I just dinged 65.
It may not be the best place to start a blog about the beta testing for The Burning Crusade, but this is nonetheless where I start. I dinged 65 today as I was questing in Nagrand, one of the areas in Outland. After killing a bunch of birds and some wild elekks, I turned them in only to find that I lacked 100 experience to level up. Another wild elekk died, I dinged. Yay.
For some time now, the test servers have been up and running, giving content-hungry and curious players a sneak peek at what will be The Burning Crusade. I am one of those people. With all instances in the current game on farm, new and exciting material is tempting.
At first, I wasn't too happy about the whole levelling thing. With three level 60 priests, levelling them all to 70 sounded like a royal pain in the ass. I still think it is, but at least levelling one character seems like something that is not going to be too hard.
At 60, my priest became a lowbie again once she entered the Hellfire realm. In order to make levelling easier, I chose to spec shadow - a spec I had never before had on that character, as I actually grinded through the levels as discipline/holy. Shadow proved to be very efficient though, in particular when grinding alone. Each mob gives 550-ish experience, and spirit tap made me able to go on forever without drinking.
My damage gear isn't all that good though. I very much a PvE player, and healing gear is what I have gone for. Six pieces of Faith and more than +1000 healing doesn't help that much when you want to "melt faces". When I transferred, my dps gear consisted of two pieces of Oracle and Burrower's Bracers, that was it. Well, I had a Claw of Chromaggus without an offhand to go with it, so I chose to use Anathema instead.
Fortunately, you don't need fantastic gear to be able to get by in Outland. Sure, it gives you a little advantage like for instance better regeneration and the such, but in one of the first instance runs I did, we had a tank who was wearing Lightforge (!) and some healing greens. And we actually did pretty okay.
Apart from the fact that I spent six-ish hours levelling herbalism from 1 to 375 in order to be able to level my alchemy, it didn't take long to hit level 61. In general, levelling has gone much smoother than I expected. Quests normally give 7000-ish rep, and you don't lose much experience from partying for instances. There are plenty of quests as well, though some drop rates are pretty crappy, which may prove a problem come release.
Then again, I might just live inside the instances for a few days to avoid the initial rush of people questing in the starting area of Outland. We will see.