World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade Review

It would be hard to argue that World of Warcraft hasn't been a huge success. Not only has it been a financial success in the MMO market, but it has introduced many new people to Massive gaming that might not have otherwise given it a shot. With their first expansion, The Burning Crusade, Blizzard has made huge advances in many areas of the game. Long-standing complaints have been addressed, and the structure of the popular title has been reinforced. The casual players have gotten a large injection of content that is both accessible and enjoyable to someone who doesn't have huge amounts of time to play. At the same time, hardcore players who thirst for new challenges on a daily basis have quite a bit of work ahead of them. This is not to say that The Burning Crusade (BC) doesn't have its pitfalls, but overall I get the feeling that this is closer to what Blizzard's World of Warcraft dream was meant to be. Read on for my opinions of this new round of addiction.

• Title: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
• Developer/Publisher: Blizzard / Vivendi
• System: PC / Mac
• Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Game
• Score: 4/5 - This game is a wonderful addition to the original World of Warcraft universe and helps to alleviate many of the "problems" that players have been complaining about for a long time. If you are burnt out on the original game, now is a good time to give it another look.

In the beginning Blizzard gave us World of Warcraft. And life was good. Like any shiny new toy, the faults inherent to the game weren't initially obvious. As time wore on, though, players were able to delve into the guts of the game through raiding and excessive amounts of play. After a while the main complaints seemed to fall into two different "camps": those who wanted to see more "hardcore" content and those who wanted to see more "solo" or "casual" content. There were many arguments about how these two groups of people were mutually exclusive and how one or the other was the "obvious" best choice. However, in BC, Blizzard has done an excellent job in making sure that both groups of players have content to shoot for, even if the rewards aren't necessarily all that much better for conquering the raid content.

The first major improvement in the game comes with the extension of the level grind. There is a vast difference in the enjoyment of leveling a character from levels 1-60 and from 60-70. While the amount of experience is relatively comparable, the mechanisms in place make it a completely different animal. With the original game, leveling was thought of as one of the main aspects of the game and designed to take a long time to do with very little continuity or help to speed you along. Instances were designed to be for gear rewards and something you did rarely in between your bouts of leveling. With The Burning Crusade, the quests were designed to make you feel like you were accomplishing smaller tasks within a grand scheme, and they actually helped to develop the plot and a feeling that you were a part of the game rather than just trying to "beat" the game to get a level.

Throughout the questing and overall leveling process, instances in the Burning Crusade were also designed to be a much more integral part of the game for both leveling and gear. The group experience bonus allows a player to still make good progress towards the next level while playing through group content with friends and finding new challenges and boss fights along the way. The quests for every zone eventually start to poke and prod you towards the next level appropriate instance to help players make this decision and help round out the leveling experience. To make the process of instancing even better, Blizzard has grouped the instances in each zone together as "wings" of increasing difficulty within a larger structure that has an overall theme. This allows players to tackle the content in smaller chunks without having to commit large blocks of time just to do an instance. At the end of each group of instances the content culminates in a larger group encounter for raids to tackle once their players have completed a key quest for that particular instance.

While instances may have gotten a large push in the right direction, there are still a couple of major problems that continue to crop up, preventing players from really enjoying the content that is right in front of them. The largest of these problems are instance-breaking bugs. There have been quite a few of them since launch, and while bugs are to be expected, these are taking a long time to fix. Meanwhile the customer service reps in game are doing very little to help the players deal with the bugs beyond telling them it is a known problem and sorry about your luck. Now, I realize that some people are going to try and exploit GM assistance, but there comes a time when you just need to give your customer the benefit of the doubt and help them through any problems that crop up. The other major problem attached to instances comes before you even make it to the instance. If you aren't part of a large guild with resources always at hand, it means you are going to have to try your luck with a pickup group. While the "Looking for Group" interface was a neat addition, I think Blizzard either did too much or too little depending on what they were going for. With a simple global chat channel it was very easy for players just to type what they were looking to do and for others to answer, a quick and easy solution. In fact, most servers have seen a grass roots channel emerge to move back to this functionality. With the introduction of a user interface and automation to the process, they removed the "easy" solution but didn't go far enough with the complex solution. Ultimately, the "best" answer to this problem would be to bring back the chat channel but make the user interface "grab" names and classes from that chat channel into a larger pool of people to draw from, allowing users to use both methods of communication depending on their preference.

One of the main points of skepticism before the release of The Burning Crusade was the number of reputation "grinds" that would be required in order to experience new content. While much of the new content is hidden behind reputation requirements, the new system allows players to gain reputation at an amazingly fast rate making this requirement almost a non-issue. In addition to new content for these new factions the reputation system also unlocks a vast amount of new pearls for the crafting system. This allows different reputation choices to determine which recipes you are able to craft so that each crafter has the ability to obtain unique recipes instead of being a cookie cutter crafter like it was before the expansion.

Despite the fact that the casual consumer has definitely been given quite a bit of content to work their way through, the hardcore player has certainly not been left in the lurch. Raid content is available in spades. The addition of a 'heroic mode' for dungeons allows players to go back and play through previous instances at a higher difficulty level (and for better rewards). This, again, requires that they have put in the time to attain a high enough reputation level with the controlling faction. With each set of instances, there is also a difficult 25-man raid (now that Blizzard has decided to limit their "large" raids to 25 players instead of 40) encounter designed to provide an additional challenge. Beyond these short raids there is also new 10-man content (Karazhan) that allows players to work through a larger dungeon and attain a new armor "set" in addition to the random drops that still occur. Once players have made their way through this 10-man content they can start working towards some of the even larger 25-man content with huge sprawling dungeons promised, eventually culminating in the battle through Mount Hyjal. However, in order to get to this final realization players must wade through a lot of content. In an effort to help players in this goal one player even put together a flow chart of what it is going to take to realize this goal.

