Tobold's Blog
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
 
My first day in Burning Crusade

Once I had the Burning Crusade up and running, I started by moving my main character undead priest through the Dark Portal into Outland. Took the flight path to Thrallmar, and rode through Hellfire Peninsula all the way west to Zandermarsh, tagging the Falcon Watch flight point on the way. In Zandermarsh I turned south and rode to Terrokar Forest and the city of Shattrath, where I set my hearthstone. I assume this is where my bind point will stay at least until the next expansion, because in Shattrath there are permanent teleport portals to all other cities.

After having set the bind point, I took one of this portals, to Silvermoon. I unlearned tailoring, and took up jewelcrafting instead. Now theoretically I have all the materials to take jewelcrafting to 300. But practically this is lot of stuff, and it is distributed over 4 characters, one with metals, one with gems, one with all the elemental ingredients, and the undead priest with the miscellaneous stuff like large fangs and flasks of mojo, plus the recipes. As an added complication I stored far more than necessary of these materials, so I'm sure I won't be caught short, and I can probably resell the excess for twice of what I bought it for. So I didn't mail all of the stuff to the jewelcrafter, but mailed batches of what I'd need for the next 50 or so points in jewelcrafting, waited until it arrived, did the skilling up, and then sent the next batch. Thus I only got until 135 in skill last night, but I'm not really in a hurry.

In the waiting time I did one dungeon trip with some guild mates, to the Hellfire Furnace. Yeah, I know, that is actually the second of the Hellfire dungeons, and not the first. But we did allright, with no deaths. Perfect party mix, my priest, a druid, a warrior, a mage, and a warlock. The mage + warlock combo is perfect crowd control in a dungeon full of orc warlocks, because you can sheep the orc and banish the demon. First mob dropped a paladin libram, and of course on the first day of BC in a Horde group we didn't have a level 60 paladin yet. Second mob dropped cloth bracers, but I didn't roll for them, as my tier 2 bracers were just as good. The last mob dropped some leather armor, to the delight of the druid. So no loot for me except for some random green stuff, but one dungeon trip already got me about 30% of the way to level 61, so I was pleased enough.

I also moved my troll warrior to Shattrath, because I realized that I'd better park him in a city or inn, and not in front of the Dark Portal where he was. Rest xp are back, and I want him to be charged up with them to the max. And of course set his bind point to Shattrath as well. I doubt there will be many people above level 58 left soon which are bound elsewhere than Shattrath.

Then I made a new character, a blood elf mage. I took a look at the male character model on the character creation screen, and decided to make a female instead. I'm not usually homophobe, but playing a powerful mage, able to incinerate everything, but who looks positively gay somehow goes beyond my roleplaying abilities. All the homosexual men I ever met were far too gentle for a thrower-of-fireballs role. So I made a female blood elf mage, and leveled her up to level 5. Then I moved her to Silvermoon and learned tailoring and enchanting. The idea is that my jewelcrafter will have to make a lot of low level jewelry to level up, and nobody will want to buy the stuff. So I'd rather use it to train enchanting on my new character than to vendor it.

All in all a successful first evening in the Burning Crusade. I refuse to get rushed, even if I already saw some people reach level 63 on the first day. For me the goal is the playing and experiencing, not getting the getting somewhere.

So how did your first day of Burning Crusade go?
Comments:
Had no problems installing the game, so that was good.
Rode through the portal, and had my first view of Outland. Joined up with some guildies and shared probably 10 quests between us.
We then rode round Hellfire Pen, slaughtering anything and everything together. Had to corpse camp the odd bosses we got to, because everyone else was after them. One demon we thought we had killed 3 times, but someone else had tagged it first each time, which was pretty annoying.
Picked up a green belt that totally outclassed my Deathmist belt, found a necklace that was much better than my Anarstari Necklace from Strat, and got a nice green ring, again better than I had worn previously.
Now the bad news. Some of my Lv 60 friends have not been able to get hold of BC (for whatever reason), and won't be able to get it in the near future, which means they are suddenly isolated in Azeroth, with no one to play with, and pretty much all their single player quests completed. Apart from grinding, there is very little for them to do. Now I am not so happy.
 
