Crafting

One of the more interesting additions to World of Warcraft comes in the form of a Blizzard classic: socketed items. For those of you who don't know (and I'm not sure how that would be possible), socketed items originally appeared in Diablo 2. Basically, certain items will have sockets in them that you can fit gems into to give them extra powers. Of course, these gems can be made by a jewelcrafter.

The latest profession to be introduced to World of Warcraft is jewelcrafting. Jewelcrafting allows you to create several intersting products as well as refine gems to fit into socketed items. Among the other things you can do with jewelcrafting, you can create jewelry such as rings, crowns, necklaces and other items that used to come off of drops and quest rewards only.

One of the jewelcrafting abilities is prospecting, and it allows you to check mined ore for gems. This, other than the fact you use precious metals to make jewelry, encourages jewelcrafters to be miners as well. A mining jewelcrafter is more or less self-sufficient.

In The End

World of Warcraft has the most subscribers for a reason: it's very good. Even after the people who started Blizzard left, they've kept on trucking and churning out the hits. The Burning Crusade is absolutely not an exception.

The Burning Crusade offers exactly what players want: more levels and new places to explore. Of course, it doesn't take much smarts to see that taking a mega-hit of a game and adding more content to it will produce more sales. The winning formula for World of Warcraft has been to take the severe penalties out and make the game more user friendly.

Come January 17th, there will be a ton of server problems due to overcrowding and the login servers will be completely hammered. It's going to be hard to move around in the newbie areas, and we'll be loving every minute of it. Hey, if it isn't broke, then why fix it? Except for the login server problems. You can fix those.