World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Preview

The first thing you'll notice while raiding in HR and TBF is how short and easy they are; primarily designed to ease high level players into the new world of Outland, there are few spectacular set-pieces, rooms or bosses. You'll spend much of your time taking down groups of Fel Orcs, driven evil by demonic rage, in the traditional balletic ebb-and flow of most five man runs in WoW. In a decent group, you'll plough your way through either HR or TBF in under an hour.

There's nothing particularly spectacular. There are nice touches, like the quite frequent booming voice of Magtheridon moaning about demon Night Elf Illidan Stormrage. And there's a nice touch at the end of TBF, although I don't want to spoil the surprise. All I'll say is "look down!"

But there is something spectacular - the loot. And this is one of the most heated points of debate among players of the beta. The loot from these dungeons is in many cases better than the gear you've no doubt spent hours upon hours raiding Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraj and, for the best guilds, Naxrammas for. If that's not a kick in the balls, then get this: a lot of this new gear is green!

Within hours of play, I'd replaced two tier two armour pieces I'd spent hours raiding BWL with my guild for. For my Night Elf priest, I grabbed a blue chest piece, Sun-Touched Raiments, with better stats than my epic robe from BWL, from the final boss in TBF. I nabbed a pair of Bloody Surgeon's Mitts from a mid-level boss in the same dungeon, also better than my tier one hand armour. Add to that the fact that the new gear has sockets for jewels (made with jewelcrafting, the new profession in TBC), which add further bonuses to your weapons, and you start to get the picture.

... they're trying to give casual players a reason to play, and don't want good loot to be the exclusive preserve of fat, balding single men with no life...

I can see Blizzard's point here - they're trying to give casual players a reason to play, and don't want good loot to be the exclusive preserve of fat, balding single men with no life, but it still feels like the last year or so has been a bit pointless - all those hours wiping on new bosses in MC, the hundreds of gold spent on repair bills, the five millionth time 40 of us had stayed till two in the morning to kill the black dragon Nefarion - all for naught.

It's not really as bad as that. Tier three armour will still keep you going well into the 60s, but some of the stats on green weapons and armour are absolutely brutal, and, as some players have predicted, will make many existing dungeons, like Stratholm and Blackrock Spire, simply redundant.

HP will keep you entertained up to about level 62. After that, you'll want to jump on your mount and explore the rest of Outland. Much of it isn't available in the beta, but the immediate areas surrounding HP are, including Zangarmarsh, a purple and blue coloured marsh covered in fungal forest and infested with fungal giants, spore bats and spore walkers, and the haunting beauty of Terokkar Forest, which contains Shattrath City, a capital-sized city shared by the Alliance and the Horde. This will become your home from home in Outland, much like Ironforge and Orgrimmar have done back in Azeroth - aaah, Azeroth, it seems so last season.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Rest assured, for high level players who resist the initial allure of creating a female Blood Elf paladin or a male Draenei shaman, questing, grinding and raiding in the madness that is HP will quickly become second nature.