Our character copy went through, so our level 60 Rogue got the opportunity to sneak into the entry point for the new Outland Zone called Hellfire Peninsula. When we signed on to World of Warcraft's closed beta of the new Burning Crusade expansion, we found our talents completely stripped due to Blizzard's monkeying around with their layout. Each class has received a talent revamp to allow for the addition of new talents to accommodate your progression from level 60 to 70. Delighted as a five year old in a candy store, we eagerly went through the new revisions until one caught our eye. As tempting as the new Mutilate ability was (similar to the Rogue's Backstab ability), we opted to go full on dagger-spec (elite WoW -speak for focusing points on talents that bolster damage and critical strike rate with daggers) so that our Core Hound's Tooth and Qiraji Sacrificial Dagger wouldn't go to waste.
Once the housecleaning was done, we hopped the first griffon out of Ironforge and headed to the Blasted Lands where the Dark Portal awaited. On the flight down, we noticed our experience bar was completely empty except for the devastating figure well above 400 thousand. Crestfallen, we tried to come to grips with the fact that we were twice as many experience points away from level 61 as we were away from level 60 way back when we were a lowly level 59. Of course, there's still a bit of time before the expansion releases so Blizzard may yet reduce the amount of experience required to level, but we're planning on losing a ridiculous number of hours to the Burning Crusade anyway so maybe the exorbitant number of required experience points won't matter.
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