This is going to be a long one, an account of my first couple of days in the Burning Crusade. The short version is that my undead priest made it to level 62, and jewelcrafting 325, plus he got a few upgrades to his gear. My blood elf mage got to level 10, and maxed out his tailoring and enchanting skills for that level. And my numerous alts made a boatload of money by selling all the metals and gems I had hoarded pre-BC. Now for the long version:
I found leveling in the Burning Crusade to be not quite as fast, but still very much acceptable. But then, I didn't play all day, and I didn't concentrate on leveling. So level 62 after the first BC weekend is good for me, even if other players already reached level 70. Most importantly I'm not the slowest leveler in my guild, I'm pretty much in the middle of the level distribution there, which is good for guild grouping. I did a couple of guild groups to instances, Hellfire rampart and furnace, plus one to the slave pens in Zangarmarsh. The Hellfire trips generally went well, and I finished all quests there. The slave pens we were only able to kill the first boss, and wiped several times at the second, due to having only one healer (me), a druid as tank, and generally not high enough levels.
Nobody was using the new LFG interface, which is a shame. But the general chat in Hellfire Peninsula was full of "looking for healer and tank for rampart / furnace". There still aren't enough healers and tanks in World of Warcraft, and apparently Blizzard doesn't plan to make these classes more attractive to rectify this. So due to general lack of healers I got suckered into a few pickup groups, but they generally didn't work out well. In the worst one the tank went afk after the very first fight, we continued until the first bigger challenge without him, and then were stuck waiting for him. After 10 minutes of him being afk I left, with the result that one guy was angry at *me*, not at the afk tank. Other pickup groups were nice enough, but often not very skilled, and frequently with a bad class mix, so we weren't always able to kill all bosses. The dragon boss in the ramparts is hard if you don't have a good group.
I also did one guild group in the old world, Dire Maul west, for a guild warlock who needed his epic mount quest finished there. That basically involves clearing out that part of the dungeon. Fortunately we had a level 65 druid as a tank. A level 65 tank makes DM really easy. The warlock epic mount event is fun, or as one group member described it "all pink and shiny". And while the loot was bad, compared to Burning Crusade stuff, the experience points weren't so bad at all. At level 61 I got around 300 xp per kill, and we did a lot of kills. So going to the old instances isn't a complete waste of time, although of course for the new instances there are more groups, the loot is better, and you gain reputation with the new factions. I think from level 60 to 62 I made about 1 level with instances, and the other with questing.
I spent some time doing PvP in Outland. There is a repeatable quest to capture the three structures in Hellfire Peninsula, which gives 6,600 xp and 3 marks of thrallmar. And every honor kill while doing that gives another mark of thrallmar, which gets you a lot of marks rather quickly. And the Incendic Rod, a level 62 blue wand with good stats and 97 dps I already mentioned in the beta journal, still only costs 15 marks, so guess what I'm wielding now. I also did some PvP in Zangarmarsh, where after capturing both towers you can capture the graveyard in the middle. I didn't find a quest for it, but still got marks of thrallmar from the honor kills doing so, and after buying the wand still got 36 marks left, with no idea what to spend them on. In Zangarmarsh you can only buy a trinket and one of several items for the ranged slot of your respective class. In Thrallmar you can also get socketable gems or rings, but these are heavy on stamina and not really all that useful for a priest. If all else fails I can spend 5 marks for a buff that gives me 5% more experience and 20% more Thrallmar faction for 30 minutes. So PvP in Outland is very well rewarded, but only for the first hour or so you do it, afterwards you don't know what to do any more with the reward marks.
Besides leveling and PvP, my undead priest also got his jewelcrafting skill up to 325. I got to about 310 with the hoarded metals and gems, and made the rest by cutting the new gems into socketable form. I haven't done much mining yet, it is hard to find a ore spot with so many people in the zone. But I got a lot of gems from other players, as I am offering to cut gems for free, and the gems can be found not only from ore, but also as rare treasure from mobs, especially in the dungeons. I'll need a bunch of fel iron ore to continue, but I'll have to mine that myself. Both for raising my mining skill, and because fel iron ore goes for over 2 gold apiece, up to 50 gold per stack in the auction house. On the positive side of these crazy prices, I had stored far more metals and gems than I ended up needing, and sold the rest at a good markup. Gems weren't all that profitable, because with the prospecting skill there is now a good source for them. My profit margin on metals was a lot higher. I'm still far from level 70, but I already have the gold for the non-epic flying mount. And I don't think I'll go for the flying epic mount, that seems like a waste of 5,000 gold of effort to me. My second priest, the human priest on another server, also had metals and gems stored, because I used a copy of him for some beta-testing. But he now sold all of the stuff, and will stick to tailoring, if I ever get around to it. He didn't even have an epic ground mount yet, but now he has the gold for one.
While leveling up jewelcrafting I made hundreds of rings, necklaces, and trinkets. These are basically worthless to a vendor, compared to the cost of the materials, and the auction house is already swamped with the products of all these new jewelcrafters. So I mailed the whole bunch to my blood elf mage. Then I had to level the mage to level 10, to raise his level cap for enchanting to 160 (blood elfs get a +10 bonus), which enabled me to disenchant about half of what I had produced. Disenchanting items now requires a certain minimum skill level, depending on the item level, and you can't just disenchant everything with a level 1 enchanter any more. But no problem, playing the mage was a nice break from leveling up in Outland. The blood elf lands are very pretty, and the quests are interesting enough, although some of the draenei quests were even better.
I was having fun with the Burning Crusade. Interestingly a lot of quests had changed since I did the BC beta, so I didn't know all of them already. While during the week there were still some server crashes, on the weekend the server was mostly stable. As expected some places were terribly overcamped, but the dynamic spawn system made it at least bearable. I saw one boss mob respawning so fast (responding to demand) that in the end there were three of his corpses lying around. That kind of environment feels strange, but at least you're not stuck in your quests.
But I couldn't help wondering how long the fun would last. 2 levels in the first week, even if the next levels are slower I'll finish them in less than 2 months. And then what? 10 months of raiding until the next expansion comes out? I will certainly start raiding at level 70, but I'm not sure I won't get terribly bored with that rather soon. If the Lord of the Rings Online really comes out end of March, I might want to play that instead, and cut down significantly on my WoW time. Might even want to cancel the account until the next expansion comes out. The Burning Crusade is certainly not bad, but the phrase "too little, too late" comes to mind. Anyone think that you can play BC for a year without getting bored?
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