The largest problem with the current raid content is that while it requires large amounts of work to get to and complete (as it should), the rewards for actually completing that raid content have all but eviscerated the desire to do the work. Having moved from a "hardcore" raiding style of play to a much more casual approach I was quite pleased at how much I was able to do on a daily basis with my limited time. However, looking back at my previous play style and the rewards that I would be shooting for I realized that there was very little reason for me to aim for those "end game" rewards anymore. The time spent versus rewards earned seems a little imbalanced. I'm sure that a large part of this decision was to try and cater to the larger "casual" player base and stop the hemorrhage of players they were losing to other games. Just the same, if you are going to create content that caters to your hardcore players you should probably create rewards that justify the work they are about to put into it.

While much of the game play and content has been improved greatly the class balance issue is still one that continues to haunt Blizzard. For example, if you are a Rogue and you really want to experience some of the heroic content and smaller raid encounters, you are in for a difficult time finding a group. The same goes for priests if you are really into the competitive player versus player aspect of the game. I am willing to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt on this one since they are probably still evaluating how the new talents and new gear will effect the overall class balance, but changes are definitely needed.

In addition to all of the game play changes, each faction also has a new race, a new homeland, and tons of new starting quests to work through. While information on the new horde race, the Blood-Elf, has been available for quite some time, the new alliance race, the Draenei, has been somewhat of a mystery almost until the release of the beta. Unfortunately, this also shows in the quality of both the quests and the overall feel for each of these races. The homeland and starting quests for the Blood-Elves have a much larger degree of continuity and they lend a feeling of a long time in development while the Draenei feel like a last minute cobble when they couldn't think of anything else. This obviously doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things once you make it to Outland and the new content, but it can have a definite effect on someone just starting the game.

Overall, it seems that Blizzard is definitely listening to their player base, they just need to do a better job of communicating that fact. I realize that it is hard to release information about something if it later gets taken away or changed, but let your GM staff work for you, give the player the benefit of the doubt more often, and admit when something is wrong so that players can avoid the disappointment while it is being fixed.

Despite any pitfalls, The Burning Crusade is an excellent addition to the Warcraft Universe. Blizzard has done an excellent job of catering to many of the different types of players within the game, providing a wide array of enjoyable content. If you are new to the MMO scene or even if you gave up hope before The Burning Crusade hit the streets, now is a great time to get into the game and give it a shot.

Comments

Re:Why review this?

[Cheapy]

What about the people who quit WoW, and are intrigued by BC? I don't think anyone would say that those people aren't interested in the reviews.

global "looking for group" channel

[LochNess]

While I can see people's point when they complain about the newish LFG tool, I really don't want to go back to the server-wide LFG channel. It was basically global Barrens chat.

Re:global "looking for group" channel

[bugnuts]

The way they could fix this is to put a global chat channel INSIDE the LFG tool, with a timer (2 broadcasts per 30 sec). That'd make it inconvenient to use as a chat channel, and would mostly be seen only by people actually actively looking for a group. The tool is nice, but needs some tweaks. But worse, the inability to chat destroys any usefulness it might have had.

Re:global "looking for group" channel

[MeanderingMind]

The biggest downer of the LFG tool is the artificial limits that have been put in place.

1) Altruism - There have been times in the past where I see a grammatically correct and polite request for a VC group sent out for an hour or more. I like to reward people for these things, and so I'll bring in a high level character and get them through the dungeon or a hard quest. The new LFG tool has absolutely no support for friendly, high level players.

2) Multiple Characters - I tend to have multiple characters on a single server. A habit of mine with the LFG channel was to play one character while monitoring the channel for a dungeon another character needed. The LFG tool has no functionality supporting this.

3) Craziness - Sometimes people want to group for odd things. Whether it's a roleplaying parade, a raid on an enemy city, or a counter-offensive to an enemy attack the LFG channel allowed groups for non-standard events. The LFG tool has no functionality for people joining groups unassociated with predefined directives.

4) Automation - While much of the LFG tool is automatic, using it isn't. Most players by default would join the LFG channel on login. People must personally open the LFG tool and set what they need. The result is a crippling effect on participation.

5) Simple Limits - One of the major problems with the LFG tool is the limited amount of LFGing you can do with it at any one time. Despite the fact that I might be looking for several wings of SM, RFD, some elite Arathi quests and perhaps a general Zone group for the Badlands I must pick and choose between a maximum of three things. SM alone can eat 3 of those without even covering the whole instance. As instances generally fulfil many quests, they take higher priority than individual quests. This makes it extremely difficult to use the LFG tool for anything that isn't a dungeon, as people naturally select what will give them their "money's worth".

6) LFM - The LFM portion of the tool is simply bad. Three was limiting enough, but at most you can LFM for one dungeon, quest, raid, zone at a time. If you're doing quests outside of dungeons, you might suffer from the "ships passing in the night" syndrome as you flutter through the relevant quests looking for people who might be interested.

Those are my criticisms of the tool. It has great potential, but I think Blizzard jumped the gun. It's going to be twice as hard to convince people to adopt it because of the perception that it sucks. Even if it is improved to the ease of use and functional level of the LFG channel, people won't be convinced. It would have been better if they had waited and expanded it before replacing the flawed but undeniably useful LFG channel.

