The PTR exists! And it uses talents and such a little older than in the WotLK beta.

Myself, I copied over my 70 mage, 70 warlock, and 70 hunter. Spent most of the time today on the hunter, to experience the hilariousness of the pre-nerf survival tree.

I'm talking, a 70 hunter in levelling greens, a couple of BoE blues, and engineering goggles. This is not what you would call good gear. Or even passable gear. I walked up to a 70 elite a few minutes after logging on, threw down an immolation trap, hit him with serpent sting, kited him over the trap, sicced my pet, threw the requisite Lock and Load Exploding Shots and... well the plan was to feign death and continue DPS but he was already dead. So instead of falling over to feign death I bent over to loot. Wooo, fun.

Wow, you may be the first hunter to admit it.

And it looks like they've already amended this. I didn't look through everything, so I dunno if it was just the one change, or a complete overhaul to a newer talent build. But I logged on and Lock and Load was three shots. Two hours later I log on and it's one.

I expect we'll be seeing a lot of this prior to 3.0's release. Last I checked, Paladins (particularly Retardins) were ludicrously strong - look for Kamil's recent short video if you want to see for yourself. I've seen many posts about Shammies being significantly weaker than other classes, and some of them even had real data to back them up! Well, you'll be seeing a lot of changes, because I've uninstalled WoW.

It's really hard to tell with shaman with so many of the skills and talents just being broken. The last time I tested only WF rank 5 had the right proc rate for enh and even then only on the off hand. Everything else was procing at 2% instead of 20%, etc.

This is why I've been saying 3.0 can't be anywhere near ready because the crap is so bad on the beta realms.

I'm hoping the regen bug (as in all mana/energy/runic power regen just stops) isn't on the PTR like it is in wotlk beta. Pots, eating/drinking, mana monster, nothing works to get it back you just don't get mana/energy/runic power back at all sometimes it takes 3+ logouts/exits before it starts working again as well.

I was wondering why my off-set elemental gear was blowing my Enhancement DPS out of the water.

As for ret paladins, they are ridicilous... I've killed T6 players by rolling up to them on a paladin with greens, blues, and 2pc T4, and Gorehowl (None of them socketed or enchanted).

By mashing 3 buttons.

The only thing that can stop one is a frost mage - if the mage gets the opener, and has all appropriate cooldowns.

Kamil beat a rogue and feral druid by doing nothing but self-healing; eye for an eye and retribution aura did everything else

Here's me doing 1300 DPS unloading a full mana bar into a target dummy, in this gear on a terrible, terrible alt that I have zero pve experience with, with a spec I made for PvP, on a server with about a full second of lag (or more, in spikes), with no shot macro, and not even bothering to try to keep Serpent Sting up (thus no lock and load procs) due to the lag, and the ridiculous amount of debuffs constantly being applied to the dummies.

This is... considerably more than I'm doing in live. I can't kill anything in live.

'Course, the target dummies appear to have no armor. But still.

I probably ought to mention, this is with a 0/10/51 survival spec.

Prot pally fun solo'ing on the PTR.

First stop, on a laggy PTR was non-heroic Ramparts.

40 minutes later (click for larger image showing stats, etc):


Laughably easy. Maybe I could do a lot of that instance (level 60'ish mobs, so pretty low level elites) on live, but I certainly couldn't do it with style. On the PTR I ended every pull (sometimes multiple pulls at a time) with full health and full mana, including the boss kills.

Seal of Vengeance is pure joy, and I only swapped to Seal of Wisdom for short periods here and there if I was low on mana somehow (by low, I mean 70% or maybe 60% worst case). On most pulls I didn't bother consecrating, as it is a mana hog. I used HotR, Holy Shield, and Judgement of Light and things just died...fast.

I also switched to a weapon I picked up for grins in one of our ZA speed runs, Heartless, which it turns out beats Hammer of Judgement for tanking in most cases. How nice not to have a big pink...umm...hammer anymore.

I moved up to Shattered Halls (non-heroic) after. I pulled all through the hall up to the first boss, but got stymied on the 2nd to last big pull before the boss thanks to the server completely lagging out.

For laughs I took my feral druid through mana tombs to see if he could do chest runs a-la my rogue. Roots indoors is just way too much fun. For all the complaining about it, rend and tear is pretty fun for this sort of stuff. 90% crit chance of ferocious bite was yum, as was the furor change.

Was going to see if I could solo the daily non-heroic quest, but it was shattered halls so I didn't bother.

It used to be possible some months ago to do chest runs in Heroic slave pens with a hunter, no idea if they have changed that. Misdirection, frost trap, and feigning are your friends (and deterrence, if you want to survive after looting the chest).

So, you guys finally get a taste of what it's like playimg on the single EU WotLK beta realm "Coldarra" since the beta started, ey?