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The Burning Crusade: Preview 2 January 11, 2007 Jason McMaster |
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Summary: Jason McMaster, our knife-biting maniac, takes his catass ways into the Burning Crusade and writes up some impressions of Outland, as it is in the last days of beta.
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 5 ) |
I had to dig out my first character, the one that I created while reviewing WoW for FiringSquad the first time. I went through the character copy process and fired up the Burning Crusade for the first time. For the purpose of my work in the Burning Crusade I’ll be playing as my 60th level warlock who is mostly epic raid equipped. Let’s get to the killing!
First off, the entry to the new areas of the game is through the Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands. Now, instead of having the whole area infested with demons, there's a base camp for the Alliance and Horde. Of course, the other side of that gate is where all the new content lays waiting. Once you go through that gate, the new adventure begins.
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60 and Beyond
So, one of the biggest deals for players is that when the expansion hits the shelves, characters will be able to level up to 70. Arguably a great portion of WoW players, or even the majority have been stuck at level 60 for some time, and are chomping at the bit to get out of that level. Of course, with a higher level come new talents. However, most of the new talents have already been released to the general public, so there isn't much to say about them that people haven't already discovered. There have been changes to several trees, notably rogues no longer have Cloak of Shadows as a level 41 Subtlety talent, but a level 66 trainable skill. Other minor adjustments are visible in various other classes.
Of course, with the new chase on to hit 70, you'll want to have the best possible build to do so. Though it’s impossible to test all possibilities, indications are that the trees and builds that worked to get characters to level 60 are still effective for the remaining ten levels. PvP builds are of course serviceable, but not optimal for leveling, especially in tougher instances.
Killing monsters is a genuine concern in the expansion because the mobs do have quite a few more hot points than people are used to. You don't usually run into mobs that are level 60+ while just running around in the base game. To that end, you'll want to make sure you have a strategy for the higher level kills. Fortunately, the items that drop in Outland tend to have a great deal of stamina to increase character health as well.
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As always, the fastest leveling is achieved by stacking quests together to achieve objectives in roughly the same area and turn the quests in. The Burning Crusade has fairly abundant quests of the familiar variety, and should keep most diligent questers from having to spend too much time on mere grinding.
Other than just the basic information that you've purchased an expansion named the Burning Crusade, you'll notice that the entire game world is in the middle of a war. If you head down to the Blasted Lands and go to the Dark Portal, you'll see why. On the other side of the gate you're welcomed by a demonic assault that's being held off by a force of Alliance and Horde. As soon as you step out of that gate, you're ushered over to a travel node for a flight to the base behind the lines. This is where you'll do your initial questing.
| Hellfire | Page:: ( 2 / 5 ) |
There are a couple of quests that prove entertaining and break the mold of "kill x monster for the alliance/horde." After running a few basic errands, you're put on a wind rider and given a handful of bombs to close some demon gates. After you get back from that mission you go on another that requires destroying cannons, enemy forces and commanders. It's not a particularly difficult quest series but at least it's different.
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The quest rewards that you'll see, even in the early levels, are an improvement over most commonly available level 60 gear in the core game. Certain basic equipment is very easy to get and well worth the trouble. In fact, most people will find that they want to quest as much as they can in the new expansion for the easy experience, so the rewards are just a nice little perk.
The Hellfire Peninsula is basically the starting area and re-introduction to the leveling process. Eventually, the quests start pointing you towards the Hellfire Citadel, which sits in the center of the Hellfire Peninsula. Inside is where you'll find a hotbed of evil orc and demon action. The insides of the fortress are composed of the first four instances in the Outlands The Ramparts and The Blood furnace are the two we will be taking a look at for right now because the other two are considerably higher level.
The Ramparts
The Ramparts is most likely the first place you'll end up going in the way of instances once you hit 60 and head outside of the core game. In this wing of the citadel, you'll be killing a few boss mobs and clearing off the walls. The first boss you run into once you've cleared out a bit is Watchkeeper Gargolmar. He just kind of wanders around his area with a couple of healers looking for guys like you! The group I had when I fought was all either 60 or 61 and wasn't too much of a problem. We killed off his healers and then blasted him down. Shortly after the Watchkeeper, we ran into our first bout of trouble in the form of Vazruden and Nazan.