Incomprehensible!

[Andy_R]

As a non-WoW player (I do play Runescape though) this made very little sense to me. Can someone explain what an 'instance' is?

I'm equally baffled by the reviewer saying "players must wade through a lot of content." isn't content rather than grind what everyone wants?

Re:Incomprehensible!

[halivar]

And "instance" is a dungeon, populated with monsters and quest goals, generated specifically for your party. No one else is there. If some other group tries to enter the same dungeon, they get a difference "instance". It's a good way of getting away from the farmers and channel chatter.

Instances also have bosses with mad l3wt, which is always fun.

Re:Incomprehensible!

[Aaul]

An instance in WoW is a self-contained "copy" of a dungeon for your group. You basically get your group mates together, walk through the dungeon's portal entrance, and a "copy" of the dungeon is created for your group to progress through. In the days of EverQuest (before the LDoN expansion), every dungeon was shared across the server, so if one dungeon was full, you basically had to wait until people left or you went to another dungeon. It takes a little bit of the "community" out of the game, but the added convenience is well worth it.

I think what the author meant by "wade through a lot of content" is that there is a lot of pre-requisite content that must be completed before moving on to the later, (arguably) more rewarding content. The statement is partly true (but exaggerated). If you look at the chart supplied showing the requirements, it does look like a whole lot of stuff to do. However, what people fail to mention is that just by playing the game, completing quests, and going through dungeons, you end up completing the vast majority of the requirements without a whole lot of extra effort.

For instance, every Heroic mode dungeon (the harder version of the dungeon) requires every group mate to have the Heroic mode key. You buy the Heroic mode key off a quartermaster for that dungeon's reputation, which requires you to be Revered standing. The first dungeon, Hellfire Citadel, is tied to the reputation "Honor Hold" (for Alliance) and "Thrallmar" (for Horde). By the time you do all the quests available, and run through the dungeon wings a few times on normal mode, you're already nearly up to the required reputation. There is very little extra grinding effort required to get to new content, unless you skip the natural progression of doing quests and dungeons for leveling.

I'm having a lot of fun with the expansion. So far my only complaint has been the issues the Warrior class has been having with fulfilling its job as a tank, but that will be fixed in time.

Re:Incomprehensible!

[DerekLyons]

I'm equally baffled by the reviewer saying "players must wade through a lot of content." isn't content rather than grind what everyone wants?

It's the eternal paradox of MMO's - the customers want more content in game, but they don't actually want to encounter the content. All they want is the next level easily and painlessly. (Then when they've gotten to the top of the ladder - they whine because there wasn't enough content.)
 
Or as was recently posted by a player after a round of particularly ludicrous complaints* on the boards of a game I play: The devs should be praised for listening to us at all - I wouldn't.

* An object was recently added to the game that pays homage to an eighties cartoon character. One poster complained that this 'desecrated' her childhood memories 'just as if the devs had poured paint on a picture of Jesus'. (I kid you not - I saw it with my own eyes.)

Good review, for those thinking of returning

[bugnuts]

I concur with almost everything in this review.

I'll note one additional data point: When you do some of the initial quests, you'll be amazed at the quality of the quest rewards for relatively simple quests. I believe this was an intentional design to bring the "casual" player up to raid quality gear, effectively levelling the playing field. Casuals do not start at much of a disadvantage when they're having T2-quality gear heaped upon them (previously only available in instances such as BWL, where few casual players were able to attend).

The game does slow down after you hit 70, but more options open. Most likely, you'll be grinding to get a fast mount, but you'll almost certainly have 1000g for the slow flying mount. You'll want a guild, but one is not necessary to participate in most of the content. However, guildless, it's unlikely you'll progress into the "advanced" content for quite a while. It's difficult to complete the 10-man Karazhan key in PUGs, and even if you do, there are few 10-man PUGs. That sounds kind of funny, but Karazhan is NOT simply a level 70 UBRS. It's more like a 10-man Naxxramus.

Re:Good review, for those thinking of returning

[SydShamino]

I had little raid-content gear before I started in the expansion. I was, literally, replacing a piece of armor every 30-60 minutes of play for the first week. All of my pre-BC gear was gone in two weeks, and in most slots I'd upgraded 3-4 times.

Eventually, when finished with Hellfire Peninsula and moving into Zangarmarsh, the gear turnover slows down. Suprisingly, I found this to be quite a relief; I didn't want to have to slow down and reevaluate my gear once an hour!

Re:Good review, for those thinking of returning

[Anguirel]

Or you could, you know, play on a Normal or RP server where you don't need worry about ganking unless you choose to participate in World PvP...

Re:Good review, for those thinking of returning

[Kjella]

I'll note one additional data point: When you do some of the initial quests, you'll be amazed at the quality of the quest rewards for relatively simple quests. I believe this was an intentional design to bring the "casual" player up to raid quality gear, effectively levelling the playing field. Casuals do not start at much of a disadvantage when they're having T2-quality gear heaped upon them (previously only available in instances such as BWL, where few casual players were able to attend).

Translation: Get new players and current casual hooked on the new and "powerful" stuff, while making hardcore gamers grind like crazy again to get new cool loot since their current gear is soon commonplace.

Draenei Cobbled?

[borkus]

While I've liked both starting areas, I have quite enjoyed the Draenei starting quests. It's true that the architecture in the Blood Elf region is more complex, but that's consistent with the game in my opinion - the Blood Elfs are starting in their recently wrecked city, the Draenei start stranded on a remote island. The starting quests on the Draenei side are quite good - in fact, the "Medal Ceremony" at the end of the final elite quest is very cool. And then there's the Kessell Run.

