The content and new races should give veteran WoW players a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Rejoice fellow gamers! The first expansion pack for World of Warcraft is just around the corner. I was lucky enough to have a beta key and jump in on the closed beta. I’ve been playing for about a week so here is my report from the front lines. Let’s start with the new game mechanics.

Game Mechanics

Burning Crusade will introduce many great game mechanic enhancements, like the new LFG interface. The new looking for group tool lets players choose the dungeon, raid, or battleground they are trying to find a group for in a drop down box that queues them in a pool of other players looking for similar group oriented tasks. Those useless meeting stones are finally going to be useful; meeting stones will be able to summon party members if two party members are at the stone to summon. It works like a warlock summoning but without the warlock.



The user profile has a drop down menu for spell damage, criticals, and chances to hit. Players can also check their defensive and melee ratings. A new skill being implemented is resilience. Resilience is the rating a player can resist critical strikes and critical strike damage.

The PVP tab in player profiles shows procured honor and arena standings. Most of the new sexy PVP gear comes from the Arena combat now. So get your 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 teams together and start practicing!

All equipment has been adjusted for the new way of calculating chances to hit and criticals. Criticals are no longer percentages, but a numeric rating. I’m not sure if this rating goes beyond 100, though it seems each percent to critical from the old system equals around 12 to critical chances. A new statistic called resilience is the chance of not being hit with a critical attack and lessens the damage of critical strikes taken. Most of the new Arena PvP gear has very high resilience and stamina on them.



Strolling through most of the new areas and looking at PvP and faction rewards will make one’s jaw drop. I’ve posted a few screenshots to show some of the insane gear.