Cataclysm Beta Testing

Okay, so onto the "main" topic of this blog. Cataclysm Beta Testing. I will be embarking on an endeavour to cover every single zone/class/race through the new levelling experience of Cataclysm. This will take a long time, and will perhaps not even be completed by release: Hoping for a period of around 10 weeks with 1 Race/class combo done per week. This however may change with Blizzard releasing beta patches and changing the experiences dramatically.

Basically I am going to level 1 class from each of 10 races. I am not going to level a character that is Draenei or Blood elf. This is not because I do not like the aesthetics of these 2 races (Draenei and Blood elf are my 2 favorite races in WoW currently. I made this decision because a) Nothing has changed in their current starting areas, they were good before and are actually part of the "BC server cluster" or w/e it's called so I highly doubt they will get anything but aesthetic touches. B) There are only 10 classes, one of which is a death knight which sees no new content in their starting area, so having to repeat 2-3 classes twice is not something I really want to do.

First off a few "provisos".

1) My "main" so to speak is a Holy Paladin, I have dabbled with raiding as a fury warrior and a shadow priest however I consider my main to be my Holy paladin, I love the class and because I only had 9 classes to fit into 10 races I decided I will level a Paladin twice. This is not to say I won't regret that decision, however I will certainly be a little scared over embarking on it.

2) I have mostly been Alliance throughout my playing of WoW. I have levelled maybe 2 horde characters but mostly only have dabbling memories of some of "vanilla" questlines. Mostly I went to zones that I found efficient as Horde, so my knowledge of some areas pre-cataclysm as horde is somewhat limited, along with some aspects of Lore.

3) Posts on areas will be split up into separate quest hubs as to not overload a single post with billions of info.

4) This blog will include lots of screenshots of quest text, key characters, perhaps some short videos of awesome dialogue (maybe with personal commentary although my voice is eurgh D:). Annotated Maps with Questflows on them etc.

5) Opinions stated in this blog are entirely my own and should not be taken as fact or in anyway representative of others.

6) My plan is to write up on 1 particular zone a day. There will be some repeat of course when I level repeated factions, or perhaps even in similar zones. Mostly I will gloss over detail that has been explained in a previous blog and focus mostly on changes that have happened perhaps with a beta build and with the current class I am levelling.

Ok, with that out of the way we come to the order of my great endeavour. Using a random number generator function on a calculator I have come up with the following order for my endeavour.

1) Troll Druid

2) Night Elf Priest

3) Dwarf Shaman

4) Goblin Rogue

5) Orc Warrior

6) Human Paladin

7) Undead Warlock

8) Worgen Hunter

9) Tauren Paladin

10) Gnome Mage

Fortunately the Troll area is mostly complete afaik and the questing will take me through Kalimdor, which is also mostly complete according to Blizzard. I tried to choose classes for the races that were "new" or generally I hadn't played before. Personally I am a "Draenei/Belf/Human female or gtfo" type of leveller so yeh this a bit new. Anyway: Onto the Echo Isles.