However, I can see how someone might prefer the flavor of the Blood Elf starting area to the Draenei area. To me, that difference in flavor shows how much thought Blizzard put into each area.

casual

[polar red]

what do they mean by casual players? People playing less than 2hrs a day ?

Re:casual

[halivar]

They mean people with jobs and\or social lives.

Re:casual

[Lord_Slepnir]

I'm an enchanter and I'm in a chatty guild, but I don't think that I'm a casual player

Re:Why review this?

[SydShamino]

If you used to play WoW but quit, perhaps because you ran out of non-40-man-raid things to do, you might want to restart your account and get the expansion. It's rather fun.

My account was cancelled for a full year, but I picked it back up in January, got the expansion, and have enjoyed it so far. I reached 70 on my main a few nights ago, and spent last night just flying around on my (flying, obviously) mount.

Additional impressions from a casual player

[diagonti]

Just some intro caveats: I'm a casual player. I think I've been in a raid-group of more than 5 twice. I am friends with several people who are serious raiders, but I'm not one.

Initially when you first start the new content, the items you receive feel unbelievably good. They are meant to bring you up to just barely under the power level of the folks who have spent the past years raiding. And because of this, the new stuff felt really munchkin initially. Fun, but munchkin. Epic items from pre-BC were replaced with green(normal) items found in BC. The quests are good - a lot of the little annoying bits have been toned down (fewer pointless long runs, flagging quests that really require multiple people as requiring 2 or 3 people as appropriate). There is a lot of nice flavor here.

One thing the reviewer missed is that a lot of BC is really beautiful. Each zone is very distinctive. And there have been several times when I just paused to admire the beauty. With the addition of flying mounts, there are some really gorgeous views that can be found. Several of the instances are visually stunning as well. This is a pretty game.

There are some class balance issues -- but I think at least part of the issues are that the classes changed a bit and people have not adapted their thinking. For example, it used to be hard to try to be a raiding druid in the tank role -- there was effectively one set of gear that all tank-druids went for. BC has added a large variety -- which means the class is a lot more viable in a role than it used to be. Is this unbalancing? No. It is different and changes some of the feel of the game.

Quick Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Where you able to type out "With the original game, leveling was thought of as one of the main aspects of the game and designed to take a long time to do with very little continuity or help to speed you along." without laughing?

BC = Easy

[vision33r]

So far I think the BC's content is large but short on quality. Lots and tons of new gear but re-colored items with no new graphics. Some new epic gear has some of the wackiest artwork, doesn't have the consistent quality of many pre-BC designs. Most of the quests are way too easy for certain classes, while certain classes are dependent on others to help them grind quests. They have yet to fix class imbalances and looks like it got worst. Some classes have scaled so far ahead of others that they don't even need a party to help grind elite quests. Its a bit unfair there. I say BC was a bit rushed overall, lots of repetitive quest grinds and nothing new to the game, many class specific changes only benefit those classes and Blizzard has remained silent about changes, not giving anyone a shred of hope that they would fix them. Perhaps LOTR Online, here we come?

It's all about context

[nganju]

Did anyone else read this synopsis on the Slashdot front page and then completely misinterpret the next article down? For a minute I thought Slashdot was turning into Gamespot.

First Article - "World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade Review"
Second Article - "Recovering a Wrecked RAID"

Re:Why review this?

[DJCacophony]

Nobody has ever quit WoW.

Re:Why review this?

[Alari]

> Nobody has ever quit WoW.

One of us, one of us.

Re:Why review this?

[SilentChris]

I'm a casual player as well and curious as to what you've been smoking.

My only character in the game was a level 60. I haven't done any of the new races (I heard they're well designed and beautiful). From level 60-70, I've probably gone on 20 small-man dungeon runs (5 players) and done about 400-500 quests. I've levelled up my leatherworking and saved money for my epic flying mount (Druids get the regular one for free). Even when I play totally solo, the new content has kept me enthralled.

Will you enjoy the game more if you level to 60 and find a few friends to play with. Yes. Is that hard? No. If you're still struggling to get to 60 (again, not hard) you're going to see generic content -- nothing from 20-60 has changed. For every other casual player who's at 60, the expansion has been a blessing with loads of new content and lots of upgrades.

Re:BC is good, to an extent

[dave562]

However, after I did a quest where I had to kill Hydras for 4 hours in order to get 8 scales or whatever, I realized that it was more of the same crap and the promptly quit the game again.

I started a Blood-Elf for the hell of it and realized after not too long that you can skip any quest that involves killing monsters to collect X number of items. That particular kind of quest has to be the most tedious and absolutely frustrating quest available. I read the interview with the Warhammer Online team and they seem to have gotten it right. In their game, if you go on a quest like that, then EVERY SINGLE MONSTER that you have to kill will drop the item you need to collect. I wish the Blizzard folks would pull their heads out of their asses and do the same thing.

Re:Why review this?

[Digital Vomit]

You're joking, right? The BC expansion seems tailor-made for casuals to enjoy. The level progression is set at a good pace for casual gaming, and there are many instances that can be played with casual, 5-man groups. Reputation gain is also a lot faster, so people who don't play 8 hours a day don't feel as though all the good rep rewards are out of their reach.

I'm not a hardcore raider, but I wouldn't quite call myself a casual player since I average about 4 hours of gaming a night. I can clearly see how Blizzard has balanced the new content between casual and hardcore playing styles. Blizzard has obviously learned some lessons here.