Vazruden is the Herald of the citadel. He's riding around on his pet Nether Drake named Nazan. Once Vazruden spots your party, he drops down off of his drake and begins combat. During the battle with Vazruden, you have to dodge Nazan's fireballs, and after he falls you have to fight Nazan himself. Nazan is reminiscent of certain other boss fights throughout World of Warcraft that aren't very hard when executed properly, but can easily destroy a disoriented party. After Nazan lands, he starts throwing fireballs around like crazy and blasting whoever is in front of him with his fiery breath. After a few attempts, we killed those two and moved on to the, oddly close, third dungeon boss Omor the Unscarred.
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Compared to the last two, Omor isn't really all that bad. He summons a few hellhounds that will usually head for the healers. These hellhounds are usually pretty easy to kill, so he's not that much of a challenge. When he gets lower in life, though, he will sometimes deflect spells. Once he's down, then that's about it for the Ramparts, but there's plenty more killing where that came from. Next up is the Blood Furnace.
| More instances | Page:: ( 3 / 5 ) |
The first boss you'll run into is the Maker. The Maker is a giant undead guy who wanders around, uh, making things. He's a fairly easy fight, actually, and shouldn't be much of a struggle for most normal groups. Mostly, groups will want to just shoot him until he's dead. Not really much of a strategy for this guy. Put a foot into his keister and be on your way. The next fight is where you really run into trouble.
After making the Maker, you head on towards Broggok. Broggok is considerably harder to deal with than anything you've played against so far. Now, you can't really say that it's all just Broggok, that would be unfair. The difficulty of the fight probably has a little something to do with the fact that he summons wave after wave of Fel Orcs to kick you in the head. However, if you manage to survive the waves, then Broggok isn't particularly that difficult to kill.
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Finally, to finish the Blood Furnace, you have to face Keli'dan the Breaker. When you get to Keli'dan's area, you'll see him in the center of a circle of Fel Orc warlocks. When you begin the encounter, you must first kill his Fel Orc buddies before Keli'dan will join the fight. The one thing to watch out for with this boss is that he constantly casts high damage area spells. He will fire one off in a cone that does between 2 and 3 thousand points of damage and he has an all-around AoE that does between 4 and 5 thousand points per hit. Other than the extreme damage, he's a pretty easy kill. The trick is to have your tank keep him pointed in one direction. Also: don't get hit.
Shattrath City
We've spent a fair amount of time talking about the Hellfire Peninsula because, well, you'll spend quite a bit of time there around the middle of this month, but there's much more to the Outlands. Some of the areas you're bound to see early on are the Zangarmarsh, with its giant mushrooms and the Terokkar Forest, which holds a giant sanctuary known as Shattrath City.
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Shattrath City is a central hub for the new continent and can be extremely useful for anyone who wants to explore the Outlands. There are portals to all the large cities and a place to bind and fly out of to the new areas of the game. Most people have been binding themselves in Shattrath and using it as a base of operations for exploration throughout the new world.
| Crafting | Page:: ( 4 / 5 ) |
The latest profession to be introduced to World of Warcraft is jewelcrafting. Jewelcrafting allows you to create several intersting products as well as refine gems to fit into socketed items. Among the other things you can do with jewelcrafting, you can create jewelry such as rings, crowns, necklaces and other items that used to come off of drops and quest rewards only.
One of the jewelcrafting abilities is prospecting, and it allows you to check mined ore for gems. This, other than the fact you use precious metals to make jewelry, encourages jewelcrafters to be miners as well. A mining jewelcrafter is more or less self-sufficient.
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In The End
World of Warcraft has the most subscribers for a reason: it's very good. Even after the people who started Blizzard left, they've kept on trucking and churning out the hits. The Burning Crusade is absolutely not an exception.
The Burning Crusade offers exactly what players want: more levels and new places to explore. Of course, it doesn't take much smarts to see that taking a mega-hit of a game and adding more content to it will produce more sales. The winning formula for World of Warcraft has been to take the severe penalties out and make the game more user friendly.
Come January 17th, there will be a ton of server problems due to overcrowding and the login servers will be completely hammered. It's going to be hard to move around in the newbie areas, and we'll be loving every minute of it. Hey, if it isn't broke, then why fix it? Except for the login server problems. You can fix those.
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| Gallery | Page:: ( 5 / 5 ) |