The installation and account upgrade went smooth as silk... then in game the lag and DCs hit (Doomhammer server). To be honest, it wasn't as bad as I expected, and at least I got to see Hellfire Peninsular - here's hoping people are a bit more spread out by this evening, and the server handles it better! I'd give Blizz a Beta+ for this (mainly since I didn't expect to be able to play at all...)
 
I know BC from the beta, so I was already familiar with the quests, although I couldn't find the quest for the Illidari trinket (the might have changed it somewhere after december)... :-/

At 9pm my guild met for our first guild event in Outland: a sighseeing tour across the Hellfire Peninsula with lots of anectotes and tips (Assasine!) from the beta, followed by a trip to Nagrand where we successfully raided and claimed the PvP village in the middle :)
-> http://idx3d.ch/wow/styx-outland3.jpg

Afterwards we dove into the Hellfire Ramparts, which we cleared within an hour despite not having a tank with us (we had to use our hunter's pet and my frost mage to kite).

We're on one of the very few servers where horde outnumbers alliance, so for us it was easy questing, whereas the allies must have had their share of woes ;)

All in all a very exciting and joyful first eve.
 
Got my TBC copy throught the post monday lunchtime, installed it wihtout a hitch monday evening around 21.00 GMT, logged in immediately, played until 22.59 when the system told us to relog. Did that expecting to have to queue for hours and crash all the time, but no! At 23.02 I was going through the Dark Portal - nearly no lag, no crashes.

Yesterday was fairly similar, but with a LOT more people around - played for around 10 hours with only a couple of DCs and each time I got back in real quick. I don't know what Blizz did to the servers but it worked!

Loving TBC so far - as a casual, non raider I'm enjoying it probably more than most.
 
I agree, Tobold. The goal is the playing & experiencing...i will not be rushed to level 70. Well I just managed 60 for first time a week before BC, so it shows!

Will be tagging this post, once I make my first BC post...ah my first try at a Shaman...alliance of course..female of course...
 
We did a bunch of quests around Thrallmar, and only had an issue with one mob being camped. It seems like Blizzard has upped the respawn rate on most everything in Hellfire. In some cases named mobs were respawning before their corpse had even disappeared. It made me pretty happy to see that Blizzard had thought ahead on those sorts of things.

We ran Ramparts then Furnace. If it had been the other way around, I would have been pretty disappointed in Ramparts. It looks like LBRS, basically. On the upside, both instances had a good pace and easy to get to bosses. My renews were keeping up with the majority of the healing. We had a prot warrior, rogue, warlock, mage, and priest. I snagged a new healing trinket and some dps pants. Now I just need a level so I can use them. hehe

We also picked up a very nice level 62 BoE pally chest piece which we mailed to one of our new belfs.

Based on guild chat, it looks like many of our guild were replacing their non-tier 2 items like cloaks, necklaces, and trinkets. In some cases, greens were filling previously purpled slots. While I came across some slightly better pieces, nothing so far would make me break up my trans.

I was pleasantly surprised how many greens were dropping off mobs. Maybe it's just been forever since I've had to level, but it seems like I picked up a lot of enchanting mats last night.

Overall I came within 2.5 bars of getting level 61 (6-7hrs?). I would have made it if I somehow hadn't missed a Ramparts quest. I just need to go back and kill the first boss to complete it. :(

-Mart
 
As a casual player with only a few pre-TBC epics, spread between two level 60's, it was like Christmas to be suddenly presented with all these wonderful new armour upgrades.
I had recently re-speced my druid to feral for levelling, but I'd never seen a feral druid weapon before. My first quest reward was a staff with +30 Sta, +19 Str, +19 Agi and +46 attack power in druid forms. I was grinning like a big kid and really didn't want to call it a night or go to work today.