And there's a fact that a lot of people miss: the new level cap and the power escalation that these new levels provide give casuals more of a chance to try the old "end game" content that they previously could not see because of their lack of commitment to gaining the powerful weapons and armor needed to see them. Sure the rewards won't be great, but, in my experience, casuals are more geared toward "having fun" than "getting the best equipment.

And that leads me to a final opinion about the article submitter's gripe about the lower quality of hardcore gear. While games like WoW are certainly "item acquisition" games, if your only goal is getting the next best thing, then I think you're missing out on a lot of enjoyment that WoW has to offer. Ten or twenty years from now, when my friends and I think back about out time spent playing together on WoW, our recollections will not be "remember that mace I got with the +50 Str?" but, rather "Remember when we finally beat that boss you spawned clones of us while we were fighting?"

I sincerely hope that a lot of people with the mindset of "better gear" being the be-all-end-all of the game came to their senses with the wakeup call Blizzard put into the BC where the tier 2 armor sets they spend months trying to obtain were made almost immediately obsolete by the first new items available in the BC.

To sum up my feelings on the Burning Crusade expasion: "gg blizzard"

time vs skill

[dj245]

The largest problem with the current raid content is that while it requires large amounts of work to get to and complete (as it should)

Why should it? This is why I hate (and do not play) this game. A good game should advance with the player's skill and a little bit of time. World of Warcraft advances the story only with time, time, and more time. You'll pour your life into the game, but you can still suck large amounts of ass at it. The reason that there are countless level 60/70 clueless morons is because the game requires no skill to speak of, only endless amounts of time.

Re:BC is good, to an extent

[wynler]

Yup.  When looking for Murloc eyes, I found it really funny that apparently some Murlocs didn't have eyes. 

Meanwhile Engineering gets a single faction recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

Green Smoke Flares

What do they do you ask? Nothing. FUCK YOU BLIZZARD!

Re:Why review this?

[tbannist]

They really shouldn't be. It's exactly the same except now you kill foozles instead of woozles. In my opinion, Burning Crusade made WoW worse than it was before, not better. I bought a copy of BC and a couple weeks later cancelled my account permanently. All Burning Crusade really did was reset the game to a level 70 cap and make everything accomplished before level 61 irrelevent.

Some people want more of exactly the same, but combined with Vivendi's foolish idea that removing dps class roles from the game would somehow improve the game by disenfranchising rogues and mages, the game ended up being more of the same but distinctly worse. Since the release of the expansion there has been a steady trickle of people in my former guild quitting the game. It seems only the really new players actually like the expansion, mostly because they hadn't invested time into doing level 60 activities and thus didn't end up wondering why everything that had accomplished in the game to date had to be rendered utterly useless by the expansion.

My (short) experience with WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

roflcopter lawl lrn2dps nub
lawl dude ur ghay
wtf i need
i clicked greed it must be a bug
ya right btch

ok we're almost to the boss
i gotta go
What? why?
mom wants cpu
Huh? Your Mom? Its 4a.m. How old are you anyway?

i nd gold plz
Huh?
ind gold to repr my armer
will u giv me sm gd?
No.
y not? wtf
I'm almost broke, I can't be giving any gold.
FU thn nub u sck

not a gamer so please forgive me

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

With a name like "crusade" how does it sell in Arab countries? Or do they have a different name for those countries like "Idol Crusher" or something?

Re:Why review this?

[SilentChris]

As the other replier pointed out, training is free. You get flight form and the ability to ride any regular flying mount when you train at 68. Outside this, there's another great benefit: Druid flight form is instant cast. It's also immune to polymorph and breaks certain snares. That means, at any given time (even falling hundreds of feet) a Druid can shift and fly away. It's an invaluable addition to their repertoire.

Re:Why review this?

[MeanderingMind]

Even casual players aren't going to take more than a few months to get to level 58.

That is unless...

...you keep rolling alts instead of sticking with the same character.

I'm a fairly hardcore WoW player, although other interests and a 40hr/week job reduces how much freetime I have to dedicate to the game. However, despite having the game for over a year I have not one 60 yet.

This is, as you stated, because I keep rolling alts. I have approxmiately 30 characters most of whom are low level alts, although about a fourth to a third are over 20. I've a couple level 50s, a couple 40s, three 30s (a fourth deleted), three 20s, and 17 at level 19 and below (another four deleted). The Burning Crusade certainly didn't help me curb my Altoholic nature.

Given over a year, that may strike you as pretty low, but I do/did spend half or more of my time PvPing which greatly reduces how quickly one levels.

I did the same thing in Diablo 2, although an account limited to 8 characters generally helped me get much further.

In an attempt to train some discipline and focus, I've given up all my charcters save one for Lent. I'm interested in how far I can take a character in 40 days of play.

Am I a lonely nerd? Yes I am.

Re:Why review this?

[flibuste]

I have a very different experience from yours with BC. I belong to a guild which itself is part of a guild group, geared toward what people call the "hardcore" instances. Only 1 on 200 people in my guild left since BC, and all the others are enjoying it so much that it's now hard to gather 40 people for a good auld "hardcore" instance.

There is no "reset the cap to 70 and everything before 61 is gone.". Most items in BC aren't worth replacing the set items found in 60 instances, and such sets help you fly through 60 to 70. It is true though that some 60 quests aren't worth anything now but there are so many othere quests to do. I would actually object that the more generous quest rewards in gold pieces helps preventing being stuck at one thing while you're grinding for cash, making questing and the overall game much more enjoyable.

