With the Burning Crusade expansion, I finally have a new game to play on World of Warcraft.  New quests, new worlds, new equipment, and new instances – and I have never been happier.  As an official WoW addict, I have been waiting for the day that I could do something other then pure raiding (as I have been doing for the last year), and the expansion truly has lived up to the hype in giving us new things to do.

Quicker then most, but not as quick as some, I hit 70 in about 10 days – literally a level a day.  I was pretty proud about that, seeing as I only gained experience by questing with my sidekick Azn PMS, so we pretty much had to coordinate around her school schedule; I think we did fantastic!  We moved area to area and did every quest line (aside from the few bugged ones we came across), quickly gathering all our new items and replacing our purple epics.  It was kind of sad to see our glowing, matching epics replaced by dingy, haphazard pieces of green and blue gear, but seeing the new stats on everything was also pretty exciting.  At this point, I am only wearing one last purple epic item that I didn’t yet replace and sitting on about 30 nexus crystals since I disenchanted all my tier 1 and 2 pieces.  (Yes, I am speaking mumbo jumbo to you non-WoW players!)

Since hitting 70, we are now focused on completing instances and working on key quests that will allow us access to the more difficult raiding instances.  Most of the areas have instances that you must complete on heroic mode, and to even get in you need to earn revered reputation.  I am not sure if Blizzard did this to ensure that all instances were explored or if they simply wanted to make it much harder to go to the new raiding instances, but it surely has everyone in a mad scramble to accomplish these large feats.

I have to say that I have never been more humbled in my life, as a few of the level 70 instances have really caused us some headaches.  This one boss in the Botanical Gardens of Tempest Keep completely owned us for a few hours until we got disheartened enough to call it a night, and you wouldn’t expect that in a basic level 70 instance.  He was a druid boss that summoned his Treants (little tree mobs) to kick our asses while he healed them, and we were in true misery while trying various strategies that never seemed to work.  I will say this, however – the game isn’t so easy anymore and we all have to go back to the basics and start anew as we discover what works best and what doesn’t work at all.  The process is very exciting, if a little frustrating.

Anyway, to those of you playing the expansion:  best of luck leveling, congratulations on 70 when it happens (or if it already happened), and see you on Scilla!