Here's the current schedule for Trial of the Crusader PTR testing:
On the North American test realms: Lord Jaraxxus - Thursday Night, July 9, starting at 7pm EDT/4pm PDT.
On the European test realms: Eydis Darkbane and Fjola Lightbane - Thursday Night, July 9, starting at 19:00 CEST.
Note that only the 10 Player and 25 Player difficulties will be available on PTR. The Heroic versions will not be available. If you are usually part of raids that easily crushes Ulduar Hard Modes, you should find the non-Heroic difficulties to be not difficult.
Koralon the Flame Watcher is also available to be tested in the Vault of Archavon depending on PTR Wintergrasp status.
Test Patchwerks (Tank and DPS versions) will also be available in the Argent Coliseum during similar times to other bosses. Instead of the previous tank test patchwerk that increased melee damage over time, the 3.2 tank test patchwerk will just hit VERY hard (as hard as Algalon) all the time to allow for more lengthy sustained tank parses. We're always interested in seeing combat logs and parses for all raid testing on the PTR, but especially test patchwerk logs. These are extremely helpful to our class team.
This schedule could change at a moment's notice due to server, bug, or patch status. I'll try to keep everyone informed as much as possible. The Trial of the Crusader and the bosses to be tested will remain also open a variable length of time. How long they stay open depends upon a host of factors including designer availability, bug status, etc. These bosses are very much a work in progress, and this is a test server.
Quick Trial of the Crusader FAQ:
Q) Where's all the trash?
A) There isn't any in this raid zone. Really.
Q) Where's the loot?
A) Loot is present on the bosses, but note that many of the items do not have final art.
Q) What about achievements?
A) Most of them are not fully implemented yet.
Q) What about the Trial of the Champion (ie the 5 player dungeon)?
A) This will see more extended testing later in the PTR cycle.
Just to confirm, Tome of Cold Weather Flight is actually a new heirloom item planned to go into patch 3.2. At level 80 players can buy this heirloom item from the Cold Weather Flying Trainer in Dalaran for 1,000 gold and send it to an alt of the same realm, faction and account. The tome can be used to learn Cold Weather Flying at level 68, consuming the tome in the process.
You just have to buy the tome. The cost for the player is the same. It just means if you have an alt and can afford it, you can get yourself flying in Northrend by level 68.
The tome costs 1,000 gold. It is not meant to bypass the cost of the training, but only to allow for level 80 players with alts the ability to fly in Northrend once they arrive at level 68. It's a small perk for those who have reached level 80 and like leveling new races or classes.
Players must be level 80 to purchase the tome and it can only be transferred to a character on the same realm, faction and account.
Today I wanted to highlight a useful addon for finding other addons that are misbehaving, Addon Profiler. It can be found on WoWInterface.
It is very easy to use, all it takes is a quick install, and then you can open it in game with the /ap command. Once opened, it presents you with three options, all of which you should check. A duration can be entered in seconds to profile, and you need to reload your UI to enable or disable CPU profiling. The different columns can be sorted be clicking on the title and the groupings of modules per addon can be expanded by clicking the plus signs. Once a duration is entered and you start profiling, you can stop at any time if it seems to be having too much on an impact on your game. You should profile for at least several minutes for good results. You can move the window by dragging the right side bar, "Addon Filter" bar is not draggable.
The CPU column shows how much total CPU time was used by that addon over the profiling duration. This combined with the cpu/sec column should be able to help find addons that may be impacting your FPS. The memory column shows static memory used by the addon and is not an amazingly useful metric. The garbage column shows the amount of garbage generated by the addon, clearly less is ideal. (These metrics also come in handy if you are trying to compare the performance of different unit frames)
Shadowed did not include an easy way to make changes to the frame size, so if you would like to scale up the window, you can do a /script AddonProfiler.frame:SetScale(1.30) and that will make it larger. If you would like more rows, change local MAX_ROWS = 18 at the top of the addon to local MAX_ROWS = 25 and self.frame:SetHeight(400) to self.frame:SetHeight(550).
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