The article is also right in the fact that casual people have been more taken care of and will find more enjoyment in playing BC.

Besides, it looks so preeeetttyyyy

Speak for yourself. I just started WOW.

[MMInterface]

I just started playing WOW 3 weeks ago. I resisted the urge for a long time partly because I wanted to have a life. As a complete newb I'm not sure if I should buy this or not so it is helpfull. At this point I don't even know if a low level player like me could benefit much from the new content. It especially helps to know what kind of experience I will get based on how much time I devote to the game. One thing I can say for sure is that there are a lot of newcomers so your comment is really innacurate. Basically the review doesn't help you and thats fine, but don't speak for everyone else.

WOW instance detail

[Akaihiryuu]

WOW acutally has several types of "instances", distinguished by portal color. First, the two main continents (Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms) actually are instances that are separate from each other (the ships and zeppelins are the "portals"). These work the same way "travel" instances do (white portals)...programming-wise they are still instances, but there is no limit to the number of players in it, and all players are placed in the same instance. Outland is the same way, and the Blood Elf/Draenei starting areas also are (to get to the blood elf area you walk through a white portal or teleport). This means that the Blood Elf/Draenei starting areas, while they are shown on the main world map, are not technically part of the geography of EK or Kalimdor...if you were to find a way to exploit the terrain to get around the portal to the blood elf area you'd probably just end up at a beach with nothing there (and possibly terrain glitches since that area hasn't been finished since you're not supposed to go there). Blue instance portals are normal 5-man instances (some of these have a limit of 10 players so you can technically enter with a raid but you're not really supposed to). In these, a separate instance is created for every party that enters. Raid portals are green and are either 10, 20, 25, or 40-man, separate instance is created for each party...only difference with these is that they reset on a regular weekly schedule rather than when you clear it or reset it manually, you can't reset these manually. This is because these are long and hard and take a lot of work to find a group for...so you don't necessarily have to complete it all at once. Finally there are purple portals (only in Outland so far)...these are the same as regular (blue), only difference is it indicates that a heroic mode exists for that instance.

Re:WOW instance detail

[Gropo]

if you were to find a way to exploit the terrain to get around the portal to the blood elf area you'd probably just end up at a beach with nothing there

Verified... Tried swimming from North of Scarlet Monastery to Ghostlands before I installed BC (and after it had gone live) and all you wind up in is 5 dimensional space (shows you walking through the zone on the map, but you're actually standing on an anonymous mountain coastline). I can only presume this is still the case after having installed it. Gotta wonder what happens if you party with someone, inhabit the same space as them (in different instances) and try and buff or heal them.

Re:PC / Mac ?

[grouchfrog]

You absolutely can play it on Linux by several different methods. 2 prefectly functioning commercial options are using Cedega: www.transgaming.com, and even crossover office supports WoW now. Alternatively, you can use Wine to play. Play on Linux is nearly indistinguishable from windows at this point. This is due to a couple of reasons: 1. WoW can use OpenGL to render in addition to DirectX, and 2. The modification/addon system is through a WoW specific compiler of the 'LUA' scripting language -- which is OS indepedent. Best of luck! Mich The Drizzard

Re:Why review this?

[tbannist]

I'm not sure you fully appreciate the changes in BC for several reasons:

1) Most players know that set items pre-BC weren't very good in the first place, they are easily replaced by non-set items gained through questing. True, the epic items will mostly be replaced by blue quest items, but they will be replaced. Many of the bonuses on your level 60 gear actually scale downwards as you level. Your "crit rating" becomes less effective as you level up, going from level 60 to level 70 you will loose about 50% of the crit bonus that you had at level 60, for example.

2) You will never again see a 40 man raid, the new raid content is 25 man raid content and the old stuff offers nothing to justify the time expenditure. The only reason to do the 40 man raid content is curiousity or nostalgia, because even the legendary staff from Naxx pales in comparison to epic level 70 one-handed weapons. There are simply no rewards worth delving into the 40 man content for. Even then, the level 60 content should be so trivialized by level 70 players that you probably won't need more than 10-20 players to complete MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx. Heck, it's only a matter of time before someone starts soloing the level 60 raid bosses for fame and kicks.

3) There are no rewards worth earning from any factiont that you can rep grind outside the Outlands. Almost everything of value is concentrated in the outlands. This means the time invested in grinding those level 60 reputations is now worthless, just as the time invested in earning equipment from Naxx is now pointless, you gear will be superceded by new gear on the way to 70. To some people that will seem justifiable, but the case was that did not happen on your way to level 60 from level 50. If you had the good fortune to have a level 50 epic weapon, you most likely kept it until you replaced with a high-end level 60 blue item, rather than a quest reward from some random level up quest. The only exceptions are the new instances Caverns of Times and Medivh's Tower that are in the "old world".

That's why everything pre-61 has been rendered pointless. In some ways that's a good thing, someone who just made level 60 before the expansion came out will essentially be on an even footing with someone who started at release and spent almost 2 years at level 60, but in my opinion and that of many others, that's going too far. This is a MMORPG, part of the point is to build up your character, to reduce someone who put 2 years of effort into their character to the same level as someone who put 2 weeks into it, just doesn't sit right.

Actually, since I played a mage, it was much worse than that for me. Mages received a ton of nerfs for the expansion to force one of the original 2 pure dps classes into the position of doing only average damage. At that point, why play a mage, and since it was obvious that Vivendi doesn't understand how to run or balance their game, why bother playing? Mages in particular are now inferior in every way to warlock character. Less dps, more downtime, less hit points, less pvp viabilitiy, worse AoE. If I was running a hard core raiding guild, I wouldn't take more than 1 mage into a 25 man instance, and the mage would be there solely to buff warlock dps with scorch (and hand out food and water and AB). I played the class, and that would be my recommendation.

