BC Journal - 19-October-2006

I moved my Alliance priest to the Burning Crusade beta servers as well. Not only does that give me more opportunity to play around with different aspects of playing a priest in the expansion, but he also came loaded with far more materials for jewelcrafting. That plan had limited success. I managed to get my jewelcrafting to 148, but I'm stuck again, and even to get that far I had to do some more mining. And that's with loading every available slot with metals and gems. I slowly begin to realize that it won't be possible to skill up jewelcrafting to 300 just materials stockpiled on just one character, you will need to use at least one other character as mule to store all the stuff. The good thing in testing it in the beta is that now I know that I'll need exotic stuff like Soul Dust, mana potions, and large fangs to skill up jewelcrafting, and can prepare better for the real transition to WoW 2.0.

Both my priests on their regular servers are holy/discipline spec. On the beta server the Horde priest (who has lots of +healing epics) is 0/0/51 shadow spec, while the Alliance priest is 5/46/0 holy spec. Both priests visited the Hellfire Rampart, the first 5-man dungeon of the Outlands, and both healed just fine. To put that into context: The Alliance priest, who doesn't even have more than 2 tier 0 armor pieces is able to heal in the first instance because he specialized in healing. The Horde priest can get away with shadow spec, because what he lacks in holy talents he makes up with gear that gives him +400 on healing spells.

So having raided and gathered epics *does* help, I certainly wouldn't call it wasted time. But if your level 60 doesn't have more than the gear he arrived with at level 60, he can still continue playing, as long as he distributes his talent points wisely. I might move my troll warrior, who is wearing tier 0 gear, to the beta server as well, because the effect of gear is probably different for other classes. But as far as I can judge it, people leveling up to 60 after the Burning Crusade comes out won't be forced to spend a lot of time at 60 gearing up before they can move on to the Outlands.

In a way that is problematic. If Hellfire Rampart isn't much harder than Scholomance, but gives much, much better loot, who will ever visit Scholomance again? Or Stratholme, LBRS, Dire Maul, etc.? I still like the idea of level 65 to 70 groups one day visiting Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraij or Naxxramas on "easy mode". But I'm not really sure that will happen. Maybe it is just that my "reason to raid" is just wanting to have fought the boss once, not minding the loot or the achievement. But the people who are interested in the loot won't want to go to BWL at 70, and there isn't much achievement in killing Nefarion at that level.