So The Burning Crusade, the first expansion for World of Warcraft, got released about a month ago. And I’m thorougly enjoying it. It got a bit boring toward the end, when I hit level 60 with my second character — a troll mage this time; the first character was an orc hunter that I don’t play any longer.

My mage is now level 70 and slowly working on gaining access to the endgame content — heroic mode dungeons and Karazhan.

In addition to the mage I also started playing a blood elf paladin — blood elves are one of the two new races in the expansion, the other one being the squid-faced Draenei. I played a paladin for a bit on another server and quite liked it, but that was on the Alliance side. I’m Horde now, and until the arrival of the blood elves the Horde didn’t have access to paladins, just like the Alliance didn’t get any shamans.

With the two new races both sides have access to all nine classes. There’s some lore involved, but the real decision was probably that it got hard to tune encounters for two different sides, since shamans and paladins bring very different abilities with them. A major gripe has been that playing Alliance was considered “easy mode” for raiding due to all the defensive abilities a paladin has.

Zai, my paladin, just reached level 40 and got her Blood Knight mount, but I also bought the racial mount — the Elven Battle Chicken!