World of Warcraft®

Greetings,

This thread will contain suggestions and troubleshooting steps that may help you address issues that you might encounter with World of Warcraft since the release Mists of Pandaria.

Patching solutions:

Delete your Battle.net Tools and Cache folders

Run as administrator

Enable Secondary Logon

Close Background Applications

Temporarily disable Security Software

Disable or Uninstall any third-party addon installers

Patch Tech Tips

Tech and Performance Tips:

MoP Performance Checklist

Support for older video cards

PC with 32-bit Windows and less than 4 GB of RAM

If you have a graphics card that has less than 512 MB of RAM

Addons

Known Issues

Delete your Battle.net Tools and Cache folders

Delete Battle.net Tools folder

Delete Battle.net Cache folder

Disable or Uninstall any third-party addon installers

Third party addon installers can prevent the patching/optimization process from accessing, modifying and deleting certain files. Please disable or uninstall any third party addon installers (Examples: CurseClient & WoWMatrix).

Patch Tech Tips

Addons tend to break when we patch, and broken addons can cause a long list of issues. We strongly suggest resetting your UI before patching. Please install new addons only after becoming fully patched and playable.

Characters can take much longer to load into the game after an expansion pre-patch due to the sheer amount of data being moved between our server and your computer. This issue is amplified if you are logging your character into a crowded location such as Stormwind or Orgrimmar. Please be patient and allow at least ten minutes to pass after you select your character and the loading screen appears. At most, this delay should only occur once per character.

The rush of players onto our servers when a pre-expansion patch occurs can often create unavoidable latency (lag) issues. This latency will tend to be more pronounced in capital cities such as Orgrimmar and Stormwind. Once the initial rush of players has subsided, so to will the increase in latency.

We routinely upgrade World of Warcraft’s graphics with our pre-expansion patches. Older video drivers may have issues with these upgrades, so be prepared to update your drivers if you experience any performance or display issues.

MoP Performance Checklist … or … you’ve been bold and set everything to Ultra and want things to be faster:

• Disable Vertical Sync. Vertical Sync means the game will try to present frames matching the refresh rate of your monitor. This is usually 60 Hz, so the maximum framerate you will get is 60 FPS. If the game just gets a little bit slower than 60 FPS, it will drop to 30 FPS. Unless you are extremely sensitive to screen tearing or have a very high-end graphics card we recommend to disable this feature.
• Disable multisampling, especially if you are running at a larger resolution (1600 x 1200 and up) and your graphics card is not very recent
• Reduce the SSAO setting or fully disable it, especially if you are running at a larger resolution and/or have an older/weaker graphics card
• Set Shadow Quality to High
• Set Liquid Detail to Good (Ultra causes a lot of the terrain and buildings to get rendered multiple times for reflections when the ocean is visible)
• Reduce Ground Clutter *
• Decrease View Distance *
• Reduce Texture Resolution *

* These settings have the biggest visual impact

Patch 5.0.4 ends support for older videocards

As with all of our previous pre-expansion patches, the upcoming 5.0.4 patch will see improvements made to World of Warcraft’s graphics. While these improvements to our game’s engine are vital to keeping pace in a competitive marketplace, it also means that some video cards which were barely able to play the game during Cataclysm will no longer be able to play World of Warcraft once 5.0.4 launches.

The easiest way to know if your current video card is capable of playing World of Warcraft after 5.0.4 is to try to log into either the Mists of Pandaria Beta (if you have access) or the 5.0.4 Public Test Realm (PTR). If your computer can play either of these, then you should be fine when 5.0.4 launches.

What can you do if your video card is no longer able to play World of Warcraft?

Desktop: If your computer is a desktop then you may be able to upgrade the video card. This is particularly likely if your computer only has a built-in (onboard) video chip such as an Intel Series 4. Many online resources exist to help with choosing a new video card, including our tech forum regulars.

Laptop: Unfortunately, aside from a handful of specialized “high-end” laptops, the video card in laptops cannot be upgraded. If your laptop is no longer able to play World of Warcraft once 5.0.4 launches, you will have to look at obtaining a newer computer.

Special Note on Intel Series 4

The upcoming 5.0.4 patch marks the end of our support for the Intel Series 4 video chip. Unlike the rest of the video cards which are becoming unsupported in 5.0.4, the Series 4 chip’s comparatively young age understandably creates confusion in some players as to why support for it is being dropped. The straightforward answer is that an Intel Series 4 chip is comparative in graphics power to budget video cards that were released as far back as 2003. Not coincidentally, those same cards will no longer run World of Warcraft once patch 5.0.4 launches.

While we greatly sympathize with players that are using laptops with Intel Series 4 chips, we are simply no longer able to advance the graphics of World of Warcraft without ending support for this beleaguered video chip.

If you have a PC with 32-bit Windows and less than 4 GB of RAM:

• Reduce your view distance and/or texture quality settings

If you have a graphics card that has less than 512 MB of RAM:

• Running at Ultra settings may cause video memory to thrash (especially in areas with high player population)
• Reduce View Distance
• Try playing at a lower screen resolution
• Reduce your Texture Resolution settings

Addons

While we love AddOns and actively support their development, they can cause additional performance overhead and use up valuable system resources such as memory. We do not mean to discourage players from running AddOns, but if you are running on a system with somewhat constrained resources (like a 32-bit OS with less than 4 GB of RAM) we recommend that you keep an eye on overall AddOn memory usage. Also, if you experience abnormal slowdowns during times of heavy player activity (like a raid boss fight), try disabling a few non-critical AddOns and see if the slowdowns persist.

Known issues

Where’s the new 64-bit client?

The 64-bit client is included with patch 5.0.4. The game will detect if you are on a 64-bit system and launch the 64-bit version of the game automatically.

Installation stuck at 0 %

Please allow 10-15 minutes for the game optimization and patch download to begin. If you are still stuck at 0%, verify that your security software is allowing the download or try temporarily disabling all security software.

Additionally, you may want try deleting the Battle.net folders.

• C:\ProgramData\Battle.net\Agent
• C:\ProgramData\Battle.net\Client
• C:\ProgramData\Battle.net\Setup

**Note** you will need to enable hidden files and folders on your system in order to see the Program Data folder.

An unexpected decryption error occurred

This error generally indicates that one or more patch files are incomplete or damage. If restarting the game client does not fix the issue, you will need to delete and redownload the patch data.

Open your main World of Warcraft folder and delete the following folders:

• C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft \Temp
• C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft \TempMig
• C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft \Updates

The folder you selected cannot be used. Please select a different folder.

This error generally occurs when the game is installed on a hard drive using the drive letters A:\ or B:\. Try changing the drive letter to any other letter D – Z.

Failed to open a required file. Please check your internet connection and try again. Error Code: BLZPTS0000F / Failed to download information about the next patch. Check your network connection.

This error can occur when your connection to the patch server is being blocked. Try temporarily disabling all your internet security software and then try again. If you are using a wireless connection or connected via a router, try connecting directly to your modem.

Stuck at updating-setup-files

The Secondary Logon service must be enabled for our games to install and run. You can find out how to check if secondary logon is enabled by following the instructions found here.

This application has encountered a critical error:
Error #134 (0x85100086) Fatal Condition

If you are receiving this error, make sure you have proper permissions to write to your hard drive. If you are using Windows Vista/7 launch the game using the run as administrator option.

Error code BLZPTS00007
If you are receiving this error please try closing the agent.exe program in your task manager. Then try deleting the Battle.net Cache Folder.

Also make sure that you are right clicking and selecting the 'run as administrator' option when launching the game.

Some players have reported that uninstalling the MoP Beta client has also resolved this issue.