Tier 7 Normal opens on Frostmourne on Wednesday, September 30, with Heroic following on October 7 — and Heroic entry will require the corresponding Normal progression. Before the first pull, there is a document worth reading that most private-server players never get: Whitemane published the realm's complete ranking rules for Tier 7 in advance, down to individual spell, NPC and item IDs.

{width="1536" height="1024" loading="lazy"}

Original editorial illustration by RealmList, generated for this article. This is artwork, not game footage or official promotional material.

Three different numbers, from one log

The rules exist because "damage done" is three different questions, and Frostmourne reports all three from the same combat log:

Exclusions are applied by creature type: list an NPC once and every spawn of it is covered. And the rules only decide which numbers are eligible for competitive rankings — they do not stop you using any spell, buff, item or strategy in actual play.

What gets cut out of your boss parse

Four footnotes matter more than the table:

• Faerlina's Naxxramas Follower (NPC 16505) is not excluded. Only the Worshipper pool is.
• Gothik the Harvester still shows as an encounter but earns no Damage All Stars points and does not count toward Complete Raid Boss rankings.
• All ordinary trash is excluded from personal boss parses, even when it is pulled during a boss fight.
• Pulling the entire Patchwerk room will not improve anyone's Patchwerk parse. It is explicitly excluded.

The external buffs that can invalidate a run

This is the section that costs guilds world-rank attempts, because two of the four categories are silent failures rather than visible mistakes.

Power Infusion has a hard per-beneficiary ceiling. Multiple priests may cast it on the same player, but the combined uptime cannot exceed what a single priest could provide. The published formula, where T is fight duration in seconds:

Maximum PI uptime = 15 × floor(T ÷ 120) + min(15, T mod 120)

Overlapping casts count as one shared uptime window, not two. Hitting the cap exactly is legal; exceeding it invalidates only the affected beneficiaries' parses, not the whole encounter, the guild, or other players. A priest casting Power Infusion on themselves is not counted as external.

Tricks of the Trade and Hysteria are not banned — they are reattributed. Both effects have their bonus damage split off from the beneficiary and assigned to a separate synthetic parser actor belonging to the caster. Never merged, never credited to the person who received it, and Hysteria works the same way when a Death Knight casts it on themselves. Periodic effects that snapshot the buff keep contributing to the synthetic actor even after the aura expires. In practice this means ToTT and Hysteria are usable in competitive play, and a rogue or DK cannot farm a parse by buffing a teammate.

Restricted buffs invalidate outright. Having any of these auras in a ranked boss window invalidates that boss parse and the related Complete Raid parse: Arcane Focus (51777), Zeal (51605), Might of Malygos (51800), Fury of Ragnaros (15288), Arcane Might (17150), Dark Whispers (16587), Blessing of Blackfathom (8733), Soul Revival (28681) and Battle Squawk (23060).

Related and easy to trip over: Loatheb's Fungal Creep spores may be carried on Loatheb and on trash, but bringing that aura into any other boss encounter invalidates that boss's ranking. The Gnomish Battle Chicken chain is fully logged for audit — item 10725, use spell 23133, summon 13166, creature 8836, aura 23060 — with the recipe itself (spell 12906) not treated as an invalidator. And two one-use quest items are legal to use but disqualified from rankings: Fishliver Oil (item 1322) and Light of Elune (item 5816).

The Life Tap trap (healing parses only)

Repeated Life Tap is a way to manufacture healing numbers, so it is capped per warlock, per successful attempt. Counting every player-available Wrath rank of the spell, the ceiling is:

Total-cast cap = max(8, 4 × ceil(fight duration in seconds ÷ 60))

There is a second, more brutal rule: more than six successful Life Taps inside any rolling 30-second window invalidates the healing parse even if you are under the global cap. The penalty is scoped to that boss's healing only — boss damage, Damage All Stars, Complete Raid Boss Fight, Boss + Trash and speed records are unaffected.

Complete Raid speed runs: start, end, and the 60-second tax

Complete Raid rankings require all fifteen Naxxramas encounters killed in one continuous run, judged by encounter state rather than by a creature death event. The details change how guilds should plan a run:

• The clock starts at the first qualifying trash fight, provided one of the designated starter creatures (Poisonous Skitterer, Dread Creeper, Patchwork Golem, Death Knight, Shade of Naxxramas, Plague Slime or Stoneskin Gargoyle) appears within the preceding ten seconds.
• The clock ends at Kel'Thuzad's death. Trash killed after Kel'Thuzad cannot backfill anything you skipped.
• Every roster swap costs 60 seconds. Participants are counted by distinct player GUID with at least one counted combat event between start and end. Roster swaps are calculated as distinct participant GUIDs minus raid size (10 or 25). Disconnecting and reconnecting on the same character is free; swapping in a different character — including your own alt — is not. Pets, guardians, NPCs and spectators are ignored, and starting a 10-man with nine and adding the tenth player carries no penalty.
• Missing required trash does not invalidate the run — it adds time. The penalty is 300 seconds divided by the required count for that specific row, applied per row. Kill 10 of a required 11 and you add 30 seconds. Pooled NPC entries (Bile Retcher and Sludge Belcher, for example) combine, and every individual spawn counts separately.

A condensed look at the required trash list, as 10-man / 25-man requirements:

The full document lists every pool with its NPC IDs and exact counts, and it is worth pulling up before your first speed attempt rather than after.

Why this matters more on a private server than on retail

On a well-run realm, rankings are a social currency: guild recruiting, loot disputes and "who actually carried" arguments all lean on them. Whitemane's approach here is unusually defensible for one reason — everything is published up front, with IDs. There is no opaque "invalid parse" verdict to appeal; you can audit your own log against the same list the server uses, and every future addition will be announced with its exact spell or item ID rather than silently disqualifying players.

For raiders, three habits follow directly:

1. Check buffs before the pull. Restricted auras and stray Fungal Creep are the two most common silent invalidators, and both are visible in a log after the fact.
2. Plan the roster, not just the fights. A single mid-run character swap adds a minute to a speed time, which is far more than most guilds think it costs.
3. Earmark trash counts. Skipping a pack on the way to Patchwerk now has an explicit price, and it is per creature.

While you are prepping, two adjacent pieces are worth a read: how Personal Loot behaves in Heroic Dungeon Finder while you gear up for Tier 7, and our field guide to how Frostmourne's Rebuffed systems actually work — Quality Upgrades, the five-currency economy and the Heroic Naxxramas design intent.

What to watch

• September 30 (Normal) and October 7 (Heroic). Heroic opens a week behind Normal and is gated on Normal progression, so Normal clears are a prerequisite rather than an optional warm-up.
• Heroic adds mechanics, not multipliers. Whitemane has recorded more than 80 player-facing Heroic Naxxramas changes plus 37 custom spell records, so expect the excluded-add lists to grow as new Heroic-only creatures appear.
• Post-launch rule additions. The project has committed to publishing new invalidating effects with exact IDs; watch the parsing post for amendments rather than assuming the September 4 list is final.
• Known issues still open. The September 20 known-issues post remains the reference for launch-week bugs, including addon compatibility and the final-boss item guarantee that Whitemane says it is still fixing.