Patching WoW from 3.3.0 to 4.0.0

If you are like me and are returning to World of Warcraft after a prolonged absence you have noticed that patching your client to the lates version will take some serious download power. Blizzard’s torrent based downloader takes way too long. I tried finding a way to patch my old client to the latest version by other means and it did not go without trouble. Here’s how I did it. The biggest problem with the latest patches is that Blizzard completely changed the way the client gets patched and how we play the game. With the new Cataclysm launcher they have intorduced means of playing the game although you do not have the full 12GB+ client downloaded. Data will be downloaded in the background while you play. Just to enable this feature you have to first patch your client up to 4.0.0 version of the game and launcher. This involves grabbing ~5GB of data. 1. I went to http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors to try and find a site that hosts patch files that I can download while avoiding torrent downloads. I went to one of the sites listed in the “3.3.x → 4.0.1.12911 Parts 1-4 — Full (~4.9-5.3 GiB)” section. These sites hold all of the files that need to be downloaded. The files I ended up with at the end are:

• WoW-3.3.0.10958-4.0.0.12911-EU-Stage-1
• WoW-3.3.0.10958-4.0.0.12911-EU-Stage-2
• WoW-3.3.0.10958-4.0.0.12911-EU-Stage-3
• WoW-x.x.x.x-4.0.0.12911-Updater

2. What you should do next is change the names of these files to (if you do not see file extensions in you Windows explorer make sure you enable them by going to Tools -> Folder options -> View -> uncheck “Hide extensions for known file types”) WoW-3.3.0.10958-4.0.0.12911-EU-Stage-1.part WoW-3.3.0.10958-4.0.0.12911-EU-Stage-2.part WoW-3.3.0.10958-4.0.0.12911-EU-Stage-3.part 3. The next step is to start WoW-3.3.5.12340-x86-Win-enGB-BKGND-downloader that you can find in your World of Warcraft Updates directory (usually “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Updates”) 4. The moment the downloader starts it will create 3 files in the Updates folder. These three files will have the same names as the ones you downloaded manually and renamed as per steps above. Cancel your download with the Blizzard downloader. 5. Copy the files you downloaded and renamed to C\…..:\World of Warcraft\Updates and replace the existing files. 6. Start WoW-3.3.5.12340-x86-Win-enGB-BKGND-downloader again and let it do its thing 7.Once the downloader is done you should start WoW-x.x.x.x-4.0.0.12911-Updater to finish the update. This should bring you a step closer to the current version of Warcraft. There is a lot of new stuff still to be downloaded but this is done by the Catalyst launcher and in the meantime you can play the game as if you have the full client.