the Beta Post

You’ve got to be kidding me!

Like a lot of people that play World of Warcraft I registered for the Beta when it was announced. I didn't really expect to get picked, even if it was a totally random chance, I'd never been in a Beta before and in a sense I would be quite happy if I didn't get picked. Unlike a lot of players I still had a lot of things I wanted to do in Wrath of the Lich King before Cataclysm launched.
So the Beta launched and I didn’t give it much thought, I logged onto the account management page the Saturday after the launch to check on something and saw a new button there. It said Cataclysm Beta, I went off to check my email and sure enough there was an email confirming the fact. Nervously I downloaded the Beta client, always the suspicion at the back of my mind that this was some kind of hack attempt on my account. I spent much of the rest of Saturday morning into the afternoon downloading and installing the patches (I think the whole thing came to 32gb). After a few false starts I was ready to go, the login screen came up and then I had 4 realms to select from one of which was Mekkatorque (EU), the others were Korean and two in the US (one PvE the other PvP).

Goblin Ingenuity

Being a Hordie I rolled a Goblin first off, this would be the character I posted on the Beta forums as, you can find my posts there under the name of Zandlin. People in the guild know me as Zand from my first character (in the Alliance NuGen) Zandathor so I followed this naming convention with most of my alts in the Beta.

Zandlin is a Goblin Hunter, as a hunter you start with a pet but no pet action bar so it attacks whatever you are in combat with. I have levelled a few hunters so I would be able to make a few comparisions, in fact in the month before the Beta I had levelled a Hunter from 5-50 so it was pretty fresh in my memory.
The spell book is now laid out to show you what level you get your spells at, spells will automatically rank up as you level. Also you now get spells at other than every two levels, the first new spell is earned at level 3 and you get a quest that shows you how to get and use it. Each time you level up a message display’s on the screen and also tells you any new spells that are available, because spells auto rank-up this is less intrusive than you might think.

The low level zone quests require you complete them all to move onto the next phase much as the Death Knight start area did. The difference being that the phasing seems more organic than in WotLK. The quests are quite fun and involve some mini games which don't suck, this is a good idea as it makes the experience much more fun from the kill 10 of those, collect 6 of these quests. As a result the whole experience feels much more like a RPG. I enjoyed the zone and it had some nice humour in it to boot.

The RPG style continues in the next zone that you encounter, you cannot get to the rest of Azeroth until you complete this zone and once completed you cannot go back to this zone. Once again phasing is used, which can be a problem if you use your Hearthstone at certain points in the story (the same is true of the Worgen zones). Once again the quests feel varied enough to keep it interesting, with only one grindy quest that I encountered involving collecting items with low drop rates. However things are constantly being changed and some of the grinding has been eliminated since I played through these zones. There are some quest that have an epic feel to them as well without resorting to boosting your stats in the way the DK final quest did. After you complete this zone you will find yourself in Orgrimmar.
Orgimmar
The city has changed a lot in Cataclysm, so much so that at first I got lost many times, there is now another gate which leads straight into the first new zone, Azshara. This is very much a Goblin themed zone and the quests are pretty varied and not too much of a grindfest. The zone still seems incomplete with some areas inaccessible, that said it should take you up to level 20+ without any XP bonuses just by doing the quests.

While I was levelling in these zones some significant changes became apparent;
The find function on the mini-map has now been changed to a tick box system so you can look for Herbs and Ore at the same time.

Herbalist gives lifeblood at skill 1, however lifeblood has been significantly changed giving you a small heal and a temporary boost to Haste. There is a discussion thread for this on the Beta forums but it hasn’t been particularly productive. I’m unsure about this change but it just means adapting to the new spell.

Hunters now use Focus and not Mana, focus works the same as it does for Rogues. The focus regen rate is being tweaked and a number of Hunter spells have no focus cost as well. For example Concussive shot had a focus cost which has now been dropped, instead it has a 5 sec cooldown and a 4 sec duration. Prior to this it was next to impossible to kite at low levels.
The new 31 point talent trees are in use but are constantly being changed so I’ll not say much about them yet. What I will say is that getting an old style talent from the old specs at level 10 is pretty cool, and some of the bonuses for selecting a particular tree can be very useful for levelling. At the moment I would say Hunters are not the fastest class to level (hint: pick a class that begins with ‘W’ ...any class).