With the transfer of my characters finally done, I hoped on my warlock and made my way to the Dark Portal. Instead of it being camped by elites, small tents, crates, barricades and much more are surrounding the Azeroth side of the portal with both alliance and horde presence detected. Walking into the portal, you exit through a new portal that is atleast 10 times the size of the portal on Azeroth. Decored with a hard, cold stone, 2 statues surround each side with a deep gaze over the land and on top of the portal, a dragons head rests.
Proceeding down the stairs, you have the alliance on the left and the horde on the right. Depending on which faction you are, you will see a quest available to you. I walked down the steps and talked to the quest giver. He tells that he needs more troops here to combat the Burning Legion and wishes for me to take a wyvern to Thrallmar and talk to the commander there. I accepted the quest but was far from ready to leave this new area. Going down more steps you see a small army of shamans, paladins, warriors, mages and preists all ready to fight the Burning Legion. With that, advanced the Burning Legion touting giant fel guards. After a few waves, more mobs showed even with a Pit Lord. This giant beast was an elite skull to me and peaked my interest. Starting with a game of chicken, I got to close to the Pit Lord and was quickly dissposed of in a blow of 4,000 damage. The event was fun to watch but eventually I was ready to proceed to Thrallmar.
Talking to the flight master, I flew to Thrallmar while passing over the many burning legion monsters below. After landing in Thrallmar I gave the report and the commander only replied with he would send reinforcements when he was available. This town has everything in it but its easy to miss all the npcs. Scattered throughout are new profession masters that will raise your skill and present you with a few new recipes. After searching around I couldnt find a single quest and coudlnt figure out what to do. Eventually I entered the barracks and was able to find a single quest giver. This new npcs looks much like Rexxar and he directs me outside to talk to another person. After finding the new quest giver, I was told to go west and slay some dreadwalkers, infernal warbringers and flamewalker imps. I was quickly able to dispatch these and return to a nice 2 gold reward and a selection of new weapons. Using the Soul Harvest still, I quickly took up a new staff that doubled the stamina and the amount of damage it gave me. I hardly ever raid so this was quite a nice upgrade for me and was happy to take it. Reporting back to the Barracks, I was told to go south to new outpost and help out there. Quickly moving along, I accepted the quest to disprut the Burning Legions portals and came back. This is where the quest we all have been waiting for.........flying bomb runs! Hopping onto a wyvern and hot keying my bomb. Flying a short distance I was told to bomb 20 peons, 5 cannons and 5 captains in the area. In my first run through, I was able to complete most of the quest but went at it again and easily finished the quest. This is was extremely fun to do as the bomb does 15k damage to all mobs in the area.
Going back to Thrallmar this time, I was present with a whole new slew of quests. Most of the quests involved killing of certain mobs so I was more then happy to do so as it was good experience for me. Most kills gave about 500 exp per kill and while I had rested, some were giving over 1,000 per kill. However, to go from 60 to 61, you must obtain 581,700. While seeming like a lot, most quests would give me about 8k-10k per turn in. Doing quests and running around the zone I became more comfortable with the zone and began to figure out how to get around and the areas to avoid.
After a few hours and doing quests I was feeling adverterous. Finding a group for the Hellfire Citadel was my new quest. This took all but a few minutes with the LFG system and I began on the quest. This is a fairly simple and small dungeon and no problems should come from it with any level 60 group. This dungeon isnt as appealing as I would hope but it flows together with 3-4 mobs per pull with little downtime. First time I was able it took over an hour to compelete with only a few deaths. The next run it took barely an hour to finish. The loot was nice and sweet and was something is provided for everyone in the run usually. Besides the loot, the bosses were done pretty well and only need to be tweaked a little bit.
After playing 6 hours of nonstop playing and exploring I reached a little over half way. I will expect the first elvel to take someone with a little less time somewhere over 10 hours for this first level.
Blizzard has done an amazing job so far with what little of the zone I have covered and have made the transition to the Outlands as painless as need be. After the first few hours in the Outlands, I realized I have only come to scartch was remains ahead of me.
Pictures soon.
