PTR client available for download

[djlar]

Well I had to make a premade just to get JC working, made all the gems I needed and mailed them to myself...

Because when you log off your premade and log back the professions will break.

I had to buy 1000 gold glyphs just to test them out, so I have the 3 kinds of glyphs equipped and active.

Luckilly my copied char had 16K gold on hand, plus 5000 from the premades made it easier..

I hope they fix this soon, we already downloaded 4.6GBs of the patch, are they in a hurry or what?

[Arees]

we already downloaded 4.6GBs of the patch, are they in a hurry or what?

That data is most likely textures and data that wont need to be changed and is finalized. Things like quests, items, recipes, etc. it what will be included in that data. Remember that for cataclysm you basically have to replace a large chunk of the existing world which means lots and lots of new textures.

[Arees]

I have a question.... I would really love to get on the PTR and try things out. BUT... when I download the installer it is a couple builds old. Do I have to install the first build and then patch it up? I really don't want to do that because the original build was like 16GB in size and the next patch was also 16GB in size because it required the whole game to be downloaded both times.

I just really dont want to tie up my computer for that long downloading 32GB of data....

[Arcand]

When I joined in, I had to install and then re-build as you describe.

It was a 16GB download, followed by another one, followed by one that only took like 20 minutes. I suppose they may have eliminated that first download now? Hopefully?

[Arees]

When I joined in, I had to install and then re-build as you describe.

It was a 16GB download, followed by another one, followed by one that only took like 20 minutes. I suppose they may have eliminated that first download now? Hopefully?

When you download the installer it is still for build 12824, so I don't think so.

[Flex]

When I joined in, I had to install and then re-build as you describe.

It was a 16GB download, followed by another one, followed by one that only took like 20 minutes. I suppose they may have eliminated that first download now? Hopefully?

It wasn't a true download for me, it seemed to copy over the existing live install and patch what needed to be patched.

[Klaudandus]

When I joined in, I had to install and then re-build as you describe.

It was a 16GB download, followed by another one, followed by one that only took like 20 minutes. I suppose they may have eliminated that first download now? Hopefully?

It wasn't a true download for me, it seemed to copy over the existing live install and patch what needed to be patched.

After the 9/18 PTR wipe - you had to download the complete client again. Is that what you were referring to?

[Flex]

When I joined in, I had to install and then re-build as you describe.

It was a 16GB download, followed by another one, followed by one that only took like 20 minutes. I suppose they may have eliminated that first download now? Hopefully?

It wasn't a true download for me, it seemed to copy over the existing live install and patch what needed to be patched.

After the 9/18 PTR wipe - you had to download the complete client again. Is that what you were referring to?

Yes. It seemed to copy over my existing WotLK install and patch whatever it needed to patch, I had high disk activity and next to no network activity and my Cache folders had cache files already in them when it was a fresh install.

[Klaudandus]

After the 9/18 PTR wipe - you had to download the complete client again. Is that what you were referring to?

Yes. It seemed to copy over my existing WotLK install and patch whatever it needed to patch, I had high disk activity and next to no network activity and my Cache folders had cache files already in them when it was a fresh install.

Ok, that's weird then.

What I did was copy the PTR unto a different partition. Just to make sure things like that would not happen.

[KysenMurrin]

You won't have to do full downloads for the actual 4.0.1 and 4.0.3 releases. When I installed the beta client it copied my existing game and took no more than a couple of hours to install. The full installs from scratch were purely for testing the launcher.

[Arcand]

After the 9/18 PTR wipe - you had to download the complete client again. Is that what you were referring to?

Yeah, that sounds like the right date. I brought up the downloader and went to bed and it
was done in the morning, so I'm not sure how long it actually took.

[djlar]

I'm using the download as needed PTR, of course instances take a bit to load (if I wasn't in them before)..

I already have capital cities and Dalaran fully downloaded so no biggie..

On the game status thingy it says I've downloaded 10% of the game.. LOL

[Arees]

I was finally able to get on the PTR. It actually didn't want to download the whole game twice. The installer's file name had the old build number in it, but it downloaded the newest client. They could avoid that confusion if they just named it something generic instead of having build numbers in the file name.

Here are some of my first impressions:
1) The download as you play feature is really cool. I only had to download about 300MB and then it let me into the game. The only downside I see to this is once it downloads the zone you're in, it seems to stop downloading. I only think this because when I exited the game after about 2 hours it was only at 450MB done downloading, which is barely more than when I started playing. I'm not sure if that is a big deal or not, because everything seemed to download really fast.

2) I tanked a few random dungeons. It felt like I was doing a lot of auto attacking, and I couldn't hold threat aoe or single target. I'd start out fine and the dps would rip off me after about 10 seconds. This could be for a few reasons. One is that its a heroic so everything dies so fast and dps want to see how they stand now, so let into the bosses immediately. It could also be that I kept tending to hit ShoR even when only at 1 or 2 HoPo because thats what I'm used to doing on live. Also, on the aoe packs I never used Holy Wrath because I completely forgot that it damages all mobs now.

One of the randoms I got was hall of stone, and the Brann event where the adds come streaming in it felt like a lot of times everything was on cd and I was just waiting for stuff to become available. It was no big deal because the adds die so fast, but I didn't like not being able to pick up the adds like I wanted.

3) I was very dissapointed that my dps dropped drastically. I was only able to sustain about 2k dps on a heroic boss. I felt like I didn't hardly contribute any to the bosses death.

4) Without so much aoe threat, I wasnt able to pull tons of packs of mobs at once so the overall pace was slower. Not saying this is good or bad, but it was just an observation. The dps though were obviously bored and kept urging me to pull more.

5) I remember some of the reasons I dislike the default UI. My character and target portraits were in the corner that I rarely look at, and without omen/threat plates I couldn't tell which mobs I had low aggro on. I also have a hard time looking in the top right to track buffs, so I like to use Needtoknow to track procs and how long I have to use them and put it right in the middle. I felt like I rarely got the benefit of GC because I hardly ever realized it procced. I also never new how many holy power I had either.

[djlar]

After some research I finally got reforging working.. the reforging NPC doesn't have a vendor or dialogue icon, first thing was to just right click him and then the window opened for reforging madness...

For DPS toon was fairly easy, the extra crit went to hit, expertise or haste, for example DBW trinket was reforged to exchange 64 crit for 64 haste, added hit to weapons, some expertise here or there (since rogue talents for expertise were removed I had to)..

For my enchanting toon.. enchanting has been revamped so you'll have to retrain EVERY RECIPE.

For leatherworkers out there.. your drums of the wild now will only heal the party for 2100 per second with no buff and only lvl 79 and below! LOL

Since blessing of kings is 5%, the drums were down to 4%

Still having trouble getting glyphs, at least for the rogue.. the aren't many glyphs that actually increase DPS, it sucks, and don't even tell me about talents, had to choose some non DPS talents to fill up the 31 pts.

[Epimer]

Now that I've cobbled together a temporary UI (threat meter appears beneath the holy power display; the unit frame HoP display doesn't work, which is a shame), I've been able to tank some heroics "properly" and get a feel for how the new protection paladin works in practice. I've decided: it's ok. It's still got some major flaws, and I can't say I prefer it to the old way, but if it went live tomorrow I'd be more or less able to get things done. Probably the most annoying thing so far was that Brann event in HoS, which definitely highlighted the holes in the rotation, but I managed, and also managed runs of FoS and HoR, too.

It works. It's not great but it's not entirely broken. I won't be switching mains, but I'll keep fervently wishing they'll address some of the very legitimate claims raised elsewhere on these forums.