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Blizzard finally released the first expansion pack for Its popular MMORPG World of Warcraft. The expansion is called The Burning Crusade. If you want more information about this expansion or World of Warcraft please visit this site

I played World of Warcraft or WoW from closed beta clear until April of 2006. I played 8-10 hours a day. I finally got to a point where it took to much time to accomplish anything.

My favored character was my Undead Priest. Of course he was level 60 and all. I was in a nice raiding guild and was getting all decked out in epics. One day I logged on and took stock of what I was doing each day in WoW. I realized that all I could do very well, being a priest, was raid and try to grind some faction. I then noticed that WoW had in essence become all about grinding. This didn't sit well with me since the early developers of WoW had stated that they didn't want WoW to become all about grinding and gear. After a few days of soul searching I went cold turkey off WoW and didn't look back until early September.

In October of 2005 I attended Blizzards party for all things Blizzard aptly named BlizzCon. At BlizzCon I heard the developers talk about The Burning Crusade. I sat through many panels about how The Burning Crusade, or TBC, was going to change WoW and put it in a new direction. I heard about how it would be more solo and small group friendly as well as how they didn't want to focus so much on gear. They didn't reveal tons of info at that time, they showed us one of the new races, Blood Elf, and told us it would be Horde playable. They talked about the Caverns of Time but didn't give much detail. All of these things got me excited for TBC. In April of '06 after I made the choice to stop playing (See above if you are already lost) I decided that I would play TBC beta since I had a free invite from BlizzCon.

In September I got my invite to the beta and downloaded and installed it happy to see all these fantastic changes. I was sad at what I saw. There was no profound change to solo play, there was no grand change in faction grinding. Instead of being less factions to grind they added more. If you play a Blood Elf there are 2 factions in the Blood Elf lands that you can get up to Exalted, or try to, before you are level 20. In the Outlands there are no less then 34.3 million factions all grindable and all with nice items you can get. This didn't sit to well with me but I decided to give it a good work over before I made an judgments.

The next thing I did was copy over my 60 priest to Hellfire and went to the Outlands. Once I reached Thrallmar I was quickly invited to a group to run a new instance, Hellfire Citadel: Ramparts. This was exciting, I mounted up on my raptor and sped off for the instance. After getting some directions I made it to the entrance and we all went in. The instance was very straight forward and simple. We didn't have a hard time with any of the mobs or bosses. After about 2 hours we finished the instance and I had upgraded 4 items. The loot was amazing, even the greens were awesome.

Well to shorten up this part I played the beta till I hit 65 and ran into the same problem I had in April. It was the same thing over and over. Being a priest and someone with out tons of time on my hands I couldn't solo grind quests very well. By the time I stopped playing the beta I had replaced all of my gear except for my Halo of Transcendence. So my summation of the PvE side of the expansion was this:

-The solo content is not any easier or changed in any significant way.
- There is more grinding not less with the addition of so many new factions.
- They changed the loot so everyone could have super great even if they didn't have the time to raid. Sadly this turned the super gear into normal gear and the Epic loot that you have to spend hours getting is even more "uber" then ever. This was a good plan by Blizzard but in the end they caved to the hard core people who play 10+ hours a day.
- I was impressed that they put in a bunch of 5 man instances and didn't put in any 40 man raids. This was a nice change.
- I didn't cover this at all yet but classes and the balance of said classes. I was very disappointed when Blizzard said there would be no new classes for the expansion. 2+ years of the same 6 classes is just insane. I really hope they don't take anther 2 years to make another expansion and add new classes.

Since I am not much of a PvP'er I can't comment to much about it. I was very surprised when they added almost all of the PvP changes into the game before TBC even came out.

The thing I am most sad about TBC is the news that they were no longer working on Hero classes. Granted this news came in the summer of '06 but it was one thing I was really excited about since they wre promised to be in the game when it hit the shelves in '04.

I really enjoyed World of Warcraft and I had so much faith that The Burning Crusade would change the game in a positive way. Blizzard always makes their games look awesome and the look and feel of this expansion is great but at the core it is just more of the same. The game is all about grinding, raiding and gear.

With an 8 million player base Blizzard has made it so hard for smaller MMOs to make it. I am really looking forward to Warhammer Online and Conan Online.

One thing I forgot to mention, Blizzard is charging $40 for the expansion. I don't think I have ever paid more then $30 for any MMO expansion. Come on Blizzard if you are going to give us more of the same content at least give us a free month if you are gonna charge $40.