Heck you hardly need any diversity in the game for an ideal raid. You want Druids to tank, and Druids to heal, warlocks to dps, and shadow priests for support dps (2 SP and 3 Warlocks for every dps group), and a few paladins for healing and buffing. The other classes are all hinderances. They lessen the effectiveness of your raid. If you're horde you might want a shaman or a warrior to deal with a fear spamming boss.

2 points of contention

[Broken Bottle]

Good review generally, I just have one point of contention I came across while reading it:

I'm sure that a large part of this decision was to try and cater to the larger "casual" player base and stop the hemorrhage of players they were losing to other games. At what point did WoW start hemorrhaging players? Subscriptions have been on a steady increase since the game launched and I haven't seen any evidence to say otherwise. They hit 7 million subscribers a month or so before Christmas and 8 million afterwards. I'd argue that making the raid content in BC more casual friendly was just a reflection of them understanding their customer base. You can't have 8 million subscribers that are all hard core raider types. If it didn't start out as one, certainly WoW is a mainstream casual friendly game now and they've simply acknowledged that.

A few notes...

[dr00g911]

I'm somewhere between a casual & heavy player. I raided a little bit on multiple servers, and burned out with the need to schedule my life around 40-man guild raids. I just can't justify playing for more than 6-7 hours in a week, and I had three lvl 60 characters at the time.

So, I put the game down as I'd seen everything I wanted to see, and accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish except for the last new pieces of epic purple lewt(TM) in my set.

Fast forward a year or so, and I bought the expansion, and I found that my needs (being halfway between "raider" and "casual") had been met absolutely perfectly.

The game is gorgeous, the new questlines and level progression from 60-70 doesn't feel anything like a grind, and the improvements to the game made over the last year as a whole, are astonishing.

Yeah, you can look at that flowchart about what it takes to get into the final, epic battle at Mt. Hyjal and it looks terrifying. But, with the exception of taking out Lady Vashj and Kael'thelas, you'll be doing all of that anyway while you're progressing through the content.

That's what people don't realize... you only have to visit each of those instances once (well, twice if you run Heroic versions for the Naaru trials), and you'll be hitting that content anyway as you continue down questlines in your 60s and past 70. The reputations with each faction aren't grinds anymore. You'll get the required rep just following quests and running instances a couple times (as opposed to running, say, ZG 300 times to get exalted so you can actually use the chestpiece you won).

The point is, there's a TON of stuff to do at level 70 now that doesn't require a raid, and raids are far less painful a proposition than they were in the Molten Core days.

Contrast that to pre-burning crusade. If you didn't run raids, you were either stuck in UBRS to rinse & repeat for loot, or stuck in 18 hour Alterac Valley BGs for loot.

Now, I can log in, run any one of 18 new high level, incredibly well-designed instances (requiring boss strategy normally reserved for old 40-man runs) in an hour, run TWO games of Alterac Valley in an hour, and actually make progress in both quests and reputations for the foreseeable future in a couple hours a week.

That flowchart shows you what it takes to "win"... ie get attuned to everything and raid the 'leet raid. For all but a few of the hardcore, getting there is the fun part. You're not supposed to "win"... because you run out of stuff to do!

There's a lot to do now post-70 that's a hell of a lot of fun if you don't raid, and there's a TON to do if you raid.

The best part is: the gear gap is really narrow now. Those who pvp or run dungeons occasionally for their gear won't be horribly outclassed in PvP anymore by people with full Tier 4/5 raided gear. It's a really, really small upgrade, but the raiders are more interested that the name's in purple and they look cool, so everyone wins.

For those who never got to high levels, the new Dranei and Blood Elf areas are great little alt sandboxes as well. The leveling seems a little faster than it used to be as well.

Take all that and add in some of the best art direction, game design and polish that you're likely to see in any game, and I think it's a fabulous expansion.

Re:Waste of your Life

[markalanj]

The game is not the problem its people. You have to be responsible and realize that the game is not the real world. My wife and myself both play WOW we group up and play together, my kids play too we WOW as a family. I have spent more with quality time lately with my wife than I used to, sometimes I spend to much time with my C compiler! You still have get up and be an adult and realize that the real world still exists you have to go to work, clean your house and do all the other day to day things. Don't blame the game or the developer. Didn't your momma teach you some self control?

BC bugginess, and the myth of class imbalances

[jchenx]

While I don't agree with the bulk of your comments, I do agree that there could be some better quality-control overall with BC. I've run into several quests which were bugged in some way. Anyone encounter Fel Cannons and sand worms that were hidden underground? You can't attack them, but very annoyingly, they can attack you. Yeah, extremely frustrating. There are a couple of other quests which were bugged in various ways, that had to be patched as well.

As for the "class imbalances", I have to disagree with the bulk of the player base. In every MMO, you will always have people bitch that their particular class being imbalanced, and whine that "so-and-so" class needs to be nerfed. All you need to do is spend some time on the WoW forums to see this. What these posters don't realize is that they represent a tiny percentage of the actual population. Just because they have a particular grudge about something, doesn't mean it's real. Only Blizzard has access to the raw stats and data, to see what is actually occurring in the game. Certainly there are imbalances of some level, which is why tweaking is always occuring. It's just natural, as the players find new ways to use their spells and talents, to maximize their potential (and minimize others). But if you just listen to forum posters and bloggers, they make it seem like the sky is falling.

