Impressions of the burning crusade

Playing the Draenei
Let me start by saying that so far I am really impressed with The Burning Crusade as a whole. Yesterday I stood in the AH checking out all the new cool items wondering if I should blow some gold on items before getting into outlands with Hexapuma. I really haven't settled for a good build either. Lots of confusion. While I stand there next to the auctioneer thinking this Draenei shaman runs up to me asking for the opening of a lockbox. That shaman was already 50... and then I realized that sooner or later I'll have to check out the two new races starting points.

The Blood Elves doesnt really interest me at all. The whole horde need a pretty race seems a bit wierd to me. Instead I rolled a female Draenei warrior... The male draenei looks really bad. They are so top heavy with their wierd tentacles and "soft" horns. Some of the face textures on the male characters are stretched and thus bugged... So it had to be a female and they actually look pretty cool. I selected warrior because I really like melee and heavy armor ^^



The Draenei starting area is beautiful compared to the old races starting points. Lots of vegetation and details in the environment. One thing Blizzard has done really well is the amount of quests in the new Draenei area (I guess the Blood Elves have the same). It seemed I always had quests and didn't really have to comeplete all quests because there were just so many of them. I´ve now reached level 12 and it has been an amazing time. I found myself reading all quest descriptions and really trying to understand how the Draenei story relates to the rest of the WOW lore. At first I was a bit sceptical of the whole "Draenei space ship" thing.. but after playing through the first 10 levels it feels pretty cool. So unless I am completely mistaken The Exodar is not only the Draenei captital - it is also the space ship which they crashed on Azeroth with.

I am really looking forward to play the next Draenei zone and I will probably keep all other characters on hold until that is finished.

The many personalities of Hexapuma

I am such a sucker for alts... and now that I have returned and no longer raid and the honor system has been revamped I have much more time to actually play alts. While my rogue is without a doubt my favourite character and my "main". I enjoy playing a paladin as well. They are very different since they have so much more to offer in terms of support.

Having played so much battlegrounds as a rogue it is very refreshing to play support and healer sometimes. Of course everyone really appriciates my heals and buffs =) If I were to add something to the rogue design it would be some sort of buff or aura... doesn't have to be super or amazing at all.. just a little something to repay friendly buffers.

The server I play on, Ravencrest, is unstable at best and during its downtimes I've started an undead priest on another server. It is actually quite fun and I can't wait until my first battleground expeditions. Since I am going to try PVP early with her I am going into the shadow tree.

Preparations, preparations

Just getting back into the game was more difficult than I anticipated... of course Blizzard's manage account page had to be down when I finally decided to return. I quite understand it though as the pressure on Blizzard's site must be huge now that all subscribers are upgrading their accounts and with all of us oldies returning to play again.

Finally I managed to re-activate my account when the next problem appeared ... deciding the new talent build for my rogue. Well ... when I left WOW in October last year I was very happy with SF dagger build. With all the new talents I have a really difficult time to decide upon my next build. Fortunately there are a few good sites out that gives a pretty good orientation of various builds.. I strongly recommend www.roguespot.com and www.worldofming.com...

Before nailing down the talents... I ran into another problem. MODS! Most of the mods I used before doesn't work anymore so just getting them all back is going to be a pain.

Instead of going for the old ones I used I've downloaded Wowace updater.. which you can find at www.wowace.com ...

And by the way… for some fun podcasting I recommend listening to a couple in Azeroth’s podcast… which you can download from their site here.

Joining the Crusade

The time of rest is over. Hexapuma returns to Azeroth.

I've just downloaded three huge patches and updated my client. I still haven't purchased the expansion but I am going to return to check out the new arena play, the new talents that has been introduced for TBC. Hopefully I'll be able to brush up my old rogue skills after being absent for a few months. If I like what I find I'll probably go running for the actual expansion asap.

So What have I been doing all this time?

I've played a lot of other games... Total War, Silent Hunter IV, Civ IV and making out with another great MMO.. EVE-Online. Eve is pure fantastic... focused on PVP but do lack interesting settings and environments.