The install and patch was painless. The server was lag free and I was very impressed with the obvious efforts Blizzard had made to make things run smoothly.

It was a nice feeling to be exploring new lands and experiencing new quests.

I did get caught out horribly by the fast respawning mobs that Mart mentioned though. There was a particular type of orc mage that switched between firebolts and summoning skeletons. Because of all the skeletons I had to fight in bear form, which isn't good for fast killing. By the time I'd managed to kill the orc and all of the skeletons, the orc had respawned in the same spot and still more skeletons appeared. I was stuck in combat for about 15 minutes, fighting a gradually increasing number of mobs. Suffice to say... I eventually died. This happened to me on two occasions. Couldn't seem to get out of the area they spawn in fast enough.

All good fun.
 
I hate the blood elf mage so much, especially now that they beefed him up. Now he is somewhere in the middle- not an emaciated freak, but ... some sort of weirdo that is still small but stands with his chest out and pumps iron every few days.

I probably should have made a female.. i just didn't want to play another female character.
 
Everything went great for about 30 minutes. Then... lag, disconnects... cannot connect... more lag... disconnected... I kept trying for an hour before giving up.

I applaud them for being able to give me a taste... but when the instance servers also lag and disconnect... something they could easily have just added more servers to avoid... it left me disappointed. About 6 players in my guild got to 61 because they didn't have work or school and I have to play in prime time. Sucks.
 
I put in some time on my (male) Dranei Shaman, fighting the rest of the Alliance to tag quest mobs because almost nobody wanted to group, not even for the "Kill X of Y" quests. It was amazing that I made it out of the noob area.

Me: Are you in a group to kill the 10 Blood Elf Scouts?
Noob: No.
Me: Do you want to group up for this?
Noob: No.

This was from a toon standing in the middle of the Blood Elf Scout area killing the quest mobs. Other people reported (not literally) noobs just grinding on quest mobs. There were even lvl 60s invading the noob area and doing the quests. Lvl 60 noobs. Lovely.

The Earth Totem Shammy quest was insane. Fortunately I persisted and just began spamming invites to the other Shammies in the immediate vicinity, because I finally created a 5-man and we downed our 4 Elementals in no time. Obviously we didn't need to group to kill them, but when 15 Shammies are all gathered in a small area trying to Tag the same mob as soon as it respawns, it's illogical not to group. But that's noobs for ya.

On the stability front the lag was terrible. I caught the boat to Auberdine, then rode over to Rut'theran Village. But when I left the boat the place was empty, literally. Not even any NPCs, no flight master, nothing. I was still talking to my Guildmates in /G chat, with real time responses, but the server was obviously having issues. Then it went down. When it restarted I logged back in and found myself in the water off the coast of Azuremyst. It had to have been close to a 10-minute rollback. I swam back to land, got to the docks and boarded the boat, only to have the server restart again. I logged back in to find myself out in the ocean where I'd been on the previous restart. Swam back to shore but this time decided to investigate the large crystal structure to the north, which is how I discovered The Exodar. Found the Auction House and was trying to buy some bags with the 20g I'd sent myself when the server went down, again. I logged back in and swam to shore yet again, wondering if I was ever going to get anything done. Fortunately I now knew exactly where the Auction House was so I made a beeline for it and got myself 4 Runecloth Bags at overinflated prices. Meh, it's only gold. Farming in Outlands will probably give me more of the stuff than I could ever need.

With a decent amount of backpack space I set out to do some more quests, which is where I noticed the drop rate for quest items seemed a little screwy. Some Mobs would drop a quest item every single time. I got all the stag meat I needed with the minimum number of kills, I think it was 8 stags for 8 pieces of meat. The Lashers were reluctant to drop their Roots but I think I was getting around 1 root per 2 to 3 Lashers. The Crabs, or Skuttlers (or whatever cute name Blizzard gave them) were real tight wads; I think I killed over 10 of them and never got a single piece of meat.

