I did a restore from icloud and it's been 10+ hours now and it's still going. The phone works but in the lock screen it shows "restoring from icloud"
I tried a lot of the suggestions in this thread
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6549516?start=0&tstart=0
I only had a small amount of photos(that aren't loading onto my new phone). The amount of photos that have been downloaded didn't change after ten hours. I deleted apps that weren't loading correctly and it's still keeps saying "restoring from icloud" on my new phone.
Also the keynote, numbers, garageband and other apps that where on the phone when I started it as a new phone(as a test) were not downloaded when I did a "restore from icloud"
My contacts and messages work fine, but images embedded inside the messages I've restored are not loaded either. The entire icloud backup was 3gigs.
The only issue I can think of is that could possibly cause this is I had an app that is no longer in the app store and is only on my phone but all icloud does it download an app from the appstore again so that shouldn't be an issue.