New beginnings

Recently, I was fortunate to get a Burning Crusade beta invite through my guild leader. Thanks he who cannot be named!

The new Blood Elf and Draenei starter areas? As beautiful as they both were, the initial wonder of a brand new game wasn't there. I compare it to an alliance player going over to start a character hordeside for the first time. The mechanics are the same, the play is the same, just the landscape, npcs and mobs are different. Gather 3 of this, kill 10 of that. Well this is an expansion, not a brand new game - so I guess that is to be expected. Nevertheless I will save trying out a new race - I'll stay true to the Alliance - for when I actually purchase the game. I'll leave that type of beta testing to others.

My plan is to level up my priest a bit in the Outlands, I think this will be more exciting, because the stagnant feeling at 60 has always been a bummer. My priest has scrapped together decent dps gear at this point, so I'm respeccing to shadow in hopes I'll be able to heal just fine since we won't be facing raid dungeon bosses right off the bat.

There was a thread on the official forums about priests in beta dropping the ball on feedback to the community. As I kept reading the type of feedback certain players were looking for I simply am not interested in obtaining. What percentage of x does y do to z? While I understand games like this have always been a play in numbers - I'll leave that to the number crunchers.

From what I understand WoW wants the expansion to cater to casual more than raiders, and I can imagine many casual players are less interested in what will one more point of AP give them, than is the game fun to play again after 60?