Amusement was provided by the people who kept shouting in chat about the lvl 10 they saw with a Mount!

When the server restarted for maybe the fifth time (I lost count) I called it quits. I needed to catch up on my sleep anyway. I only got 3 hours the night before last ;)
 
Somewhere between 4-5 hours to install, deletion of files, copying others, modifying others, fruitless posting on tech support boards...

By the time I actually managed to get in (combined about 7 different player suggestions), I had enough time to find the inn and camp.

I will say that I am surprised at how well the registration server worked. That part went fast and fine.
 
My first real night of TBC was amazing. I took a free transfer to a new server (which is still pretty low-pop), and it's been completely lag-free and smooth as butter. Did some solo/small group overland quests, much fun.

The real fun was in clearing the Ramparts twice. Great intro dungeon: easy, straightforward, fast, but with a cool final boss nonetheless. Plus, I got the Crystalfire Staff, which is comparable or better than a SotSF off Nef and a *massive* upgrade from my Rod of the Ogre Magi [shame].

Blizzard really has learned *so* much about designing content. I had a freaking blast.
 
Apologies for the link but I wrote up my TBC reaction here [http://aseasonofmists.blogspot.com/2007/01/it-burns-it-burns-or-how-i-learned-to.html].
 
Are we related? We both have undead priests, you created a Blood Elf Mage, and chose jewelcrafting. Uncanny, man.

I agree with not rushing to 70. This is about enjoying it while it is fresh.
 
I don't really understand this skinny guy can't be a powerful mage thing. Isn't that what you'd expect a powerful magic-user to be? I mean a mage is supposed to be studying all the time right? Not working out. And the whole homosexual inference is preprosterous.
 
So far, so good! I found your blog by looking for "wow priest blog" with hopes of finding some tips for my newb priest since I'm so used to the DPS of a Hunter and Warrior.

Great to see your site has been going for so long and that you're still active! I'm sure I'll be leaving a few notes here and there.

My Player Blog

Before 60: WoW Newbie blog

Valdesta
 
The blood elf males look awesome to me. Haven't you guys read Elric of Melnibone?
 
After my first visit to Shattrath City, I got the opportunity to ally with either the Scryers or the Aldor. Which choice did you make?

See also: http://www.wowinsider.com/2007/01/11/adventures-in-beta-the-aldors-and-the-scryers/
 
My first day as a Dranei was not so good and has already been chronicled earlier.

My first day on my Hunter in Hellfire Peninsula was a whole different ballgame. I actually played in two shifts because I couldn't stand the 2-sec lag at approx. 7:30pm Server Time (Pacific Standard Time) so after about 30 to 40 minutes I logged out. Being 600th in queue and taking 45 minutes to log in should have told me something.

Around 9pm I logged back in to find I was about 50th in queue, and when I got in several minutes later the lag was practically negligible. I ran around and did quite a few of the noob quests for Hellfire and am now about 1/3 thru 60. I also upgraded my melee weapon and said goodbye to my last two Beaststalker pieces, replacing them all with Quest Reward items. I would have replaced my Dwarven Hand Cannon as well except the XBow Quest Reward wasn't quite that good. I'm actually glad I never completed the PvP grind for the GM Hand Cannon because I honestly can see something practically as good looming on the horizon. My Guild has already successfully run a few of the lowbie Hellfire Instances, and while the rumor about people replacing Purples with BC Greens may not be spot on, I can definitely see Purples getting replaced by Blues.
 
Are the male Blood Elves that bad? I really prefer male characters, especially since I'm starting over on a new server, and my main's going to be a BE. Do they look a lot like anime characters? Because I think I can handle it if they look like that. (not getting TBC until this weekend =/)
 
Well, my first night included patching everything up no problem, but the account management part of the WoW site being down all night, so could not resubscribe, so after a couple of hours I went to bed. w00t!

Was able to log in this morning though and make my way to Outland finally.
 
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