced to the quest “The Splintered Throne” in order to drop.
- The drop rate of Shadowfrost Shards on 25-player normal has been adjusted to match the drop rates of 25-player heroic.
- The “End” boss of each wing (Saurfang, Lana’thel, Putricide, Sindragosa, and The Lich King) will now always drop a single guaranteed Shadowfrost Shard on both 25-player Normal and Heroic difficulties.
- Primordial Saronite will be more obtainable as well and will be purchasable from both the Emblem of Frost vendor with a new currency gained in Titan Rune Dungeon: Gamma Protocol dungeons.
Titan Rune Dungeons: Defense Protocol Gamma
Titan Rune Dungeons: Defense Protocol Gamma are the new version of dungeons that will roll out on live servers with phase four patch. These dungeons will drop a Defiler’s Scourgestone currency that can be used to purchase 245 item level gear from the Trial of the Crusader 25-player raid from Korralin Hoperender or Kolara Dreamsmasher in Dalaran. Besides that, you can earn five Emblems of Frost per day from these dungeons.
The Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection become available
The Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection are the three dungeons that truly depict the spirit of WoTLK—eerie atmosphere, major lore developments, and, most importantly, incredible loot. All three dungeons will be a part of the Titan Rune Dungeons: Defense Protocol Gamma rotation and running them on Heroic difficulty will give additional rewards.
User interface changes
- A new collections interface has been added to Wrath of the Lich King Classic to gather Pets, Mounts, and Heirloom items into one convenient location.
- Most pets, mounts, and heirloom items are also now account-wide.
- You will find the collections UI in your micro bar here:
Class balance changes
Hunter
- A new skill has been added for Hunters: Trap Launcher: Explosive Trap.
- This skill can be trained by any Hunter class trainer and is available to all specs.
- This new skill is not usable in PvP Arenas or Battlegrounds.
Druid/Priest/Shaman
- The Wild Growth, Circle of Healing, Ancestral Healing, and Divine Hymn spells have been adjusted to favor players over pets and guardians.
- With this adjustment, these “smart heal” spells will still attempt to heal pets that are very dangerously low on health, but in general, this spell will favor players who are missing health first.
Warlock
- Reduced the internal cooldown of Demonic Pact from five seconds to one second.
- Optimal play for Demonology warlocks is currently to wait several seconds to send their pet into combat while waiting for trinkets and other spellpower-increasing procs to occur, to prevent from locking yourself out of a higher snapshot of spell damage that occurs a few seconds after your pet’s initial Demonic Pact proc. This adjustment is merely meant to slightly smooth out optimal usage of Demonic Pact and to allow demonology warlocks to send their pets into combat a bit faster.
- Demonic Pact will now always be 10 percent of the Warlock’s spell power.
- Summon Infernal’s cooldown will now reset on encounter end events, similar to other long cooldowns in Wrath Classic.
Bug fixes
- Please be advised that the LFG tool is not functional in this PTR build. We are working to update the group finder tools for this patch and as a result, the previous iteration of the LFG tool is no longer functional but has not yet been replaced with the new iteration.
- There are several interface errors that may appear on login and during gameplay.
- The Argent Crusade NPCs, camps, and Battering Ram have not yet arrived at the entrance to Icecrown Citadel. We expect them to appear in a future PTR update.
- There are several issues with the RP scenes that play after the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter.
- The Flesh-Eating Insect swarm trap outside of Professor Putricide’s room must be triggered and cleared twice before the door to Putricide’s room will open.
- The Frostwing Welp packs leading up to Sindragosa have multiple animation issues and may float when dead.
- The visual effects for Sindragosa’s Frost Bomb and Blistering Cold abilities are not the correct size.
- Sindragosa’s Tail Swipe ability doesn’t properly knock players down and immobilize them.
- Players can see their own Frenzied Bloodthirst target “blood drop” visual effect on them during the Blood Queen Lana’thel encounter, even when they do not themselves have the Frenzied Bloodthirst debuff.
- Fixed an issue preventing players from being able to queue into Burning Crusade Heroics
- Fixed an issue with the minimaps in certain areas of the Caverns of Time and Old Hillsbrad Foothills.
- Fixed an issue that prevented deep wounds and other similar DoT effects from ticking on Rogues in stealth.
- Fixed an issue that sometimes caused a client crash when viewing certain player buff tooltips from across zone boundaries.
- Fixed multiple interface errors in the Random Dungeon Finder and Premade Group Finder.
- Fixed an issue that caused freshly created characters to begin with 150 riding skill.
- Added a Lich King Raids heroic difficulties to the Start a Group interface in the premade group finder.
- The Random Dungeon Finder tool no longer defaults you to the group role specified on your talent pane, and you’ll need to select a role before queuing for an activity.
- When searching for an activity in the Dungeons and Raids or Dungeons areas of the premade group finder, the search bar will now allow searching for specific raid sizes or difficulties.
- When Starting a new group in the premade dungeon finder, a default title is now assigned to an activity if the party leader does not have an authenticator and SMS Protect active on their account.
- Fixed an issue that caused the Argent Crusade tents and siege engine objects outside of Icecrown Citadel to have too short of a view distance.
- Fixed an issue causing groups formed via Random Dungeon Finder to use Battleground chat instead of instance chat.
- Made various adjustments to the order activities are listed when starting a Dungeon or Raid group in the premade group finder.
- Fixed an issue that was allowing you to queue into lower-level dungeons after outleveling them.
- Added a level 80 requirement to the Kalu’ak Tribe Exalted reputation reward, Mastercraft Kalu’ak Fishing Pole.
- Fixed an issue causing various abilities in the Professor Putricide encounter to occasionally deal more or less damage or healing than intended.
- Fixed an issue causing Lady Deathwhisper to occasionally Mind Control tanks and offtanks.
- Fixed an issue preventing long cooldown abilities from resetting after wiping to Festergut.
- Resolved an issue causing Prince Valanar’s Shocking Vortex ability to only ever target a tank rather than random raid members during the Blood Princes encounter.
- Fixed an issue where players who had fallen off of the Lich King encounter area were ported to the middle of the encounter and became resurrectable during the encounter.
- Fixed an issue causing Sindragosa’s Tail Smash ability to not properly stun players affected by it.
- The Glyph of Omen of Clarity now reduces all physical damage dealt by five percent.
- Fixed an issue preventing players from entering Sunwell Plateau during the quest “The Purification of Quel’Dalar” without being in a raid group.
- Fixed an issue causing Bronjam’s Soulstorm to cause damage in the middle of the encounter space.
- Fixed an issue causing pets dragged from the pet collections interface to the action bar to not be able to be interacted with.
- Fixed an issue allowing each rogue to be able to apply multiple versions of Wound Poison to the same target.
- Fixed various issues with Mounts not respecting mounting restrictions and being able to be mounted in places they shouldn’t.
- Fixed several issues causing certain options in the options menu to be non-functional.
- Fixed a texture issue on the NPC Colosos in the Alliance area of the Argent Tournament Grounds.
