I’m Nyeriah, one of the developers working on Chromiecraft and I am here once again bringing you the latest news from the development front.

The past month was especially rough for most of us with all of the real-life responsibilities we had to deal with (family, work, college…) but we still managed to get a considerable amount of issues addressed, which eventually allowed us to officially open Zul’Gurub to public testing. Some of you who joined our community during the earlier stages certainly remember the “beta” stages we used as we progressed through the level brackets. We could say Zul’Gurub is in a “beta” stage right now as we run our tests and ready ourselves for the official release on the live realms. The first test runs gave us quite valuable reports and brought to our attention several bugs we hadn’t noticed yet while scouting the place ourselves.

So with over 50 new issues to address, we began working towards the current state we found ourselves in, with only a handful of issues remaining. The vast majority of the encounters within Zul’Gurub received full reworks, to name a few: Mar’li, Thekkal, Mand’okir, Hakkar… and the list goes on. Most of the encounters didn’t work correctly (or at all) when we first stepped foot inside Zul’Gurub, and by now they’re all working in a much better shape with just a few quirks here and there that we’re working to address. As always, you can follow our progress live by checking the commit history: https://github.com/azerothcore/azerothcore-wotlk/commits/master and following the pull requests opened in the AzerothCore main repository. As you would all be aware by now, ZG is releasing on the 13th July. A special thanks to our testers, triagers, and other contributors who helped us with sources and patches, speeding up the whole process considerably.

Healthy competition is something that certainly keeps everyone engaged. That said, many of us working behind the scenes were wondering if you lot would be capable of… taking a step further. Certainly, Hakkar looks rather intimidating on his own, but have you seen how menacing he looks while fully raid buffed? Take speed clearing to the next level and down him with all five priests alive and claim your glory among the heroes of Chromiecraft. While custom achievements are beyond our reach, a special honorary mention will be made about those who managed such feat. And maybe something more. Who knows.

We’ve recently updated the maps and movement maps used by the server (“vmaps” and “mmaps”, respectively) and unfortunately, it led to a few issues with creatures not pathing underwater correctly. Thankfully, we were able to address that issue and it should be much better now. We’re monitoring the situation and we will apply further changes if necessary. This update was necessary to solve the edge issues with charging/blinking underground that have plagued us for ages.

In the meantime, we’ve already started scouting the two upcoming raids for possible issues and fixes we could sneak in before the real testing starts. C’thun, for example, has received an almost-complete rewrite by now, which added missing mechanics and improved many of the already existing ones so they behave as they did on the original servers. On the other hand, one of our contributors, Silker, has started addressing the AQ20 issues he’s managed to identify, and for that, we’re extremely thankful! It should save us quite some time.