One great example is that of the Shaman class. For months, the popular sentiment was that Shamans were overpowered, and they needed to be "nerfed" (tweaked so that they were less powerful). I even joined a guild, entirely made of Shamans, that was called "Nerf Shamans", poking fun at this idea. Nowadays, it's the popular sentiment that Shamans are underpowered and thus need "buffs" (tweaked so they are more powerful). But you know, not all that much has really changed with the class. You can say the same with almost every WoW class, which always seems to go through a cycle of being over-and-under-powered.

Thanks for the warning

[SmallFurryCreature]

I need my MMORPG fix but I do NOT need those random loot drop grinds.

WoW players might regonize were I stopped playing WoW. It is in the night elf area, third area, and you got to kill some warlocks with their pets for an item to drop as part of a longer quest.

It didn't drop. My rogue gained two levels in that area while I learned how exactly to get them in the shortest possible time. Simple, conceal, sap caster, kill pet, kill caster. Rince and repeat.

That killed the game for me, right there and then I knew that this was exactly how the game would be for the next 40 levels and then some.

Since I had already paid over the next few weeks I got my char to around 30 (were getting new skills ends and you just get slightly more powerful skills to deal with more powerful critters) and then just stopped.

I couldn't stand the random drop nature of things. EQ2 at least most times TOLD you how much you had to kill. Granted most its quests were Kill 8 X, Kill another 8 X, and again. Once more. Okay, now kill 10 of them. Okay! Now kill 8 x (adjective) X. Congrats, you done part 1, now kill more X.

But at least you could count them.

Get the goddamn fucking randomizer OUT of my MMORPG's. If I kill every single last one of those casters the damn item should just fucking drop.

It was the same with crafting. The chances of actually getting some of the rarer stuff were so random that you just couldn't make plans. By the time some items actually dropped I had gotten so many levels I was way beyond the item I had wanted to grind.

WoW takes to long. Your warning tells me BC does not improve this. I HATE RANDOM DROPS.

If Blizzard had made Star Wars poor Luke would have had to make a dozen trips to the Jawas before R2-D2 dropped.

Then again, if Sony had made Star Wars, you would have had to form a que to rescue Leia, if she was spawning that day.

Mmm, if only Lucas made a MMORPG. Surely that would be tops! Oh wait.

Overwhelming

[Avatar8]

That's the first word that came out of my mouth when I saw some of the new content artwork. Some of the locations and architecture are absolutely gorgeous.

After getting into BC a bit, overwhelming applied to how much new quest, gear and instance content there is.

I'd say I'm a casual gamer even though I play WoW ~25 hours a week. I've played since beta, played every class to some extent, achieved a few level 60's, run all the non-raid instances and half of the raiding ones. I still felt like I had quite a bit more to do and see in the old content. Then BC came out and I feel like I'm starting over again.

I've started new characters to experience the new starting zones, and I have a few of my characters in Outland. My guild is quite divided about the content: hardcore group has muscled ahead and reached 70 planning to lead the guild through raiding, casual group is still reaching 60 and wants to raid the old content.

I haven't purchased any other game since November 2004. I played Ultima Online for 7.5 years. WoW is considerably better than that, so I expect to be playing for a very long time. The review is fairly accurate though I disagree with the author's negative opinions about the old content.

Re:Why review this?

[Shadow Of The Sun]

Is that what you would call a real life pve experience?

Karazhan Key

[bidule]

The bcraids.jpg seems wrong to me. I think you need to do Shadow Lab, Arcatraz and Steamvault to obtain Karazhan key.

I'd say more, but I have to level my alts.

Re:Why review this?

[generationxyu]

Actually, since I played a mage, it was much worse than that for me. Mages received a ton of nerfs for the expansion to force one of the original 2 pure dps classes into the position of doing only average damage. At that point, why play a mage, and since it was obvious that Vivendi doesn't understand how to run or balance their game, why bother playing? Mages in particular are now inferior in every way to warlock character. Less dps, more downtime, less hit points, less pvp viabilitiy, worse AoE. If I was running a hard core raiding guild, I wouldn't take more than 1 mage into a 25 man instance, and the mage would be there solely to buff warlock dps with scorch (and hand out food and water and AB). I played the class, and that would be my recommendation.

I don't know what kind of crack you're smoking, but I play a mage too. Most of my new gear is green, with a few blues, and one socketed item. I'm only 65, with 42 points in frost and 14 in fire (it's going to be 0/19/42). I'm out DPSing (70) warlocks, BM hunters, shadow priests, and sometimes rogues. Now, given the original position of the mage in beta, and before the nerfs, I've fallen a couple ranks on the DPS charts -- mages used to out-DPS EVERYONE, with rogues only being able to win on fights that went for more than 10 minutes or so. I do run out of mana pretty quickly, but that's because of how I've min-maxed my gear (+dmg, +crit, stam, int, then spi). Just about every fight I pull out my extra 200 DPS pet, and every 90 seconds I've got 15 seconds of pure 2500 frostbolt crit magic thanks to trinkets. Warlocks don't touch me. Of course warlocks are going to have more HP than you, this is by design. But that doesn't mean they've got more pvp viability -- try taking a warlock against a melee class. Mages, on the other hand, completely wreck warriors, paladins, and rogues, and have good success against shamans. And AoE? How long can a warlock really do RoF? Mages can blizzard till the cows come home, and then take the rest of them out with CoC and AE. L2P.