Poking Around the PTR
Blizzard’s tech staff finally resolved the problems with some European Battle.net accounts being unable to login on the PTR realms, so I’ve been able to poke around some stuff. Found a few changes that weren’t mentioned at all in the notes as well, and some of them are pretty cool.
Interface Improvements
Quite a few of these. The most important is that quest turn-in locations and objectives are now marked on the World Map. This is a pretty good change – saves some alt-tabbing to Wowhead or installing Lightheaded or whatever addon you like to use. I didn’t make a screenshot of that, because it’s most likely all over the WoW.com and other blogs.
The raid difficulty and dungeon difficulty are finally separated. Dungeon menu is the same as it is now, and the raid one is set up for the new 4 different lockouts.
Another nice things is you can now enable stat comparison and item levels on Blizzard’s tooltips. Quite useful and while it lacks RatingBuster’s math abilities and configuration, it makes choosing an upgrade easier. And showing item levels is a welcome change these days when vehicles and stuff scale with our gear.
You can see here that it doesn’t care about the gems in the sockets or enchants, it only shows the stats that are on the gear. You need to enable it in the Options, so if someone’s really used to RatingBuster, you can still use it without the tooltips being absurdly large.
The last piece in this category is made for Druids. I guess it won’t be that useful if you changed your unit frames, but it might help if not.
Equipment Manager fixes
The Equipment Manager has gone through some fixes as well. First of all, if you click on a partial set, you will now see what slots are ignored. This is awesome change, as it makes it a lot easier to edit the set – right now on live realms you have to ignore everything again by yourself.
This is my partial fishing set. The yellow arrows are clickable and they’re showing things you can put in this slot, just as if you’d mouse over the item with Alt pressed now (it still works as well). As you can see on the right, the set tooltips are now a bit more useful (with red text if an item is missing).
New World Events
Of course, the Pilgrim’s Bounty is the biggest one. It’s set a week after Hallow’s End, from November 8th till 14th. Also Hallow’s End ends two days earlier and there’s a new Day of the Dead instead, with one achievement for it.
The biggest thing would be of course the long-awaited Northrend Children’s Week. There’s an Orphan Matron in Dalaran, and you can choose to take care of either a little Wolvar pup or an Oracle hatchling. Just as with the old orphans, they give some travelling quests, and after that you get a pet in the mail.
Unfortunately you have to choose which one you want, so I did the quests again on my other character to see the Wolvar pet. He’s quite cute I must say, and the Wolvar orphan’s quests are more fun than the Gorloc’s.
Both new orphans also count for the achievements such as Home Alone. I hope Blizzard will not make us wait till next year to get them, that would be a real shame. Also I wonder if we’re going to be able to choose one of the two orphans like it’s now on the PTR, or if we have to have a specific faction reputation with either the Oracles or the Frenzyheart.
Argent Tournament
The main place of the patch, so it obviously got a lot of changes. Apart from the most obvious ones, such as the completed Colliseum with the instances (not working yet), there’s a bunch of other changes. There’s now a lot more rewards for Crusader Seals, and some new dailies if you’re exalted with the Silver Covenant (and are a champion of at least one city) or have the Crusader title.
The new dailies aren’t very hard, and award 5 extra seals if you do all of them. You don’t get any Champion Purses though. They have also changed the champion dailies a bit – the one with 15 Scourge is now about 15 Cultists (easy enough, they’re all over the place and very near the Tournament grounds), and the Battle Before the Citadel one now requires to kill 3 Commanders.
There’s also a bunch of new rewards for the Seals. I’m pretty sure everyone heard about the upgraded Argent Squire (with bank, vendor and a mailbox) and the new mounts, but there’s also a new pet availaible from the Silver Covenant quartermaster – the Shimmering Wyrmling. Oh, and I’m now officially really jealous of the Horde’s new Sunreaver Dragonhawk. It looks nothing like the dragonhawks you get for 100 mounts achievement – it’s a lot bigger and very awesome.
