1821

Why would they remove the portals in 4.0.1?

I thought the portals were going away in 4.0.3 (12/7).

1822

The portal change isnt in the patch notes, I don’t think any of the world changes are going in until Cata itself.

1823

Nah, a lot of people moved their chars out to less laggy spots to make it so they can login after the patch, as a lot of people will likely be logging on to check out changes. If you’re in a less laggy city (like the Exodar) you are less likely to crash and whatnot.

1824

It might be in this patch, I know that change is live in the beta, but I didn’t check the PTR.

1825

Dalaran has a lot of lag inherently. On even small patch days Dalaran can get pretty laggy. And actually this would be the first time there’s been a major patch with Dalaran in the picture, so the lag could get ridiculous whenever the servers come back up. Had I hearthed out of Dalaran with my characters going back to Org or UC, I could avoid all of this lag, but since I forgot, I’m stuck with it. My mage will just portal to UC, and my Death Knight portal to Ebon Hold. The rest may have to wait, depending on how bad it is.

Also wowtal.com now has a feature where you can automatically update your character’s spec in game using their website.

I have some questions for you guys who have been playing on the PTR.

Mastery. Will it be worth putting Mastery on items at this time since Masteries aren’t in the talent trees yet?

Which classes/specs need Spirit now? It just seemed as if Blizzard changed their mind about this every other week. Do Mages or Warlocks need spirit?

Will the stamina changes start showing up on items? Will new characters started now show more latent stamina?

Is the price change for flying in yet?

I’m sure I’ll have more as the day goes by, but these are my biggest ones.

Thanks!!

1826

Phew, OK, good, you guys had me worried.

I’m feeling really down on this patch for a variety of reasons. It’s basically turning the existing game into a live beta for expansion mechanics, which really irks me. I’m kinda down on the expansion at this point too, after playing the actual beta for a while. There’s just nothing in it that excites me. Maybe I’m just burned out, but I don’t feel burned out. I donno.

1827

Wowhead has some nicely formatted Patch Notes. I’m still looking through them myself, but thought I’d toss them up.

This is no different than 3.0, which did the same thing, but of course in that case it made a lot of classes incredibly overpowered compared to BC, so everyone loved it.

1828

Well, I think one big difference is that there’s a nearly 2 month gap here, rather than the 1 month for 3.02 -> Lich King. But you’re right that it’s not fundamentally different.

Edit: the change in raid structure annoys me too, probably as much as anything. The fact that you can’t do 10 and 25 ICC in one week means there’s a lot less to do.

1829

To be able to take advantage of mastery, you have to train an ability at your class trainer (there’s a reason not to be in Dalaran!). From what I’ve read, it should work once you do that. Whether it is good or not depends. I think for tanks turning avoidance into mastery is probably worthwhile due to harsh diminishing returns, but for other specs it may not be as good as haste or crit or whatnot.

1830

Yeah, first thing anyone should be doing is hitting their trainer.

1831

I don’t think there’s going to be a way to acquire actual mastery rating until the expansion, since there won’t even be mastery gems. You do get some effect by default, though.

1832

Reforging is in, so you can reforge your stuff to add it, but that’s about it.

1833

You can get mastery by reforging.

1834

Okay, the patch updater is giving me this error:

Exuse me, Blizzard… but what repair button? The launcher auto-quits. Do I really have to reinstall the damn thing and download a bunch of other pre-patches for 4.0.1?

EDIT: So it was repair.exe, not a repair button… anyway, after 20 minutes of scanning it told me to just reinstall. Gee, thanks.

1835

Damn, didn’t realize that and had about 700 unspent frost and triumph badges. :(

I got my 2500 badge achievement (now a feat of strength?) in about 45 mins last night, so that’s good at least. I also spent the last bit of time getting doing the Darkspear event on my Warrior who has all kinds of feats going back to the Classic-era undead invasion.

1836

In the Wow folder on your hard drive, there’s a program called repair.exe.

1837

From Elitist Jerks: Spirit is useless now for mages. I’ll be able to reforge the spirit on my gear to something useful.

1838

I would also boot up WoW now since it still has to unpack and download more patch info. Although with the new streaming patches, you may get to play before the patch finishes. Not sure. Regardless, I have it running on 3 PCs right now.

1839

It took about an hour to apply the pre-dled patch on my computer, and then it’s been doing the streaming one, which is another 1.7GB. I could play now if the servers were up.

1840

Yes, as of a few days ago I’d downloaded everything, but there was an additional bit to download today. Now it is done with that and is doing the actual patching, which is taking quite a while.