One player's design thoughts on The Burning Crusade

With tons of other reviews, I didn't see a need to add my 2 cents, but after reading some, I noticed that no one really mentioned the design of Outland.

One issue I had with the original lands of WoW (Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms) was the travel time from place to place. If you were Alliance, and ever had to travel to Tanaris or Un'Goro Crater, you're talking about 5 full minutes just to fly there (about 20 minutes by land) from any of the main cities (Ironforge, Stormwind, and Darnassus). And setting a hometown just to be closer to Tanaris would mean taking a long time to reach any Eastern Kingdom land, so that wasn't a viable option either.

With the expansion, however, Outland is designed such that the main city, Shattrath, is pretty much in the center of the entire continent, so that travelling from one area to another is much easier. Add to that epic flying mounts, and then traveling from one corner to another is much faster. Additionally, in Outland, each dungeon area was actually a dungeon portal in that there were actually 3 or 4 dungeons right next to each other, so that they're easily accessible (geographically, at least, since some required certain quests and levels to unlock). This meant that you had over a dozen dungeons for 5-man groups, as well as half a dozen or so raid instances added with this expansion.

A second feature that wasn't really mentioned is the reputation rewards. You now really have three ways to get very good equipment. One way is to join big groups (raids), and hit the big areas and get the big loot. Another way is to do lots of PVP (battle grounds and arenas) and get PVP based equipment rewards. A new, third viable way is to repeatedly do solo and/or small group (5-man) adventures and grind your way toward epic reputation rewards. (There's of course a 4th way, where you buy, swindle, or flirt your way to a lot of gold and buy epic equipment, but that's of course heavily discouraged and may get you in trouble if the transactions are illegal.)

Again, very good expansion. If you own WoW and are still playing it, buying this expansion is a must. Highly recommended.
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