Socketed Items

If you played Diablo II, then you'll understand the concept of socketed items fairly instinctively. Many of the pieces of armor that you'll find in Outland will have sockets in them, into which you can insert jewels, which we talked about in the Jewelcrafting section of the guide.

Matching colored jewels to colored sockets can reveal hidden bonuses in an item.

Unlike in Diablo II, though, every jewel you find is color-coded, as are all the sockets on items. You can put a jewel of any color into a socket of any color, so if you find a blue jewel and have an empty red socket, feel free to pop it in. However, most socketable items have a greyed-out stat boost. The only way to unlock and activate this stat boost is to ensure that all of the sockets on your item are paired up with jewels of the appropriate colors. If, theoretically, you found an item with three red sockets, then you'd need to find three red jewels to insert in those sockets to unlock the item's latent stat boost. You can, again, put any color jewels in these sockets, but if you use anything other than red jewels, you won't unlock the stat boost. For most items, though, these latent stat boosts are relatively minor, at least compared to the built-in stats and those you'll be netting from jewels.

Note that some jewels are multi-colored. If you find a jewel that counts as both red and yellow, it will be able to fit in a socket of either color and still count towards activating the hidden stat boost.

Also unlike in Diablo II, you can eliminate jewels from sockets after they're inserted, so you don't have to hold out for the perfect jewel for an item. If you fill up an item with jewels, then find another jewel that you'd like to put into it, go ahead and place it into a jewel slot. It'll destroy the jewel that was previously in the slot, so you won't be able to reuse or resell it, but you'll at least be able to upgrade your item with the new jewel.

In addition to jewels made through jewelcrafting (which we're going to guess are going to be relatively common on most servers), you can also find some powerful jewels on the boss monsters in some of the Outland dungeons. These are likely to be more powerful than anything that jewelcrafters will be able to create, and as such will no doubt make for some interesting loot discussions when your team gets a drop off of them.

Arenas

In addition to a single new PVP Battleground, the Outland also introduces the Arena PVP system, which allows for smaller groups of enemies to face off in single combat without having to worry about dealing with the objectives of Battlegrounds.

Both of the Arenas currently in the game are in the Outland, but there are battlemasters that can warp you to them from most major cities. You can't join a ranked Arena Team until you're level 70, but players of most levels will be able to join practice or pickup matches before you reach the level cap. You can play in Arenas in groups of two, three, or five players, facing off against an equal number of players from the opposite faction.

Fights in the Arenas have a number of specific rules intended to keep the fights relatively fair. To wit:

• The pre-match warmup session will reduce mana costs for all your spells to zero, allowing you to quickly buff all team members without worrying about mana. Warlocks can also cast any Soul Shard spells without using any Soul Shards.
• No player can resurrect when killed; when you die, you're dead.
• No consumable items save for bandages or conjured food/water can be used in the Arena. No potions!
• No spells or abilities with cooldowns of more than 15 minutes can be used. If you rely on Retaliation or Lay On Hands to survive fights, prepare to test your other skills for a while.

As such, when an Arena fight starts, it's a simple matter of killing everyone on the opposite team before they're capable of killing you. You don't get any points for effort here; your goal is to win.

While practice or pickup matches are played simply for the fun of the fight, when you reach level 70, you can form Arena Teams that can be ranked. The process is fairly simple on its surface: your rank goes up when your team wins match. You gain a lot of ranking from defeating teams that are more highly-ranked than you, while winning against lower-ranked teams will net you a lower amount of ranking prestige. Correspondingly, losing against higher-ranked teams won't affect your ranking as much as will losing against a team that's inferior to you.

New Talents and New Level Cap

One of the most obvious enhancements for players with the Burning Crusade is the ability to level up to level 70. The previous level cap in World of Warcraft was level 60. After you install the Burning Crusade, your level cap will increase automatically and you’ll be able to begin earning experience again.

Increasing your level to level 70 will result in a number of benefits; you’ll gain more talent points, will be able to use higher-level equipment, and will eventually be able to use flying mounts.

The adventure begins….

New Talents were introduced to the game in the patch that immediately preceded the Burning Crusade, allowing most talent trees to extend all the way up to a 41 point ubertalent. This completely changed the way that most class builds are formulated, so if you’re returning to the game after a bit of time off, you’re definitely going to have a period of adjustment to the new order. Alongside the new talent trees, some talents have been rearranged in power, so you’ll need to examine the new talent trees (especially the new talents at their bottoms) to see what’s right for you now.

Note that you don’t have to have the Burning Crusade installed to use these new talents. But getting to the bottom of a talent tree will take 41 points invested in that tree, which for a level 60 character will leave them only 10 points to invest elsewhere.