BC Journal - 23-October-2006

As I spent about 12 hours this weekend in Blackwing Lair on the real servers, I didn't get very far in the Burning Crusade beta. But I did make it to level 61, and I had a lot of fun doing so. From level 60 to 61 you need 415,000 xp, which is nearly double the 210,000 xp you need from 59 to 60. But each kill gives about 500 xp, or 1,000 xp if you have rest bonus like I did, and each quest gives about 7,000 xp. I didn't consider the leveling time to be unreasonably long up to now. I'm leveling slowly, but that is because I'm playing more like a tourist, spending more time exploring than concentrating on levels.

The beta isn't exactly crowded. I wonder how Hellfire Peninsula will play when it goes live on the real servers, and a thousand or more players hit the zone. In the beta finding a mob to kill for your quest usually isn't a problem. I sometimes had to postpone a quest because too many other people were killing my mobs, but I usually quickly found another quest to do where there was less competition. When fighting the mobs in the evil orc fort of Zeth'Gor, my problem was actually the orcs respawning too fast. By the time I had cleared out a path to my target, they already started respawning again.

The most fun quest I did up to now was two missions in series where I was riding on manticore (whose flight path I couldn't control), and had to throw bombs on some demons and their teleporters. Not really a dangerous quest, as the demons can't hit you up on the flying mount. But immense fun, especially the second part where you have to throw the bombs in a way to kill a certain number of demons.

The least fun quest looked harmless enough, a level 61 quest to kill demons, this time on foot. But something was horribly wrong with the quest. I assume the mobs and the quests should have been marked as elite, but they weren't. So while other level 60 mobs hit your for 100 points of damage, the demons at this spot hit you for 400 points (and the level 62 non-elite boss mob for 700 points of damage) per hit. Absolutely impossible to solo, and very frustrating. I assume this isn't working as intended, there are quite a number of bugged quests. For example the number of demons to kill in the bomber mission was different in the text than in the short list of things to do. And I also got a quest which told me to go to some place and meet "XXX". Quest was level 1, grey, and there was no "XXX" at that spot, the quest is obviously just not finished yet.

Drops continue to be good, although I haven't found any more stuff useful for my priest. I found a green random trash mob one-handed sword, which at 45 dps was better than the weapons my troll warrior has. Too bad it was "of the eagle", the int bonus isn't exactly useful for warriors. The funniest drop was a grey item, a two-handed mace called "The stoppable force". Joke on the people who grinded AV reputation to exalted to get the "The unstoppable force" two-handed mace. Blizzard continues to add little jokes like that to the game, somebody told me there was a blond blood elf named Haris Pilton in one of the cities.

The lore of the Outlands is nice, and well told with quests. I just hope the quest series that leads to you discovering an unknown friendly orc tribe in the Outlands will have some follow-ups later. I can also recommend the guided city tour from Khadgar's servant through Shattrath, which explains a lot of the draenei and blood elf lore.

I've visited the second dungeon in the Outlands, the Blood Furnace in Hellfire Citadel. Another short dungeon with 3 bosses, slightly harder than the Rampart. The only annoying thing was that some of the orcs in there were bugged, and were flying motionless through the air, instead of being animated and walking. As they kept flying when dead, and there was a room with lots of them, this got quite confusing. No luck with drops for me there, only weapons and armor I couldn't use. But I did get the key to the third dungeon, although that one is of much higher level.

I moved my troll warrior to the beta server as well, loaded with crafting materials for jewelcrafting. Now I just need to train mining a bit more and collect lots of thorium to continue. The other materials, like gems, noble metals, and exotic stuff like different sorts of mojo I packed a lot of. So while I was skilling up mining with my priest in Tanaris (good place for mithril), I passed by the Caverns of Time and decided to visit them. You can enter the main area now, which used to be blocked by a nasty dragon. But I couldn't get into any of the three instances. The third instance gave a "this instance isn't ready yet" error message, the second one you can only enter after finishing the first, and the first instance you need to do a pre-quest for. And that quest seems to be level 64, at least the quest giver showed a grey exclamation mark at level 61, and the meeting stone in front of the dungeon said level 64-70. The place looked to be fun, but I guess I'll have to wait before I can explore it further.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:36 AM Permanent Link