Nera'Thor Realm Forum

The character screen, instead of only showing your agi/stam/int/spir/str/armor + melee stats, now has two panels with a dropdown box. You can select from Stats, Melee, Ranged, Spells, and Defense. Stats is the same old panel. Ranged and Melee show their respective weapon damage, adjusted weapon speed, DPS, skill rating, hit rating, and crit rating (with tooltips to automagically calculate rating to actual stat). Spells has the spellcasting stats - I didn't look too hard at it. Defenses shows dodge, parry, block, defense rating, and resilience rating, with tooltips.

Jewelcrafting itself is basically split into two sections. Pre-Outlands levels, it's focused on rings, necklaces, trinkets, and consumables pretty exclusively. Post-Outlands levels, it's focused on making socketable jewels and consumables.

Green-quality (comparatively easy to make in other words) 18 slot bags, and blue 20 slotters.

To get TO outland, you either A) need to go throug the Dark Portal - which is no longer guarded by elite demons, at least on the Azeroth side ;), B) Beg a Mage who's gotten Exalted with the Scryer faction in Shattrath (a neutral capital city complete with its own map and 3 factions in Terokar Forest) to portal you, or C) Bind there and hearth. To get FROM outland, you need to A) go through the Dark Portal, B) Get a portal from a mage, C) Bind in azeroth/kalimdor and hearth, or D) Walk through one of the permanent one-way portals in Shattrath to each of the 8 capital cities.

Bladefist's Breadth
Trinket
Equip: Increases your Critical Rating by +26.
Use: Increases your Attack Power by 200 for 15 seconds. (2 minute cooldown)

26 crit rating is 1.85% crit at level 60.

It's a quest reward from an elite non-instance quest in Hellfire Peninsula, the first zone you'll hit. There are tank and caster versions, as well, but I don't know the stats offhand.

BTW, there are some awesome things to do before leaving Hellfire. There's one series of quests that leads you you riding a war wyvern/war griffon and dropping bombs on hordes of level 70 elite demons and EFFING HUGE demonic war golems. 20 story huge. Devilsaur on steroids and growth hormone huge. And those same golems patrol through the whole zone, just like Devilsaurs, making the ground shake as they walk by with steam whistles and gears grinding audibly.

There are ring enchantments in the enchanting profession, but they forcibly bind the ring to the enchanter and can't be enchanted through the trade window.

Basically, Hard Mode is almost exactly like going from Nightmare difficulty to Hell difficulty. Much harder enemies, and much better loot. All Hard Mode versions of instances are level 70, even for the level 60 instances (Like Hellfire Citadel Ramparts).

There are some tank-and-spank encounters, but then there's also 5 Man Grobbulus, too. It's a good mix from what I hear.

there's a ton of new food bonuses. 40 attack power + 20 spirit, 20 agi + 20 spirit, 23 spellpower + 23 spirit, 20 str 20 stam, etc etc.

The weapon and armorsmith weapons basically start out as a fairly straightforward crafted epic. Then you take that epic and some more materials and you craft a fancier epic, generally with a Use: or nonstandard Equip: and some extra stats. It's like making an Onyxia Scale Cloak from a Cindercloth Cloak and an Onyxia Scale.

5 man groups so far have been so awesome as a hunter. My guild (many whom are in BC Alpha/Beta) has a new respect for hunters. We have done much 5 man content with only 4 man groups when we have had 2 hunters. 2 hunters are godly because of traps in combat. I have noticed the trend so far in the Hellfire instances and Zangramarsh instances (Coilfang) that you get ALOT more mobs to deal with. CC is even more important. We are talking 8+ 61-64 elites on some early pulls at times. 2 hunters with frost/freezing traps makes even 4 maning possible. We were able to keep almost anything chained CC'ed at times very well. I had never used traps so much in my life.

all the AQ20 books are now skills you can buy at the trainer

All the towns are new reputations.

Yeah, they just opened a new one called Eye of the Storm.

The arena rewards are comparable to top tier raiding loot. 118 DPS 2h weapons, etc.

That's in the default UI on Live, actually. There is a new Enemy Casting Bar UI element in Burning Crusade, though, that shows you any non-instant spell your targeted enemy (and any enemy if you have the little hovering health bar things showing) are casting and how much time is left on the spell. Yes, it works in PvP too.

So it depends on which class you are, which buff you will give. Also, paladins are +physical, shaman are +spell.

Leatherworking still isn't itemized as much as some of the other crafts. In alpa there were no rep or drop recipes and no recipes above about 350 skill. Now I've seen some new druid recipes (Druid tank gear! It even has +defense!) at the cenarion expedition provisioner at revered rep level.

A lot of the graphical effects have been updated. Hunter's Mark is a kinda spiky/flanged arrow instead of a boring straight edged one, and all the paladin seals changed to cool new glowy aura type things.

The first instances are doable at level 60 with the new random drop green gear and give roughly BWL equivalent rewards.

The LFG interface brings up a window asking whether you're looking for a group or whether you have a group that's looking for more. If you hit LFG, it lets you put in up to 3 groups you're interested in joining; there's a dropdown box that lists several things (no category, raid, instance, pvp, quest), and a second dropdown box that lists possible objectives in each category. For instance, if you were level 63 and you selected Dungeon from the first dropdown box, you could select any Outlands instance (assuming you're in Outland) within your level range - namely in this case Hellfire Ramparts, The Blood Furnace, The Slave Pens, Underbogs, and one of the Auchindoun instances. Quests lists every quest you have in your quest log. You can select up to three of these to be "LFG" for. As soon as it finds a match, it automatically joins you into that group.

The Looking For More interface basically is the same as the LFG one, but it lists the people that are LFG for the topic you select (individual instances, etc). You can select people from there manually to invite to your party or allow the interface to automatically do it for you.