World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade is an expansion for World of Warcraft.
When it was released in late 2004, World of Warcraft raised the bar for the massively multiplayer genre, and more than two years later, none of its would-be competitors have even come close to matching it.
With the recent release of The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft has never been better, and while you don't need the expansion pack to continue playing, it's hard not to feel like you're missing out in Azeroth without it.
In the draenei the Alliance finally has a race that measures up to the Horde's tauren.
Like any great expansion pack, The Burning Crusade doesn't just offer more of the same, and it doesn't cater exclusively to experienced players. It offers a lot more of the same, and it also adds a number of new features that can be enjoyed by newcomers and level 60 veterans alike. Perhaps the most significant additions introduced in The Burning Crusade are the blood elves and the draenei -- two new playable races that have made the paladin class available to the Horde faction and the shaman class available to the Alliance faction for the first time. Both of these races have quite fascinating back-stories that are revealed both through their respective intro movies and via in-game quests and conversations with non-player characters. Like the eight previously existing playable races in Azeroth, the blood elves and the draenei begin their adventures in specially designed starter areas where you can play without having to worry about bothersome high-level opposing players for the first 15 to 20 levels of your character's existence.
It's only possible to advance beyond the original game's level 60 cap if you own The Burning Crusade, which unlocks new player skills and talents for characters through to level 70. It's conceivable that you could advance through many of the levels post-60 without ever visiting the new Outland realm, but it'd be a far more time-consuming and less profitable process because quests in Outland offer significantly more experience points and gold. Furthermore, Outland is the only place where you can advance your chosen professions beyond the previous skill cap of 300 to gather all-new resources and craft powerful new items. All of the existing professions such as leatherworking, alchemy, cooking, and enchanting can now be pursued to a maximum skill level of 375, which is also true of the new jewelcrafting profession.
Along with engineering, jewelcrafting is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and useful professions to pursue in World of Warcraft right now. As a jewelcrafter, you'll initially spend your time and resources making simple rings and necklaces that afford their wearers small attribute bonuses. As your skills improve (and the materials you need become less common and more expensive), you'll learn to make powerful trinkets, rings and necklaces that can be used to buff the attributes of other party members as well as your own, a handful of weapons, and gems that can be socketed into new pieces of armour and jewellery to make them even more powerful.
Even the relatively common gear that's available in Outland is better than much of the rare and epic equipment that has been dropping in Azeroth for the past two years. Those of you with complete sets of epic armour will find that it's good enough to get you through most of the new continent's quests and dungeons, but everyone else's equipment becomes obsolete within hours of them stepping through the Dark Portal. The new gear serves to lessen the gap between hardcore dungeon raiders and more casual players, and as a result, the Outland quests are neither too challenging for relatively inexperienced players nor too easy for those in the minority who can truly claim to have "beaten" the original game. The fact that the playing field has been levelled somewhat also makes player-versus-player encounters more enjoyable now than they've been for some time, which is just as well given that almost all of the new Outland environments have PVP objectives and rewards.
If you're not already wearing epic gear, expect to replace everything you own within hours of going through the Dark Portal.
Flying mounts that can be used exclusively in Outland are another significant feature of The Burning Crusade, although it's not possible to drop bombs or to perform any other kind of attack while you're riding them. Level 70 players flying on these mounts still have a significant impact on all PvP, though, because they're able to move between objectives and battles much more quickly, and they can leap down to the ground to join a fight in an instant. While they're very expensive to buy, flying mounts are worth every piece of copper, silver, and gold that they set you back, not only because they offer a distinct advantage in world PvP, but also because there's no better way to take in Outland's occasionally breathtaking scenery.
Regardless of whether you're questing or taking part in PvP, The Burning Crusade caters well to solo and grouped players alike, although a number of the harder quests are impossible to beat alone. This is also true of the game's dungeons, which are specifically designed for groups of between five and 25 players and are instanced so that every group gets an identical challenge. The Burning Crusade adds more than 20 new dungeons to World of Warcraft (not all of them are in Outland), ranging from those that can easily be completed inside an hour through to truly epic undertakings that will take even the most skilled groups around 10 hours or so (across multiple sessions in the same week, if necessary) to get through. Many of the new dungeons can be played on a more difficult "heroic" mode once you earn the right to do so, pitting you against much stronger enemies that drop superior items if you manage to defeat them.
The fact that the group sizes required for most new dungeons is smaller than in the original game is a double-edged sword--getting 10 players together is obviously a lot easier than getting 20 or 40, but in a smaller group, you have to be much more selective about who comes along, so depending on which class you play, it won't necessarily be easier to find a good group to play with. As is the case in all massively multiplayer games, your experience in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade will be shaped largely by the other players that you interact with. Playing alongside a good group or guild can enrich your time in the game to no end, while having your corpse camped and getting killed repeatedly by an opposing player will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. In our experience, players who delight in making others' lives a misery are certainly in a small minority, but they're out there, and it's unfortunate that they're often the most vocal in general chat channels.
If you've already spent any serious amount of time with World of Warcraft then you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from its first expansion pack. It's true that some of the new quests can feel like a grind, and it's also true that The Burning Crusade's arrival has rendered much of the old endgame content all but obsolete. This is a superb example of exactly what an expansion pack for any game should be, though, and the gulf between World of Warcraft and the pretenders to its throne is now wider than ever.
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muzt3k
26/03/2008, 01:27 AM
rating
9/10
Awesome product, i use to play but cost too much money, still great game!
Pros: great, fun game
new characters
new quests and items
access to Outlands
able to do jewelcrafting
Cons: must pay for the game and the account
time consuming
addictive!
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