BETA not guaranteed

It may seem to many of you that the bloggers have been rather lucky in getting beta keys for the new expansion, maybe a little too lucky. Well I don't have one, nor have I ever gotten a beta key from any game I signed up for. I was very hopeful in getting one for Warhammer Online because I put my name in pretty much as soon as they opened up for applications, but that doesn't seem to be a factor. So far the only beta I've been in was for Warcraft 3, but that was when they made it and open beta.

I'm not complaining though. Sure I would review a lot of the stuff here, and running Vista I am probably the most prone to having the game cause my computer to crash, but since any progress I would make in beta wouldn't count once the expansion was actually released, I don't see myself playing it all that much in favor of leveling my current characters.

Something else that alleviates the bitterness is this new patch (see previous post), and since I probably won't venture into Northrend right off the bat anyway, it pretty much means getting the expansion early for me.

Actually, that isn't quite true. See, what I'm going to do right when I get the expansion is create a death knight. I mean come on, cool new class that the game hasn't seen before? Of course I have to try it out, just like I have to try every other class out.

I know many of you are going to wait on it until the initial rush dies down a little, but I made a Draenei shaman right when TBC came out and I have to say, it wasn't too bad. The thing is, at that time we thought the game mechanics would stay the same, and with so many players running around the same area, with the same quests, killing the same stuff, it would be impossible to get anything done. Well the new respawn rate rules were also introduced at that time, and I have no trouble finding mobs to kill.

Blizzard actually tends to read our feedback and in the case that they believe it is valid, they will do something about it. I'm sure by now they have heard all the speculations on how the death knight starting area will be way too crowded and have done something about it. Sure it will be crowded, but that doesn't mean it will be impossible to get anything done.

I'm sort of wondering where the death knights will be after finished up their starting area. Will they be ready for Outland, or will they still have to do some work in Azeroth before they are up to speed? Obviously it also depends on how you go about playing through the starting area, but for the most part they tend to plan zones around getting you to a certain level before you move on to the next.

It's gonna be cool to create a character and immediately have a bunch of talent points to spend. I personally can't wait to summon ghouls, but I'm a little undecided on which talent tree to go into, they all sound pretty cool. I guess by now the beta testers are already figuring out which trees work best for which styles of play, so hopefully I can find some info out there on release day to give me a better idea of where to put my points.

On a side note, my hunter hit level 54 and is now on her way to Azshara to take on the few quests that are there. I always wished they would do more with that zone as much of it doesn't get utilized in the game, but it doesn't look like they will be going back to add to any of the Old World content anytime soon.