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Well, Burning Crusade‘s been out for about two months now, and there’s a lot to talk about, so this is likely to get very long. ^_^;

First off, our guild currently has four 70s in it. I am at the back of the pack with Dunain at 64 and Farmishi hitting 63 yesterday. (An interesting kind of ‘check-uary’ there, everyone’s so used to thinking of the final run up to 60, that it’s natural to say “54” when you mean “64”….) Admittedly, I am slowed down some by the fact I have other hobbies (like playing ASL with Patch).

Overall, I like Burning Crusade. Blizzard has done a wonderful job with all the new content. I do have some overall minor gripes. The hardware specs got pushed up with the expansion, and there’s no real acknowledgment of this anywhere in the promo material, leaving me to be surprised when my machine practically falls over dead the first time I go in Zangarmarsh (turning everything down to minimum has allowed it to be tolerable…). Beyond just the number of people who had marginal systems to begin with, I’m sure there’s a fair number who needed to adjust settings, and I think a little warning of this fact would have been prudent. Anyway, the other gripe is that I think they notched the item quality in Outland up too high. I understand that they want offer something to all those in their Tier 2/3 epics short of the new endgame content, but the random base world-drop/quest reward greens beating most of the blues our guild had seems a bit much to me.

I realized shortly after the release of BC, that I would probably prefer to switch to Farmishi as my main instead of Dunain. Along with this came the realization that the time to make the switch was a month before BC came out, so that I could position her properly. So, Dunain’s still my main… for now. The real obstacle is that they are both blacksmiths, and Dunain still has a good lead on her.

The guild as a whole is still getting the various crafting skills up, and we’re mostly entering the time when the recipes start actually wanting unusual items. Material du jour? Primals. Primal Earth, Primal Fire, Primal Life, Primal Mana… you name it and there’s something to collect of it. Last night was largely spent by the guild at large in collecting these types of materials to make Riding Crops for our high-levels. Dunain has just hit this type of thing himself, and the nice little store I’d built up isn’t nearly enough. But it looks like a little effort will keep Blanc in new armor nicely.

We’ve done a number of instance runs, though they’ve dropped off a bit lately. The highest one I’ve seen so far is the Mana Tombs in Auchindoun. Very nice, and we did pretty well, especially for a first run. Sadly, Dunain was too low level to get any quest for the place, so we need to do it again for him.

On the way to new endgame equipment, there’s a few options. There’s some small sets in the crafted items, a good number of very nice greens, and then there’s recolored versions of Dungeon 1 items. These last are generally nice socketed blue items from instance bosses geared towards the particular class who’s set it looks like. They start dropping in the first instances of BC, and are generally also the first socketed items you’re likely to see.

Anyway, I happened to get the breastplate for Farmishi’s set early, and thought it looked really nice. After finding out about the full set, I decided to get them all. So we ended up in our second round of Coilfang Reservoir runs about a week ago. Naturally, this is where the next pieces drop, and I figured Farmishi would be spending a fair amount of time in there getting all three pieces available. The runs went very well, and we did both of the low-level wings in one evening.

…And it turns out that it was Pally Night at Coilfang, as everything she wanted dropped, including some Warrior gear she can use for tanking (Smudge was on Shrimpette, so Farmishi was the only one present who could even use it). All told, Farmishi got five new pieces of equipment… only one of which she could immediately use. The other four all required level 63, and she was still part way through 62. Last night she finally made 63, and is looking quite snappy.

So now Farmishi wants to go to… the Mana Tombs. However, given the equipment and quests, she’s going to wait until she tips over into 54 64.