Even though I don't care about new gear at the moment (Naxx equipped), I plan mostly to just figure out the quickest path to a 5man once I get my beta key and have 4 people ready to charge there with me on release day. I'm sure I'll miss out on some great world pvp, but Tichondrius has crashed due to overpopulation in Duskwood (12 raid battle for the shard), Azshara (first Azuregos, AOEd the server down), Silithus (4 raids farming carapaces), Orgrimmar, Mulgore, etc. The list of population clusters that have crashed our poor server just keeps growing. The best bet will probably be to rush into a 5 man so you get on the instance servers and ride out the Hellfire down time.

Reminiscent of the AQ event is the outland side of the portal. As I understand it that 'event' is perpetual, and even on closed beta was inducing quite a bit of lag. I can't even imagine that on a relatively large server like Kilrogg.

Finding hfc was annoying enough for the first time, but as others have mentioned, the first two instances you're going to hit (60-65 mobs) really don't take much more than an hour to do, even 4 manning them. They're pretty straight forward "go down this hallway and kill the boss(es) at the end" - but they are significantly cooler than previous 5 man instances.

Could you elaborate a bit? Are we talking a persistant NPC battle right after entering the gate?

Yep, ever wondered what the Burning Legion are up to? You'll find out firsthand when you zone into Hellfire for the first time. :P

Is there anyone on a new server with new hardware that was present for the AQ war? Can you tell us how the server fared during that heavy traffic? Constant crashing, or did it hold up okay?

I'm not aware of any server that didn't crash over and over on the AQ event. I'm also not sure that bliz had begun updating hardware at that point.

On my priest's server (Aman'Thul), apparently the server died a few times, but nowhere near as many times as it did on Malygos.

During the AQ event on Tichondrius we were stuck in a constant state of deja vu for about two hours. At the time I was horde and we had taken control of the gate. Then a mass of alliance would hit the gate and both sides sent in their aoe squads. Server crashed and rolled back about 10 minutes. Repeat this 5-6 times if I recall and you have Tichondrius on the gate opening. I recall a guildmate complaining that he had tried to fly from Orgrimmar to Silithus each time and kept getting rolled back and never actually made it to Silithus.

I can't wait for the same 'fun' experience in Hellfire.

I don't think this will be like Silithus at all - you can't really become involved with the direct conflict going on at the steps of the Dark Portal. Well, I guess you *could*, if you feel like exploring the locations of the graveyards.

Farming the non-Outland mobs for XP or doing those quests might be plausable if they gave equal experience but they don't. First thing I did was spec into an AoE build, head to Silithus and start blowing up Twlight camps to find out I got 275-325 xp per mob (58-60s). I'd already talked to a Warlock friend in Outland that was getting 505xp for L60 boars there. He also tried turning in a couple of quests in EPL and recieved 0 XP for them. In an effort to stop people from queueing up quests and "instantly hitting 61-62" they are forcing more folks that might actually look at other options into the Outland.

The Grind vs. Quest levelling option also seems to up for debate with me. Looking at the 60-61 gap only, its 415k xp and for killing a 60-64 mob you get between 505-685 xp in Outland. This means you're looking at killing 600-800 mobs to level. Lets look at my mage setup for a moment. Each mob takes roughly 6 Frost Bolts (killing 63s to 64s) to kill meaning 4 kills per minute -- we'll round that down to 3 for the drink/move/loot time. So in an ideal situation of never moving too much or running out of mobs we're looking at 3 hours 20 mins for one of the most offensive classes.

For AoE in Outland the stuff followed much further than I'm used to but some enemies actually stopped to bandage while being nuked down. With their increased health I wasn't really able to pull anything higher than 61s and nothing that didn't have some 'annoying factor' to kill me so far that I could pull in groups of more than 5 or so. Since each pull requires a full mana bar refill drink it seems better to be in my DPS/Raid gear with good mp/5 and just chaincast FB so far. After I get to run with a priest so I can spend more mana nuking and less keeping my butt alive I'll post again about this (especially if I find a better location than I have so far).

Drelegon, was your warlock friend 61+? Those quests most definitely gave me xp at 60 earlier. It's possible they're making the cutoff point level 61 for when old quests stop giving xp, which I'm perfectly fine with.

Also, the mob exp values have been stated to be increased for testing purposes. Obviously this only includes Outland, because the other testing areas will either be instances people will be testing regardless of exp values, or the new areas that attract people to test them because of it being something new. They want to try to keep people focused on playing in Outland, not finding a good grinding spot in the old world and sitting down there for a day or two.

Right there with you. Would love to hear from people in beta if there's anything to help underpopulated sides in world PvP, because it's going to be a massacre for some of us otherwise. An announcement of more xp for the faction with the least people on, thus letting us level faster to off-set the numerical issues, would make me the happiest boy in all the land.

So has anyone heard if they are opening new servers with TBC?

It will be overcrowded, laggy and have some server crashes to be sure. Can they really fix this though? Probably not. It's like rush hour - unless you want to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure to handle rush hour, when it would sit unused the majority of the time, is not the way any corporation is going to logically allocate their money.

We'll just have to grin and bear it. Those rolling new pallies/shammies will definitely get the advantage experiencing all the quests though. On the other hand, I'm quite looking forward to respeccing back to shadow and having a blast with world PvP. =)

Doesn't really matter how good the hardware is -- you put one thousand players in close proximity to each other, each uploading/downloading server updates for their client's side -- its not additive its mulitiplicated, and the servers WILL go down.

What Blizzard did was create huge zones in Outland to alleviate the server/client relationship. It remains to be seen if they can achieve even a modicum of stability.

Which is why I plan on leveling my draenei shaman in EF/Westfall/RR. I can skip the totem quests till week 2; as long as there is some shaman trainer outside of the starting zone, it should all work out.