A First Time for Everything

The PTR is open for patch 3.0, and I did a very odd thing. I got off my lazy bum and figured out how to get onto it. I only managed about a half hour today, but I do have a few first impressions.

1) The sign in screen for Wrath > the sign in screen for BC.

2) Everyone is on the PVE realm! Why is everyone on the PVE realm!? Get off the PVE realm so I can get on already!

/cast misdirect [target=PVP] /shoo!

3) The graphics got a nice upgrade. Love what they've done, but somehow things seem a bit grainier than they are in Live. Though, this may be because there's so many people on the same server... Also, must see if the shadow thing is on live - cause I love it.

4) Love the pet Ferocity tree! Respec'd Alvar, my ghostsaber, then had to respec him again as I found Heart of the Pheonix is borked. How is it borked? For those who haven't followed such things on the Beta forums, HotP allows you to rez your pet for free during battle. However, it has a cooldown of 10 minutes (though the tooltip shows it as 7 minutes). So what's the problem?

This cooldown restarts itself every time your pet is summoned. Mount up to go from the pet trainer to the Auction House? It resets. Still on cooldown and you have to rez your pet? It resets. I'm not sure as I haven't managed to test it, but I'm reasonably sure zoning into an instance and taking a taxi flight will also reset the timer.

5) Love the pet Tenacity tree! Went and tamed a white L70 Warp Stalker in Terokkar to play around with, and realized after that I had no fruit or fish. /facepalm

So, I plugged in the talents, and went off to see how quickly Guard Dog would increase happiness from Sad to Happy. Three mobs later, I had a fully content Stalker. /cheer!

6) The Cunning tree looks good, but I haven't had any chance to play around with it yet. A certain Shaman friend has demanded any testing I do be with a Spore Bat (indeed, he demanded I go tame one immediately), so we'll have some fun with it. Later. When the server isn't locked.

7) I am staying Beast Master for the expansion. Why? Because I already demand the 4 extra skill points Beast Mastery provides. Though, to be honest, I wish respecs didn't cost 50g in the PTR... Because of this, and my perpetual Broke-ness, I will not likely test the other two trees.

8) Five pets. 'Nuff said. (Though, 50g and 150g for the last two stable slots really hurts, considering the first two are 1g and 10g each.