The Burning Crusade Beta is officially here! The brand new classic experience, The Burning Crusade (TBC), returns and it is finally here for testing. Not an actual fake out by Blizzard, not a failed launch but a real launch of the beta. Let’s see what the beta is looking like right now, how does it work, what is the character boost looking like right now, what is there to test and what content is available currently on the Beta.
1:00 Right now on Burning Crusades Beta you can boost the character level 58 and then start out with very basic gear. This does not seem like any kind of gear that you can get from quests or from a vendor. It just seems like baseline gear for you to get started with your character to test questing and test a variety of different content.
You start out with a very base build for a Rogue for example. You start out with a dagger, a thrown weapon and some minor green pieces. However every character that you create has an outlands survival kit full of food, reagents and different pieces of gear to equip. So for a Rogue if you want to try swords or daggers or a mix of both with them playing combat, assassination or a subtlety build I could switch it around and try different poisons in my main hand and off hand. And have reagents for vanishing powder and such. As well as a mount to traverse The Burning Crusade.
Since this is the TBC Classic experience you do get the talon builds of TBC. As in mutilate for Assassination Rogues and a couple different changes for Combat Rogues like surprise attack and of course for Subtlety we have shadowstep. However shadowstep is taken for granted but in TBC it is a major impactful ability. You also get a variety of different class changes.
2:18 As you level and quest through TBC expansion, you unlock different abilities for you to learn from your class vendor. Until then at 58, you have the majority of the same abilities as classic plus or minus adjustments for the expansion. As Blizzard did do quite a bit of tuning for a variety of classes and even spec play styles for TBC going off from the classic. And of course you get to enter the massive green portal that takes you into the wondrous world of Outlands with the Hellfire Peninsula greeting you as the very first zone. A very iconic zone to World of Warcarft, an uncharted new world that will get to play again in this expansion.
Currently the questing in TBC is locked to level 56. Blizzard is most likely going to raise this cap as you go on further. So until level 56 you have a set of zones that you can explore instead of quests you can do. Most likely Blizzard is going to allow players to explore and quest in more areas just to make sure all the quests are functioning properly and nothing is super buggy. None of the mobs and NPCS are doing way too much damage or too little damage. To make sure that it is as authentic as a classic experience as it can be. Maybe at some point Blizzard will even let us boost a character to level 70 to test some of the end game gear and end game abilities. As of right now that is just a speculation until Blizzard has a confirmation on what they plan to do for further testing in TBC. The Beta just began and this is literally the first week of TBC testing.
3:55 CHARACTER CREATION
Let us navigate the character creation screen. The lighting looks a little janky. However, I have not played the original BC so maybe this is just how the lighting works from the get go. Just looking at it, it looks a little bit weird.
First thing you will notice is the new races are added in here as well.
You have the Blood Elf, the Draenei and the original races as well. Yes the Blood Elves can be Paladins as one of the biggest features of TBC. You will be able to test out Blood of Paladin and a Draenei Shaman. Draenei just like the orcs and trolls has a little bit of weird lighting but maybe that is just how the lighting was back in TBC.
4:35 ROGUE
So far on the beta one of the most fun things I’ve had to do is actually being able to make a bunch of characters of the same classes I have in Shadowlands and try now to see how they feel over on TBC. The Burning Crusade is a perfect opportunity for many players to try something new and different and maybe find a new potential main. So I am testing out Rogues but I am also taking a look at some of the other classes that I am interested in and I am taking a lot of the feedback off of the specs and classes that I play currently on Shadowlands. I do play a little bit of Rogue on classic but I never got into max level. And the way Rogues play on TBC, at least at the early levels, is very familiar to that of classic. It is kind of familiar to that of Shadowlands’ sinister strikes and slice and dice, the only thing missing is Roll the Bones.
If you are a Shadowlands player, one of the biggest differences you will notice for Rogues is your energy region comes in chunks. Instead of having a passive, natural, smooth energy region, it happens in intervals every few seconds. Makes you plan out your abilities a little bit more. Also common points are stuck on enemies as the old-school WoW design instead of traveling with you. So if you are a retail player trying out Rogues, they are going to be quite a few things that are different.
5:52 PALADIN
Next class I tried out was a Paladin. In Shadowlands they are a builder spender play style where you see abilities to build holy power and spend it on helpless verdicts. In TBC, they are completely different. You have a lot of different auras that can provide buffs to your groups. A variety of different buffs to empower your healers, melee, range, you even have these seals that you’ll use judgements instead of a primer. Judgements will unleash the current seal that you have active to put up different debuffs or different damage and abilities from your character. So you can put up debuffs on enemies where you can get mana from attacking them or healing. You can do extra holy damage to enemies and weaving those seals with judgements is kind of core to the gameplay.
6:36ENHANCEMENT SHAMAN
Next class I have tried is Enhancement Shaman as a Draenei since Shamans are available for the alliance finally. The changes to Shadowlands Shaman is to make it more cool down based and you do end up being a little bit more cooled down reliant on abilities. You will use things like storm strike but lava lash is not really in the game just yet so you will end up spending a lot of your fillers with earth shock. And totems are everything for you. There’s a variety of different totems to give you healing, to give different buffs and debuffs to your enemies and allies. There’s a lot of different ways to kind of build your Shaman and they are probably one of the most utilitarian classes that is required in every dungeon group and raid group. So definitely a class in my consideration if I do end up playing TBC. They actually seem durable when it comes to pulling multiple enemies. And the damage to do is quite spiky.
7:26 WARLOCK
Warlock is another class I have been enjoying recently in Shadowlands. It is just a hodgepodge of abilities over in TBC. You kind of feel like a Destruction Warlock, Affliction Warlock and Demonology Warlock all at once. Having access to corruption, immolation, drain soul, even drain mana and shadow bolt spam while maintaining a felguard. The felguard does not have nearly as many abilities as Shadowlands, he is kind of just a pet that does good damage by himself. Having him hold aggro, like he does on retail, is a little bit more trickier than that. Definitely feels like a very powerful and extremely durable caster. And having a pet class just gives you the free damage that if you say run out of meta or in a bad situation, that pet can definitely get you out of tough situations.
8:08 WARRIOR
Last class is the Warrior and this is definitely one of the weirder classes. The whole stance dancing thing between battle stance, defensive stance and berserker stance is something that is not natural to me at all. It is probably a way that you can integrate macros in order to make that play style easier. Managing and maintaining all these different abilities based on the stances you are in and keeping up with all that can be quite difficult. I found it a little bit more difficult from each level as a Warrior in comparison to every other class I’ve tried so far. I think it might be one of those classes that just kill cap. The better you are as a player the easier time you are going to have with it. So it might be a class that is challenging and if you are looking for a challenge in the expansion, this could be the class to play as a solo leveler.
Besides testing our classes to figure out your new main for TBC, or even exploring some of the leveling content to figure out the best routes in the future when the expansion finally goes live. You can also try dungeons and PVP, there’s already been some world PVP happening in the center of Hellfire Peninsula since there are some buffs you can gain based on hook controls and some of the flags down in the center. And players are constantly looking for group finder when it comes to dungeons trying to get a five man going. You can even copy your classic character that has gear into TBC right now if you want to have an easier time looking for groups or even doing more damage than anybody who boosted a character level 58. Or if you simply want to test out how the character feels in the future expansion with all the gear from previous classic raids.