Getting Started With the WoD Beta

[Slugggo]

I noticed a few people here are in the Warlords beta, myself included. There are a few things that might be a little confusing at first, especially if you're looking to do pet stuff, so I wanted to post a few tips that might help people starting out.

Character Copy
When you install the beta, you have the option of copying one of your existing characters over to the beta. There are two ways to do this: through Battle.net Account Management or through a new in-game Character Copy option at the beta login screen. I've yet to see the Account Management option working; the in-game Copy Character option seems to work great.

You can copy 5 characters over, and they appear with whatever items and gold they have in their inventory when you copy them. So if you move whatever gold you have from character to character as you copy them over, you can give yourself some extra gold to play with in the beta.

Where Did My Pets Go? (or, Who Let My Dogs Out?)
If you do a straight character copy, you'll notice all your pets are gone. Oh noes! Not to worry. There's a "Copy Account Data" option at the beta login screen (the same place where you copy characters over), which will copy your (account wide) pets over, and (I assume) other account-wide stuff like achievements and mounts. (thanks Dakender for the tip)

It's So Plushie!!!!
If you fly to the main pet tamer in Stormwind or Orgrimmar (both are sorta near the respective Cata portals), there's a new vendor who sells three useful items. The first is the Elekk Plushie pet, who currently does nothing but look cute: at level 25, it has 2500 health and no offensive abilities, but instead moves like "take a nap" "look cute" and "give a hug." There's an achieve planned for beating various tamers with the Plushie on your team, which we'll learn more about eventually.

Get Stoned
The same vendor that sells the plushie also sells two useful stone-related items. The first is the familiar Flawless Battle Stone, sold in groups of 5 for like 50 gold. This is almost certainly just for beta purposes, and will let you upgrade any non-rares (like the Plushie) cheaply and instantly. The second is the (epic) Mythical Battle-Stone, which instantly trains any pet to 25. In the beta, it's a permanent item that sits in your inventory with unlimited use, clearly just for testing purposes; maybe we'll see a consumable one-time use version of this down the line?

Pet Dailies?
I'm not sure if this is true for everyone, but even with my pets restored, the initial tamer questline was reset on both characters I copied over, which means none of the pet tamer dailies are available. I sped through the chain fast enough, until I ran into a glitch: Shattrath is currently completely devoid of NPCs, so I can't complete that part of the quest and unlock the Northrend / Cata / Pandaria tamer quests.

Where Do We Go Now?
At some point you'll undoubtedly want to head to Draenor to see the new content. How do you get there? In Stormwind's Trade District, right outside the guild hall, there's a three-story high visage of Archmage Whathisface who will teleport you to the new Dark Portal. (I haven't played Horde side yet, but I assume there's a similar giant hologram that will port you). If you hearth back to town and want to return to Draenor, there's a temp portal that opens up in the same area as the Cataclysm portals.

More Toys!
WoD is adding a new feature called the Toybox, designed to free up space from stuff that might have been clogging up your bank for years: holiday items, archeology items, or vanity trinkets from Pandaria quests. In particular, your Safari Hat will reside here, and will be more of a buff instead of having to be swapped with your actual helm, which will reduce the amount of times you run through LFR with a Safari Hat on. (yay)

It's not exactly obvious, but you can find the toybox as a new tab in the mounts/pets panel. To add items to the toybox, you just click any item marked as Toy in your inventory and it gets moved into your toybox. In theory, at least, as I have all sorts of items listed in the toybox but can't seem to add. Which leads to:

It's A Beta
The first day of the beta, I couldn't stay logged on for more than 90 seconds. I've leveled my warrior to 91, but it still crashes pretty regularly, which is to be expected. If this is your first beta, you should expect lots of downtimes and server maintenances, and hopefully we'll get to try out some new pet stuff before long.

Hopefully parts of this are useful to people in the beta. I'm sure I've left some stuff out, so feel free to chime in if you're in the beta and have any other tips. I'll try to add more as pet stuff as it becomes available.

[Voskres]

LOTS of down time.

Garrison is still broke, so don't go there.

[Voskres]

So I have been in Dae and not seen any new wild pets to catch yet.

I have seen Frostwall Rat and Cave Crab and Tundra Hare but just as critters.

Also have seen a Sea Gull in the snow you can battle but he has no buddies.

[Edonae]

Garrison works again, and Velen has finally been quieted.

Haven't seen any pets around yet, though. Searching!

[Voskres]

Have have only found two battle-able pets, the Gull behind garrison and one other run-of-the-mill pet, I forget who it was. Both are alone with no battle-buddies.

I keep my eye out of new critters but have found none of them to be cageable yet. I went around garrison killing all critters in hope of a spawn and got nothing.