Some Quick PTR Tidbits

Due to the server crashing (and my body crashing, and me being ill), I had a little bit of time to play about on the PTR yesterday. I didn’t do much, and haven’t healed an instance or raid on the yet – but I am going to get in there and give it a try when I have a little bit of extra time. I will wait to offer any commentary on how the new abilities will affect current raiding until I have the time to test it out some.

I did do some number gathering on what my spells are hitting for on the PTR and on live, but I haven’t had time to sit down and do a comparison as yet. I am hoping to be able to spend some time with that this weekend. I am also running with my standard glyphs, and haven’t had the chance to play around with some of the others.

However, in my short time there, I did have a chance to look at a few interesting things that I hadn’t seen much mention of anywhere yet, so I thought I’d point them out. Let’s talk about what did stand out to me a bit right away though, shall we? Potential Spoilers Ahead

Guilds – They are broken. I can create a guild, and it only takes 5 signatures now, which is great! However once your guild is created the guild tab that we are all used to is gone. I’m pretty sure that this is an oversight and not intended. In order to actually get into the guild functions, such as promotions and authorities, you have to go into your key bindings to and key bind the Guild Frame. Talk about a pain.

Not only that, but currently, you cannot promote anyone past the rank of “Veteran” in your guild. That is correct, on the PTR you cannot promote any officers!

Despite all of the broken-ness there are a few cool things with the guild features. The one I liked the most is the arrows that let you adjust your guild ranks about without having to completely delete a guild rank – or those below one – to reorganize guild ranks. I also like the much talked about feature that permits you to require an authenticator for certain guild ranks.

All of that being said, there is a apparently a lot of work to be done with regards to the guild interface before the PTR is ready to go live.

Gems and Gear – All of my red spell power gems have been converted to Intellect gems. And as promised, all of my spell power (save on my weapon) is now gone and has been converted to Intellect. I have a whopping 2,563 intellect on the PTR! I currently have 1,561 on live.

Spellpower – So, what did this Intellect change do to our spell power? Well, not too much. Mostly. On the PTR I’m sitting at 3529 spell power, on live I’m at 3590. (Note the reason I’m looking at it in ToL on live, is because you receive the increased spell power in caster form on the PTR!).

But, you will notice that I said “mostly”. I’m actually down a bit more spell power on the PTR because my Idol has changed and no longer gives me spell power for my rejuvs. However, I do get a nice intellect boost, and a red gem slot. So they will roughly even out – but there is an additional small spell power loss.

One additional thing to note is that I am wearing a cloth robe, so I am not getting my bonus for being fully decked out in leather. The next time I am on, I will try to remember to pull my Vestments of Spruce and Fir out of the bank and see how much boost that gives me.

Lifeblood – This was actually one of the most interesting changes that I came across on the PTR. Blizzard has given my gathering profession a raid utility. And a pretty nice one as well.

That is right! A 240 haste buff for the 20 second duration that lifeblood is active. What makes this so interesting to me is that it seems that perhaps gather professions will no longer be the red headed step children of min/maxers everywhere. The only down side to this is that I tended to macro lifeblood with barkskin – and would use it in a pinch. Now I probably will want to separate them and use lifeblood at a more opportune time.

Efflorescence and other Ground Effect Graphics – I know everyone has probably seen the graphic below plenty…

But today what I want to comment on is the fact that the more times efflorescence stacks on one person, the denser the graphic gets! So it goes from being somewhat transparent to being OMG SO GREEN and making it virtually impossible to see anything that is underneath of it. I learned this as I was playing about with my instant cast regrowths in ToL (something I am not quite ready to comment on just yet).

What is even more troubling than my efflorescence graphic, however, is the earthquake graphic – which I also had an opportunity to see. Um…yea. There is going to be so much “good” on the ground that you aren’t going to be able to see any of the “bad”. Surely we aren’t going to be back to tank and spank types of encounters that we don’t need to be aware of the fire/shadow/ice of death that is at our feet?

Built in Power Aura – While I have been told the Power Auras is mostly working on the PTR, my addons were crashing me as I tried to log in, so I have cut back to only a few basics. However, as I was sitting there just casting away and gathering numbers, I kept seeing this leafy aura pop up at me from time to time.

As it turns out, the new in game Aura system has some default settings, and Omen of Clarity is one of them. Interesting. I didn’t play around with the ingame auras much more than to observe that it seemed to think it important for me to know when OOC had proc’d. As I understand it, I can turn the auras off completely – but you cannot alter the already pre-determined auras. Needless to say, they will not replace Power Auras, but will be nice for new players.

Free Gold?!?! – Well sort of! You know all of the talk over the past day or so about the badge conversion rate? Well, apparently my old badges of justice netted me 705 gold.

What is more interesting than that, though, was that I netted about 779 “points” from my other badges…but the current cost of the items available at the vendor, such as heirloom gear, was almost 4 times more expensive that it had been previously.

Have you been playing about on the PTR? If so, what things struck you as interesting? Have you found things that haven’t received a lot of press from the beta testers yet? Is there anything specific that you’d like to know?